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

#291

Post by THX1137 » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:41 PM UTC

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

#292

Post by notsmarthuh2 » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:42 PM UTC

soperj wrote: post #257

notsmarthuh wrote: post #239

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

#293

Post by pzo » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:43 PM UTC

pixelready wrote: post #249

Animats wrote: post #222

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

#294

Post by elmer2 » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:43 PM UTC

throwaway_7274 wrote: post #233

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

#295

Post by phainopepla2 » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:44 PM UTC

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.

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

#296

Post by equality_1138 » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:44 PM UTC

pixelready wrote: post #249

Animats wrote: post #222

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…

We never talk about social welfare programs? Odd, I hear chatter all the time. How about we never talk about rewarding management-by-breaking-things?

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

#297

Post by Muromec » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:45 PM UTC

follow_the_mone wrote: post #274

Animats wrote: post #222

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…

We remind people that Noema Magazine is owned by Berggruen Institute: https://berggruen.org/ Which is an AI booster: https://berggruen.org/projects/ai-visionaries You cannot read these articles posing as human interest without following the money.

Thank you for your service to community, dear stranger. o7

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

#298

Post by shimman » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:45 PM UTC

qlte wrote: post #259

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.

People always say this like it’s a panacea but n=1, I did exactly that for about 5-6 months in 2024 after I quit Twitter and didn’t want to get sucked back in to endless election drama like in 2016. For the first couple weeks it seemed like a mild to moderate improvement. Especially not having Elon’s tweets and the Twitter memes of the day in my head 24 hours a day. But after a month my baseline pretty much reset wit…

eh, it sounds like you don't really have a community you can socialize with. You just had a digital community. Digital communities are easy to come by but they lack the nutrition your soul aches for.

Cutting off corporate media is good, but you don't have to cut off all sources of media. I'm a fan of alternative media myself, so I listen/read things like Citations Needed, Zeteo, American Prospect, Dropsite News, or specific journalists like Edward Ongweso Jr. One thing to remember that it's still just consuming news, consuming things are very little part of the human experience. You need to actually socialize and discuss things with other humans, it's a real need; but you can still find high quality people to follow the news, maybe this is up your speed:

https://www.slow-journalism.com/

Creating is a human urge that you need to fulfill, as is socializing; with socializing it comes in many forms, but a core component needs to in some form of mutual aid. You need to have solidarity with your fellow man for we all share the same struggles together.

The urge to create for others is a human trait founds for 100s of thousands of years before industrial usage (people created + shared art with one another before things like replicated tool usage). Don't deny your urge to create and share with others. For some it's baking, for others it's raising children; you just need to create tangible things and share them with others. You can do this digitally but it's very hard, and IMO after 10ish years of doing so, also not really rewarding compared to writing music for friends or baking deserts for family. Got way more fulfillment out of helping children set up a bake sale than any amount of open source I've done in my entire life.

Just my experience, but I know I'm not along in thinking so because I ask people about this all the time. Seems to be the simple way to live a meaningful life for very little cost.

Please find your tribe, it is out there and it may give you more meaning in your life than any form of digital consumption/creation.

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

#299

Post by arjie » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:46 PM UTC

marginalia_nu wrote: post #54

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…

I live in San Francisco and life is quite nice. There are many obvious ways that this city is shitty that I’ve noticed other civilizations don’t have a problem with but also I’d say the overall experience is positive. Neither offline nor online reality is defacto unpleasant.

As far as the disillusionment sense, I think that’s an active selection bias. I think people (including me) like to feel angry and so we go out there looking for and finding people who will give us that. The key, for me, is to curate one’s feed. On HN, for instance, I usually block the majority of repetitive boring posters using a chrome extension. The majority of these people have very low context sensitivity which annoys me.

There are also abrasive people or generally sad people, both groups of which are safely blockable because they have a comment style where P(token|context) = P(token). There is no surfeit of humans on the Internet and no surfeit of interesting information. Almost all humans can be safely excluded from my feed and I can still get information.

By the way, I know you from your search engine. This might be an out there question but do you offer your search index as a downloadable structure? If so, how much does that cost?

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

#300

Post by Muromec » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:46 PM UTC

pj_mukh wrote: post #245

Animats wrote: post #222

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…

Also the headline is about tech workers but the article is about Knowledge workers. I know a class of tech workers absolutely fired up about the new Industrial Revolution, they're just not on this forum or featured in lengthy navel-gazing articles like this one.

(not a native speaker) fired up as in "optimistic and enthusiastic about the new messiah" or as in "Butlearian jihadi, all AI is haram" way?