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 Earw0rm » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:51 AM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #349

chasd00 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>It was hard on the industry but I don't think we have lost generations of journalists. We literally did. There are dramatically fewer journalists now than just a few decades ago, and everyone is constantly complaining about how bad "journalism" is now. It was definitely bad a long time ago, in the era of yellow journalism, but now "Journalists" don't even ask basic questions, don't push back in interviews at all, do…

Yep. Most "journalism" now is opinion columns.

Local journalism is dead, with unfortunate consequences for local politics that bleeds into national and international stuff.

National investigative journalism is hanging by a thread, with a TON of stuff (mostly corruption of various kinds) going uninvestigated which should be. Some of the slack has been picked up by academics of one kind or another making their work more accessible, but now they're in the firing line too.

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

#652

Post by imtringued » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:52 AM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #394

pj_mukh wrote: post #324

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…

>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.

You don't seem to get it. If what you said is true then the only reason why your job is gone first is because software moves faster than hardware. The chain reaction to get rid of all jobs has started.

After all, you can now automate the development of physical hardware including robots and their control algorithms. Then all we need to do is give the AI a job shop and mechanical engineering is done next.

And so on. Until every single job is gone.

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

#653

Post by bloody_bocker » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:52 AM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #510

bonoboTP wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed, all I do is live performance. Recording is too much work. ;-)

I also am recently coming to realization that live music is best experience, followed by recorded live music (plenty of sessions on YT that sound gorgeous and have better performances than 'normal' recordings do.

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

#654

Post by testerius » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:53 AM UTC

kaffekaka wrote: post #647

chii wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So, the plan is to work super hard until you are ~40, only to die in a car accident at 35? Don't plan to have fun later, because later may never come.

I think it doesn't matter when you died.

You didn't exist before you were born, so you had no idea about anything.

You "die" when you go to sleep.

So we could say most of it doesn't matter - of course if there isn't anything after our living here.

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

#655

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

noduerme wrote: post #558

paulorlando wrote: post #533

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

#656

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

Tarq0n wrote: post #278

RealityVoid wrote: post #252

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

#657

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

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #167

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

#658

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

ben_w wrote: post #394

pj_mukh wrote: post #324

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

#659

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

mac-mc wrote: post #645

lelanthran wrote: post #618

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

#660

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

tossandthrow wrote: post #646

bjt12345 wrote: post #262

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.