Modular, Scaleable Everything
August 11, 2018 10:51 AM Subscribe
As the gig economy grows, so too does the danger that engineers, in attempting to build the most efficient systems, will chop and dice jobs into pieces so dehumanized that our legal system will no longer recognize them. And along with this comes an even more sinister possibility: jobs that would and should be recognizable—especially supervisory and management positions—will disappear altogether.Short read: Susan Fowler in Vanity Fair notes that the
Mod note: Fixed the link, carry on.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:04 AM on August 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:04 AM on August 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
Thanks cortex!
posted by postcommunism at 11:04 AM on August 11, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by postcommunism at 11:04 AM on August 11, 2018 [2 favorites]
The risk, we agreed, is that the gig economy will become the only economy, swallowing up entire groups of employees who hold full-time jobs, and that it will, eventually, displace us all. The bigger risk, however, is that the only people who understand the looming threat are the ones enabling it.
Is it the combination of youth and the wackiness of silicon valley that cultivates incredibly annoying blind arrogance? How can anyone make that last statement with a straight face? Did an ironic emoticon fail to render?
Good that there is some self awareness. Some. Can you imagine a college senior asking "Which companies will guarantee lifetime employment?" I recall odd qualms after automating a microfiche reader, it would speed some job s but the users were integrated into the machine.
Unions are not growing. Can anyone imagine legislation that can outsmart venture capital? A startup will be working around the new law before it's out of committee.
posted by sammyo at 11:39 AM on August 11, 2018 [12 favorites]
Is it the combination of youth and the wackiness of silicon valley that cultivates incredibly annoying blind arrogance? How can anyone make that last statement with a straight face? Did an ironic emoticon fail to render?
Good that there is some self awareness. Some. Can you imagine a college senior asking "Which companies will guarantee lifetime employment?" I recall odd qualms after automating a microfiche reader, it would speed some job s but the users were integrated into the machine.
Unions are not growing. Can anyone imagine legislation that can outsmart venture capital? A startup will be working around the new law before it's out of committee.
posted by sammyo at 11:39 AM on August 11, 2018 [12 favorites]
> Now, as Silicon Valley struggles to come to terms with its corrosive underpinnings, a new vein of disquiet has wormed its way into the Slack chats and happy-hour outings of low-level rank-and-file engineers, spurred by a question that seems to drown out everything else: What have we done?
"What have we done?" inevitably follows in the wake of humanity's tendency to figure out how to do things without stopping to think about whether we should. I remember engineering students at my university openly mocking the very concept of studying anything but STEM subjects in the school paper, and this is where that mentality leads.
I'm debating whether to forward this article to a friend of mine I had dinner with a few nights ago. He was very pro-Uber, and believed the app was a win-win for drivers and customers. I countered that the illusion of control for the drivers was just that, an illusion, and that the whole thing is a minefield of unintended consequences even if the people running Uber have good intentions (which I would argue they do not, for my value of "good"). Ultimately I don't think I was able to make him understand my point of view, which was that in the long run companies like Uber, no matter how cheap and convenient they are for him, are going to ruin the labour market for his children, who will be entering it in less than a decade. To each their own, but I don't use any of these services.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:58 AM on August 11, 2018 [17 favorites]
"What have we done?" inevitably follows in the wake of humanity's tendency to figure out how to do things without stopping to think about whether we should. I remember engineering students at my university openly mocking the very concept of studying anything but STEM subjects in the school paper, and this is where that mentality leads.
I'm debating whether to forward this article to a friend of mine I had dinner with a few nights ago. He was very pro-Uber, and believed the app was a win-win for drivers and customers. I countered that the illusion of control for the drivers was just that, an illusion, and that the whole thing is a minefield of unintended consequences even if the people running Uber have good intentions (which I would argue they do not, for my value of "good"). Ultimately I don't think I was able to make him understand my point of view, which was that in the long run companies like Uber, no matter how cheap and convenient they are for him, are going to ruin the labour market for his children, who will be entering it in less than a decade. To each their own, but I don't use any of these services.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:58 AM on August 11, 2018 [17 favorites]
The bigger risk, however, is that the only people who understand the looming threat are the ones enabling it.Yes, certainly this is the very first article ever about the threat of the gig economy. No one else has even noticed it. Thank goodness we have engineers to notice, years
posted by jeather at 12:08 PM on August 11, 2018 [34 favorites]
Somebody needs to work on a vaccine for engineer's disease before they kill us all.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 1:04 PM on August 11, 2018 [16 favorites]
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 1:04 PM on August 11, 2018 [16 favorites]
Somebody needs to work on a vaccine for engineer's disease before they kill us all.
