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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

#321

Post by Lammy »

rob74 wrote: post #90
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…

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 b…

> 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

“Night must fall, now! Darker! — darker!”

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

#322

Post by marginalia_nu »

arjie wrote: post #302
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…

> 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?

Shoot me an email and we can discuss, but the index is somewhere in the ballpark of 20 TB, so there are some quite significant logistical obstacles.

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

#323

Post by andai »

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…

Well it used to be that the government's job was to keep morale high. At some point that seems to have inverted.

The coalition-of-Molochs appears to be finding it much more profitable to make everyone want to kill themselves. (Not sure if that's a great long-term strategy, but they seem to have thought this through.)

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

#324

Post by jselysianeagle »

_doctor_love wrote: post #209

Since it's Friday, I'm going to suggest an activity: this evening, invest 30 minutes in watching "The Brain Center at Whipple" from the old Twilight Zone TV series. This conversation is much older than any of us, starting really with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. My read on some of the current melancholy is that the millenial generation is starting to hit their mid-life crisis. Seeing the inherent meaningl…

> When these are found, very often one class of people is put out of work while another class of people gains employment.

I think what's contributing to the sense of dread is that so far at least, it's not at all clear that AI will be similar to past iterations of such "creative destruction". I hope to be wrong but I fear the jobs it does end up creating, if any, will be far lower paid and soul-sucking, and it will likely destroy many more jobs than it creates.

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

#325

Post by pj_mukh »

Muromec wrote: post #303
pj_mukh wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>>"optimistic and enthusiastic about the new messiah"

I mean that's you agreeing with Elon Musk, I disagree, I think AI is just normal technology [1], there's a lot of us. Like tech revolutions before, it'll have huge effects on productivity alleviating major scarcities. That's boring to the algorithm, not enough conflict, but it's exciting to a lot of tech workers.

No messiah's and no Jihads, just excited about going to work to make sure we can do more with less tomorrow than we can do today.

[1]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

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

#326

Post by chasd00 »

Tarq0n wrote: post #279
RealityVoid wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sense there is this air around of "demand our jobs keep being relevant" - I personally feel this kind of thing holds the world backwards if it works. I think if our jobs were to become obsolete, embracing it and re-orienting oneself is the one thing that is personally effective and is morally right. But what do I know, I'm just some doofus on the internet. The irony is not lost on me on all those years where people…

That's a fine philosophy on a personal level, but if the labor market is shocked for entire sectors there's not enough slack in the system for all of those people to adapt at once. That's how you end up with lost generations.

i go back to what happened to Journalism when the Internet and especially "web2.0" took off. It was hard on the industry but I don't think we have lost generations of journalists. The software biz has always expected everyone else to adapt to technological shifts at a rapid pace. I'm a dev (more of a lead/mgr these days) so my neck is on the line too but even i have to chuckle at the irony.

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

#327

Post by chasing »

“Tech” is one of the most rapidly-changing disciplines historically. It was very different in 2016. In 2006. In 1996. In 1986. It will be very different in 2036. If this is your career, part of your job is being aware of those changes and being the person who can help others create value from whatever new technologies come around. I’ve always found these changes exciting and fun, but I’ve also been aware my entire career that whatever I’m doing be year could be out-of-date and not of value the next. Tech is exciting. Trepidation is a part of excitement.

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

#328

Post by gustavus »

exogenousdata wrote: post #319
elmer2 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

“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.” Are there historical or contemporary examples of this? I googled but couldn’t find any specifics. The reason I ask is that I in the US, employer-provided health insurance is a large expense for…

I mean we've got multiple generational families that have been living on council estates all their lives and raising the next generation to do the same at the same time the NHS is collapsing all around, so there's that example.

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

#329

Post by Der_Einzige »

arjie wrote: post #291
Der_Einzige wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can't believe people here try to gaslight me on this topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtACIFEddhM

"If you're not taken, gay, or furry, the consensus is that dating in SF sucks..."

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

#330

Post by Terr_ »

stego-tech wrote: post #94
ang_cire wrote: post #21

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…

I mean, yeah. I got into IT because I loved working with technology, building communities and game servers and chatrooms and computers and the like. I got lucky that someone found me, my interest in these things, and showed me how it could be a career. Nowadays though, so much of my time isn’t spent building so much as debunking the latest grift, scam, or lie. It’s spent unfucking arbitrary vendor changes that didn’t…

> The technology of today does not enable, or empower

To say much the same things stuff a slightly different framing:

The promise of "personal computers", and then the internet, making your own applications, etc. was that they would democratize and spread certain capabilities so that everyone could have their tool which accomplished their goals to make their life better. One might even call it owning your own "means of [digital] production", although that comes with some political baggage.

The depressing parts come as that autonomy is violated, as your computer becomes not your computer, but something rented to you by a remote authoritarian who demands it executes a process that improves their lives rather than yours.

In other words, I see it less as connecting groups of people than giving individuals agency--although that agency might be to create (and leave) groups.

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