

Ask HN: My industry's becoming commoditised and I'm scared - imacommodity

For the last 12 years I&#x27;ve worked as a web developer, first solo, then part of a couple of firms, then solo again. I&#x27;ve always prided myself on inquisitiveness and giving businesses what they want, but more and more the budgets - and industry expectation - is to roll out a piece of off-the-shelf software (Wordpress, Drupal, Magento), stick some Bootstrap code on it, apply a layer of design and push it out. I&#x27;m not getting job satisfaction and I don&#x27;t feel I&#x27;m doing good work.<p>I&#x27;ve built large custom business systems (integrated sales&#x2F;crm&#x2F;accounting&#x2F;order management), but the demand for these has dried up as SaaS integrated with other SaaS works out much cheaper.<p>I watched it happen to my uncle (a chartered accountant) - it&#x27;s gone from a well-respected, well-paid profession to being data-entry using low-qualified staff and a few highly-qualified advisors.<p>Designers seem to have it even worse: no need to create, just assemble ready designed components and use off-the-shelf themes). I look at the &#x27;enterprise software&#x27; firms that I&#x27;ve had as clients and their staff have become &#x27;integrators&#x27;, gluing together Oracle&#x2F;Microsoft systems to give the client (something of) what they want.<p>I was aware of jobs becoming commoditised; naively I didn&#x27;t expect it to happen to me. And I&#x27;m scared. I never wanted to be an assembler, to see all the fun stuff automated; I chose my career in the heady early days of the web, when there was so much to figure out.<p>What do you recommend, and are there any industries or services which aren&#x27;t&#x2F;aren&#x27;t yet&#x2F;can&#x27;t be commoditised?
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karmajunkie
I've seen reports that up to 70% of workers are in jobs that could eventually
be automated. This is a pretty scary statistic when you think about it, which
is why I'm also a huge proponent of the idea of a basic income guarantee. With
numbers like that, pretty much every job is going to be overcome by
competition for the position, no matter how intricate it is, as long as we
have this notion that everyone HAS to work in order to earn the right to
live—even if there's no work available.

But if you're looking for jobs where your likelihood of being outsourced is
negligible, look for the ones that are hardest for machines to do. These, by
the way, aren't necessarily those at the top of the knowledge spectrum.
Doctors as a profession, for example, will eventually fall to machine learning
systems like Watson, and medical school will become more a technician's school
than anything else. Nurses, however, perform a wide variety of functions that
are difficult to automate safely, nor can they be offshored. Its difficult to
outsource sticking a needle in someone.

Last thing: I'd argue with the idea that web development is commoditized. At
the lower end of the spectrum, sure—tons of wordpress themes out there, its
easy to offshore something like that, basic development provided by good
software. But higher up the food chain, where you're at the end of the market
where you actually DO stuff like write original javascript, or develop some
new server platform, or whatever it is on that end of the spectrum—those jobs
aren't going anywhere for awhile.

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ZachPruckowski
Productivity increases (including robotization/automation) mean that the US
economy can produce the same goods with less work or more goods with the same
work. If we're in a situation where the prospect of being able to produce more
goods or work less is "pretty scary", then we're doing something wrong as a
society. These sorts of changes should be Pareto-efficient.

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al2o3cr
"Should be" is a pretty strong phrase in that last sentence. There's also a
big difference between being _able_ to work less (when productivity gains
translate into wage gains) and _having_ to work less (when productivity gains
translate into shrinking labor demand).

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garethsprice
Technology will continue to commoditize and move fast. The trick is to operate
in that spread between what is commoditized and what is custom.

If you want to stay with web/consumer-facing development, find the parts that
are in demand but not commoditized yet. Right now that appears to be mobile
development - responsive web, apps, etc. There is still no good development
process for high quality responsive websites.

Computing has always grown towards abstraction - can't remember the last time
I wrote a routine to manipulate video memory directly, but I can do things
with graphics in 15 minutes that blows away anything I could do in hundreds of
hours when that sort of work was required and profitable. Same will happen
with web.

Alternatively, the business value of spreading a client's message has not
changed and the technology landscape is becoming more complex. Maybe focus
more on the strategy and value of the messaging than the technology used to
transmit it.

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flumpy
I have seen this happen in a couple different industries. I did web
development from 96 to 06 and I felt the same forces at work over that time.

