Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.The Age of Engineering
Engineering is defined by a focus on the world in the “ends-means” binary: what means allow me to reach the end efficiently? So are we moving into a new age of engineering? Auren Hoffman wrote an interesting article at Techcrunch on why companies should stock up on engineers. He argues that:
Productivity gains in software engineering are powering innovation. Everyone is more productive these days. This has been a consistent trend for at least the past decade, where productivity gains have been particularly strong within the business sector. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, today’s business industry workers are on average 30% more productive than their 1998 counterparts (productivity growth of roughly 2.6% per year)…
Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999!
He outlines that, however, this has not lead to an increase in remuneration of engineers relative to the rest of employees because of off-shoring and because of a decrease in demand for engineers in a world where less can do more. He then argues that engineers are relatively cheap (and ever more productive), therefore, could define the competitive advantage of a company. The article is interesting in itself, but we might also want to ask what it means for the age of engineering hypothesis. As I have argued elsewhere that engineering culture, which has driven the production revolution of the last centuries has started to permeate governance.
With the rise of functionally organized and technologically mediated networks (the web 2.0 revolution), the conditions of possibility of coordination changed in such a way that a form of governance that is organically linked to the idea of instrumental rationality has become possible. Network society emerged as an engineering society based on a culture of “rough consensus and running code.†Requests for Proposals (RFCs) are the procedural principle on which governance is based. Self-selection is becoming an accepted principle for participation in the policy process, expertise in an an engineering culture is defined by merit (outcome) and not position, and political problems are reduced to the creative acts of RFC-writing, the focused and technologically structured deliberation, and accountability comes from peer review of radically transparent processes.
Several questions come to mind when reading Hoffman’s text: If engineers productivity increases 3 times as fast as baseline productivity does, what does that mean for production/society in 10 years? If engineers are not able to translate productivity gains into higher salary/status/power what does that mean for the age of engineering hypothesis?
