I think he is right, and its cool in a way, but also there are problems.
I like odesk a lot because if I sift through enough 'jobs' I eventually find some actual specs. I can just start working on a prototype and usually after sending out two or three links to prototyped applications I can get a project.
The problem is that since I'm competing with everyone in the whole world who saw the spec and decided to try to get it, I can't charge US rates, and I now need to move to India in order to afford the cost of living.
Where this is going is that there will be so many developers, people will just post specs, and the developers will _have_ to submit prototypes, and whoever's prototype is selected wins, and everyone else just wasted their time.
And within not too many years we will have Watson-like computer programs competing on sites like odesk.
Actually, even without really sophisticated AI like Watson, you could probably just take the huge repository of applications available to one of the giant Indian outsourcing companies (from previous projects, yes technically would not be legal to use a lot of it but many clients won't care as long as it means they can solve their business problem cheaply) and apply some fairly standard (but contemporary) AI to searching/pattern matching it against specs, and then that becomes the prototype or even iteration one of actual product. Or even the final product.
The end game for this is technological unemployment for software developers.
I think that better technology and efficiency is very important, but we need to take a very hard look at wages-for-labor and the division between the worker class and investment/ownership class. The idea that class doesn't exist or that membership into the ownership class is actually merit-based is a myth.
Comments
I think he is right, and its cool in a way, but also there are problems.
I like odesk a lot because if I sift through enough 'jobs' I eventually find some actual specs. I can just start working on a prototype and usually after sending out two or three links to prototyped applications I can get a project.
The problem is that since I'm competing with everyone in the whole world who saw the spec and decided to try to get it, I can't charge US rates, and I now need to move to India in order to afford the cost of living.
Where this is going is that there will be so many developers, people will just post specs, and the developers will _have_ to submit prototypes, and whoever's prototype is selected wins, and everyone else just wasted their time.
And within not too many years we will have Watson-like computer programs competing on sites like odesk.
Actually, even without really sophisticated AI like Watson, you could probably just take the huge repository of applications available to one of the giant Indian outsourcing companies (from previous projects, yes technically would not be legal to use a lot of it but many clients won't care as long as it means they can solve their business problem cheaply) and apply some fairly standard (but contemporary) AI to searching/pattern matching it against specs, and then that becomes the prototype or even iteration one of actual product. Or even the final product.
The end game for this is technological unemployment for software developers.
I think that better technology and efficiency is very important, but we need to take a very hard look at wages-for-labor and the division between the worker class and investment/ownership class. The idea that class doesn't exist or that membership into the ownership class is actually merit-based is a myth.
http://www.theonion.com/video/more-american-workers-outsourc...