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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

#191

Post by fl4regun »

scottLobster wrote: post #142
ang_cire wrote: post #21

Because we see what's coming? Because we watched our careers go from being in service of an industry of tinkerers and designers, to being in service of the worst people attempting to maximize wealth extraction no matter the human cost? Because Snow Crash wasn't supposed to be the goal? Because our daily complicity in what's happening is also a daily reminder that we're not brave enough to be a Mangione? Take your pic…

As a mid-career software dev I'm just sick of most of my job being a highly paid technical janitor mopping a floor that never gets clean. I've had maybe 2-3 years combined where I actually got to build something I could be proud of, and made all the red tape worth it. The rest has been navigating/paying down other peoples' technical debt and being forced to add some of my own when there's no budget for maintenance an…

never seen a better description than your janitor metaphor

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

#192

Post by gls2ro »

I like an article focused on us, the special tech people.

But the truth is everyone is sad or subjectively unhappy no matter if that is a real or imaginary reflection of wealth or money or access to food, cloths, coffee, restaurants ...

You can see it in SF movies: a lot of the successful ones in the last years maybe 10, maybe 20 years are not optimistic about the future. The same is in all areas of life: we seem to need always something to reach for, or something to fix, to work on, to improve so we can be (maybe have) eudaimonia (for a lack of a better word) or just a normal life.

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

#193

Post by pseudalopex »

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…

> All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom.

No. And this shallow dismissal builds the mood you complained about.

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

#194

Post by ang_cire »

BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #186
ang_cire wrote: post #21

Because we see what's coming? Because we watched our careers go from being in service of an industry of tinkerers and designers, to being in service of the worst people attempting to maximize wealth extraction no matter the human cost? Because Snow Crash wasn't supposed to be the goal? Because our daily complicity in what's happening is also a daily reminder that we're not brave enough to be a Mangione? Take your pic…

> industry of tinkerers and designers At no point in history was it ever thus.

Yes and no.

There were really 2 sides to the original 'tech' industry: military and consumer. The military side was always about profit, because it was just an extension of the already extant WW2 military industrial complex (and frankly, IBM falls here despite their mainframes being largely used in civilian businesses).

But the consumer side that really grew out of universities into early gaming, internet, and consumer electronics tech, was very heavily driven by design and garage-start tinkerers. That's not to say no one wanted to make money, but it wasn't MBA-bro-driven back then.

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

#195

Post by marginalia_nu »

pseudalopex wrote: post #193
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…

> All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom. No. And this shallow dismissal builds the mood you complained about.

As an experiment, completely stop consuming news and social media for a few weeks. People have lived their entire lives without these information streams, you'll survive unplugging a bit. Now I can't tell you what you will experience if you go through with this, but I can promise it's very enlightening.

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

#196

Post by SauciestGNU »

janpeuker wrote: post #190

Linking Graeber's Bullshift Jobs to Workism via his concept of "spiritual violence" would have been a nice touch because it explains the drain despite the performativity (or what Baudrillard would call reproduction)

I'm just happy people are still talking about Situationists.

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

#197

Post by sodapopcan »

dspillett wrote: post #60
ang_cire wrote: post #21

Because we see what's coming? Because we watched our careers go from being in service of an industry of tinkerers and designers, to being in service of the worst people attempting to maximize wealth extraction no matter the human cost? Because Snow Crash wasn't supposed to be the goal? Because our daily complicity in what's happening is also a daily reminder that we're not brave enough to be a Mangione? Take your pic…

In some cases being told "just treat it like you are a manager", when we've always done our level best to avoid anything vaguely like management because we like doing things particularly the nitty gritty details.

Ya, I've been doing this almost 20 years and never even thought about a manager position. I always tell everyone in interviews that I'm "IC for life."

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

#199

Post by pseudalopex »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #100
rob74 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you also consider that many of us, via the companies we work for, actively contribute to making the Internet (and by extension, the world) a worse place, the question in the article's title kind of answers itself. It also makes "quiet quitting" seem almost the right thing to do: doing only the least possible to advance your company's goals while keeping both your job and your sanity, hoping that you will one day b…

A counterpoint would be that you don't really ever see investment bankers reacting in this fashion.

You don't really ever see investment bankers reacting how?

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

#200

Post by dataflow »

fl4regun wrote: post #191
scottLobster wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a mid-career software dev I'm just sick of most of my job being a highly paid technical janitor mopping a floor that never gets clean. I've had maybe 2-3 years combined where I actually got to build something I could be proud of, and made all the red tape worth it. The rest has been navigating/paying down other peoples' technical debt and being forced to add some of my own when there's no budget for maintenance an…

never seen a better description than your janitor metaphor

I actually can enjoy being the digital janitor, when I'm allowed to. What's frustrating is when things are dirty and they don't even let you clean.
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