It's called the liberal arts. There's a reason people keep saying that engineers need more than engineering courses.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:11 PM on August 11, 2018 [44 favorites]
It's called the liberal arts. There's a reason people keep saying that engineers need more than engineering courses.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:11 PM on August 11, 2018 [44 favorites]
Somebody needs to work on a vaccine for engineer's disease before they kill us all.
The planet is indeed working on one, but it's kind of a blunt instrument.
posted by ryanshepard at 1:11 PM on August 11, 2018 [20 favorites]
The planet is indeed working on one, but it's kind of a blunt instrument.
posted by ryanshepard at 1:11 PM on August 11, 2018 [20 favorites]
Engineers are wage laborers. We get fired if we work against the desires of the capitalists that pay us. Treat the disease, not the symptoms.
posted by ReadEvalPost at 1:14 PM on August 11, 2018 [19 favorites]
posted by ReadEvalPost at 1:14 PM on August 11, 2018 [19 favorites]
Yeah really. Software engineers build stuff that is designed by business people. You wouldn’t blame the contractors for a big ugly house someone paid them to build. Profit motive doesn’t care about liberal arts either.
posted by bleep at 1:18 PM on August 11, 2018 [9 favorites]
posted by bleep at 1:18 PM on August 11, 2018 [9 favorites]
You wouldn’t blame the contractors for a big ugly house someone paid them to build.
So, it's not okay to blame them, but it is okay to blow them up if they're on the job site when a Rebel attack occurs?
posted by FJT at 1:22 PM on August 11, 2018 [12 favorites]
So, it's not okay to blame them, but it is okay to blow them up if they're on the job site when a Rebel attack occurs?
posted by FJT at 1:22 PM on August 11, 2018 [12 favorites]
I lead a team of prrgrammers, and am a programmer myself, but I studied speech and mass media, and worked in radio and television, before I did any professional programming. Prior to my current career, any programming I did was in the context of my own amusement.
It continues to astound me how much value I give to my teams not by teaching them coding techniques (although I do that), but by teaching them to be people who think of other people, and think how their choices at every level impact the real world.
The narrowness of this kind of thinking stood out to me recently with a coder who spent fifteen minutes writing a test to prove that coding something one way was twice as fast as coding it another way, which mattered academically and at scale, but in this case would only be done once in response to a user action. And the "slower" one took 15ms to do a thousand times.
Teaching comp sci engineers to think at scale is important, but we have to teach them that what they do only exists as a means to an end, so if they don't consider the end, they will likely choose inappropriate (and at least wasteful, at most harmful) means... and that the end isn't the technical goal, but rather how completion of that technical goal impacts real human beings.
posted by davejay at 2:33 PM on August 11, 2018 [16 favorites]
It continues to astound me how much value I give to my teams not by teaching them coding techniques (although I do that), but by teaching them to be people who think of other people, and think how their choices at every level impact the real world.
The narrowness of this kind of thinking stood out to me recently with a coder who spent fifteen minutes writing a test to prove that coding something one way was twice as fast as coding it another way, which mattered academically and at scale, but in this case would only be done once in response to a user action. And the "slower" one took 15ms to do a thousand times.
Teaching comp sci engineers to think at scale is important, but we have to teach them that what they do only exists as a means to an end, so if they don't consider the end, they will likely choose inappropriate (and at least wasteful, at most harmful) means... and that the end isn't the technical goal, but rather how completion of that technical goal impacts real human beings.
posted by davejay at 2:33 PM on August 11, 2018 [16 favorites]
I enjoyed Molly Sauter's take on this piece on twitter (echoes what sammyo and jeather said above).
posted by ubermuffin at 2:47 PM on August 11, 2018 [8 favorites]
posted by ubermuffin at 2:47 PM on August 11, 2018 [8 favorites]
(Quietly arranges things on the table)
posted by The Whelk at 2:49 PM on August 11, 2018 [9 favorites]
posted by The Whelk at 2:49 PM on August 11, 2018 [9 favorites]
but by teaching them to be people who think of other people, and think how their choices at every level impact the real world.
