I had a long and intresting conversation with my therapist just now. I’m not comfortable sharing exactly what we were talking about but I can rephrase it: basically I was complaining that tech companies don’t want to innovate.
I’ve been trying to bring new technologies to my boss because I thought it would give him a better opportunity to realize value from the products I’m creating/maintaining for him. That’s what I understand is my purpose in the workforce. I’m a programmer not a salesman I can’t go out to the market and get him the money so he can pay me with something, I can only make things put things in his hands for him (or hire someone to) to go out and collect the money we deserve (deserve within the limits of market demands and the nature of the product, not the labor invested). But he doesn’t want them… well he does when he needs them but I miss way more times than I hit which is making my professional feelings feel less valuable. And if I’m not valuable enough then I can’t work doing what I love.
When I started working I went in with a plan to upgrade and modernize everything I touch. I still believe that to be the case, or like… my “purpose”(as an employee not a person). But every company I’ve worked for so far has been running old ass shit. Springboot apps, create-react-apps, codebases in c and c++, no kubernetes, little to no cloud. And it feels like everything that tech companies want me to do is maintain and expand old existing codebases. And I understand why, I know that its expensive to rewrite entire code bases just for a 20% efficiency boost and to make it easier to add upgrades every once in awhile. But noone is taking advantage of innovative technology anymore and that’s what’s concerning me.
In my therapist’s opinion he thinks we as a soceity are not taking 100% advantage of technology we have. I can’t go into too many details bc our conversations are private but at the end I agreed with him. I’m seeing it now in my working day but he convinced me that it’s everywhere. Are people actually benefitting from technology enough such that nobody actually needs to work to maintain a long and healthy life?
Lets say that no, technology is underutilized in our soceity. Does that mean that if we use technology more we’d have enough value in the economy to pay everyone a UBI? Could we phase out the human workforce to some extent? Or do we actually need more workers to do work to make the value, in which case we can’t realistically do UBI because people need to get paid competitivily to do the work.
Lets say that yes, we are taking all advantages of technology. If so than there should be enough value to pay a UBI. But we don’t have a UBI, so why? If the value exists than where is it? I don’t believe its being funnelled into the pockets of some shadowy deep-state private 4th branch of government. If it was than there’d be something to take, is there? Are we sure that its enough?
Basically I don’t know if technology generates value.
Think about it like this
If its cheaper to use technology to grow an acre of corn than to use people, is that subsequent output of corn more valuable or less valuable because of the technology. And if you believe that scaling up corn production to make the corn just as valuable as if we didn’t have technology then you agree that the corn is now less valuable. If self-checkout machines are replacing cashiers, does that mean that the cashiering work being done by the machine is more valuable to soceity or less?
This is basically end stage capitalism. We need to recognize if the work we do for soceity (whether you derive personal fulfillment or not) is actually adding to soceity or not. I’d rather not give up my job as a programmer just so I can do something more valuable, but I might have to if that’s the case. And I feel like most people in the world are thinking like that too. Is soceity trying to hang on to the past, or do we just not understand the future?
Sorry for the wall of text. I feel like this might be to philosophical for this community but I couldn’t find a better place to post this. If you know of a better community for this discussion to take place then I’ll consider moving this post based on the comments already posted. Thank you for reading this and I’d love to answer any question you’d have about my opinions/feelings.
You’re getting a lot of answers that are explaining to you that the value doesn’t go to society, it goes to the owner class, and I agree. It seems to me you’re experiencing the personal wounds that come from being alienated from your work. This is because a capitalist, hierarchical workplace is inherently low-information. Your manager is in a position of power over you, which means they don’t have to listen to you, and most workers figure out sooner or later that their efforts are wasted and they’ll get by easier if they just keep their heads down and don’t make waves, so they stop trying to get managers to listen.
Your manager doesn’t necessarily care about innovation, or making society better, or your personal fulfillment. That doesn’t mean you need to find a manager that does, because the problem is that positions of power over others breed indifference to those others. Management in particular tends to go to people who are good at taking credit and ingratiating themselves to their superiors. It doesn’t select for competence at the actual job. If you luck out and get a good manager, they’ll be replaced eventually. You have no power over that decision.
I would recommend you read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (that is a talk he gave on the topic for a brief overview). It explains the mechanisms by which companies fill themselves with bloat and create jobs where very little is achieved and the people in them are miserable.
I would also recommend you look into worker owned cooperatives (google renamed that subtitle from “a cure for capitalism” to “curing capitalism”, presumably because the former title leaves room to think we are curing ourselves from capitalism, but the latter implies we are making capitalism better; I suspect his intent was far more revolutionary than they would like). They give the workers that actually produce everything control over the company. Managers are elected and recallable, so if your manager doesn’t listen they can be replaced by the people they manage. Their job is actually management, not a generalised rulership where they can turn your entire department upside down at a whim or just ignore you in favour of their own comfort.