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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

#701

Post by AnthonyMouse »

paulorlando wrote: post #529
Rendello wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu documents the last day of hot type at The New York Times before the digital changeover. It's one of my favourite documentaries, everything feels so vivid and alive: https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...

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…

> Result of the strike: failure. 6000 printers were fired, but there were jobs for 670 new workers who used word processing.

The sad part is that it kind of does work from the other end.

Suppose you're a former press operator who can't expect to find any more work operating a printing press. Should you take a McJob? You have years of experience working with electric motors and hydraulics and pumps and industrial control systems. You might be better off to get a job in a trade. Study for the licensing exam and become a plumber or an electrician or the like. Except that you can't, because you're required to do a multi-year apprenticeship to get into any of those things no matter how much experience you have doing something similar. And you can't even get the apprenticeship to begin with because you're 45 years old and the union won't take you.

When a job is being eliminated by newer technology, the union has essentially no power because the employer doesn't care about workers going on strike when they're about to be laid off regardless. But when those laid off workers then want to get a job in another industry, the union there shows up to exclude them.

Which obviously sucks because then the union is screwing the laid off workers rather than some faceless corporation we might imagine or prefer them to be screwing.

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

#702

Post by johnnyanmac »

tayo42 wrote: post #256
notsmarthuh wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem in the Western world is that switching to a different career is made almost impossible. This society pushes people out of the workforce all the time. I'm one of them. I've been "unemployed" since 2012 with apparently ZERO ability to get any kind of skilled job ever again, just due to a "zigged when I should have zagged" situation decades ago.

I've been curious about leaving software but it really feels impossible. Theresa no careers that you can learn on the job and you need to go back for another 4year degree to maybe get into the entry level job,no guarantee though.

If I could afford to go back to school for 4 years, I wouldn't be worried about finding a job right now. Besides, I hear entry level people are hit the worst right now. I better be spending half my time in college networking if I want a job. But.. Why not do that for my current field at that point?

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

#703

Post by vrganj »

NateEag wrote: post #624
tossitawayplz wrote: post #97

A lot of people truly enjoyed the craft and creativity of building something. That is being stripped away. The building is being outsourced now. In some cases, the design too. Everything they once enjoyed and took pride in is being done by machines now. That is not a good feeling. Imagine you are a master craftsman, a furniture builder. You sourced the wood, designed the furniture, built it by hand, took pride in you…

You have channeled a great deal of my anxiety, stress, anger, and sorrow with this comment. Every day at my job I search for a chance to write some fragment of code by hand, a place where just for a moment I remember the joyous struggle to be a craftsman. I have the sense that you're right - musicians, writers, illustrators, actors, animators - they largely seem to hate the way the genAI companies vacuumed up everyth…

I wonder if an indie games studio might be the place for both kinds of craftsmen to create unique rewarding quality work.

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

#704

Post by ludicrousdispla »

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 sometimes took forever to get your gas if the attendant was busy

Then the gas station owner could hire another attendant. Or your parent could pick a different gas station or a different time of day, free markets and all...

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

#705

Post by marginalia_nu »

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

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, not really something I spend much time thinking about. I'm on a ton of different social media because I run a business and need to be where people are discussing my work.

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

#706

Post by rufasterisco »

thraway3837 wrote: post #574

I think what happened is that a lot of the wrong personalities entered technology for all the wrong reasons. Some of us started in the 80s or 90s and got into it with personal projects and treating the PC as a hobby. It is satisfying to be able to command a hunk of metal and get it to do things. And it can do boring stuff really fast and repeatedly. And that alone was exciting. The majority of us would stay up into t…

I belong to the "hacker-type from the 90s" group and what you wrote really resonates with me.

Yet.

I worked with clueless managers leading whole dev teams to burnout because they read a book and apply it verbatim, without understanding anything about it.

In a team full of great "hacker-types", a new project manager arrives and in one of the first meetings says "You know you are all very intelligent, you don't need to prove it all the time".

We delivered ahead of schedule, having a lot of fun, and all coders agree that he was the reason for it.

I "managed" a 2 person team where the "just-in-for-money" dev was reliably churning out one API endpoint after the other one. He loved it, because it was repetitive boring work. The codebase was really consistent, no extra patterns, all code he wrote was really easy to read.

The other dev, "hacker-type", in 40 hours of work across 3 days, writes a beautiful, perfect plugin system, i was hoping for a prototype in 2 weeks. Of course, he loved it. At the same time, I gave him a "boring endpoint" once, he proposed a "solution" to a "problem" that was never there, his brain needed to over-engineer the problem until it was fun.

I agree with the sentiment of what you wrote: if your job is your passion, a new tech innovation like AI feels exciting rather than scary.

But i don't see staying up until morning as a requirement for being a good coder.

As a "hacker-type", my early growth ladder towards being professional in a business environment included a few steps about finding work "less fun".

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

#707

Post by jvidalv »

hellohello2 wrote: post #487
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…

Yeah I'm not sure what happened but Reddit in particular is beyond saving, and I'm not saying it was ever great. I think we simply don't know how to create online communities that make any sense yet. I'd rather have second hand smoke than any more algorithmic "engagement" maximization at this point.

Small forums is the answer. In spain they are still popular and after some time it feels like an small town in the good sense, you know everyone and everyone knows you. Of course small forums will not IPO

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

#709

Post by laichzeit0 »

skhameneh wrote: post #613
laichzeit0 wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s great to care about the craft as long as someone else is paying for it. I think most software developers are waking up to the reality that they were always just holding business at ransom with their craft. Software is a grudge purchase for businesses. No one has ever cared about the craft except the craftsmen.

The parent comment’s take resonates with me and your response is exactly, what I assume, frustrates us both. I’ve been at companies that were founded on sales of physical goods that literally had vendors pick them for vended goods because they found the software made purchasing more convenient - as in they literally had customers tell them they bought their physical goods because of their software. They didn’t need t…

Look I get it. I completely emphasise with the feeling. My undergrad is Computer Science, I often dreamed about writing my own compiler and spent years learning low level performance optimization, loved design patterns, re-factoring code to be more elegant, all that stuff.

I just feel like after years in industry and how I’m steering something like Fable now that all of this is irrelevant and the writing is crystal clear on the wall: Writing software by hand is in its death throes. There is no future for it besides some very niche areas. When last have you actually looked at what your high level language is actually being compiled and optimised to? We’re moving up the abstraction ladder with software.

To your point: People care about the actual output, the interface, whether it does what they want it to do, but in no way do they care about the internals and how it’s built. That’s an implementation detail. And that’s where all the fun of the craft actually sits.

This is not unique to software engineering though, go take a look at the maths and mathematics subreddits. There are guys doing PhDs in maths who are too afraid to run their dissertation topics through the latest models because it might just solve the problem they’ve spent the last few years working on in a few hours. They absolutely hate that problems are being blown away where people have spent years trying to figure out. It feels like the same psychological pain software engineers are going through.

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

#710

Post by paganel »

> “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid.

Uncle Ted is being proved correct in his assessment day after day after day. Too bad that the normies in the article wont' ever look at the world through Uncle Ted's nor through Ellul's eyes, they're too intellectually limited (to not use the word "stupid") for that. Too bad, had they known they could have turned their lives for the better earlier on.

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