Marx discussed this thoroughly. The same thing is happening to salaried jobs, just to a lesser extent. This phenomenon was one of his bigger objections to capitalism.
All productive labour is being broken down into pipelined work streams where any individual worker performs as simple and as well defined a task as you can give them, and performs that task all day every day. This increases the economic efficiency of the worker, at the expense of depriving their work life of any meaning and turning them into an unremarkable, disposable, exchangeable cog in a machine.
Pretty much every industry in the developed world follows this trend, including tech.
I can say this absolutely exists in Corp tech shops.
I worked in an environment where the CIO would frequently refer to the tech staff as “the factory”. I often encouraged this CIO and others in the management team not to because it was demoralizing and not true - the work was highly skilled, highly dynamic and not repetitive.
Oh and if you treated tech work like a factory it looked like lots of management overhead, poor execution from low skilled workers, predictable timelines (long timelines), and last but not least higher cost.
We haven't discovered great ways of winning wars or building empire without being inefficient and treating people like pawns.
Our history books don't spend time making us think about the morale of the front line soldiers in Alexander/Genghis Khan/Napolean/Stalin's armies. Instead we have entire shelves of books devoted to the mindlessly ambitious guys at the top of the food chain.
We make Edison an icon and give Marconi a Nobel, but if you know your history, these guys ended up at the top of the food chain because they were ruthless. It hardly mattered what Oppenheimer/Einstein/Feynman thought about the nuclear bomb. Because they were the "factory".
Much like the "factory" of people at the pentagon/wall st/google/facebook etc.
We still haven't figured out a good way to keep "factories" running or expand/defend empires without propping up mindlessly ambitious people. The inequality rates suggest our faith in them is at an all time high.
Our current default method much like the cold war or a chimp troupe, is to keep mindlessly ambitious people at the top of the food chain constantly paranoid about each other. Ofcourse we can do better. But the agency isn't there yet. For example, Facebook could turn into a Wikipedia type entity by tomorrow if the "factory" of workers revolt.
I’m not sure Oppenheimer/Einstein/Feynman would have been referred to at the time as “the factory” nor would I imagine anyone consider their work needing to be highly efficient nor would I imagine anyone would dream the appropriate management style to be to eek out all the efficiency in what they were building.
I don’t disagree with your thoughts on charismatic leadership but the response seems misplaced or slightly off topic.
I think factory management and motive is slightly different than dictatorial/power leadership.
the CIO would frequently refer to the tech staff as “the factory”. I often encouraged this CIO and others in the management team not to
At least he was being honest in revealing management thinking. Worse would be a guy who said the company was like a big family, while planning which kids to lay-off next quarter.
We have some of those too but they are usually junior managers who have a single level team (and likely haven’t had to fire or lay someone off). Org leaders usually have more perspective than to call it a family.
It almost feels like secure salaried positions were actually the abnormal deviation in history, a small island of stability caused by a temporary surge of social democratic politics in the post-Great Depression era.
And these cogs are more and more actual machines, computer or mechanical. I read somewhere that if your job does not consist of some Rube Goldberg like process where you never are doing the same thing more than a few times, then your job is likely to be automated as the machines continue to improve.
A successful path forward for humanity in such a world might involve somehow getting most people to have ownership of the robots that produce what they need/want. A difficult proposition because, if one has the freedom to manage capital one also has the freedom to be conned out of that capital or take on too much risk. It also seems very unlikely at the moment as at least the US's educational system seems to be run by people that think thinking about capital and investing is not valuable or a worthy use of time. Wouldn't it be great if we were all capitalists with an income stream we controlled that could support a minimum lifestyle. If it was supported by mostly robots/machines and not other people, it could be a great outcome for everyone.
Book V of the Wealth of Nations has a long passage about the ill effects of the division of labor (or more specifically, of the constant repetition of simple tasks) on the workers.
Cheers, that was a good read. I'd still attribute the argument to Marx, because Smith doesn't seem to link this effect with the inherent values of capitalism.
Turns out there's also a wikipedia page outlining the history of this line of reasoning:
All productive labour is being broken down into pipelined work streams where any individual worker performs as simple and as well defined a task as you can give them, and performs that task all day every day. This increases the economic efficiency of the worker, at the expense of depriving their work life of any meaning and turning them into an unremarkable, disposable, exchangeable cog in a machine.
Pretty much every industry in the developed world follows this trend, including tech.