Yeah it’s fucked, our job has been destroyed from a fun team-based intellectual activity to being a button pusher. I imagine something similar happened to tailors who became factory sweatshop workers.
No point crying about it or coping that some bubble will pop and the genie will go back in the bottle. I’m pretty confident that’s not happening, though in the distant future some society will recognize that everything that can be automated should not be automated, that society will look very different and probably won’t happen in my lifetime (it will for one, I predict bring back tailors too).
So here’s my solution, leave the field. If what you enjoyed most was creative problem solving then moving to a field that enables that is the best solution. Yes the next Ruby on Rails app will involve even lesser creativity than before, but is that the situation for the next good aeroplane? Flying car? Small modular nuclear reactor. I suspect just button pushing for that won’t work nearly as well and that’s my plan anyway.
This is how I have been thinking too. Programming as a mass-market career is over the same way being a tailor, a blacksmith, a cobbler a carpenter, etc for the mass market is also over. Unlike programming, those profession enjoyed millennials of history so there is still some type of romantic idea of a "hand made garment" or a "hand made leather shoe", but outside of very small market for that, there is no economical value in those anymore. The fact that a person might have enjoyed sewing or woodworking as a vocation is incidental to people's need for clothes or cabinets.
I don't think anyone would care about "hand made software", arguably no one ever did. You need a tool to do X. The enjoyment of the person producing that tool is entirely incidental. You don't care if the corn you're eating was hand picked by a person who loved manual farm labor or by a combine harvester. Just like you wouldn't care if someone enjoys driving a combine vs a self-driving combine nor if someone enjoys directing self-driving harvesters or if they are self-directing.
Yeah, I think I would avoid video games with AI art or code, I only play indie interesting video games and looking at the public’s reaction I think they too feel the same way, so I do expect a smaller market for handmade video games.
Outside of that it’s hard to envision handmade anything in software in this everything mass produced cheap consumerist society.
sashank_1509 · · focus · HN ↗
No point crying about it or coping that some bubble will pop and the genie will go back in the bottle. I’m pretty confident that’s not happening, though in the distant future some society will recognize that everything that can be automated should not be automated, that society will look very different and probably won’t happen in my lifetime (it will for one, I predict bring back tailors too).
So here’s my solution, leave the field. If what you enjoyed most was creative problem solving then moving to a field that enables that is the best solution. Yes the next Ruby on Rails app will involve even lesser creativity than before, but is that the situation for the next good aeroplane? Flying car? Small modular nuclear reactor. I suspect just button pushing for that won’t work nearly as well and that’s my plan anyway.
eddythompson80 · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think anyone would care about "hand made software", arguably no one ever did. You need a tool to do X. The enjoyment of the person producing that tool is entirely incidental. You don't care if the corn you're eating was hand picked by a person who loved manual farm labor or by a combine harvester. Just like you wouldn't care if someone enjoys driving a combine vs a self-driving combine nor if someone enjoys directing self-driving harvesters or if they are self-directing.
sashank_1509 · · focus · HN ↗
Outside of that it’s hard to envision handmade anything in software in this everything mass produced cheap consumerist society.