
Blue-collar knowledge workers will save the economy - luu
http://seldo.com/weblog/2012/08/30/software_developers_can_save_the_economy
======
jfarmer
I grew up in rural northern Michigan in a village of ~1,500 people. It's the
largest municipality in its county, if you can believe it. My senior year of
high school was the first year my high school ever offered calculus. The
annual unemployment rate in Antrim county for the last three years has been
between 12% and 15%.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elk_Rapids,_Michigan>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antrim_County,_Michigan>

Unemployment stats: <http://bit.ly/12HtfrM>

I've now been in the SF Bay Area for six years and have co-founded three
companies: Adonomics, Everlane, and Dev Bootcamp. I'm living on Fantasy
Island, but there were plenty of people I went to high school with who would
be equally or more capable of doing any of the things I did.

But when you're "inside" a place with a devastated economy, you're
understandably myopic. You're asking yourself things like "What do I do if I
get sick or get laid off and lose my health insurance? How am I going to
afford next month's rent? How will I get my car's heater repaired before
winter?" The world of technology is so far outside your realm of experience
that the opportunity it might provide doesn't even register.

When people talk about the "bubble" in Silicon Valley, they usually mean a
capital bubble. I think the more relevant one is the complete disconnect
between how people in the SF Bay Area live (or "the tech industry" more
broadly) and the reality experienced by most people outside.

This experience is one of the main things that drove me to help start Dev
Bootcamp (<http://devbootcamp.com>).

~~~
codewright
I'm from Ohio, a poor and rural area (not quite that bad buuuut)...I work in
startups now. Even have a few side projects rolling around.

I'm incredibly fortunate but the people I encounter in the bay area who are
completely oblivious to what poverty really is do a lot to dishearten me.

Good to know somebody from the sort of place I'm from made it out here.

Cheers.

~~~
Crake
I'm from a poor rural area of Ohio too! Unfortunately, I don't have a success
story (yet). It's great to hear about people escaping this awful state.

~~~
codewright
I lived in NYC (Ohio -> NYC -> Cali) before moving to the bay area!

If you want any pointers on NYC or with your programming studies let me know.

Cheers and good luck either way :)

------
dizzystar
Every single one of these articles are missing an element that I believe will
prevent US production from ever returning: the supply chain is way longer from
US -> US than it is from China -> US. This sounds absolutely absurd, I know,
but it is the truth. If you go to China, you can practically buy direct from
many factories, or you can go through a broker who actually does know the
source factory. This does not happen in America, at least in my brief
experience.

I used to be responsible for finding US sources for certain products. If you
aren't aware, you'd think that the price of a US-made product is 10x that of
China, when in reality, it is just the supply chain that is 5 people deep, but
only if you really work at getting it that low. The amount of "middle men" is
absurd. I reversed engineered quite a few supply chains, and even managed to
get in contact with the source, but there I was blocked. I had to go one
person higher, but that person refused to speak to my company. I then had to
go one person higher, and they refused to talk to me. I ultimately ended up
going up 5 levels away from the source, but even that is not a chain, but more
like a web. If I was able to buy from the source, or even two levels away, the
price of the products would be cheaper than China.

The final slap was that the person I finally managed to get a "yes" from was
not willing to work with me unless I worked specifically on their terms. I
won't go into detail, but their term was 100% unreasonable. The fact is that
the supply chain in the US is far to complex and it is based on protecting
profits. US-made items are not inherently more expensive than Chinese
products, but even those with clout have to deal with long response times and
an ever-growing web of middle-men. Simply hiring a Mandarin speaker to call
China is far quicker and easier.

~~~
mgkimsal
I worked with a manufacturer back in 2005-2007, and kept in touch some with
the next dev on their development efforts. The company spent a lot of time and
money dicking around with developing some custom ecommerce stuff, tieing in an
ordering system to their customer service dept, etc.

Then they'd show it, have meetings, make changes, etc. Did this for multiple
_years_. And made a handful of sales. Why? Because they never promoted it
(either under their own name or another). Why not? Because they didn't want to
'upset' their current channel partners. But they'd investigated direct sales
for a few years because the channel wasn't delivering.

Absolutely ridiculous, and it would not surprise me one bit if I could call
China and order the exact versions of what they made and have them shipped to
my house faster than ordering from this company in Chicago.

