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

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

#81
Because everything is ads, lots of propaganda and too much politics.

Flame wars used to be about distros and code and now it’s about how people think and opinions.

Everyone needs to go outside for a second, smell the flowers, hear the birds chip and calm down.

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

#82
post #30
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience, (outside of the quiet car), "extremely rude" - only South Korea and Japan?

i’m in the US, if you took a call for more than a few mins a busy metro car I’d tell you to knock it off

My dad speaks loudly on speakerphone phones in restaurants and public spaces daily because he's a rude old asshole.

No one beside myself has ever told him to stop because I think being old gives one a bit of a 'get out of jail free card ' with regard to social behaviors.

I would love for you or someone like you to happen upon him and tell him to knock it off, but alas that seems fleetingly rare.

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

#83
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience, (outside of the quiet car), "extremely rude" - only South Korea and Japan?

It's considered rude in Belgium, at least when I commuted there by train. People would leave the wagon to take a call. Maybe it's changed in the past few years. There were also signs that it's prohibited to call in the trains.

Leave the wagon to where? Like get off the train? The trains are all wagon, no?

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

#84

Because we see what's coming? Because we watched our careers go from being in service of an industry of tinkerers and designers, to being in service of the worst people attempting to maximize wealth extraction no matter the human cost? Because Snow Crash wasn't supposed to be the goal? Because our daily complicity in what's happening is also a daily reminder that we're not brave enough to be a Mangione? Take your pic…

[flagged]

Mangione is a murderer but that "innocent man" he killed was not innocent at all, he indeed was a murderer too. The only difference between then is they used different tools. No... Mangione murdered one, the other guy killed much more.

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

#85
Long long time ago people in tech were in tech because of the tech.

Then, at some point, being in tech became a gilded profession and everyone: salesmen, artists, clerks etc. joined in. Not because they wanted to be in tech.

They wanted gold.

For years it was working, but right now things shifted. You can no longer just do the thing you learned for a job and continue doing so, because landscape shifted. So they're miserable and they want to get back to knitting, pottery or whatever thing they want to do but not tech.

For people I know who are in tech for the tech nothing changed. There's new tech in town, one has to adjust, and it's still possible to discover new things and pave new paths. Tech was always shifting and I suppose people who worked in it for it always knew it, and it doesn't derail them.

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

#86
I wrote a little bit about this a few weeks ago [1]. For me, programming, building software has always been a creative expression based on fundamentals. AI sucks all the joy out of it.

[1] https://deanclatworthy.com/2026/02/09/the-joy-of-programming...

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

#87
On a personal level to remain as a SWE/Dev maintaining your sanity comes down to a few choices:

1. Do I want to have the kind of lived experiences that the field has to offer? The answer can come through some introspection to questions like: "Do I have a good devx talking to AI and understanding how it works? If not am I willing to learn how to?" or "Am I ok if development has become more intense than it was — because you will talk to AI/Machine more than before?".

2. Whatever your introspective questions are, if there answer is: "Yes I am more or less ok.", then pick a goal that lets you get those experiences and hack away.

I feel this decision making is more important than ever for people who are banked on more their skill to write decent code and not much else in the recent past. And also people with mental health issues should be more deliberate about their choices.

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

#89
post #3

tech people need to become business owners

there's no space for everybody. not even near. free market is inherently oligopolic for most cases..

Oligopolies are unlikely in a free market because as soon as you do anything interesting a million other people will copy what you are doing wholesale and you will have no advantage to see you rise up to form an oligopoly. We find oligopolies in our regulated markets because regulation, such as copyright, patents, tariffs, etc., legally hinder that competition from emerging.

However, even if we accept oligopolies as inevitable, that doesn't mean the tech people cannot collectively own those oligopolies. A business does not have to be owned by just one person. Cooperatives are a thing.

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

#90

Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going…

If you also consider that many of us, via the companies we work for, actively contribute to making the Internet (and by extension, the world) a worse place, the question in the article's title kind of answers itself. It also makes "quiet quitting" seem almost the right thing to do: doing only the least possible to advance your company's goals while keeping both your job and your sanity, hoping that you will one day be offered a buyout package and then maybe find something more fulfilling...
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