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

#301

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

#302

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

pj_mukh wrote: post #247

Animats wrote: post #224

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?

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

#303

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

ianbutler wrote: post #225

autoexec wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that ignoring all of the very real problems we have and the ways we're being harmed can make some people feel better, but burying your head in the sand doesn't make any of it actually go away. You can pretty safely ignore a lot of irrelevant rage bait, but by remaining ignorant to what's going on around you you also risk losing a lot of useful, actionable, information and being blindsided by things that coul…

What are you doing to fix the issues though? Has the knowledge of the issues increased your agency in a meaningful way such that you've taken actions to improve things or are you just enjoying living in a perpetually outraged state for the sake of it? If your martyrdom isn't doing anything to help fix the problem you're just hurting yourself and stopping yourself from potentially being in a space to ever actually do…

> What are you doing to fix the issues though?

You can't always expect to be able to fix everything yourself, but you often can take steps to help or at least protect yourself. It just depends on what's in the news. Very recently, I've started avoiding produce from Taylor Farms. Good thing I was paying attention to the news when that mess started. It was only by reading the news that I became aware of a change in how postmarks were being added by the USPS and that saved me some potential headaches.

Being informed can result in things like patching vulnerable software, withdrawing supporting a political candidate, reaching out to your representatives about issues that concern you, asking your doctor about treatments/medications/vaccines, exploring new media, changing or delaying travel plans, changing your spending habits, making adjustments to investments, etc.

What does ignorance get you?

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

#304

Post by greenchair » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:47 PM UTC

pixelready wrote: post #251

Animats wrote: post #224

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 because every time UBI is tried it fails?

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

#305

Post by tuesdaynight » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:49 PM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #270

marginalia_nu wrote: post #197

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.

I just read this from Nokia's blog of all places[1]: > A fresh U.S. residential IP address (especially one behind carrier-grade NAT and harder to block individually) is “gold.” Customers pay up to $95 to lease a single U.S. residential IP address for 2 weeks (versus $0.30 for an Eastern European IP). That's bananas. The place I found a link to that story was jwz's blog, a site that is actively getting hammered by one…

I feel like your last paragraph could be said about any time in the last 10 years. That was my biggest wake-up call to stop following mainstream news. Whatever shows here or in my social circle are enough to be informed as much as needed (YMMV)

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

#306

Post by mixmastamyk » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:49 PM UTC

qlte wrote: post #261

marginalia_nu wrote: post #197

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…

Doomscrolling vs. no-news-at-all is a false dichotomy. There are calm sources of news. And nothing wrong with learning events from others a few days later. What would you have done with the Biden news?

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

#307

Post by throwaway_7274 » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:49 PM UTC

elmer2 wrote: post #296

throwaway_7274 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah absolutely. And obviously I’m overplaying my naïveté and idealism for effect here, a little bit, but I was still surprised how much it really did improve my quality of life.

I don’t even buy a lot of things, really, I still don’t own a car and hope I never will. But now I just don’t feel quite so wracked with guilt over getting a haircut or getting the organic raspberries or whatever. There are so many little waste-of-time tasks that I don’t have to waste as much time on. I dunno. It’s funny. “Selling out” is real easy. It makes everything real easy.

I do wonder if this is the first step down the path to “I am a prisoner to my Stuff. Where did my life go”

Just thinkin out loud into the internet

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

#308

Post by Xirdus » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:50 PM UTC

elmer2 wrote: post #279

pixelready wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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." This would be great, in theory. The reality is that people would live on it and never work, have kids, and the same thing would happen with a new generation. As it expands, you run out of tax payers and the system collapses. A 'robust' healthcare system that the governmen…

> A 'robust' healthcare system that the government runs is a pipe dream.

That "pipe dream" has already been achieved by most EU countries decades ago. Sure, you might argue it's worse in quality than American healthcare and that wait times are horrible, but I guarantee you most Americans would see it as an improvement over their current situation.

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

#309

Post by shimman » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:50 PM UTC

pzo wrote: post #295

pixelready wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does winning even mean for the USA here? I'm not going to benefit if OpenAI or Anthropic become trillion dollar companies, and I sure as fuck won't benefit when more myopic business leaders become billionaires that have some of the most anti-human ideas that decide they want more control of society.

Americans would largely languish if big tech wins, big tech is already profiting of our misery now they want to profit in other domains too?

80% of this country is not going to benefit at all from any American corporations because American corporations have open disdain for workers.

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

#310

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:50 PM UTC

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #170

mattcantstop wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's rude to me as well. But I think we are wrong about this. I was in the doctor's office and a person was on the phone talking in the waiting room. I thought it was weird. But then I thought "if a person was sitting in the seat next to them and they were talking, would that be weird?" I don't think we'd see two people talking as being weird. Why is it weird if someone is by themself speaking to someone that isn't a…

I would consider two people talking to each other in a waiting room or on a train very rude too. If they are loud enough that the people next to them or behind them can hear the words they are saying, then it is rude of them. Of course, this is relative to how noisy the place is overall.

[deleted]