atw: Re: The decreasingly meaningful authoring experience
- From: "Steve Hudson" <adslyy5g@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 15:27:01 +1000
Exactedly. Let us look at a case study. Banking. When computers came in,
everyone was worried about the attendant job loss. At first, everyone got
all excited by the multitude of new jobs: developers and so on. Then the
effects of the new technology started to come through. Please, can anyone
here honestly tell me that there are more people employed by the finance
sector today than 30 years ago (keeping pop increases etc in mind)? Banks
have been systematically laying off staff for 20 years now. You can't tell
me their developer division, a dozen or two people, somehow equate to the
THOUSANDS of tellers etc they have laid off over this period. The IT
division - another dozen people or two. So we are looking at definitely one,
and maybe at least 2 orders of magnitude in difference here.
Now, for the smarty pants who try to claim that the people in, say IBM's
mainframe development division, make up for this, they are also numbered in
the dozens, and they support ALL industries - not just banking, so you can
only claim a small % of this crowd as well.
Would banks REALLy bother putting in computers if all they did was directly
shift the labour assignment to other duties? Of course not - that would
DECREASE their profit by the additional expense of the IT. They implement IT
to reduce headcount, and thusly INCREASE their profit.
___________
I watched this happen at a small local level too. When I was a wee little
tacker, there was no such thing as office systems. My dad's accounting
business employed a secretarial pool numbering over a dozen - armed with
typewriters and carbon sheets. Every senior partner had a junior partner to
assit them. Then they bought a mini-computer. Within 10 years I watched the
secretary pool shrink to 2 and the need and presence of junior partners
reduced to one. Yes, the business was servicing more clients 10 years down
the track, and without the computer would have needed to hire extra staff to
deal with the workload.
The company that provided both hardware and software was called Hartley.
They had a hundred or so employees, servicing hundreds of accountancies. So,
at best there was one extra person hired to make the hardware and software
for my dad, and over 10 people made redundant.
____________
NCR also makes for a good case study as well. Please, for those opponents of
the argument, provide a case study that clearly shows the reverse of the
above. Its all very easy to say "But its not true", now go ahead and prove
it.
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter G Martin
...
There may indeed be a transfer of labour from one area to another, but it's
not likely, is it, to be a one-for-one transfer ?
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