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Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

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Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#61

Post by tbrownaw »

janalsncm wrote: post #55
VirusNewbie wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason the 'middle class' is smaller is because more families have become "upper middle class". All the data shows this. You can argue that housing is too much or that inflation hasn't benefited the right things, but to say that the middle class is shrining just doesn't match reality.

“Upper middle class” has nothing to do with it. In 1950, the median household could buy a house with 2 years of income. That is, 50% of households could do this. Today, the median house costs $400k. Only the top 12-14% of households make 200k per year. So proportionally, the % of households that have the same buying power as a median 1950s household has shrunk roughly 4x.

Those do not measure the same thing.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#62

Post by dumberquestions »

SoftTalker wrote: post #52
janalsncm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Based on your numbers, 65% of women were not working at that time. 2) That 35% number was likely even lower for married women. 3) Racism was still a systemic problem and was bad. Black men were excluded from the GI bill for example. 4) In spite of that, the median American household needed only 2x their salary to buy the median house. That number is 5x today, and after taxes the ratios are 2.2x then vs 6x today, w…

Compare the median house in 1950 with one today.

Have people's standards for what a house constitutes gone up, or are affordable options that people would be very willing to buy less available now?

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#63

Post by api »

t-writescode wrote: post #59
VirusNewbie wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason the 'middle class' is smaller is because more families have become "upper middle class". All the data shows this. You can argue that housing is too much or that inflation hasn't benefited the right things, but to say that the middle class is shrining just doesn't match reality.

The only way one can claim that the middle class isn’t shrinking is to have a floating definition of the middle class. If you lock it in any way to something like “home ownership and simple vacations once a year” (which was absolutely possible in the 90s), it has plummeted.

I always mention this in these discussions:

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...

It's housing prices.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#64

Post by regularization »

briga wrote: post #21

The central premise of this post is basically not true: working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years. The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity. Where the current revolution will lead remains unclear, but if the past is any indication things will probably continue to improve for most people.

The US Department of Labor measures wages, and adjusted for inflation the hourly wage is below what it was in 1973. It is even lower if you are only counting non-management roles then and now. Wages have not gotten better over the past half century they have gotten worse.

Workers now work more hours pee year to try to catch up to what they made back then, so working conditions are worse now as well.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#65

Post by shellkr »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #48
maxbendick wrote: post #19

Marx actually has a bit about this: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm... The most interesting point here is relating machine speed to intensity. Plenty of tech folks are both working longer hours and overseeing more responsibilities thanks to AI. There are other factors at play though (interest rates and AI-addiction, for two).

[flagged]

This point could be made on every ideology.. Capitalism in essence is pretty gruesome too. The enlightenment, american and french revolutions and the labor movement was stuff that moved the pin in the right direction.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#66

Post by maxbendick »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #48
maxbendick wrote: post #19

Marx actually has a bit about this: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm... The most interesting point here is relating machine speed to intensity. Plenty of tech folks are both working longer hours and overseeing more responsibilities thanks to AI. There are other factors at play though (interest rates and AI-addiction, for two).

[flagged]

Marx builds on Smith. Would you agree then that Adam Smith is disproven even more and responsible for far more starvation? That would be ridiculous.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#67

Post by gulugawa »

This reminds me of watching JIRA go downhill over 10 years as it incorporated new technnology.

I used to be a scrum master who helped manage the team JIRA ticket board. When running into the inevitable problem during a meeting, I would sarcastically make a comment about "JIRA's monthly downgrade". By the time I stopped using JIRA in early 2025, it had become noticeably slower and had a bunch of UI clutter that made it difficult to do basic tasks.

I checked the homepage for Atlassian, which owns JIRA, and it has a headline saying: "Unleash your teams and their agents"

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#68

Post by sublinear »

Aurornis wrote: post #14
taeric wrote: post #5

This feels wrong. Did the vacuum make cleaning worse for employees? What about sewing machines? Modern looms? It is probably a safe case that most tech revolutions reduced the number of needed employees for most things. But even then, it would be great if this would provide evidence of that! Notably, it isn't like people strongly missed this work! Yes, there are fewer secretaries. But there aren't none, and the ones…

The claim of the article is that expectations increase at a faster rate than the work becomes easier. It probably feels that way to someone who got comfortable doing their job the old way wishes the world could go back to when they had it all comfortably figured out. If this does happen, it’s a second order effect from reducing the barrier to entry. Now that anyone can make some code with enough prompts, it’s no long…

> Now, it’s hard to justify having a lot of those easy ticket solver developers around.

This is such a flawed, but common take. Are you seriously going to claim you were never a junior dev that nobody trusted with "hard tickets"?

Note that I am not making a statement about what your skills were like when you started getting paid for dev work.

I'm saying that the "easy ticket solver" devs are an illusion. When they really fail to perform, you should ask yourself whether it's because many years of bad management undermined the motivation they may have once had. Yes it would suck to be one of those unlucky people, and I'm not saying they shouldn't get fired, but you still need to recognize the bias there. I won't comment on why they weren't given opportunities. There are so many.

Choosing dev work while lacking the necessary skills over other career paths that often pay more, whether back then or even now, is so irrational that it breaks your premise.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#69

Post by WalterBright »

regularization wrote: post #64
briga wrote: post #21

The central premise of this post is basically not true: working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years. The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity. Where the current revolution will lead remains unclear, but if the past is any indication things will probably continue to improve for most people.

The US Department of Labor measures wages, and adjusted for inflation the hourly wage is below what it was in 1973. It is even lower if you are only counting non-management roles then and now. Wages have not gotten better over the past half century they have gotten worse. Workers now work more hours pee year to try to catch up to what they made back then, so working conditions are worse now as well.

This corresponds with the increasing share of the economy consumed by the government.

> the hourly wage

This is a misleading statistic. The actual statistic is "total employee compensation", which includes the benefits packages, the (so-called) employer contribution to SS, 401k employer contributions, etc.

The TEC is often worth up to 150% of the wages.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#70

Post by WalterBright »

cluckindan wrote: post #38
siavosh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're conflating productivity growth with distribution. Technology increased wealth, but whether workers shared in those gains depended heavily on bargaining power and institutions.

Everything changed with floating currency. Inflation became a tool for centralization of ownership.

Inflation is caused by deficit spending. It is a tool for government to increase spending without raising taxes.
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