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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

#281

Post by RobinL »

bjt12345 wrote: post #256
RobinL wrote: post #245

I've often felt my job as a programmer has often been to automate myself (and others) out of my job. But I've always felt in control of that. I suppose there's some cosmic justice to the fact that it's now being done to me.

Serious question though - how are they going with that? In reality, I see a lot of the current unhappiness in the Tech industry is being triggered by their pointy haired bosses wasting millions on their failed AI strategies only to embark on more failing AI strategies.

One example: I've been working for a couple years (not full time) on a high performance FOSS address matcher: https://github.com/moj-analytical-services/uk_address_matche...

Until recently LLMs have been really bad at this task. I always knew it was coming, but with GPT 5.6 they've suddenly become good. It's pretty clear to me that it won't be long before most of my work on this is rendered pointless because the LLM can either do the classification itself (when given agentic access to the canonical list of addresses), or write a classifier itself if given enough labelled data. Of course these two are complementary

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

#282

Post by rindalir »

ang_cire wrote: post #269
rindalir wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I should say it was sheep —> artisan cheese, which is in my view one of the few paths to viability for a small sized farm. It’s definitely not big enough for producing a commodity profitably. And farming takes either generational wealth and experience OR being able to go big by forming a farming cooperative like Chris Newman. It’s probably not something most people can “escape” to.

Or, as any respectable farmer does it, it's though heavy subsidies and crop insurance fraud!

Yes, honest person that I am even I think “is the reason this isn’t working because I am not capable of gaming the system”. But all that money goes to farms orders of magnitude bigger anyway.

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

#283

Post by arjie »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #120
ComputerPerson wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a well-known book that labels programmers as a specific type of pointless job. "Duct tapers" is the category. Also task masters, who would have a foot under the software development umbrella, have space in the book. "Bullshit Jobs" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

We are socially punished for our extremely cushy jobs SWE has negative social value. Saying you’re a SWE or god forbid anything in AI in a dating/courtship context is basically suicide. We are paid so well as compensation for debasing ourselves socially. A lot of normies intuitively understand the concepts in that book even without reading it and either see you as evil or a grifter, maybe both, when you say you work…

This hasn’t been true for me. Not only are the majority of software engineers I know married but also looking at the marriage rates in high-income in the Bay Area, it’s quite high, so I don’t think it’s specific to my group.

There are angry people on the Internet but real life has rarely reflected them.

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

#284

Post by legastenigga »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #233
marginalia_nu wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an experiment, completely stop consuming news and social media for a few weeks. People have lived their entire lives without these information streams, you'll survive unplugging a bit. Now I can't tell you what you will experience if you go through with this, but I can promise it's very enlightening.

My offline time is spent volunteering with asylum seekers. As an experiment, try actually caring about the people experiencing what you think of as meaningless online negativity.

[dead]

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

#285

Post by npilk »

So the author tells us there is a crisis of meaning in the workplace, and their proposed solution is… to remember none of the work matters?

The start of the piece: “These conversations inevitably turn to fundamental questions about careers: What the fuck are we actually doing? What the fuck is the point of all of this?”

The end: “For most employees, we owe it to each other to remind one another that this work is not, in the grand scheme of things, all that important. It is illusory.”

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

#286

Post by THX1137 »

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…

> forcing me to go out every day and talk to human beings face to face, even just little things like making sure I was showered and dressed every day

This part is strange to me. I've worked from home for about 10 years and I've never once had an issue with twice-daily showering, meeting people face-to-face, going out for coffee, going outdoors, going to the gym, etc. The fact I can just go sit in a park, on a hiking trail, or whatever and work there is a genuine "killer app" for me. I'm surprised at people who tell me that they are isolated by home work when there are so many opportunities for social and natural connection everywhere...

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

#287

Post by notsmarthuh2 »

soperj wrote: post #253
notsmarthuh wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem in the Western world is that switching to a different career is made almost impossible. This society pushes people out of the workforce all the time. I'm one of them. I've been "unemployed" since 2012 with apparently ZERO ability to get any kind of skilled job ever again, just due to a "zigged when I should have zagged" situation decades ago.

what were you doing in 2012?

[flagged]

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

#288

Post by pzo »

pixelready wrote: post #246
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…

The answer to this is always the one we don’t want to talk about: a robust public safety net. This is the balance to “move fast and break shit” technological disruption. It’s great to have an adaptive overall system, but disruption has a human cost. If there’s a robust public healthcare and UBI type system in place to pad the fall, people will bounce back and adapt when industries break down. If instead we stick our…

Maybe I'm too pessimistic but i doubt how this can work out worldwide. It can work out maybe for some few wealthy countries but in this AI revolutions most likely we will have only 2 winners: USA and China.

Smaller EU countries cannot even today introduce a fair revenue tax on big tech so that they pay any tax without being threatened about retaliatory steps by US administration.

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

#289

Post by elmer2 »

throwaway_7274 wrote: post #232
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…

It’s funny, people are so different! I’d always taken it as an axiomatic Truth of the world that money doesn’t buy happiness. When I finally caved and took a high-paying job, I was shocked (shocked I tell you!) to find that it made my life a lot easier. So much breathing room :) This isn’t a disagreement or a hook into some discourse or anything. I don’t have a point. Just thoughts

"that money doesn’t buy happines"

I think people get this meaning wrong all the time. The love of money doesn't buy happiness. Having money can definitely make your life easier, and you can spend it on things that make you happy.

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

#290

Post by phainopepla2 »

pc86 wrote: post #154
jonahrd wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are definitely downsides to office work, but this post really implies to me that you don't actually personally know anyone who works in the trades. The amount of body pain/damage, extreme conditions, and ridiculous scheduling (as in, last minute decisions that you must be on site at 5:30am the next day, not as in overall hours) are pretty much incomparable to tech work.

I didn't say they were comparable. But there is a common refrain that every single person who works in the trades has their body basically destroyed by the time they're 40, which isn't remotely true, and that nobody who works in an office (or a number that is essentially a rounding error) has any physical effects directly caused by that, which also isn't remotely true.

That's not a common refrain, that's you interpreting reasonable statements in the most extreme possible way.
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