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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

#771

Post by dan_q »

mawadev wrote: post #642
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

#772

Post by dan_q »

hdndjsbbs wrote: post #521

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?

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

#773

Post by jkrom3 »

andrepd wrote: post #740
listenallyall wrote: post #725

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…

In other words: everything to do with economics is worse and everything to do with the inexorable march of progress is better. Yeah sorry but no shit. Technology has progressed since grandpa's day. "TVs are better and cheaper" is not a useful counterpoint when discussing the economy of the 2020s.

You’re being myopic. Yes, TVs being better and cheaper isn’t that useful. But ACs, dishwashers, washing machines, beds, cars… etc. are all useful counterpoints when discussing the economy and these are impactful. And beyond the normal big ticket items, smaller items (thank China and Walmart) are cheaper. And that adds up. Lamps being cheaper doesn’t seem like much but add that across all the furniture in the house.

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

#774

Post by kelnos »

listenallyall wrote: post #734
close04 wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he had 5 children, a house in Daly City and 3 apartments across the street from Dolores park as well as a brand new home in Terra Linda How well would you need to be paid now in any career to support a family like that one while accumulating that wealth already early in life? Careers can evaporate just the same but what they leave behind is vastly different from 60 years ago.

How much wealth? Not really that much if you move to the middle of the country. You're thinking of San Francisco (well, Daly City) of the 2020's, which San Francisco absolutely was not in 1963. Nice place, sure, but still heavily working class, blue-collar and union. You could have 5 kids and a few apartments on a reliable, but not spectacular, income today in many cities (and suburbs of such) in the US.

That doesn't really pass the smell test for me.

How do you get this "reliable, but not spectacular" income in one of these places? What are these places?

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

#775

Post by jdm2212 »

appplication wrote: post #769
jdm2212 wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A 1963 house is what we'd think of today as a starter home. Available medical care was very limited, so you don't need modern health insurance. No braces for the kids. One small car, and it can be a really old beater and still be better than 1963 cars (no seatbelts or catalytic converters back then). One landline phone, no internet, no cell phones, etc.

The "he lived in Daly City" thing is a bit of a red herring. Daly City was not a 15 minute drive from the center of the hottest industry in the world in 1963. So substitute Fresno.

Anyway, if you can find a woman who wants to be a SAHM to your five children in a Fresno starter home, where she clips coupons and cooks meals from scratch with no appliances, you can achieve a 1963 standard of living pretty easily on a schoolteacher's salary.

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

#776

Post by realharo »

Animats wrote: post #224

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…

Maybe that's because back then it just didn't affect enough people at the same time.

They weren't too big to fail.

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

#777

Post by CoastalCoder »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #616
JohnMakin wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry if I am being uncharitable, but are you saying the solution to depression is that people’s friends groups (which the depressed person may not have access to to begin with) is to just like, bully them out of it? lol? Tell me you’ve never had a depressive episode without telling me. hint: the people with support groups in the first place are less vulnerable and bullying depression doesn’t really help, I could…

You are being uncharitable. In fact, you're demonstrating the dynamics I spoke of in my post. I could give you a detailed response but, given your tone, instead I'll say: assume the best and don't make everything about yourself. Several people I know have struggled with negative mental health effects of finding themselves in a caretaker role for a mentally ill friend or partner. In my experience offline groups (not i…

For what it's worth, I think I understood your original post as you intended it.

(Just mentioning this so you know the wording wasn't universally confusing.)

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

#778

Post by lollapalooza88 »

testerius wrote: post #666

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…

[flagged]

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

#779

Post by pydry »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #605
pydry wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For people I know who are in tech for the tech nothing changed. Yeah it did. The environments became a lot more toxic and the decisions became a lot more stupid. I also miss working with people who actually cared about the craft. They exist on the IC level but they're burned out and on the executive level it's mostly just insecure morons these days.

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 patient with heart disease doesnt give a shit about exercising and eating healthy they just want the doctor to make them better.

No business has ever appreciated my craft directly and why would they? Theyve just enjoyed the indirect benefits - speedy delivery of bug free features. Sometimes execs understood why they got that from one team and not another, mostly they didn't.

The difference these days is not that high quality code isnt appreciated it's just that there is a religion that has developed around AI being The One True Way To Develop.

When it is delivering worse quality work, more slowly that is usually tolerated because the hope is that it will long term lead to the ability to lay off engineers.

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

#780

Post by strangegecko »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #616
JohnMakin wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry if I am being uncharitable, but are you saying the solution to depression is that people’s friends groups (which the depressed person may not have access to to begin with) is to just like, bully them out of it? lol? Tell me you’ve never had a depressive episode without telling me. hint: the people with support groups in the first place are less vulnerable and bullying depression doesn’t really help, I could…

You are being uncharitable. In fact, you're demonstrating the dynamics I spoke of in my post. I could give you a detailed response but, given your tone, instead I'll say: assume the best and don't make everything about yourself. Several people I know have struggled with negative mental health effects of finding themselves in a caretaker role for a mentally ill friend or partner. In my experience offline groups (not i…

FWIW, I had a similar impression of your comment as JohnMakin.

> give the friend a subtle clue that it's time to move on

If a friend needs someone to listen about life struggles and you tell them you're tired of it and don't want to hear it anymore, then you're not being a friend. Maybe you want to be encouraging and that is fine, probably helpful. But you immediately seem to turn that encouragement into threats of social exclusion:

> If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative.

I've seen this many times - people suggest "solutions" to something they don't quite understand, then get angry when people don't take their non-functional solution. Similarly, in online support groups, I've seen plenty of people storm off angrily because people are being "too negative", not seeing that sharing these feelings, wanting to be heard and knowing you're not alone with certain struggles can be part of a discovery and healing process. Those people use similar language you used in your comment of "misery loves company", essentially accusing people of wanting to be miserable and choosing depression.

If you want people to read what you write in a charitable fashion, refusing to explain the background for your comments is rather dysfunctional BTW. In general, people don't all have the same mental context and experience background to understand where you're coming from.

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