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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

#751

Post by alex43578 »

Tade0 wrote: post #743
listenallyall wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point about affording the lifestyle isnt entirely incorrect, but it is skewed by what you choose to include vs ignore. Owning a house? Indeed, grandfather probably had it easier. More space per person in the primary residence? Grandson wins, most likely. Restaurant meals vs home cooked, international travel, ubiquitous air conditioning, threat of being drafted into the military (and actually being deployed!), ex…

Disregard the grandfather for a moment. How is today better than the situation 20 years ago?

Most of those measures, just less significantly compared to the grandfather.

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

#752

Post by dan_q »

pydry wrote: post #526
cheschire wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you chasing the feeling of successfully solving a problem? Have you replaced problem solving with LLM chats? Maybe instead of engineering, you’ve been subtly shifted into project management and hate that career. But it’s tough to engineer much these days. Instead I find I’m PM’ing the bots more than solving problems.

The culture of the tech industry started going to shit in 2022/2023 after rates were hiked and before LLMs were capable of anything much. There's more toxicity, more waterfall, more authoritarianism, less autonomy, more pressure. Consequently lower productivity, too. Sometimes AI is just the label that gets slapped on "all the ways the tech industry has changed over the last 3 years".

2022/2023 is when the AI wrecking crews came in in full force

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

#753

Post by dan_q »

punkbit wrote: post #671
testerius wrote: post #655

Currently, I have 3 main issues with AI, LLMs and so on. Generally speaking I am happy that I can use Claude Code and Codex to help building, fixing and maintaining software in my job. To be honest it is so helpful, I am less stressed bacause most of the time I can "find out" solution without asking collegues for help or I do not have spend a lot of time struggling myself. Yeah, if you understand what feeling it is t…

Three really good points. Specially the third one. Not sure why HN readers are downvoting you…

This site aggressively suppresses any criticism of LLMs, especially LLM generated/"assisted" code.

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

#754

Post by Rumple22Stilk »

jleyank wrote: post #495
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…

Look at the disappearance of pink-collar jobs due to computerization and "do it yourself" that it enabled. There's lots of examples of whole career fields disappearing. The trick has always been to see whether and how things reappear.

There is no tech created like this. This is a literal thinking machine. And it replaces other thinking machines. You.

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

#755

Post by abustamam »

tcrenshaw wrote: post #552
sysworld wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a path for people effected to be able to at least cover basic needs, while also offering some kinda training into a different role that pays. Defiantly not something most countries have setup.

What is the different sort of roll that pays at this point?

Blue collar work, but obviously that labor market would get saturated pretty quickly.

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

#756

Post by dan_q »

crnkofe wrote: post #672

I have this nagging feeling that the depression, anxiety and pessimism is as-of-late coming from people from all the companies that risked it by adopting token maxing and AI usage enforcement. Its not representative of the whole industry though. There are still many places where engineers or knowledge workers are respected and left to lead (or not) AI adoption.

> There are still many places where engineers or knowledge workers are respected and left to lead (or not) AI adoption.

Please start naming names

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

#757

Post by appplication »

jdm2212 wrote: post #741
lp4v4n wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst of all is that people will still argue that, in this day and age, labour has not been completely devalued and that you are wealthier than your grandfather. That kind of story was not uncommon at all in the past, today you would have to be a literal multi-millionaire to have that lifestyle.

If you're ok with 1963 living standards, you can in fact have the grandfather's same lifestyle today at a very reasonable cost.

Very curious what living standards you’re thinking of

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

#758

Post by abustamam »

robotnikman wrote: post #462
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…

This time its the entire white collar industry though. The scale of job displacement will be at a scale never seen before. If there are no societal safety nets in place for this then I can see things going south quickly

At least here in America, our politicians lose their shit if they see someone getting money without working for it (as if politicians don't already get paid for doing almost nothing). And they use scary words and rhetoric like communism and Marxism, yknow the stuff we fought wars against.

What they (and their constituents) fail to realize though is that we're quickly approaching a post-work society and people won't just disappear or stop needing to eat.

I keep hoping that the public would wisen up and see the writing on the wall but somehow incompetent people keep getting reelected.

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

#759

Post by dan_q »

mawadev wrote: post #631
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?

The "us" vs "them" thought pattern is the essence of "Western" (read: white, European, colonialist) culture, dating back to Plato's Republic.

Marimba Ani's seminal work Yurugu is a sociological study of this culture from a non-western perspective. I can't recommend it strongly enough if you want to understand the nexus of social/psychological/epistemic factors that sustain the "us" vs "them" thought pattern and its corresponding cultural manifestations.

https://archive.org/details/yuruguafricancen0000anim/page/n3...

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

#760

Post by dan_q »

hdndjsbbs wrote: post #510

The bigger problem, for me, is that knowledge work has become stupid. If you want to write code by hand and do a good job, you will be ruthlessly replaced by your boss churning out "good enough" LLM code. The CEO at my company tried to PR code to my repo. It didn't make any sense but it was a whole political thing to make it go away. The industry has always been stupid and selfish and short-sighted but now the ICs at…

> The industry has always been stupid and selfish and short-sighted but now the ICs at the bottom of the pyramid are themselves being commoditized like all the workers they "disrupted".

Are you allowed to use the word "union" on this website?

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