What's this about?
xicilion's compressed claim — engineers will never disappear, but the way they work changes; tooling advances until its return on investment falls below human labour, and then more people are needed to fill the remaining gaps — was expanded by dotey into the week's most-shared analogy.
What exactly is the analogy?
You buy a dishwasher and replace three dishwashers at once. But it cannot handle odd-shaped pans, burnt griddles or delicate china. Building a super-dishwasher for that last 5% costs ten times what the first 95% cost. So you keep one person for the edge cases, because at that point human labour is cheaper than the machine. Tooling stops advancing where the economics stop, not where the capability ends.
What's the community saying?
573 likes on the expansion, 151 on the original
- The second half of the argument got the most attention: better tools expand total output, so the restaurant serves more customers, generating more odd-shaped pans — the absolute number of edge cases can grow even as their proportion falls.
- It was read as a rebuttal to both extremes at once, against total replacement and against nothing-changes.
- A related thread from ixiaowenz pushed further: individual efficiency means doing the immediate task faster, organisational efficiency means eliminating tasks not worth doing, and giving the leverage to whoever can define problems matters more than distributing tokens to everyone.