Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

noemamag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 1001 posts

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

#451

Post by andix »

FloorEgg wrote: post #446
andix wrote: post #416

I have the feeling this goes much deeper than knowledge work and AI. I see it in many places that people seem to not take their job serious anymore. The incentive seems to be gone. Also their managers don't seem to care anymore, as they are also taking their job less seriously. I can't put a finger on it, but it's not about younger people or Gen Z, it also applies to older people. It just feels like good work doesn't…

Sometimes in an effort to understand things I'll try and take them to their limit. One limit, framed as a path to a kind of dystopia is "wire heading". Another more tangible limit is opium addiction. These are basically collapsing of values. Trading a rich and robust value system for pure dopamine. Modern media is on this spectrum (infinite scroll, algorithmically tailored, short form video). When people can get dopa…

Interesting idea. Modern media and social media is probably really the most relevant change we had in the last 15 years. Everything else didn't change that much.

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

#452

Post by nik282000 »

darepublic wrote: post #371

I'll never consider my time with programming to be useless. Even if we got sent back to the stone age and programmable computers no longer existed. The way of thinking to me is very valuable

The fact that you can think is what is valuable. I work for a slew of drones who will ask the same question 4 or 5 times, to multiple people, hoping that one of them will 'slip up' and reveal that there is actually a hidden easy solution.

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

#453

Post by vinyl7 »

MarkusQ wrote: post #380
geraneum wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember, our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect. We read these articles with different eyes. There are people who are the real audience and salivate when they read these sentiments.

Who's making money off our misery exactly? I can see it as a foreign adversary psyop (they benefit from us being demoralized) or as a side effect of the attention economy (more clicks is all that matters) or even a hyper-partisanship epiphenomenon (whichever side is currently down wants people to think everything is awful). But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-mo…

Emotionally charged headlines generate clicks, and in 2026 displaying ads is the primary source of income for all major companies

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

#455

Post by erikerikson »

What the article describes was already a problem. Business people frequently pushed for broken incomplete work via shortcuts, fell for flattery, and otherwise twisted the work for those of us who cared about doing it well and accomplishing valuable and important things.

Early in my career I wrote a product that helped get a startup funding. That product went on to be used, among many other things, to reduce the impacts of genocide. Further actually impactful results were abstract in nature, a framework that was used to start many financially successful companies.

The entire 25 years there was an endless tension to balance actually doing good work and slapping together some garbage really fast. There's some good to that tension but discussing that here would be a distraction. I think AI really accelerated the sloppy acceleration and really emboldened the slop crowd. It's the perfect tool for the blowhards playing politics and irresponsibly pushing under the belief that there is endless grift absorption capacity.

To me the article makes a strong point but what do I know? I'm too busy farming to really think it through.

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

#456

Post by titanomachy »

morley wrote: post #274
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.

Have you seen this 1-acre Vermont farm? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT6O-4zbP6E I'm not a farmer so I can't speak to how much of this is unreproducible, but it does seem very interesting. The paper pot transplanter blew my mind.

"We produced $250k worth of food last year. We sell most of it wholesale, so we don't get a terribly high price for it."

The title says they make $13k per week, which would be $676k... so $13k must be just during the weeks they produce. And it seems to be based on the grocery-store price of that food, rather than the actual wholesale price that they're able to sell it for.

I wanted to watch at least enough to understand how the title is misleading. If two people could make $13k/week on an acre there would be a hell of a lot more people doing it.

It's still cool though, they've clearly worked hard and made great use of their land.

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

#457

Post by bonoboTP »

analog31 wrote: post #422
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…

Agreed. I'm a musician. Talking pictures. Then piracy, and a few things in between. Now music is either a spectacle, is carried out in private, or as a labor of love by people like myself who have some other means of support. Support that AI is now threatening.

Do concerts. It's the old way. It's human and personal. It's effort though, not passive income like album sales used to be.

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

#458

Post by uncivilized »

entropy47 wrote: post #441
uncivilized wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you disagree that your work is pointless?

I certainly do. As usual the revolution is weeks away, but I continue to produce work better, faster and more reliably than my colleagues who have outsourced their brains to Claude. You can tell me I'm not gonna make it and the last 5% is going to topple on the next model release, but the work I enjoy doesn't have precedents and it seems the plagiarism machine is quite bad at that specific flavour of knowledge work.

That has nothing to do with your work being pointless or not (it is), but more you showcasing your insecurity of having to be smarter than your peers because they use LLMs.

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

#459

Post by VoodooJuJu »

xlii wrote: post #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 mi…

[dead]

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

#460

Post by DragonStrength »

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…

My grandfather’s career was in decline before my father hit adulthood (autoworker, electronics), my father’s career (nuclear control systems engineer) was in decline from the day he established it, and I’ve never expected my new-fangled software career to be there for the next generation, but there’s a rhyme probably.

I find this comparison to printers arbitrary, precious, and specious. Aren’t the armies of software engineers in tech more akin to the line-level autoworkers than artisans? The numbers would certainly suggest so. But it’s also silly to pretend such a new profession is anything akin to a generations-old trade. But maybe those tradesmen aren’t such victims either in this context? How privileged to be able to pass your profession down to the next generation! No one in my family has had that since farming, when only the oldest benefited.

Post reply on HN