But I think it may have some baring on it. Came across this article
in the Guardian and began to think about it some.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/31/why-our-jobs-getting...

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The truth is that you're probably right to hate being back
in harness. It's not just that, from here, the days get
wetter and shorter, that there are no more bank holidays
till Christmas or that sacrificing the surplus value of your
labour to The Man is really no fun (although that last point
alone surely justifies more than one sharp kick to the
office LaserJet). Those are all-important, but something
more specific is going on. Our jobs are getting worse.

It used to be easy to divvy up the labour market: there were
the McJobs, and the rest. The task of politicians was to
keep the number of tedious, routine occupations down, and to
enable as many good jobs to be created as possible. Except
that the reverse appears to be happening. More and more
prized careers are becoming McDonaldised - more routine,
less skilled, and with the workers subject to greater
control from above.

Take supermarkets. Jobs there could traditionally be split
between the unskilled, low-paid drudgery of stacking shelves
and sitting on tills - and the trained butchers and
fishmongers and store managers. But when the sociologist
Irena Grugulis and a team of researchers recently studied
two of Britain's largest supermarket chains, even the
managers reported that they had little room for manoeuvre.

A trained butcher revealed that most meats were now sliced
and packaged before they arrived in store; bakers in smaller
shops now just reheated frozen loaves. In their paper,
published this summer, Grugulis and her colleagues note that
"almost every aspect of work for every kind of employee,
from shopfloor worker . . . to the general store manager,
was set out, standardised and occasionally scripted by the
experts at head office". Or, as one senior manager put it:
"Every little thing is monitored so there is no place to
hide."

And all this was enabled by technology. The modern
supermarket - with its electronic scanning and inventory
controls and price reductions decided by a software program
run out of head office - is probably more hi-tech than any
web-design firm. The result is that the man or woman in
charge of your typical supermarket (or other chain shop) now
has little to do with the selling or arrangement of goods:
nowadays they concentrate on driving their staff to meet the
targets set by head office. Their job is not so much
retail-management as rowing cox.

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And this is not just happening to the traditional skilled jobs but to
a lot of high tech works as well. I posted a while ago how engineers
had to not only know how to design but also had to be able to
build the prototypes of what they designed. They had to be
craftsmen as well. Now most (if not all) of this is done on computer.
In fact even engineers have less leeway in what they design and
how the design it as most of this work is not finding the chips
and appropriate packaging. The computer even dose the electronics
necessary and spits out a board design which is then shipped
to a board house that makes the board by computer and sends it back.

I was a systems programmer for may years on IBM mainframe computers.
I had to be able to program in IBM machine language as well as a number
of higher level languages. These days I do little of this and am probably
one of the few left at my place of employment that can still program in C.
Nearly everything else is done on packaged applications where you simply
adjust the configuration to suite your needs.

And most of the jobs in the future will consist of even less skilled occupations
than the ones mentioned in the above article. And I do not see this as a good
thing.

C