When I was a little boy, every morning on my way to school, I walked past a strange shop in front of which people stood smoking and drinking beer. Most of the time most people were standing there, sometimes one or two of these people hurried away. It was only much later that I understood that this was not a shop, but an agency for day labourers. We’re talking about the late ’70s and early ’80s.
My memory came back to me when I read the article “The Whole World as Competition” by Anja Reiter in the November 13, 2014 issue of ZEIT. Reiter manages the balancing act between two sides of the coin, namely the self-determined independence of digital nomads and the inability of legislators and trade unions, who usually argue about work, to respond to this new world. At the same time, she also describes the less exciting digital jobs, for example the Mechanical Turks, who perform easy tasks for little money. More and more of these jobs, I suspect, will soon become obsolete as more algorithms have to take over. The question is, when will the jobs that require more qualifications, such as web design, also disappear?
At the height of the New Economy, whose rise and fall I witnessed first-hand, above-average incomes were awarded to those who understood at least some HTML. At that time, Bertelsmann founded its own “school” where career changers could learn web technologies and where Lycos sent masses of applicants who were then to receive a well-paid employment contract. I am no longer sure whether it was decided after the first or after the second cohort that these lateral entrants, some of whom gave up secure jobs, would no longer be needed, so that they were already dismissed from their jobs while they were still at school. Of course, this was also due to the dot-com crash, but at the same time, we had also introduced some technologies during that time that required less manual work. Only those who knew more than just HTML, for example had gotten into JavaScript or even PHP or Java, were able to survive.
Reiter’s statement in the article is that quality is still in demand in this country. Companies that had previously placed orders abroad were not satisfied with the quality delivered and booked freelancers in Germany again. I think so. My experience with Virtual Private Assistants, for example, was disastrous, which of course may also be due to the language barrier. But no one needs HTML or PHP knowledge to build an interactive website today, WordPress & Co now install almost themselves. Overall, technology will free technology from technology.