At 08:43 AM 5/8/97 -0700, you wrote: >Louis: One of the things that is so interesting about the software >industry is that it has resisted the deskilling process that Stanley >Aronowitz and William DeFazio wrote about in "The Jobless Future". I have >seen efforts to mechanize and Taylorize the programming business since the >mid 1970s, but it has come to naught. Deskilling does go on in the computer industry, but at the same time new skills keep popping up as new hardware creates new possibilities. What people like Aronowitz don't get about the computer industry is that it's a very young industry where the technology has been changing at breakneck speed. As a result, not only are there always new skills to learn, but there's also a healthy market fixing the inevitable screwups that occur when you play with new toys before they're ready. >The latest magic bullet is something >called "object orientation" (OO). It has been a fiasco. OO tries to create >the equivalent of replacable modules, such as the kind that are found in >hardware assemblies. Companies have tried and abandoned OO because they >discover that software algorithms and data are constantly changing to >reflect new company policies. I think the object-oriented debate is a lot like the whole word vs. phonics debate: it's a red herring. A few years ago, NASA, which plays with every new computing fad that comes along, did a study of programming techniques and toys and found, much to its suprise, that no method or toy was correlated with increased productivity. What was? The people skills: how well teams of programmers worked together, how well they were managed, how good the communication between the programmers/developers and the users was, etc. This is why so many promising techniques crash and burn: they aren't worth a damn if they're badly managed (incidentally, object-oriented approaches are making a comeback under the Net, albeit with a lot less furvor over OO ideological purity). >Louis: I don't expect Indian programmers or their American counterparts to >ever organize. This is basically a petty-bourgeois layer. This is another >flaw in Aronowitz and DeFazio's analysis. He believes that there is some >kind of proletarianization going on. This is ridiculous. The highest per >capita membership in the Liberatarian Party of any corporation in the US >is at Microsoft. And a lot of them are probably "Lockheed Libertarians" (i.e., greedy selfish pigs). Anders Schneiderman Progressive Communications
