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

#631

Post by ricardobayes » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:01 AM UTC

jakelazaroff wrote: post #563

noduerme wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Oregon. Up until last year , you weren't allowed to pump your own gas in most parts of the state. The law required gas station attendants to do it, as a scheme to keep them employed. The most annoying part of this wasn't the tiny marginal cost, but that it sometimes took forever to get your gas if the attendant was busy. You'd just sit there looking at the pump you weren't allowed to put your credit card in…

As a New Jersey native (the single remaining state that still mandates gas station attendants) I have spent my entire life convinced this is sour grapes from other states. Why would you want to leave your warm cozy car in the winter to pump your gas?!

In Dubai and other gulf states, you can order gas to your home and they fill your car up in your driveway.

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

#632

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:02 AM UTC

purplemoonx wrote: post #622

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…

The fact you say "on mastodon" proves it's effectively centralized, just pointing that out

[deleted]

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

#633

Post by bothers » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:02 AM UTC

elmer2 wrote: post #277

pixelready wrote: post #249

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…

>I suppose the people that are actually working will just need to get more guns.

If shit gets as bad as people are hoping it will get, workers aren't going to be in the "gets things" class anymore.

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

#634

Post by chii » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:15 AM UTC

quijoteuniv wrote: post #625

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…

Isn’t it better to find out that a lot of corporate work may not have much intrinsic meaning now, rather than just before you die? At least then you get a chance to do something about it. It seems to me these changes are much more daunting if you live in a country where no job means no health insurance, and where the pay gap between skilled and unskilled work is huge. That makes an existential question about work int…

> much intrinsic meaning now

work should not be considered to have to have intrinsic meaning for it to be worthwhile - you merely need to make sure your pay is worthwhile.

Find intrinsic meaning outside of work. The best way, imho, is to find the highest paying job you can, work super hard and earn maximally, until you built up a nest egg from which you can draw a living off indefinitely. Then, use the remaining time you have left to pursue what you find to be intrinsically rewarding.

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

#635

Post by BloondAndDoom » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:16 AM 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…

As someone who has been in the industry over 25+ hands down this is the worst period of being online.

There has always been that programmer who wanted to quit and run a restaurant, but tech world lost its original soul. We were making people’s lives better, now we are just creating more wealth gap. Majority of the industry is hostile, online communities are extremely hard to get into and very exclusive, if you are new you cannot get in. Majority of the content somewhere between bots, fake news, propaganda and rage bait. Almost all good things about tech and the internet were killed one by one.

Don’t get me wrong there are very exciting things from pure nerd perspective in this AI age but nothing is fulfilling as it used to.

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

#636

Post by throw-the-towel » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:18 AM UTC

slowhadoken wrote: post #572

Tech corporations co-opted open source technologies and liberalism by employing a bunch of wokies to act as social interfaces. Feminism has been doing the same thing to tech and media that Mitt Romney and private equity firms have been doing to brick and mortar businesses for the last 25 years.

Can you elaborate please?

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

#637

Post by tonyhart7 » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:21 AM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #614

pj_mukh wrote: post #245

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.

> I know a class of tech workers absolutely fired up about the new Industrial Revolution, That's because they're thinking that they're still going to get paid $200k/y for typing in "Duh, Claude, make me an app, here the specs from the client, doh!" They aren't seeing that there is very little value to add when all they are, is an interface to a magic software-making machine.

You will get downvoted for saying the truth

replacement would not happen overnight but they would decrease the amount of jobs required

back then we need a team of 4 - 10 engineer for an project/app, now maybe we need 2-3 max

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

#638

Post by mawadev » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:23 AM UTC

lostaccount wrote: post #32

This is basically office space but for the modern era. Peter found happiness in construction work, but when something physical like that is your job… I don’t know. A lot of those guys have back pain, inflexible schedules, working in extreme weather, and the pay isn’t even that good. Is tech so bad? Or is the world of work broken?

I have no idea why we go down the route of "us" vs "them" type of thinking. Have you considered both sides to be an abstract kind of hell?

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

#639

Post by J_Shelby_J » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:23 AM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #614

pj_mukh wrote: post #245

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.

> I know a class of tech workers absolutely fired up about the new Industrial Revolution, That's because they're thinking that they're still going to get paid $200k/y for typing in "Duh, Claude, make me an app, here the specs from the client, doh!" They aren't seeing that there is very little value to add when all they are, is an interface to a magic software-making machine.

[flagged]

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

#640

Post by kakacik » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:28 AM UTC

Lerc wrote: post #558

lovich wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are sizeable camps for both those opinions.

I mostly agree, except for the Messiah part. I think the optimistic excited people are thinking more 'What a time to be alive' than 'All praise be, for they have come' Which is not to say there won't be people deifying AI, I just don't think there are many of those yet. The cynical side of me thinks it will happen, but right now I feel like most of those who seem susceptible to that kind of thinking are tending towar…

There are no white collar workers around us excited with AI. Bureaucrats, doctors, bankers, none.

Yes everybody sees it as useful tool, and everybody damn well understands in medium term their work is at huge risk. That rolls over any emotion around 'oh what a nice new toy to use'.