I'm not suggesting all companies are like this by a long shot, but I've seen
inside more than enough to understand just how inefficient many companies are,
and this idea of 'protecting' the supply chain will be a pretty moot point as
it becomes easier and easier to order direct from alibaba vendors and have
things shipped over in days vs waiting for the appropriate field-sales-
marketing-division-exec-vp-manager to fire up their outlook and hunt-and-peck
a typo-laden form letter complete with out-of-date brochure/price-list.

~~~
dizzystar
I had to deal with the same issues as well. Protecting the supply-chain is
priority one in the industry I used to work for, but the fact is that the
internet exposed the entire industry for the BS protection mechanism it is.

What happened is that the distributors decided to go past the suppliers and
order direct from China, which they couldn't do even 5 years ago, but the
suppliers, if they ever went direct to the end-user, would get tarred by the
entire industry. It didn't stop here. End-users would contact the suppliers,
who would uphold the honor and refer them to distributors. The end-user would
say screw that and order direct from China who couldn't care less about what
American companies think.

I don't want to specify what industry I used to work in, but that fact is that
this old-world ol'boy protectionism is destroying America's ability to re-
enter manufacturing. The sick part is that there are entire regulatory bodies
protecting the supply chain.

Unfortunately, politicians either don't know the truth, or really can't be
expected to explain all of this to the general public. Of course, the
politicians will be incorrectly blamed for not bringing jobs back to America,
but the reality is that this all has to change from within the industries who
are destroying themselves.

~~~
mgkimsal
I'm pretty sure it doesn't even matter the industry you specify - if it
involves manufacturing of any sort, I suspect there's a lot more of what you
and I are describing going on.

The "refer to distributor" model can have its place, but I think those days
are numbered for many industries. In many cases, it's just a different person
you're ordering from, and an extra day to get your stuff - there's _0_ value
add. The fact that we can even talk about ordering direct from China -
shipping stuff 15,000+ miles over several days, and still getting better value
than buying from someone two states away says far more about the state of
'business' than anything else. It's felt to me that for most of my adult
working life, 'business' has been far more about cost cutting and offshoring
jobs than creating any sort of value - I'm not even sure most 'business'
people (with the degrees and years of experience) even understand how to
create or measure the value their customers want. Competing on price alone
they've been doomed for a generation, and we're continuing to see the
unravelling of American business (primarily manufacturing, but it'll happen to
other industries too).

~~~
dizzystar
You hit the nail on the head: it is all about VAS and getting squeezed on
price, especially in the supplier-distributor model. The end-user will price-
shop, but unbeknownst the end-users, all the distributors get their stuff from
the same few suppliers. The end-users squeeze the distributors, and the
distributors squeeze the suppliers, and it ends up no one makes any money.
This then gets compounded because China is raising their prices, and at times,
choking off the supply chain completely. After the end-users can't find what
they want, they just look online and order direct from China.

I've been convinced for quite a while that price-slashing is the ultimate
killer. The only advantage US suppliers have at this point is keeping foreign-
bought stock locally so that they can deliver in less than a week. End-users
are learning very quick, especially with the price of software decreasing,
that keeping things in-house is not only more convenient, but cost less too.

------
jaggederest
The only reason salaries in SF are ridiculous is because they base hiring on
which degree you have, compete for the new graduates so they can work them to
death, and only look for people in the SF bay.

If you relax any of those criteria, you suddenly don't have a programmer
shortage anymore.

In addition, programming is inherently not something you can have masses of
blue-collar people doing. Once you program something once, there's zero cost
to make a copy. That's why blue collar jobs are dying in all sorts of
industries where things _can_ be automated - they soon _will_ be automated.

The idea of websites that are 'factory produced' is called _facebook pages_ or
any of a number of other as-a-service setups that give you a domain, some
pages, and a form-based interface to fill them out.

There's again no need to go bringing a bunch of people into the equation -
those sass businesses need virtually no human sales or support compared to a
car dealership in every city over 10k people. You can sell your product
everywhere on earth with a sales and support system of ~100 people, if you
really want to hold a lot of hands.

~~~
tibbon
Yes, there is still a developer shortage, at least for certain technologies.

