Crutcher's post about unsourcing reminded me of some conversations I once had. So, let's continue in this vein for a bit.

First, let's think of an actual example of where unsourcing could affect a fairly large number of people: fast food. Like the auto-industry of the past, fast food workers could be replaced en masse by mechanical counterparts. But, before we even worry about this, is it even feasible to replace cheap labor with a machine?

Let's take some hypothetical burger joint. This one is particularly efficient and needs only 5 workers present at any given time. Also, this franchise pays its workers extremely well (compared to the minimum wage of many) at $10/hour. So, how much is this store's payroll each year?

5 * $10/hour * 24 hours/ day * 365 days/ year = $438000 per year.

So, this hypothetical store pays out almost half a million a year not including other costs such as training, managers, shrinkage, safety equipment, et cetera.

So, if a burger making machine is $2 million, it would only take 4 years for any given franchise to pay it off. After that, the store is 'saving' $438,000/year.

So, this raises some very interesting questions:

• Why isn't McDonald's hiring MIT-trained roboticists


• What would this do to the market/ how would it affect competition amongst fast food companies?


• What do we do with this large number of displaced workers (2 million according to Wikipedia)?

Per #1, they might be, I just don't know. #2, we can only hope that it leads to a price war which heralds back the days of the $0.10 burger. Let's also hope that this is accompanied by some major medical advances to deal with all the new cases of diabetes and coronary illness.

It's the last question that I'm really interested in. Crutcher states that his job is to kill your job. Somehow this seems almost ok when we're talking about software companies, because it means that there's a better product being produced and also that you can just go to a new software job. But what happens when the jobs of unskilled labor become unsourced? This has happened many times before, with mechanized farming and the like, but what do we do when almost all unskilled labor can be mechanized away? There are several possibilities. One of the easiest would be to just give them a government stipend every month to let them buy things like the (now) cheap hamburgers. However, our good-ole-American hard-working attitude certainly feels cheated by people getting things for free. We could work on training them to become skilled in some task. But what skills will be unsourced next? Another possibility is that we just put our fingers in our ears and pretend that this kind of technology does not, and will not, exist and continue to pay the pittance to the unskilled labor we have.

I'm not sure how this will be resolved, but I certainly think it's a very interesting point of discussion. We should probably talk about it now before the Burger-o-matic 1.0 is released.

Labels: unsourcing

There's a lot of argument about "Outsourcing", the process of farming out work to other providers, frequently in other countries. There's a lot of blame tossed around about this. But I want to suggest that not all of those jobs arrive. Some of them are Unsourced, and simply don't need to be done any more.

I'm very interested in productivity. Not in achieving it, but in the consequences. Suppose you and 100 other people have a given job, and by various tricks, your industry (of 100 people) figures out how to save 5% of its time. If demand doesn't go up, congratulations, 5 people are gonna lose their jobs after the market consolidates.

I like to call this Unsourcing. No one's getting the job, it just doesn't exist anymore. This is what productivity is all about - not hiring people, and firing them if you can get away with it.

This brings me to a recent TechCrunch article:

Engineers Are The Best Deal - So Stock Up On Them
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!

As an engineer, I get paid to increase productivity for some group of people. Sometimes those people are engineers as well. My job is killing your job.

Thus far, things have generally worked out; and new labor replaces old labor. But robots throw a wrinkle into blue collar jobs, and software reduces the need for white collar jobs. I don't know where this is going, but I'm pretty worried about it.

Edit: Looks like ComputerWeekly.com beat me to this term in 2001. I think they were somewhat uncritical of the terminology at the time, which as stated was essentially a euphemism for "firing people". I stick by my usage here.

Labels: unsourcing