Back at Apple in the 80’s when User Interface was it, this was drummed into the programmers to always think about the user - what they expect to see, expect to do, expect to think about what they were doing, etc. Coupled with the drive to internationalization - translation of UI text, images, etc. - you had to have a much broader horizon when designing software. Thus the User was supposed to always be the first thing you think about as you design and build. And there was obligatory user testing to actually test your notion of what user expects. Sometime in the 90’s I think the user first attitude morphed into we know better than the user attitude. And as apps and OSs evolved the UI evolved too and not in any user friendly way. UI design now seems to be a combination of “this is our style of doing things (for you)” combined with what ever somebody else might be doing. The users were forgotten. Apple’s User Inteface Guidelines were the bible then. You never seem to hear about them anymore.
posted by njohnson23 at 4:32 PM on August 11, 2018 [6 favorites]
Back at Apple in the 80’s when User Interface was it, this was drummed into the programmers to always think about the user - what they expect to see, expect to do, expect to think about what they were doing, etc. Coupled with the drive to internationalization - translation of UI text, images, etc. - you had to have a much broader horizon when designing software. Thus the User was supposed to always be the first thing you think about as you design and build. And there was obligatory user testing to actually test your notion of what user expects. Sometime in the 90’s I think the user first attitude morphed into we know better than the user attitude. And as apps and OSs evolved the UI evolved too and not in any user friendly way. UI design now seems to be a combination of “this is our style of doing things (for you)” combined with what ever somebody else might be doing. The users were forgotten. Apple’s User Inteface Guidelines were the bible then. You never seem to hear about them anymore.
posted by njohnson23 at 4:32 PM on August 11, 2018 [6 favorites]
Reads piece. Remembers Fowler was a philosophy-physics double major at Penn. Reconsiders a liberal arts-based cure for techno-capitalism.
In related news: Fowler will be joining the NY Times Opinion section as Technology Editor.
posted by cichlid ceilidh at 5:15 PM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
In related news: Fowler will be joining the NY Times Opinion section as Technology Editor.
posted by cichlid ceilidh at 5:15 PM on August 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
We can discuss how much blame a low level programmer does or doesn't deserve for working at Uber, and there are some interesting thoughts there.
But whatever the answer is to that, she deserves all sorts of blame for saying that the engineers who have finally seen the light are the first people to sound the alarm.
posted by jeather at 5:44 PM on August 11, 2018 [6 favorites]
But whatever the answer is to that, she deserves all sorts of blame for saying that the engineers who have finally seen the light are the first people to sound the alarm.
posted by jeather at 5:44 PM on August 11, 2018 [6 favorites]
So I double majored in a liberal arts subject and CS, and I've said this before here, but the most sheltered, privileged students were the ones in liberal arts, because they didn't need a guaranteed job after graduation. It was not the CS students who decided it'd be a great idea to join the Young Conservatives and organize an outing to a strip club to welcome the new members. Many of the people responsible for the mess we're in now, I wager, had a liberal arts education.
That said, I agree that software engineers have a tendency to forget about history, and find it easier to start from scratch than work with something existing regardless of the real-world consequences. But I think it's kind of funny, because if anything, the entire experience of software engineering is encountering this awful legacy system, coming up with a beautiful, elegant design to replace it, running up against the real world, bolting on fixes, then realizing you've ended up with something that's not necessarily better (and sometimes, even worse) than what came before . Like, guys, of all people, you should know better.
posted by airmail at 6:43 PM on August 11, 2018 [8 favorites]
That said, I agree that software engineers have a tendency to forget about history, and find it easier to start from scratch than work with something existing regardless of the real-world consequences. But I think it's kind of funny, because if anything, the entire experience of software engineering is encountering this awful legacy system, coming up with a beautiful, elegant design to replace it, running up against the real world, bolting on fixes, then realizing you've ended up with something that's not necessarily better (and sometimes, even worse) than what came before . Like, guys, of all people, you should know better.
posted by airmail at 6:43 PM on August 11, 2018 [8 favorites]
Yeah really. Software engineers build stuff that is designed by business people. You wouldn’t blame the contractors for a big ugly house someone paid them to build. Profit motive doesn’t care about liberal arts either.
Well, if software engineers have no responsibility for what they do, then we can pay them less, can't we?
Also, does this mean we can also stop listening to the damn engineers when they weigh in on everything from evolution, to gender biology to politics? If they can't even be in control of their own discipline, why should we listen when they claim to have authority in anything else?
posted by happyroach at 9:50 PM on August 11, 2018 [5 favorites]
Well, if software engineers have no responsibility for what they do, then we can pay them less, can't we?