After that I spent 6 years in AAA game development. Again, many custom systems
were replaced with middleware.

It's my opinion that these trends are driven by the needs of business,
generally. Technology (and other disciplines) are a means to a business goal.
Imagine a game designer with an idea (or anyone with an idea). They want to
execute the idea with as little pain between conception and execution. They
don't care about linear algebra or DMA. It's this force that leads to
commoditization of tech.

IMHO you can't avoid this, and it is not necessarily bad. It's also been my
experience that you can find places that do the work you want to do. But you
might have to move.

Best of luck to you.

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tomkarlo
The rush to build big desktop sites is largely over, and the stragglers / late
adopters are the most likely to value lower-cost, lower-risk solutions than
the early customers. None of that should be surprising.

There's another wave coming: although most top-tier web sites have already
done it, a lot of these SMB web sites are going to need to adopt to a mobile-
first world where more of their traffic is coming from phones.

I'd suggest that's the right place to look, but you should always expect that
any industry so close to technology is going to evolve continually towards
greater automation, because it's populated largely by software developers who
are the exact group likely to implement that kind of automation.

If you want a job / industry that doesn't evolve quickly, you need to be
somewhere with large amounts of physical implementation and low risk
tolerance. Like bridge building, or oil drilling, or mining. People can go
their whole careers in those industries in largely the same role, because
they're more about repeating the same process exactly and dependably than
attempting to quickly innovate.

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kirillzubovsky
It's a good thing that some parts of design/development are being automated.
We can now spin off new products increasingly faster and for a substantially
lower cost.

That said, at a certain level of competency automation stops. While you can
buy a design template to try something out, it won't give you the same
tailored experience as something that was created by a professional. While you
can download a jQuery plug and strap it to a html page, that won't give you
the same power as code written by the best engineers...etc.

Instead of thinking of a different industry to join, think of ways that you
could elevate yourself from the masses. If you're currently coding in PHP,
learn Node and try Meteor - then go work with people who find these new
methods attractive. If you currently design t-shirts and logos, understand
iOS, learn Android, explore Google Glass, and then go work for projects that
are in demand.

All said and done, commoditization of labor will weed out the under-
performers, but it will give even greater power to those creatives that can go
above and beyond.

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uptown
Technology will always march towards cheaper solutions. Either the technology
itself will become cheaper, or you'll face competition from people that know
the newer technology or are willing to work for less than you charge.
Furthermore, technology has been successful because of its promise of
automation and cost-savings.

I've seen a similar pricing-trend with client-work. It's encouraged me to
pursue product development. You sound like a capable developer, so why not
consider using your skills to build something that can generate its own
revenue stream.

There are many industries that won't be commoditized ... healthcare being one
of them ... but something like that probably isn't aligned with your
expertise. Stick with what you know, and apply it towards building a product
rather than a handful of products for other people.

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noelwelsh
You're starting from the premise that there is a job that will not be
commoditised for the remainder of your career. This is a faulty premise. It's
up to you to learn the things you need to remain relevant, be that additional
technical skills or "soft skills" like management.

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imacommodity
I disagree I can learn my way out of the problem and remain relevant.
Additional technical skills only keep me another step ahead of the
commoditisation, and if people don't want to pay money for these skills, it
hasn't helped. Management skills I need to improve, but if the workforce
reduces in size, there's less need for managers too...

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porker
Minister of Religion is the only job I can think of that is hard to
commoditise...

Good luck!

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kfk
I don’t fully agree. Take the chartered accountant thing. It means you can
find an audit/internal audit job today and that’s still something with status.
I bet you are not considering other markets to apply your skills. Custom
software for many company makes no sense no more, but then who is building the
standard software? And can you outcompete them? I was looking yesterday for a
small CRM for a company I am advising, the “cheapest” solution costs USD 24
monthly per agent. What about building something that costs USD 5 per agent?
There have to be other ways for someone with your skillset.

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enderpender
If you can't get over your competitors, join them! Start automatizing
things... This could be a good start for a web developer:
www.theclientrelationsfactory.com

But you are absolutly right. Things change fast, and the thing is changing
fastest is the change itself.

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aaronetz
Things that require creativity won't be commoditised, hopefully. Art, music,
research, game design, writing, etc.

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Lionga
But > 95% creativity "workers" (Art, music, game design, writing) get very
little money

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enderpender
Dan Brown gets little money?

