Comment by aabhay

Post industrial era, there’s been a consistent migration of jobs through what I might call the “automation lifecycle”. Programming is indeed one of these job types and the lifecycle will be similar here.

Stage 0: The trade is a craft. There are no processes, only craftsmen, and the industry is essentially a fabric of enthusiasts and the surplus value they discover for the world. But every new person that enters the scene climbs a massive hill of new context and uncharted paths

Stage 1: Business in this trade booms. There is too much value being created, and standardization is needed to enforce efficiency. Education and training are structurally reworked to support a mass influx of labor and requirements. Craft still exists, and is often seen as the paragon for novices to aspire to, but most novices are not craftsmen and the craft has diminishing market value compared to results

Stage 2: The market needs volume, and requirements are known in advance and easily understood. Templates, patterns, and processes are more valuable in the market than labor. Labor is cheap and global. Automation is a key driver of future returns. Craftspeople bemoan the state of things, since the industry has lost its beating heart. However, the industry is far more productive overall and craft is slow.

Stage 3: Process is so entrenched that capital is now the only constraint. Those who can pay to deploy mountains of automated systems win the market since craft is so expensive that one can only sell craft to a market who wants it as a luxury, for ethics, or for aesthetics. A new kind of “craft” emerges that merges the raw industrial output with a kind of humane touch. Organic forms and nostalgia grip the market from time to time and old ideas and tropes are resurrected as memes, with short market lifecycles. The overwhelming existence of process and structure causes new inefficiencies to appear.

Stage 4: The market is lethargic, old, and resistant to innovation. High quality labor does not appear, as more craft driven markets now exist elsewhere in cool, disruptive, untapped domains. Capital flight occurs as its clear that the market can’t sustain new ideas. Processes are worn, despised, and all the key insights and innovations are so old that nobody knows how to build upon them. Experts from yesteryear run boutique consultancies in maintaining these dinosaur systems but otherwise there’s no real labor market for these things. Governments using them are now at risk and legal concerns grip the market.

Note that this is not something that applies broadly, e.g. “the Oil industry”, but to specific systems and techniques within broad industries, like “Shale production”, which embodies a mixture of labor power and specialized knowledge. Broadly speaking, categories of industries evolve in tandem with ideas so “petroleum industry” today means something different from “petroleum industry” in 1900