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The Blacksmith and the Bookkeeper, Part 2
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His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate'er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.
- From "The Village Blacksmith" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The job of the ubiquitous smithy, once a historically vital, centrally necessary vocation that enabled social and technological innovation over epochs of human history, is now practically extinct. The similarly vital role of bookkeeper, which shares much with the blacksmith in terms of ancient historical and commercial-enabling roots, still thrives in the Network Age. This second of a three-part series of articles discusses the fitness of each profession insofar as evolving fitscapes are concerned, and compares each to the role of computer programmer. Here we posit that the programmer has much more in common with the blacksmith than the bookkeeper, and ponder the impact such similarity will have on the profession of programming in the coming decade.
In the previous installment in this series, the genesis and growth of importance of the blacksmith trade was chronicled. Now we will explore the decline of the smithy as the Industrial Age matured, even as the blacksmith's hammer and forge built the foundation upon which the apocryphal transition was built.
From the dawn of the Iron Age through the 19th century, the blacksmith trade grew in demand and became increasingly specialized in the process. America would not even exist were it not for the smithy. Indeed, civilization itself is indebted to the blacksmith for virtually all material innovation up to the advent of the factory floor. The importance of the blacksmith cannot be overstated. But then, something happened: machines.
The smithy trade began to decline in the mid-19th century, as machines began to produce items that were formerly made by the blacksmith. At first it was the simple things: nails, hooks, fence rods. In time, more complex products were machine-crafted, such as hinges and barbed wire. The smithy simply couldn't compete with the economics of machine-crafted implements, a phenomenon that soon gave rise to a virtuous cycle of machine-dominance in the production of most material goods. What the machines didn't take from the smithy was soon eaten by other competitive innovations and historical events:
The Great Depression killed a last bastion of the blacksmith market niche when architectural ironwork became a symbol of a luxury-laden bygone age. In a matter of less than 100 years after Longfellow's poem was published, the vital trade of smithy was all but dead.
Today there are maybe 10,000 blacksmiths in the United States, most of whom are part-time artists. In a nation of nearly 300 million, that represents a paltry few, especially when we remember that just 150 years ago, the smithy trade was so very important. Clearly the advent of machines and Industrial Age manufacturing practices were the chief contributing factors that resulted in blacksmithing becoming one of the top ten on the list of endangered occupation species, along with icemen, luthiers and mule-minders. Coupled with the demise of the blacksmith was an entire ecosystem of related occupations, including anvil makers, forgemen, strikers, and bellows makers, all of whom received the proverbial pink slip. The advent of the Industrial Age disrupted much more than the itinerant farmer, it would seem.
The Industrial Age saga of the bookkeeper lies in stark contrast to that of the blacksmith. Just as Western Europe's 15th century Renaissance gave rise to an environment that insisted that a more formalized role for the bookkeeper emerge, the advent of the Industrial Age placed an order-of-magnitude-greater demand on the profession. Transactions became considerably more complex as early supplier chains began to evolve. Assembly lines all but assured a dominant role for Fredrick Taylor's concepts of scientific management, which proffered four principles:
Note the role that measurements must play if a reasonable execution of Taylor's principles are to occur. Any process that touts itself as science-based must measure something to some degree, by definition. And the essence of measurement, in a capitalist system, will always be a first-order derivative of the much-maligned bottom line--it's not personal, it's just business. So it is fair to conclude that the very forces that made the blacksmith's forge chill heated the demand for bookkeeper-cum-accountant. The interplay of economics and technology (i.e., innovation) was responsible for both.
The fact that one calling, the bookkeeper, flourished while the other, the blacksmith, waned, is beyond dispute. While we could argue that both professions simply evolved into others as the Industrial Age progressed, it is a fine point that perhaps merits some discussion but probably misses the point. Clearly the bookkeeper of the mid-19th century would find the keeping of books to be a very different affair than the quill-and-inkwell era in which the blacksmith prospered. However, in terms of occupational identity, today if I asked you if you know a bookkeeper, it is likely that you could name one or more individuals who would claim to offer such services. The same cannot be said of the blacksmith.