I'm in Columbus, Ohio, and its near impossible still to find a local Rails &
Backbone developer who is looking for work and does a good job. I'm not going
to work them to death, and i'd be willing to pay a decent salary.

Friends in NY, Boston, Austin, Chicago and DC have reported similar findings
in looking for qualified individuals. These people aren't looking for
rockstars, but often just someone who will do the job well.

If you're willing to hire remote, it still isn't always easy to find someone,
but it does get much easier comparatively.

~~~
jfarmer
One of our summer Dev Bootcamp students moved back to Columbus, Ohio. Shoot me
an email at jesse@devbootcamp.com and I'm happy to put you two in touch. :)

Can't promise he's what you or anyone you know is looking for in terms of a
potential employee, but it might be nice from a community-building standpoint!

~~~
tibbon
Thanks Jesse!

------
tibbon
I've tried to get a few friends into development who aren't developers. These
are people working at $8-10/hr, often upward of 50 hours a week. Even moving
up to $25/hr would be a massive life change for them, and given hiring trends
in tech I thought it would be a great move for them, even if they weren't
great at it for a few years.

Its been a miserable failure. I've come to the conclusion that programming is
hard, and I've been incredibly privileged by having a computer since I was 2
(C64!) and I have so much built in knowledge that I don't even realize I have.

Also, this stuff just isn't fun for a lot of people. Sometimes its downright
painful for them and they just can't push themselves through the tough parts
motivation-wise. I can imagine it being a bit like doing Crossfit (or any
exercise). I know I'd be a lot healthier if I did it for a year. But the
upfront expense, the pain, and being incredibly bad at it for the first few
months just makes it so I don't even try- even though I know the benefits
could be life changing.

I bought a copy of Agile Development on Rails and gave it to such a friend. He
didn't know how to pull up a command prompt, and I realized that he didn't
know what a text editor was. Or that you'd run things from the terminal, and
type them in the text editor. I helped him get past that, but he never focused
in on it and never saw the beautiful and amazing parts of it.

Another friend got a little farther. But I soon realized how much 'background'
knowledge he was missing. I pointed him toward some free online CS courses,
which helped. But life got in the way and it just wasn't the #1 thing for him,
so he got distracted and quit when he moved to a new (small) city.

Another friend wanted help getting started. He was motivated, but we hit a
major problem. He's a student with an older iBook. We had huge issues setting
up Ruby due to various environmental problems. I didn't have the time to
really redo his entire system, but I wasn't able to get Ruby installed easily
since he was on 10.3 or something ancient.

Just telling people that there are boatloads of money to be had, and that
there are tons of resources out there doesn't always work. They really have to
love it to get through that first painful year or so.

Now perhaps having more jobs (these knowledge factories) that will give people
an environment to work in, the tools, the training, etc... might help. But
otherwise, I've just seen that I have personally been a complete and utter
failure at helping friends get into programming. I'm thankful that I have a
background that makes it easy for me to do and learn, but many just don't have
that background and I don't know how to help them get past that.

~~~
tsotha
Programming is one of those things some people just don't have the knack for,
and no matter how long they stay with it and how hard they try they'll never
be more than barely productive. The industry is already full of those kinds of
people shuffling from one three month contracting gig to another.

We're not going to retrain blue collar workers to do IT as it's done now, and
the factory model doesn't work - consulting companies have been trying to do
this for decades with no success (well, aside from billing a whole lot of
hours).

If we want to deal with high unemployment on the lower rungs of the job ladder
we need to stop the flood of illegal immigrants. Any small gains we try to
make by bringing people up the ladder will be washed away in short order.

~~~
jfarmer
I think this is easy to say, but hard to prove. It's certainly the
conventional wisdom among software engineers.

~~~
tsotha
It's an observation. I'm not sure what other proof I need.

------
toyg
We keep looking at XIX century models and try to map them to the present day;
that is just wrong. The fundamental shift in production models that full
automation is bringing is still poorly understood. Even worse, we keep looking
at _percentages_ of growing populations, with no regard for absolute limits:
we assume our models will grow forever, that we'll produce an infinite number
of physical objects (houses, cars) in a finite space.

You cannot expect the construction sector to grow forever. You cannot expect
factories to stop using better and better robots. You cannot expect developers
to stop automating more and more processes, including their own job.

The only sectors were you can try to create "infinite employment growth" are
social: healthcare, education, some creative industries. These sectors have
hard dependencies on their customers/workers ratio, and are forced to grow and
shrink in tune with actual population numbers.

Unfortunately, these are also sectors we undervalue and underfund, with very
sensitive boundaries, and where classic capitalistic paradigms don't work
well. There is a lot of work to do.