Also, does this mean we can also stop listening to the damn engineers when they weigh in on everything from evolution, to gender biology to politics? If they can't even be in control of their own discipline, why should we listen when they claim to have authority in anything else?
posted by happyroach at 9:50 PM on August 11, 2018 [5 favorites]
Collective action is necessary if workers want to shut down business demands. The Tech Workers Coalition is one organization I know of that's trying to bring this about.
posted by bookman117 at 12:21 AM on August 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by bookman117 at 12:21 AM on August 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
The inevitable conclusion happened? Who saw that one coming, besides anyone who was paying the slightest bit of attention?
Bright to you via a No Duh Grant from the No Shit Sherlock Foundation.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:24 AM on August 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
Bright to you via a No Duh Grant from the No Shit Sherlock Foundation.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:24 AM on August 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
the most sheltered, privileged students were the ones in liberal arts, because they didn't need a guaranteed job after graduation
Wait, what?? That is not my experience at all. Most of the CS/engineering major I know/knew were focused on getting only the best-paying job, while most liberal arts grads were looking for jobs where they had an impact - on the environment, on the arts, on public good. Knowing what the hiring organization’s mission statement and strategic plan was seems to be a theme for liberals arts grads while CS/engineering was asking about signing bonuses (not all CS/engineering but a really huge part of them, tended to go along with the sneering)
posted by saucysault at 4:26 AM on August 12, 2018 [6 favorites]
Wait, what?? That is not my experience at all. Most of the CS/engineering major I know/knew were focused on getting only the best-paying job, while most liberal arts grads were looking for jobs where they had an impact - on the environment, on the arts, on public good. Knowing what the hiring organization’s mission statement and strategic plan was seems to be a theme for liberals arts grads while CS/engineering was asking about signing bonuses (not all CS/engineering but a really huge part of them, tended to go along with the sneering)
posted by saucysault at 4:26 AM on August 12, 2018 [6 favorites]
If you want Uber to be a pariah for skilled Silicon Valley employees... it already is, they're having a really hard time getting decent employees right now. Some of that is the documented awfulness at headquarters, some of that is what they're doing to society at large, some of that is people guessing the company won't be around in 3 years. But it's happening.
Most of the tech people I've worked with have actually been pretty socially aware... it only takes a tiny fraction who are willing to work at Uber, defense contractors, writing the code that tells Amazon warehouse workers what to do minute-by-minute, etc. And remember that a large fraction of tech workers are not from the US and really don't care all that much about US social issues (a software engineer in India makes far less than the US median income, even adjusted for purchasing power... why should they care about poor people in the US?).
posted by miyabo at 8:53 AM on August 12, 2018 [3 favorites]
Most of the tech people I've worked with have actually been pretty socially aware... it only takes a tiny fraction who are willing to work at Uber, defense contractors, writing the code that tells Amazon warehouse workers what to do minute-by-minute, etc. And remember that a large fraction of tech workers are not from the US and really don't care all that much about US social issues (a software engineer in India makes far less than the US median income, even adjusted for purchasing power... why should they care about poor people in the US?).
posted by miyabo at 8:53 AM on August 12, 2018 [3 favorites]
...the most sheltered, privileged students were the ones in liberal arts, because they didn't need a guaranteed job after graduation.
As an isolated child raised by abusive religious extremists, who (me, that is) went on to major in French with a minor in music (I originally majored in piano performance) and who just barely finished my BA thanks to getting a scholarship for my final year – which I earned by being top of the liberal arts college at my university, i.e. not just in French, but in the entire liberal arts college – because my parents refused to contribute a dime to my independence and also actively tried to sabotage my degree – I'm sitting here nodding like so.
I now manage key projects and teams at Fortune 50 companies in Paris. There are those of us who are driven by ideals, not just salary. I'm pretty careful about how I talk about it because it's not just idealism, it's also discipline, which includes quite a few ingredients.
I too have seen incredible progress made when managing with all the philosophical, psychological, historical, and plain-old-wise tools I learned through the humanities. If there is one thing that motivates every human, whether they recognize it or not, it's the need to feel they're doing something with meaning. Seek that out – what each unique person on your team wants/seeks, try what you can to find it together, and the resulting progress is amazing. Where "progress" is any mixture of cohesion/independence/autonomy/teamwork, productivity (it's positive when people have their meaning for it, not an imposed meaning), well-being.
I also know full well that sort of thing attempts to be done via all sorts of wack, corporate-simplified recipes like "team-building" (which doesn't work too well for introverts), NLP (thankfully this one seems to be dying) and such. But really the only recipe is a long, disciplined slog of humble participation as a human being who listens to other human beings and only asks of others what s/he has already asked of hirself.
