This touches on Taylorism (&quot;scientific management&quot;), one of the more horrible things that has happened to human society. Fredrick Winslow Taylor was the favorite industrial theorist of both the Harvard Business School and Josef Stalin, which should set off all alarms right there.<p>In Taylorism, &quot;skills&quot; are replaced with &quot;processes&quot;. Employees are taught to do small, simple, repeatable, and thoroughly documented processes, without understanding of how the whole system works. This covers huge swaths of manual labor today - both factory labor and service jobs like fast food tend to be heavily Taylorized.<p>The value of Taylorism isn&#x27;t that it&#x27;s more efficient than relying on skilled workers. It&#x27;s <i>less</i> efficient, and unashamedly so. But it has the side effect of disempowering the worker. Employees are now replaceable cogs, to be fired on a whim and replaced by the next warm body who can be taught the steps (and punished even for improving on them). Taylorism shifts the balance of power between employer and employee strongly in the employer&#x27;s favor.<p>The only &quot;safe&quot; jobs in a Taylorized society are those that demand skills immune to Taylorizing, like engineering (and that&#x27;s mostly because any job I do that can be replaced with a dumb human process can also be replaced with a program).