~~~
Crake
Humans don't like to think about the fact that everything will end for them
someday. Most people can barely plan for a week, much less for a century from
now. Humanity's downfall will almost certainly stem from the shortsightedness
of the majority.

------
ilaksh
He makes some good points. In particular the idea that web sites and other
common applications don't need to be hand-crafted at a low level for each
individual customer and instead can be built by configuring and combining
components with graphical interactive tools.

This type of component-based software development has been available for
years. It just hasn't become popular with programmers, because configuring
components isn't considered programming since it doesn't involve typing
cryptic ASCII code. This is the main issue holding back software development.

Also, the idea that you shouldn't have to write code to position text and
graphical elements on a page, I think would be obvious to more programmers if
it weren't for the HTML+CSS tradition that has been built up and become
ensconced.

~~~
spitfire
You couldn't be more right. We're still working with such low level tools it's
embarrassing. The worst part is, I think this is because of a sort of job
security mentality. We had real working RAD tools in the 90's (NeXT/Apple
enterprise object frameworks). Systems with databases built into the OS in the
80's (AS/400), and so on. But we've abandoned all of those.

>I think would be obvious to more programmers if it weren't for the HTML+CSS
tradition that has been built up and become ensconced.

HTML/CSS and in fact the entire web stack is a horrible monster. It's
essentially programming in assembly to put dialogs up on a screen. The only
real saving grace is reach.

Here's an experiment, put up a modal dialog up in your GUI. One line. Now do
the same in a webpage.

------
xarien
The cost of automating car construction is quite costly. The cost of
automating website construction is near zero. That is the number 1 reason why
you can't compare these apples and oranges.

One of the top reasons why blue collared labor is being phased out is not only
due to outsourcing, but also from the installation of robotic workers (i.e.
Amazon's warehouse infrastructure). One of the fundamentals of programming or
software engineering is the ability to reuse code, modules, frameworks, you
name it. With this level of automation already in place and still growing,
there's absolutely zero need for this class of blue collared knowledge workers
as you've described.

------
cadlin
The graph in the post indicates that unemployment in all sectors went up after
the financial crash, some were just hit by it more than others. Specifically,
those who worked in construction suffered the worst from a collapse in real
estate.

Also, that jobs that require "worthless" college degrees and/or oversaturated
professional degrees (e.g. law grads) still have more job security than those
with little to no post-secondary education.

It would be interesting to see a similar graph-by-occupation when the dot-com
bubble burst. Would you see the exact opposite trend?

------
rossjudson
You can't increase the bandwidth of the programming industry by lowering
salaries. If we're doing well right now, so be it. There's always another
crash around the corner, and next time we may not be lucky.

------
lgleason
There are two issues with this article. One, writing software is not like
producing things on an assembly line. This is why we have come to realize that
CMM is not effective, and Agile/Lean works.....Writing software is analogous
to designing a product, not mass producing it.

In the same way that the economy went through a transition during the
beginning of the industrial revolution, the same is happening
today.......granted I would love to see things move towards a resource based
economy ala the zeitgeist movement.....but that is another discussion.

------
rizzom5000
It's possible to compare writing software to writing literature. In the end,
it doesn't matter how huge the demand for good literature is; the number of
people capable of writing a good novel will remain roughly the same.

If anything, smart software will put mediocre programmers (and novelists) out
of work. It seems unlikely, however, that we'll ever see a significant number
of unskilled workers in the tech sector.

------
necolas
The analogies and conclusions are based on false assumptions about the driving
forces and consequences of the "machine revolution". You can expect fewer jobs
and the accumulation of more wealth concentrated in the hands of fewer people
as a result of increased automation and the creation of more efficient
"digital production lines".

------
cvursache
That is an interesting wide political vision of how the current society could
change into something a lot better by following an idea. It also sounds a bit
like Frederick Engels. Good read, anyways.

------
ajlai
What you are calling for is <http://www.wix.com/>.