That's pretty much it, too: You cannot ask of anyone, anything that you have not already asked of yourself.
posted by fraula at 12:11 PM on August 12, 2018 [4 favorites]
As an isolated child raised by abusive religious extremists, who (me, that is) went on to major in French with a minor in music (I originally majored in piano performance) and who just barely finished my BA thanks to getting a scholarship for my final year – which I earned by being top of the liberal arts college at my university, i.e. not just in French, but in the entire liberal arts college – because my parents refused to contribute a dime to my independence and also actively tried to sabotage my degree – I'm sitting here nodding like so.
I now manage key projects and teams at Fortune 50 companies in Paris. There are those of us who are driven by ideals, not just salary. I'm pretty careful about how I talk about it because it's not just idealism, it's also discipline, which includes quite a few ingredients.
I too have seen incredible progress made when managing with all the philosophical, psychological, historical, and plain-old-wise tools I learned through the humanities. If there is one thing that motivates every human, whether they recognize it or not, it's the need to feel they're doing something with meaning. Seek that out – what each unique person on your team wants/seeks, try what you can to find it together, and the resulting progress is amazing. Where "progress" is any mixture of cohesion/independence/autonomy/teamwork, productivity (it's positive when people have their meaning for it, not an imposed meaning), well-being.
I also know full well that sort of thing attempts to be done via all sorts of wack, corporate-simplified recipes like "team-building" (which doesn't work too well for introverts), NLP (thankfully this one seems to be dying) and such. But really the only recipe is a long, disciplined slog of humble participation as a human being who listens to other human beings and only asks of others what s/he has already asked of hirself.
That's pretty much it, too: You cannot ask of anyone, anything that you have not already asked of yourself.
posted by fraula at 12:11 PM on August 12, 2018 [4 favorites]
I concede I made a sweeping generalization. I definitely had classmates who overcame a lot to study something that meant a lot to them. Let me rephrase this - the worst behaviour I saw came a bunch of liberal arts students. My liberal arts major was where I met, for the first time in my life, people who had gone to $35k+/year private schools. They were very good at sounding smart and saying the right things. But all the vaunted liberal arts classes they took didn't stop them from posting photos of themselves mimicking racist caricatures (at a "secret" club, of course). I never encountered anything this egregious in CS.
Because of these experiences, when people throw out glib statements like "the liberal arts are the cure for engineer's disease", it smacks me of the ruling class patting themselves for being enlightened philosopher-kings and sneering at the unwashed masses for, like, focusing on subjects that will get them into fields with stable career prospects. (CS and engineering students have a similar thing going on in reverse - "if only all those irrational underwater basket weavers could learn how to code" and "the world would be better if engineers were in charge").
I agree most students would benefit from a broader education. Actually, CS, while I was studying it, had breadth requirements. Most students saw it as a huge hassle - and I understand, because being forced to study something you're not interested in and which will likely bring down your GPA because you're not good at it isn't fun at all. So of course, most people were just trying it get it over with and they didn't get much from it.
Also, the liberal arts are not a monolith - we're generalizing in this discussion. But I think it matters exactly what you study and how it's taught. For me, I studied history, and specifically at a time when the field is highly skeptical of the grand narrative, which is a good counterbalance to the "engineer's disease" of forgetting, well, history, and systemizing things off a cliff. But I was very privileged to be able to take this path (I didn't study CS until later on) - my family wasn't waiting on me to put food on the table.
But I don't think it was history that helped me develop empathy, which I think is really key - it was life experience (I'm still working on it). And some of the most empathetic people I know didn't even touch the liberal arts, besides that one first-year requirement. And some of the worst were, well, the people I described above. If only we could make people better by having them take classes at university - if only it were as simple as that.
(And engineering and CS aren't the same - software engineers often come one or the other, and engineering has actual ethical requirements in the curriculum, while CS doesn't. I'm not sure what the prevailing attitude is to the ethics portion for engineering students.)
posted by airmail at 5:43 PM on August 12, 2018 [2 favorites]
Because of these experiences, when people throw out glib statements like "the liberal arts are the cure for engineer's disease", it smacks me of the ruling class patting themselves for being enlightened philosopher-kings and sneering at the unwashed masses for, like, focusing on subjects that will get them into fields with stable career prospects. (CS and engineering students have a similar thing going on in reverse - "if only all those irrational underwater basket weavers could learn how to code" and "the world would be better if engineers were in charge").
