Computers in the workplace and the industry
Is the party over?

DIAC 1992


It¹s always a pleasure to be able to take a step back and look at the bigger 
picture, even when the picture is bleak. And I had the opportunity to do so on 
Sunday, May 3, at the closing panel of a seminar sponsored by Computer 
Professionals for Social Responsibility called "Directions and Implications in 
Advanced Computing."

The DIAC panel was called "Is the Party Over? The State of Work in the 
Computer Industry," and panelists included myself, John Markoff of the New 
York Times, and Amy Pearl, a Sun Microsystems engineer and author of 
"Becoming a Computer Scientist," a report on the status of women in the 
computer industry done for the Association for Computing Machinery.

The title implied that there was a party to begin with, though it doesn't seem 
to me that computers in the workplace have been a party for anyone unless 
you were a computer scientist or an engineer. 

Computers are hard to learn, hard to use, hard on the body, don't increase 
productivity, can (and often do) increase "busy work" and further 
segmentation of labor, provide a significant opportunity for employers to 
abuse employees' rights to privacy (in networked environments, at least), and 
highlight deep malaise in today's corporate structure.

One Procter & Gamble executive told me that if someone offered him 50 cents 
on the dollar for every personal computer at P&G ‹ and there are thousands 
‹ he'd not only take them up on it, but would probably receive a promotion 
for it to boot. He says that computers at P&G have done absolutely nothing to 
improve competitiveness and productivity. 

That's a pretty heavy indictment. If the situation is so obviously ludicrous, 
why do so many of us stick around? One reason, for me, is that there is great 
potential for the computer to be the tool which changes corporations and the 
workplace for the better, if we'd only use them for what they're good for.

The office is already the foundry for new technology; it is where the troika of 
word processing, spreadsheet and database standards were forged and cast. 
Now that we've hammered those paradigms into submission, they haven't 
proven particularly useful for anything other than automating functions that 
were once done by much cheaper equipment, such as typewriters, calculators 
and filing cabinets. 

So now, maybe, industry could push harder to use those expensive 
typewriter-calculator-filing cabinets at tasks they're particularly suited for. 
Such as finding relationships between things. And increasing the amount 
and the quality of communication between workers and employers. 

Big Fortune 500 companies are starting to see that workers trained to use a 
good system competently become far more capable of making good business 
decisions. And workers in the networked corporations of tomorrow can and 
should grab a vital role in helping iron out some of the obvious dichotomous 
problems that technology creates. 

For example:  How do you balance privacy issues with the company's right to 
know and track what its workers are doing? What applications will help 
transit PCs from being exorbitantly expensive typewriters and calculators, to 
powerful tools for collaboration and analysis? How do we convince 
employers that it's a much better idea to empower workers with computers 
than it is to run an electronic sweatshop for data processing? How do we 
mitigate the effects of computers in the workplace so we're left with a code of 
ethics that everyone can live with? 

Getting these things to happen will require a change in the corporate 
structure, and that kind of change comes hard. A workplace consultant, Dan 
Lacey, believes that the economy is forcing the transition already.

Lacey's theory is that most U.S. corporations, especially the big old ones, were 
fashioned in the early '50s by former military men back from the World War 
II front. They shaped companies in the social structure they knew best:  the 
military hierarchy. The commander at the top makes sure that all his (gender 
specificity used advisedly) lieutenants were in line and the word most 
frequently heard up and down the chain of command was, "Yes."

When the companies got bigger, instead of finding ways to work smarter, they 
just added layer after layer of middle management to facilitate 
communication and productivity by moving information around the 
"network." But today's weak global economy means these middle managers 
are being laid off -- never to return, according to Lacey.

That means a couple of things. (1) The people who are left have to learn to 
work smarter to get the job done. Computers can powerfully augment that 
process, but to be effective management has to (2) allow them to participate 
more fully in making decisions. 

If this happens, the metaphor shifts from a pyramid structure to a wheel, 
where the spokes each "report" to the hub, but have direct responsiblity for 
the performance of the whole.    

Though these changes could doubtless improve the quality of work in U.S. 
corporations, the computer industry workplace has some peculiarities -- likely 
to be reflected in society at large somewhere down the road -- which are also 
going to create even larger problems as we get better able to use computers 
wisely.

For example, Markoff of the NYT says one of the most interesting things 
about the computer industry, more than any other he's seen, is that the 
children routinely eat their parents in a process that he calls "continual 
obsolescence." 

Though we can certainly see how this holds true for the creation of products, 
Markoff also says the cyclical nature is particularly, and perhaps most 
painfully, apparent in the shifting of jobs in technology.

70,000 jobs were lost in hardware design since 1985, he says, but 200,000 more 
were created in the software industry during that same period. Lines between 
circuit designers and system designers are blurring, and the line between 
hardware and software design is gone, he says. The industry's perpetual state 
of flux means that its workers must be even more adaptable than other 
industries suffering the slings and arrows of changing fortunes.

Even more fascinating is Markoff's take on object-oriented software design, 
which in many ways is a perfect snapshot of the computer industry's 
dilemma as a whole. Object-based software, in the end, will make software 
much easier (and faster, and cheaper) to build by allowing us to "snap 
together" pieces of code into the kinds of applications and systems we need 
and/or want. 

But by thus eliminating the hierarchy of software design, Markoff says, object-
oriented software holds great potential to "de-skill" a large part of the 
workforce that now writes code. Once object libraries are built, what need will 
there be for large ranks of programmers? 

Similarly, we are seeing computers become more widely used not only in 
manufacturing lines as replacements for warm bodies, but as decision and 
design support systems -- exactly the functions they should be used for, since 
it's what they're good at. This is what people feared about computers in the 
1960s, but it took longer to come true than most believed.

Today an executive's performance is measured by how many jobs he can cut, 
how many workers he can eliminate by the clever implementation of 
powerful computer systems. This is exactly what the computer industry has 
been selling for the past 30 years, and now it is falling victim to its own sales 
pitch. 

Thus the larger question remains, and it is one that most observers are loathe 
to discuss: what will happen when all manufacturing is done by robotics, and 
most design and data analysis is done by computer? Where will all these 
people go? What will they do for work? Will we regularly see PhDs in 
computer science or brilliant software programmers flipping burgers at 
McDonald's? How will society deal with computers that make them obsolete? 

As we look back on the riots in Los Angeles, and the incredible negative 
power that a disenfranchised population can set loose on the population, I 
think it's time we took a look at these problems, from the bottom to the top 
strata of society. To refuse to look them in the face today could be a mistake of 
staggering proportions. The party's been over for a long time, and nobody's 
come along with any good ideas about how to clean up the mess. 

Copyright 1992 by Denise Caruso