What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers • Hacker News Board

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#791

Post by a2ff6eeb0 » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

flaburgan wrote: post #763

I don't understand those articles, especially, I don't see why AI changed anything. At least for me, the important quest isn't how you build, but what you build. If your product is meaningless, useful only to the company because what it does is futile, then the emptiness you feel is not coming from the fact that AI is "stealing your job". Don't quit to a farm with goats, find a way to distribute food which would have…

I wonder how long it'll be before you can ask an LLM to investigate, run surveys, and figure out what to build. It feels like it's not that far away. Hm, this may actually be an interesting business for someone to found.

It's definitely farther away for this than it is for coding, but 2 years ago it was also totally useless for coding.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#792

Post by hyperadvanced » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 3:42 PM UTC

miyoji wrote: post #778

cheschire wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did the remote thing before Covid and rejected it for many of the same reasons. Then Covid happened and so many people got to experience it and loved it. But I still hated it while I was forced to. Every time I told anyone that I personally didn’t like working from home, and was excited about the return to office that would inevitably come, I got SHOUTED at. Absolutely flayed for not being 110% in support of this t…

Commutes are uncompensated labor, so you're advocating for a pay decrease for both yourself and your coworkers. Pay me for my commute and I'll gladly work from wherever you like, just recognize that I would get more done if you weren't paying me to travel to and from work. If you don't pay me for the time I spend commuting, you aren't interested in paying the total cost of employing me and you can kindly go fuck off.

Salary jobs let you pick your price. How much more as a % of your yearly would it cost you to commute every day, amortized over your ~2000 hours of expected work at said office? 10%? 20%? For me, it’s probably 10% for the right gig.

Granted, the availability and pain in the ass of actually getting a new job today is suffocating, so it’s not like everyone gets to pick their dream setup anymore

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#793

Post by hyperadvanced » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 3:55 PM UTC

rindalir wrote: post #229

I want to address something mentioned in the article about people wishing for for grounded occupations. I have a sheep farm and I could not keep it running without my tech salary. So I kinda view these as false escapes. Unless forced to or of independent means, who is going to throw themselves into the bottom fork of the “K-shaped” economy.

I have a friend who owns an organic farm (with a couple partners). They mostly scrape by and work long hours and there’s a lot of stress. People really really under-appreciate how nice the remote tech daily routine is: “I wake up, drink coffee, and solve a few abstract problems each day with an army of AGI bots at my fingertips, and for a high salary”. Compare to roasting in 95 degree heat and wildfire smoke to make sure your veggies don’t die, living in a trailer on the farm, and working retail in offseason/relying on GoFundMe to recover from the inevitable natural disasters.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#794

Post by jbs789 » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 3:56 PM UTC

geertj wrote: post #584

cheschire wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you chasing the feeling of successfully solving a problem? Have you replaced problem solving with LLM chats? Maybe instead of engineering, you’ve been subtly shifted into project management and hate that career. But it’s tough to engineer much these days. Instead I find I’m PM’ing the bots more than solving problems.

> But it’s tough to engineer much these days. Instead I find I’m PM’ing the bots more than solving problems. I’m genuinely curious about your perspective as I have almost the diametrically opposite view. I love chatting with the bots as they can build the thing I want, how I want it, much faster than I could. The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally. The speed makes me feel,…

I’m finding I’m able to learn more and pick up hobbyist projects easier w the help of Claude.

For the production stuff I still learn and watch it more closely.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#795

Post by stego-tech » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

Terr_ wrote: post #320

stego-tech wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, yeah. I got into IT because I loved working with technology, building communities and game servers and chatrooms and computers and the like. I got lucky that someone found me, my interest in these things, and showed me how it could be a career. Nowadays though, so much of my time isn’t spent building so much as debunking the latest grift, scam, or lie. It’s spent unfucking arbitrary vendor changes that didn’t…

> The technology of today does not enable, or empower To say much the same things stuff a slightly different framing: The promise of "personal computers", and then the internet, making your own applications, etc. was that they would democratize and spread certain capabilities so that everyone could have their tool which accomplished their goals to make their life better. One might even call it owning your own "means…

100% agree with your twist, there. I was speaking from the broadest possible sense, from local OS all the way to corporate internet infrastructure, but you're correct that one of the earliest promises was independence and intent separate from corporate dicta.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#796

