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

#651

Post by inigyou » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:56 AM UTC

noduerme wrote: post #554

paulorlando wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you mentioned Etaoin Shrdlu and hot type / linotype... There are a lot of industries (at least historically) that have organized labor. In the UK, there was the “Wapping Dispute” in 1986 when computer technology enabled journalists to type in their copy directly, doing away with the need for workers to set type using linotype printing. Linotype was a big improvement on the older letter-by-letter typesetting and…

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…

It would be better if they were paid to do nothing.

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

#652

Post by anovikov » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:57 AM UTC

Tarq0n wrote: post #276

RealityVoid wrote: post #250

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.

If law enforcement still does a good job, what are the downsides? I can't see crime climbing really high, after all, population ageing, and crime was on the decline for decades.

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

#653

Post by anovikov » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 7:00 AM UTC

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #166

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…

I have been in tech for the tech for over 20 years now, heck over 30 years as a hobbyist. I have lost almost all interest in it these days. It feels increasingly meaningless, and actively harmful. I know it is my own fault for neglecting my health and relationships, but I can't help but feel this career makes the most important things more difficult.

Well, being harmful is the whole thing about tech. Economic and technological development happens through harming people, this is how society grows. Finding new and new ways of harming ever larger groups of people, forcing them to adapt.

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

#654

Post by ricardobayes » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 7:01 AM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #390

pj_mukh wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>"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 goi…

"Normal tech" puts people out of careers every so often, and kinda randomly. Society has benefited as everyone who isn't put out of a job significantly outnumbers those who are. I was expecting AI to put me, a software developer, out of a job after everyone else , because I thought coders would be needed to write the AI for everyone else, one job task at a time. Right now, it's looking like LLMs can translate not onl…

We haven't really been able to figure out the responsibility thing properly yet. I'm ok with AI/LLMs but not so much on agentic stuff, a human always needs to be in the loop. If there's anything we learned from Robocop, is the need of a human decision maker. I'm not okay with a fully agentic radiology AI or a fully autonomous surgery robot, without a surgeon supervising.

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

#655

Post by sph » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 7:05 AM UTC

mac-mc wrote: post #641

lelanthran wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's very similar to being an EM, and if you think EMs are useless, the vast majority EMs have decided it's not worth their time to educate you, and the few who have tried to gently probably went over your head.

WTF is an EM? Please expand your acronyms.

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

#656

Post by anovikov » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 7:05 AM UTC

tossandthrow wrote: post #642

bjt12345 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question though - how are they going with that? In reality, I see a lot of the current unhappiness in the Tech industry is being triggered by their pointy haired bosses wasting millions on their failed AI strategies only to embark on more failing AI strategies.

We are too early to deem it failed ai strategies. I am advising small startups. One of them went entirely to agentic developed software by a team of non technical founders. They had their sec audit done with considerably fewer errors than had a software developer build the same (which would have taken upwards of 4 times as long). I am sorry, the technical capabilities of the agentic systems for software development i…

I agree. There is no point in hiring anyone into a technical-only role anymore. It's very valuable (and probably always will be) to be something-and-technical: a specialist in the target field who also understands how computers and software work. But not "just" technical, these are already completely obsolete and all of them who still have jobs, do so simply because of institutional inertia, connections, and companies being awash with money. Which is not to say that this is not a sustainable state of affairs - it may very well be so forever.

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

#657

Post by foobiekr » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 7:06 AM UTC

david927 wrote: post #44

zitterbewegung wrote: post #29

When have people in Tech been happy? (Serious question).

The 1990's

Othr than bubble $, not really. The true "golden time" was the 1980s. Creation of Cisco, Sun and SGI, and so many other things (like the personal computer), all new, incredible energy, mostly positive.

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

#658

Post by tomhow » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 7:10 AM UTC

zuzululu wrote: post #437

KaiserPro wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK as weaving was mechanised it lead to huge upheavals and only narrowly avoided civil war. It changed the face of the country completely.

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

#659

Post by Toutouxc » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 7:12 AM UTC

hollowturtle wrote: post #352

THX1137 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I mean in which lucky place of the planet you live in? I dunno u but where I live it's 40 degree celsius out there and all over europe. I'm a remote worker and most time of the year going outside is just not possibile, over heat or too cold or raining like it never did before(climate change you know)

I’m don’t know how to say this, but if you’re claiming that there’s a place anywhere in Europe where going outside is “not possible” for more than a handful of days of the year (like extreme heatwaves), you definitely have some kind of problem that other people don’t have. And I mean it, it isn’t normal to be this scared of going outside.

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

#660

Post by win311fwg » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 7:13 AM UTC

pseudalopex wrote: post #226

win311fwg wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The glaring flaw in the theory is that it hypothesizes that jobs are pointless, but in fact they do have a point: Companionship. There are always exceptions, but overwhelmingly those with resources don't like being alone and without social standing and so they use their resources to buy friends, so to speak.

Graeber's test of a bullshit job was it could be eliminated without harm to society. Jobs to make people above feel important was 1 type he identified.

We're talking about the link. It refers to pointless work.

- "over half of societal work is pointless"

- "workers are required to pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be"

Companionship isn't pointless. Nobody in a companionship role is pretending that they are at work for any other reason unless they are so out to lunch as to not notice what the job is. And if one is that far out to lunch, why would they see their job as being pointless rather than believing it useful in some other way?