Find your local Yellow Pages, or use the Yahoo version for your locale, and search for both vocations by their 19th-century names. The results are very clear. Is the auto mechanic one version of the 21st century blacksmith, functionally providing specialized skills for some small part of the continuum once served by the smithy? Perhaps. But today's auto mechanic would be hard pressed to form his parts from unforged materials, to bend, shape, and temper them as needed, and thereby even begin to provide value for today's transportation need. Today's bookkeeper in its many instantiations, on the other hand, might be substantially slowed but would still be vital if pen and paper were suddenly once again the sole tools of the trade. But the explanation for this outcome--the demise of the one versus the deviation of the other of these two august vocational species--is as much a function of why we value services as it is how the work is done.
Few trades, occupations, professions, or services require little know-how. Even the least-valued jobs in the poorest of human concerns requires something in the way of knowledge, appreciation of context, and a rudimentary understanding of the cultural milieu in which activities occur. Postmodernist objections aside, a "constructed" worldview must precede any meaningful (i.e., task-oriented) activity worthy of being called a job. The difference between the blacksmith and the bookkeeper, therefore, was not one of know-how or the lack of need for it in order to perform. It was the degree to which that knowledge could be extracted, standardized, and automated that determined the ultimate fitscape fate of the two professions. Upon reflection, we might list the certain attributes of the knowledge required to perform the chain of tasks inherent in the delivery of any product or service to be:
Each of these attributes forms a continuum, a dimension that we might consider when evaluating the difficulty and probability that a given vocation might be automated.
As a general rule, the extent to which the nature of the knowledge required for any vocation can be analyzed for these attributes will determine if and when that vocation will face extinction. The chain of tasks in the smithy's world, a vocation that had explored the forging and twisting of metals since the dawn of the Iron Age, was ready for harvest with respect to its knowledge base. The advent of machines, the parts for which initially came from the smithy's forge, all but assured that that know-how would be exploited otherwise.
The knowledge required of the bookkeeper, on the other hand, included key components that could not be standardized and automated: the unique context of each individual or enterprise. While it may be true that some transactions are similar to other transactions, and that all transactions have something in common, it is the sum of those transactions in a given account that makes each account unique. Add to that the almost infinite number of combinations when it comes to various choices that can be made to account for the finances of each unique individual or enterprise, and task of building a "bookkeeping factory" becomes daunting.
The keeping of books requires abstract interaction with a litany of concerns that are outside "the body" of the individual or enterprise, including suppliers, customers, service providers, and governmental entities. That changing fitscape of exogenous forces amounts to the economic equivalent of fluid dynamics, which may be recognizable in terms of tendencies and patterns, but is also quite unpredictable when it comes to the minutia required to individually model and then automate in practice.
Governments alone provide a dynamic in which rules tend to change on a regular basis. As such, the bookkeeper is always required to survey the fitscape anew with each transaction, each account summary, each assumption and choice. Not so of iron; the rules for shaping iron have changed very little since we discovered we could. Once discovered, once standardized, the automated delivery of products (and services) based on a favorably high AVKB score will always result in the demise of the vocation in question. A low AVKB score will ensure that the skills will remain in demand for years to come, provided there is intrinsic value in service in the first place. Thus, the contrasting fortuity of the blacksmith and the bookkeeper can be understood from the perspective of why they were needed as much as what it was they actually accomplished or how they did what they did.
Applying a similar rubric to the postmodern computer programmer might now yield some insight as to the coming fortunes of that trade.
At its apogee, the career path proffered by the study of computer programming was one characterized by high-demand employment possibilities, relatively lucrative compensation packages, and myriad opportunities in diverse fields. By simply mastering the ability to read and write a popular computer programming language, a dedicated programmer could be assured of work in many quarters. By providing the transitional tools for a new age, the postmodern programmer was both centrally necessary and economically vital to virtually all concerns. The tenets of evolution, though, are applicable to all sufficiently complex adaptive systems, including those that are bound by economic constraints. And not unlike the legendary blacksmith, the programmer too will soon be seen as curiosity and historical artifact; the remnant of another age.