Post by lbrito » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

Agree with the dread, but the point is often just making money so one can survive. While the jobs might be meaningless in an ontological sense, the surplus value is very real. All the billionaire yachts are there to prove it

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#797

Post by kazinator » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 4:01 PM UTC

close04 wrote: post #628

jimbobbam wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My grandfather was a printer not to far from that Burger King, in a building now owned by the academy of art. In 1963 he had 5 children, a house in Daly City and 3 apartments across the street from Dolores park as well as a brand new home in Terra Linda. He died early, but extended family stayed in the business. It was union work, he as the youngest operator of the 4 color press. His wife my grandmother didn’t work.…

> he had 5 children, a house in Daly City and 3 apartments across the street from Dolores park as well as a brand new home in Terra Linda How well would you need to be paid now in any career to support a family like that one while accumulating that wealth already early in life? Careers can evaporate just the same but what they leave behind is vastly different from 60 years ago.

Maybe the secret is in what you print?

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#798

Post by thegrim33 » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 4:01 PM UTC

estearum wrote: post #729

Animats wrote: post #221

Addressing the question in the title, "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers", look at what happened to printers. That was a good skilled trade for centuries. Then it just went away. Phototypesetting took the high volume end. Desktop publishing took the low end. Computer-controlled presses took press operators. And then the newspaper business died. I've heard homeless former printers…

Surprised no one has made the extremely obvious observation that it took literal centuries for printing technology to eliminate the trade of printers, which could not have possibly have employed more than 0.01% of people at its peak. Compared to the potential obsolescence of 40% to 60% of the US workforce over the course of 10 - 20 years? You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is , the…

The difference is that one of those things actually happened, and the other one is your hypothetical extremist/exaggerated/worst possible case of what might happen this time.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#799

Post by dec0dedab0de » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 4:04 PM UTC

mancerayder wrote: post #781

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #162

This dropped off the front page in the time I read it, I assume because of the controversial gate that favors upvotes to comments (which I am making worse by replying to others). It is a shame, because this really resonated with me. I've been working in tech for over 20 years now in various roles, and this is the least I have cared about it. I used to want to get better, and was constantly excited about learning new…

I and my cohorts are forced back in the office four days a week. It's a miserable grind. Routine includes alarm, after a poor night of sleep, getting ready, commuting in, loud, bright offices where while you enjoy the convivial nature of joking and commiserating with colleagues, it's so distracting and noisy and visually distracting that you can't be productive technically. Next you go home at 6, 630, sleepy, go to t…

I remember feeling exactly the same way. When I got offered a work from home job in august of 2014 it felt like a magic portal into a dream life I always wanted, and it was for the first 6 years.

Maybe it is my town, maybe it's me. But I just don't think it's healthy to wake up, walk down the stairs and sit in front of a computer for 8-15 hours every day, rinse and repeat. Maybe things would be different if I had the discipline to consistently shower, cook, exercise, go outside, spend time with friends, pursue my hobbies, and maintain my household.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#800

Post by hyperadvanced » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 4:05 PM UTC

mangoman wrote: post #490

> The world does not wait with bated breath for product launches. A marketing campaign will not change the world. Almost no one will remember all the work we do. It did at one time! I think that’s what’s so alluring initially about Workism. People waited with bated breath for the iPhone and iPad and its new versions. Those iPod commercials and the marketing campaigns for “rip. Mix. Burn.” did change the music world.…

I think the next frontier for (knowledge) Workists is to use the AI to make sci-fi shit. Someone go make me a schematic for a 3d-printed battery. Someone go make me a an electric (flying?) skateboard kit. Someone go make me an at-home clothes printer. Someone go make me a flying car. Someone go make me an RPG that feels like Morrowind, EverQuest, or WoW did when I was a teenager - let me play it on the couch with my friends and our kids. There are so many possibilities… I feel like the doomers here are (rightly) mad that these kinds of problems are hard and not the same as “write me a web GUI that lets me search a database for music” or even “spend 80 hours writing a custom k8s operator to manage autoscaling for semi-persistent queues” but compared to what tech was 10 years ago, the ability to create anything and everything right now is amazing.