Whenever I buy a console I'm super aware I have maybe 5 years of using it before I'm forced to upgrade to the next console. It's even worse with phones. I wonder how many of these devices (or realistically, new features existing devices) are held back on purpose to justify a new phone every year.
What is the current rate of technological advancement if we discount capitalism creating a culture where businesses don't put out their best product always, and innovation is not innovation for the sake of itself, or to make people's lives easier, but a tool used to beat out the other guy and keep making money off of people every year?
Any specific questions? Technical advancement will likely depend on field and purpose of the engineering within an industry. But generally, he's entirely correct about the lack of driving forces to create technical experts. The focus is entirely on creating smaller and smaller management structures of supervisors, division managers, etc., and real advancement is only up the management ladder. And of course, along the way, you are evaluated by the management structures to make sure they can trust you to maximize fear and exploitation of the lower engineers.
Innovation is dead, particularly between industries. Technologies are indeed silo'ed, and proprietary designs and avoiding industry standardization prevent any boosts in real efficiency.
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I can elaborate more on that, honestly it's more of a personal observation than anything else.
In the early 00's it was (anecdotally) possible for scientists and engineers to have a stake in a company they started and then make it big when it goes public or gets bought. On paper that's still technically true, but in practice there's always some shell game that happens to either dilute the value of the shares owned by the actual people working at the startup. Any future funding rounds tend to involve just losing more and more control of the company and the end product.
The entire merger + acquisition process is also corrosive for developing technical experts and actual improvements in technology. It will often get sold internally as "we're going to gain so much market share" or "we're keeping the whole incoming engineering team". More often than not it results in an orphan product getting maintained by people who are multiple steps removed from primary source information on how or why technical decisions were made. Technical improvements tend to cease abruptly, but you'd be surprised how long products can limp along as increasingly distraught supply chain people try to track down single board computers that went end of life in 2007.
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Yes that is entirely the case, I'm pretty sure at all levels. All high-profit companies are scouted by the high finance firms, bought, stripped, and sold, to then deteriorate.
Yeah, and unless you're self-financing or like just taking out loans to pay yourself you're kinda stuck "pitching" to investors.
This is compounded in America by needing to also pay for your coworkers health insurance and retirement at the same time as you're trying to "start up." It can be daunting, and makes the Faustian bargain that is getting investor finance that much harder to justify avoiding.
Also when I say lose control, I mean you're going to start getting increasingly locked in on exclusively the path deemed most profitable. At some point there will invariably be a mass exodus or power struggle and the end result is rarely a functional organization.
Starting from the beginning, it really depends on the background for engineers, in particular their secondary schooling.
Depending on whether we're talking consumer goods or industrial/commercial; tech, resource extraction, utilities etc., the path will be slightly different. Many of the large public universities have good programs for everything, however if you want to really increase your chances of getting a decent career starting point, you would choose a school that has a ranked program in that industry, essentially pigeon-holing yourself before you even get to college. This is more important than one might think, as the industry leading firms/companies will spend the large majority of their time recruiting from their associated colleges (LOOOOOTS of money flowing back and forth between the sponsored universities and the companies hiring from them).
All through college, the programs are mainly built to act as a farm for the companies/corporations associated with them. The prestigiousness of these companies are constantly enforced, and the importance of intern/early career experience at some of the worst labor-practicing firms/companies is of the highest importance. As a result, most students have their dreams and creativity beaten out of them before they even leave college.
The first few years of an engineers career are pretty awful, though the experience will differ in its shittiness depending on industry and company philosophy.
I myself am in the utility industry. Whether it be water, gas, electric, etc., all these sub-industries are split into four main categories:
The owning utility company - top of the food chain, young engineers entering here will find it hard to advance at all, generally working at a utility is where you go if you're ready to settle down somewhere, not work too hard, and generally just live out the rest of your existence doing daily tasks much like the mood of any office movie youve seen. Utilities are working round the clock to cut as much of this engineering staff as they can, and give the work instead to outside consultants. Engineers at utilities will monitor and plan future equipment and infrastructure, work with consulting firms to get designs to then give to contractors to be completed. Some small R&D groups exist as pet projects for the VP's.
The design consultancies - They do all large scale infrastructural design. This is what young engineers are steered towards, as it gives you the fastest pace/most diverse/most complicated engineering work. This is where I still am, after 3 years, however I left a very large firm recently due to the toxic work environment and pure exploitation/antagonism that existed between the lower and higher level engineers and managers.
The construction contractors - Build and advise construction workers from the designs provided by consulting firms. Generally they are pretty closely attached to particular areas and utility owning companies.
The equipment manufacturers - Designs the components that fit into the larger infrastructural frameworks that are designed by the consulting firms and implemented by the contractors. This is the area that probably most relates to your question of technological stagnation, as theres a shit ton of competing firms for the same purpose, and they are all designed to work best with that manufacturers other products. Soooooo much work for the consulting firms is inefficient due to this huge field of sub-par components, and each companies support system create delays in all areas.
I can expand further on any of this if you'd like, and I'll get to your other questions a little later lol
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When you say post-war, do you mean WWII or the Cold War?
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Well I'd disagree in saying that it hit a brick wall, there was quite a bit of innovation here in the US from the 40's onwards. I can hold many things against capitalism in the United States, but I would say technology has developed fairly rapidly across the entire world. The key distinction, however, is that technology as a national focus shifted from the large scale to the small scale personal/consumer scale. This shift in developmental focus has increased exponentially since the end of the Cold War, which is how we quickly saw the absurdity of the early 00's tech bubble.
Today, we see technological innovation only for the few, the bourgeoisie, higher tech toys and pet projects. Industries that have been known for "innovation" now produce competing copies of each other, all with the goal of fooling consumers into scheduled purchases. Meanwhile, the industries that serve the general public and poorer consumers remain largely unchanged, as Capital fled to software and quick-money tech. These companies are constantly cutting labor, and R&D is a thing of the past. Everything is about market share and distinguishing your product from others, trying to gain enough leverage to have some small monopoly.
Real technological achievement comes at the larger scale for everyone. People obsess about the latest smart-tech that becomes purposefully defunct within a year, while their real lives have remained unchanged or worsened for decades.
Engineering innovation as it is now (and has been since the "end of history" and the collapse of the USSR) is purely focused on separating people from their life in the material world and their community.
This has been my observation as well. Every so often there will be anomalies of actual innovation, but in my estimation those are happening in spite of our system rather than because of it.
The migration to software is a good point, the finance types love shit like SaaS and anything that can be milked in perpetuity.
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