Defining "postmodernism" is a little like nailing down a universal description of true love: words cannot convey its essence, but you know it when it hits you. The anarchistic, eclectic, and often incoherent ramblings that characterize much of the Pomo Jones mindset belie the importance and value it may conceptually provide. Computer programmers are icons of the postmodern age and sometimes idiosyncratic of its nature. As much as film, and more than television, architecture, or art, the postmodern programmer has enabled the cyber-collage, globally diverse viewless worldview that is the hallmark of Pomo entrails. Indeed, computer programmers (those of the Java, C#, and Perl caste, at least) are the Pomo elite.
From the beginning, the art of programming meant a merging of subject and object, of thought and code, providing an ever-increasing platform of interconnectedness and being, yet lacking in a grand narrative. Today, programming means breaking the bounded, solitary-node paradigm, enjoining a network that is effectively limitless but unique at every node. Beyond nihilism, the species pomo sapiens brought us humor (no small contribution) and made visible the economic, political, gender, and colonizing hegemony inherent in western "objectivity" and "universality." The task of reifying thoughts for silicon brains made such assumption-breaking donations mandatory; it was part of the development process. But enough of the mumbo pomo tripe; eschew obfuscation and consider: the AVKB score of the postmodern programmer is closer to that of the blacksmith than the bookkeeper.
A number of facts support the view that the programming trade, at least the one that is focused on building solutions for a networked environment, is headed for extinction. Consider:
These facts underscore and support the assertion that programming skills, at least those that focus on networked applications and object-oriented components, fall into a category of vocations with a high AVKB score that are clearly headed for a fate similar to that of the proverbial blacksmith. And it is the why of application development, as opposed to the how, that is fundamental to this impending decline.
Why are computer applications needed? The most straightforward, simplistic answer would have something to do with increased and increasing productivity; IT expenditures will only bring increased productivity to my enterprise if the applications I require can improve business processes and/or reduce the cost of business done otherwise. At some point, the cost of the application itself becomes non-trivial. As such, in an environment where productivity increases are gleaned via IT-related, business process improvement, the cost of those kinds of improvements will eventually rise to the top of the expense stack, requiring cost-reduction measures on the very cost-reduction measures that so dramatically increased productivity in the first place. Outsourcing IT work to locales where the labor costs are substantially lower than my own is therefore inevitable. And if I do not make similar cost-reduction adjustments, I cannot continue to compete.
Further, while there are some activities in my enterprise that may be unique (e.g., the array of choices made to manage the accounting of my firm), there are many for which a tweaked boilerplate solution will suffice. My CRM system requirements, for example, may be very similar to those of my competitor, or those of concerns in completely unrelated industries. The same may be said of the requirements for my HR system, inventory tracking, supplier management, VPNs, etc. Thus, the combination of increasingly useful boilerplate solutions, emerging CDE environments, software factories, and increasing global competition requiring ever deeper cost-cutting measures all but ensures the relatively rapid extinction of the programming species as it may exist today.
This is not to say that computer science is going away any time soon. But the adaptations required in order to remain an economically viable career path will very likely give rise to new occupational-species coming from computer science; filling jobs that will no longer require workers to actually write code--at least not in the way we've grown to understand what it means to write code today. But just as the entire notion of "writing code" has changed dramatically since the earliest stacked job batch systems of the 1960s, our current concept of "writing code," bound to an early 21st century frame of reference, will not continue indefinitely.
How will the postmodern programmer evolve? What new occupation species will emerge to take its place in the dynamic economic fitscape unleashed by 21st-century forces? That, and the concept of hyper-human activities, will be the focus of the third and final part of this series.
Max Goff is the Chief Marketing Officer for Digital Reasoning Systems, Inc., headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee.
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