I agree most students would benefit from a broader education. Actually, CS, while I was studying it, had breadth requirements. Most students saw it as a huge hassle - and I understand, because being forced to study something you're not interested in and which will likely bring down your GPA because you're not good at it isn't fun at all. So of course, most people were just trying it get it over with and they didn't get much from it.
Also, the liberal arts are not a monolith - we're generalizing in this discussion. But I think it matters exactly what you study and how it's taught. For me, I studied history, and specifically at a time when the field is highly skeptical of the grand narrative, which is a good counterbalance to the "engineer's disease" of forgetting, well, history, and systemizing things off a cliff. But I was very privileged to be able to take this path (I didn't study CS until later on) - my family wasn't waiting on me to put food on the table.
But I don't think it was history that helped me develop empathy, which I think is really key - it was life experience (I'm still working on it). And some of the most empathetic people I know didn't even touch the liberal arts, besides that one first-year requirement. And some of the worst were, well, the people I described above. If only we could make people better by having them take classes at university - if only it were as simple as that.
(And engineering and CS aren't the same - software engineers often come one or the other, and engineering has actual ethical requirements in the curriculum, while CS doesn't. I'm not sure what the prevailing attitude is to the ethics portion for engineering students.)
posted by airmail at 5:43 PM on August 12, 2018 [2 favorites]
Agreed with airmail - am neither from STEM or any liberal arts so I have no skin in this fight but the worst behaviours on display at university came from the arts. But I would guess that's because STEM students were probably too busy being buried under their course load or were insufficiently socially outgoing to get into any real trouble. Or maybe it's just the tools of oppression - you use what you know. Liberal Arts people are presumably experts at debate, feelings and words. Engineers can only oppress others when they finally build the machines like Facebook, Uber or Twitter to do it for them.
posted by xdvesper at 2:35 AM on August 13, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by xdvesper at 2:35 AM on August 13, 2018 [1 favorite]
I think it's kind of funny, because if anything, the entire experience of software engineering is encountering this awful legacy system, coming up with a beautiful, elegant design to replace it, running up against the real world, bolting on fixes, then realizing you've ended up with something that's not necessarily better (and sometimes, even worse) than what came before . Like, guys, of all people, you should know better.
For me, the really funny part happens when what you've described gets internalized and goes all meta, such that the entire software industry suddenly (in roughly the late Eighties) becomes completely obsessed by the problem of avoiding the re-invented wheel to the exclusion of pretty much every other consideration.
The culmination of that obsession is Object Oriented Programming - an approach putatively devoted to encouraging the creation of code suitable for re-use, which has in practice facilitated the creation of an absolute quagmire of overlapping and subtly incompatible functionality that's so abstracted and rarefied and indirect that nobody can understand what it actually does any more, much less re-use it in any intelligent fashion.
Much of it could be re-used if only anybody did understand it, but there's so much of it out there that it now usually takes less time to build new wheels from scratch than to evaluate accurately which of the available pre-designed ones is best suited to one's purpose, and real-world software design now involves being a dedicated follower of fashion to a far greater extent than it involves sound engineering.
posted by flabdablet at 6:43 AM on August 13, 2018 [2 favorites]
For me, the really funny part happens when what you've described gets internalized and goes all meta, such that the entire software industry suddenly (in roughly the late Eighties) becomes completely obsessed by the problem of avoiding the re-invented wheel to the exclusion of pretty much every other consideration.
The culmination of that obsession is Object Oriented Programming - an approach putatively devoted to encouraging the creation of code suitable for re-use, which has in practice facilitated the creation of an absolute quagmire of overlapping and subtly incompatible functionality that's so abstracted and rarefied and indirect that nobody can understand what it actually does any more, much less re-use it in any intelligent fashion.
Much of it could be re-used if only anybody did understand it, but there's so much of it out there that it now usually takes less time to build new wheels from scratch than to evaluate accurately which of the available pre-designed ones is best suited to one's purpose, and real-world software design now involves being a dedicated follower of fashion to a far greater extent than it involves sound engineering.
posted by flabdablet at 6:43 AM on August 13, 2018 [2 favorites]
« Older Why Britain Voted for Brexit | Jame Gumb had excellent taste in music. Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
Software has made it possible to go further (like the assembly line before it), but capitalism as a system of production has always involved chopping and dicing jobs into dehumanized pieces. This is essentially the thesis of Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital, which in a better world would be required reading in every computer science program.
posted by enn at 11:00 AM on August 11, 2018 [15 favorites]