Tech 63100 Week 8
What Tech Calls Thinking
Question: Is failure a good thing?
Failure
The tech industry, especially start-ups, have ingrained failure into its culture, celebrating it as much as successes. Failure is acceptable in specific situations. It is an opportunity to learn and improve yourself, your product, and your team. However, it should not be promoted as a target objective. It is not failure that should be celebrated but the exploitation of the potential it creates as good can come out of failure, but failure itself is not inherently good (Smith, 2013).
As Mark Zuckerberg noted in his 2017 Harvard graduation speech, "the greatest success comes from the freedom to fail." Not all have this freedom. In some cases, failure results in termination. Fortunately for those in the tech industry, there is a higher tolerance for failure in others because of the inherent push to innovate (Daub, 2020).
The Exponential Age
Question: Which jobs are anticipated to grow in demand?
Labor's Love Lost
Contrary to the anxiety of the general public that people will be replaced by exponential technologies, like automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI), more jobs are generated due to exponential technologies. These technologies create more profit. That increase in profit results in growth and with growth comes more jobs (Azhar, 2021). This notion of job growth is reflected in U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2024) projected number of new jobs between 2022 - 2023. In this chart the highest anticipated growth is in Home Health and Personal Care Aides. This is likely due to the aging population of Baby Boomers (Springer, 2023). Next are software developers which confirms Azhar's (2021) assertion that automation is hard and high level skillsets are needed to implement exponential technologies. After software engineers are skillsets that, as Azhar (2021) describes, require human skills that can't be easily replicated by algorithms and skills that require knowledge that can't be put into words.
What exponential technologies have created are exponential gaps in skillsets due to companies not investing in organically upskilling their staff, quality of available jobs due to the exploitation of the gig workforce and decline of unions, and wages. Wages have decreased due to (1) globalization where cheaper labor can be accessed; (2) decline of unions crippling bargaining power; (3) rise of intangible economy reduces the relative value-add of the worker; and (4) market consolidation around super star companies results in less competition for labor and less leverage for negotiations (Azhar, 2021).
References
Azhar, A. (2021). The Exponential Age. Diversion Books.
Daub, A. (2020). What Tech Calls Thinking. New York: FSG Originals.
Smith, P. (2013). Failure is not a good thing. Stop saying it is. Retrieved Mar 2024 from Medium: https://paansm.medium.com/failure-is-not-a-good-thing-stop-saying-it-is-74c8fe8daa94.
Springer, M. L. (2023). Why Don't You Like Me? Unconscious Bias and the Changing Mosaic of our Nation. Niche Pressworks.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2024). Most New Jobs. Retrieved Mar 2024 from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/most-new-jobs.htm.