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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

#871

Post by tokioyoyo »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #482
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…

Many folks have talked about optimizing for engagement and while I do think this is a factor, I don't think this is the cause. HN has a pretty simple set of algorithms and yet it's largely followed the same trend of negativity and despair. I'm partial to what I call the "doomer effect". If you feel sad or disenfranchised you're just much more likely to spend time online talking. A person with a fulfilling social life…

> If you're in a bad place, as long as a forum will have your posts you can post to your heart's content.

I agree with you, but would also add that, ~99% of people do not post anything. They mostly consume. When your consumption habits are constantly doomerism, and "all the bad stuff that will happen in the next 5 years", your mind also starts thinking that way. And spirals down that way. There's a lack of healthy dose of reality in online circles. So everything just becomes outrage/doomer hell.

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

#872

Post by zahlman »

rootusrootus wrote: post #469
hellohello2 wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel like we're probably going to have to give up something, most probably anonymity, to get back to anything like sanity. We'll see communities that are militantly anti-AI where it's hard to get in and easy to get kicked out, and it will probably cost money and require you to divulge who you really are. It could still be semi-anonymous at the user level but not at the administrative level. I'd like to see somethin…

Giving up anonymity would be giving up on the entire idea wholesale.

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

#873

Post by zahlman »

purplemoonx wrote: post #584
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

As much as I'd like to endorse the decentralization model of Mastodon, it's annoying that I'm constantly shown Mastodon messages from new, often very suspicious looking domains that then want me to enable JavaScript yet again in order to run the same damn Mastodon app.

This problem is not inherent to the task. Nitter instances can do almost everything without JS.

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

#874

Post by Obscurity4340 »

paganel wrote: post #659

> “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 earli…

Who's Uncle Ted and how does ine see thru his eyes?

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

#875

Post by marginalia_nu »

zahlman wrote: post #869
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…

> a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become.... Like what [person in my ideological group] did [allegedly, with no explanation or description] with [thing that happened online]... [this comment made online] I see. You complain of astroturfing, but you seem unaware of things that you have come to believe because of it.

Steve Bannon's involvement in promoting Gamer Gate and co-opting it into a (what would become MAGA) recruitment funnel is fairly well documented[1]. There's absolutely nothing "allegedly" about it, he proudly spells it out himself[2].

Everyone is running this playbook now. The far left, the alt right, IS, Hamas, IDF. Russia was an early player in the space too but seems to have lost a lot of that ability when Prigozhin fell out of a window.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gamergate-campaign

[2] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/st...

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

#876

Post by dec0dedab0de »

anovikov wrote: post #610
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

disagree

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

#877

Post by miyoji »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #847
miyoji wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commutes are uncompensated labor, so you're advocating for a pay decrease for both yourself and your coworkers. Pay me for my commute and I'll gladly work from wherever you like, just recognize that I would get more done if you weren't paying me to travel to and from work. If you don't pay me for the time I spend commuting, you aren't interested in paying the total cost of employing me and you can kindly go fuck off.

I'm not paying anyone to do anything, please don't tell me to fuck off for expressing my personal experience.

You're failing at basic reading comprehension. The "you" there is obviously referential to employers, not a direct response to an anonymous internet commenter.

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

#878

Post by rubicon33 »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #162

This dropped off the front page in the time I read it, I assume because of the controversial gate that favors upvotes to comments (which I am making worse by replying to others). It is a shame, because this really resonated with me. I've been working in tech for over 20 years now in various roles, and this is the least I have cared about it. I used to want to get better, and was constantly excited about learning new…

I'm right there with you. Been in tech for close to 20 years, mostly in SWE roles but last few years of been hybrid SWE/Management.

Check my bookcase and you'll find ~60 thick books all about programming languages and frameworks. I've learned something like 9 languages at a professional level, and I've worked up and down the stack all the way from bare metal firmware, to mobile, to web, and server.

AI has gutted my passion for software development. It seems people in this industy can be loosely bucketed as follows:

* Went into software because you love writing code to solve problems, where the actual design and writing of said code is as important as the outcome.

* Went into software purely for the outcome, love building things, don't care how it gets built.

At the end of the day I'm a craftsman. I became passionate ~20 years ago about the design and architecture of software, and it fueled a beautiful career. Now, what?

I've spent the last year just throwing prompts at claude and seeing how well it does. Despite having built more in the last year than would have ever been possible before, I feel empty. The outcomes work, they work well, but I didn't write the code. I explained some high level directives to claude, maybe jumped in here or there with a technical angle to fix something when claude got stock... but by and large... the skills I've built over the last 20 years don't really apply anymore.

Yea, I'm not honestly not sure what is going to happen. Your comment about dreaming to be homeless really resonated with me. I either need to find a joy in this AI coding, or I don't know what will happen with me.

My Mom once said something to me as a kid that resonated deeply, even then. Human beings' most valuable skill is adaptation. If you cannot adapt, you will die. As long as I can enjoy this fight, this life, this grind, this mystery... then I will make it my priority to adapt and to reframe my thoughts such that joy is possible again.

It doesn't have to be the end if I don't want it to be. The world will always change, it's on me to change with it.

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

#879

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

We usually see this kind of discussion around weekends. To me it looks a bit like psychological warfare, designed to drive up the mega valuation of some IPO candidates, in other words: to make LLM based systems more valuable by bashing an entire class of workers.

I don't quite believe in the doom scenario: a lot of stuff depends on the correct functioning of software. However language model don't have a complete model of reality, they won't be able to evaluate if a given change is sufficient. Therefore systems based on language models will not be able to provide complete solutions - for some time to come. There will still be quite a bit of work in software development.

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

#880

Post by tootie »

flaburgan wrote: post #762

I don't understand those articles, especially, I don't see why AI changed anything. At least for me, the important quest isn't how you build, but what you build. If your product is meaningless, useful only to the company because what it does is futile, then the emptiness you feel is not coming from the fact that AI is "stealing your job". Don't quit to a farm with goats, find a way to distribute food which would have…

I've been hearing about quitting tech to open a bakery forever. I even know several people who did it long before ChatGPT. It's the nature of any corporate job. The politics and focus on shareholder value are incompatible with most human ethos.
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