All over the map II

Once again I cannibalize myself, but I think the dialogue is a good one, worth having. Yesterday's post, All over the map, generated an interesting comment from my correspondent mcfnord:

The discipline of software engineering is thriving. Do you mean the cash cow of the late 90's, the bizarre bubble world that gave me a quarter million dollars, flew me to Manhattan and put me up in Times Square because I knew C++ and would interview for a guy there? What about five years ago when I delivered pizza for a living? What about now at $51/hr? The labor market ebbs and flows, but the discipline of software engineering is as vibrant as ever. Stop looking in your rear view mirror, because only then will it appear that someone is gaining on you. It's because you're not driving! I see the young people, the Indians, I see them all every day, and I know my discipline is as strong as ever, competitive with anyone in any nation. My LinkedIn is a joke profile, and it doesn't matter.

Did you sign up for a cradle-to-grave Japan-style corporate security blanket? There's basically no way to know what will be happening in software engineering in ten years. Nobody ever told you otherwise. If you don't love software, don't study it. When I was delivering pizza for a living (pizza is also something I love), I decided to become a software artist, and accepted a life of poverty and beautiful code. It didn't work out that way. My project made large profits and launched me when hiring resumed. The pledge to software artistry is still with me. Nobody ever told me it would pay my bills.

There's no way I can imagine that our nation could maintain a monopoly on software or its jobs. Software, a totally conceptual construct, is conducive to the purest of labor markets: Where in the world will someone do this cheapest? Can we capitalize that person tomorrow to get it done? Carrie thinks this represents a sell-out at the top. You should know better: It represents the logical consequence of wires, labor markets... and that's about it.

My family met this weekend. My brother goes to India to train people to do his old job. My sister travels the world closing deals for Verisign with her MBA in international business. We all agreed that we're happy competing globally. Global markets are one reason I'm well-compensated. Could we have the advantages of globalization without the risks? What sort of wall can hold code inside our borders?

If you want to make an effort to serve American children, I support you. Randy Wang's still doing valuable work.

I wrote a comment, found it rambling on at some length, so I decided to recreate it here:

mcfnord: You make some good points, and I appreciate you expressing them. That said, I think we once again are closer in our thinking than it might appear, mainly because our main points are not entirely from the same place.

You've hit on a statement I made in the original post, which I see in retrospect was not precisely worded. Software engineering is not in decline as a discipline, but it is in this country. I won't say that there isn't a lot of software engineering out there (though I think we who see it as engineering have to remain ever-vigilant that we do not let it devolve into quick and dirty feature-mongering pushed by the business types who want it out the door NOW - but that has ever been so). My point was that, for Americans, the pressures are ever-increasing, that the expectations built up by the past can no longer certainly be realized. That is good for some, bad for others.

But the benefits and the costs are not being shared equally, and that's what strikes many of us as wrong. When a software job is moved, and let's not fool ourselves into believing that the movement is about quality, or bringing new opportunities to developing nations, or whatever self-serving twaddle the PR flacks come up with, it absolutely hurts the person whose job is gone. Further than that, it hurts things like the stability of families and communities as the conceptual worker becomes contingent. It's hard to quantify the cost to a community when scientific/technical minds can't run for the school board or city council because they'll be off to Baltimore, or Saskatchewan, or Abidjan in the next three months because that's where the work will take them, but there is a cost.

To argue that there is an inevitability to this is facile, and you will note that I have never advocated legislation to stop this. My goal is to point out that the kind of risk-shifting we're seeing is not being noticed by enough people, that the things you yourself are talking about are not commonly realized.

I think you're a bit too dismissive of those whom you claim are looking in the "rear view mirror." (Actually, you're claiming I'm doing that, but....) It was not wrong for people to build expectations out of the framework in which they lived, one in which they made trade-offs in search of some stability. Now that has, very quickly, been thrown up for grabs, and the cost is bound to be felt predominately by those who have no power. I want people to understand that as much as you do.

There are many people who paid a cost upfront in return for a future promise, and are now finding that promise unrealized. Take a field unrelated to software, say airline workers, in particular pilots. There are pilots who stayed with United Airlines even through rough times because they were promised things like a certain level of pensions. They turned down other opportunities, perhaps a chance to go to Southwest, as a result. Then they find the promises were worthless, that they'll only receive a fraction of the promise. Were they fools not to see that the exciting marketplace would one day take down the #1 airline? Was there anything they could have done to improve the incompetent management team? Were they wrong to build lives around the promises that were made to them?

Your family is doing well, and that's great. But each of you is hugely more replaceable than you would have been 20 years ago. There's a cost to that in present value terms, one that you haven't seen yet because it hasn't been realized. What happens when your brother has trained enough people to do his job, what does he do then? What happens when someone younger than your sister, with a fresher degree and a willingness to take less money, comes along and is hired by Verisign? You can say that the three of you are good enough, adaptable enough, to ride that tide, to go where the wind takes you and deal with whatever reality confronts you at that moment.

But you also have to think about your niece or nephew who ends up in six schools in eight years, or the neighborhood which becomes transient housing because everyone is dealing with the new reality.

Both you and Carrie are right. There is no way, especially in light of technology, to maintain a monopoly on any jobs. But it is also a sell-out at the top, because our "leadership" has done nothing to build institutions that might protect some of what this country has to offer. While countries like China and India have made the right moves, our political leadership has handed the responsibility for our nation's future over to people who have huge incentives not to care about it in the long term. You might argue that a certain exciting dynamism has been the result, but it's been fueled by a lot of self-serving snake oil.

It's easy to be casual about "capitalizing" a person, but that flies in the face of what many of us feel is good about American society, that we have attempted to see people as something more than capital. You have, perhaps unwittingly, put your finger on the problem, that there is a group of people, backed up by institutional ignorance, who are profiting from treating their fellow citizens as capital. Previous attempts to do that have proven undesirable in the long run, no matter how it may have helped us build the cotton industry.

Believe it or not, I am actually an optimist. I don't think that the situation is irretrievable, that we necessarily have to end up in neo-feudalism. But I see the trends, and I see people like yourself who are faring well, today, and want to believe that your success is accessible to everyone, who don't see the danger in letting the capitalizers have their way.

Some of us see that as a pretty bleak future, particularly in a nation that has so much potential to do better. We have taken a position of strength, one that offered the possibility of improving everyone's lot, and are in the process of turning it into a system of exploiters win, exploitees lose. Whatever the gains in efficiency that come from such a system, there is also a loss, and we are blowing past that on our way to the brave new world.

Are there ways of managing that? Absolutely, though I will not attempt to choose one or more here. But the widely-held assumption of inevitability precludes any efforts at mitigation, and, to me at least, fly in the face of a lot of what I think is right about my nation.

I'll reiterate that I don't think the two views above are that diametrically opposed. I'm not an anti-realist, I certainly realize the world has changed (I've worked for companies that hastened that change), but it is not necessarily good or easy to see the world change to the extent it has in the time it has. Society is built on pillars of stability; there may be some advantage to someone in tearing down those pillars, but there needs to be balance. To evaluate everything on a cost-benefit basis requires a full appraisal of the costs and the benefits - it's all too easy to look only at the benefits. We all have a responsibility to look more at the costs and, ideally, assign some of them to the people reaping the benefits.