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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

#661

Post by jvidalv »

hellohello2 wrote: post #469
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

#663

Post by laichzeit0 »

skhameneh wrote: post #580
laichzeit0 wrote: post #570

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

#664

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.

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

#665

Post by Foobar8568 »

josh_p wrote: post #509
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…

You mention the election cycle and things getting worse. I live in the US and I’ve watched in real time every sad, terrible decision made by the current administration and every sad terrible decision by what’s supposed to be the opposition party. It all makes me want to scream. And then I’m offline and my life carries on because none it has really affected my white privileged middle class tech worker butt. It all fee…

I don't live in the US, I live in Switzerland, and what happens in the US and Iran affects the world. And when I see this kind of shit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ58s4bwzG0 ( bbc Donald Trump dons 'Trump 2028' hat and jokes about 'fourth term' ), I am like, what the fuck? Europeans as a whole didn't have much a great opinions of republicans but I don't even understand how a republican voter can vote for a russian asset who is using the constitution as toilet paper. At this stage, just turn directly to a fascist state and stop pretending.

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

#666

Post by Peaches4Rent »

danans wrote: post #643
close04 wrote: post #631

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 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? The answer is that you don't do it by getting paid (as in exchanging labor for wages). You do it by finding a way to scale your wealth with other people's labor.

Aah, so by definition only a select few can do it

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

#667

Post by geraneum »

MarkusQ wrote: post #381
geraneum wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember, our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect. We read these articles with different eyes. There are people who are the real audience and salivate when they read these sentiments.

Who's making money off our misery exactly? I can see it as a foreign adversary psyop (they benefit from us being demoralized) or as a side effect of the attention economy (more clicks is all that matters) or even a hyper-partisanship epiphenomenon (whichever side is currently down wants people to think everything is awful). But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-mo…

We, developers/tech-employees (safe to assume since we’re on HN) are the “entire class of workers” that the article is talking about. The premise is losing faith in the future of our profession. Which is something that’s openly advertised to the investors by AI companies and more importantly, openly discussed.

> But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-movie plot.

That’s a curious one. I think it’d be healthier if you reflect on why you perceive it that way.

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

#668

Post by roenxi »

close04 wrote: post #631
jimbobbam wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My grandfather was a printer not to far from that Burger King, in a building now owned by the academy of art. In 1963 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. He died early, but extended family stayed in the business. It was union work, he as the youngest operator of the 4 color press. His wife my grandmother didn’t work.…

> 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.

If you're happy to live life to a 1960s standard, it'd be quite cheap. If I'm interpreting the stats properly [0], he expected to put two children through high school and the other 3 would have been contributing a lot to the family quite early on. It'd also be interesting to check whether it's legal to build the same apartment in Daly City's current regulatory environment because that isn't a given.

Plus, the US government at the time was less than half the size of the private sector [1] so we'd expect he was contributing less to dead-weight government projects and corruption.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_104.10.a...

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Governme...

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

#669

Post by amoe_ »

thraway3837 wrote: post #548

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…

As you say, many entered the field beacause of a natural interest in tech, rather than pay. But that doesn't imply that they uncritically accept every new technology just because it's new. It seems like you're arguing for "tech for the sake of tech", which you're entitled to do. But now tech has a transformative impact on the world, and most did not consent democratically to said transformation. It makes sense for an adult to consider the effect that their role has on the world at large.

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

#670

Post by burnt-resistor »

xlii wrote: post #85

Long long time ago people in tech were in tech because of the tech. Then, at some point, being in tech became a gilded profession and everyone: salesmen, artists, clerks etc. joined in. Not because they wanted to be in tech. They wanted gold. For years it was working, but right now things shifted. You can no longer just do the thing you learned for a job and continue doing so, because landscape shifted. So they're mi…

This is what annoyed me to no end; being surrounded by incurious corporate political players who wanted to appear "smart" but couldn't care less about learning, excellence, or much of anything except leaving in time to pickup their kids.

Meanwhile, I had taught myself coding the hard way without the internet or proper reference materials or community, by trial-and-error in front of a debugger/profiler/disassembler in the mid 80's - late 90's. Apparently, that holds no economic value now because all that matters is # of PRs, tokenmaxxing, and "impact" like savings and features. But really, the deal breaker for me is the brazen and/or clueless evil aims of the ownership class such that working for them enables rather than reduces societal harm. Thus, tech isn't for me. Also, the number and distribution of cool, decent, clever people has been driven out of both the startup scene and the megacorp scene; maybe there's better hope in obscure SMBs or nonprofits.

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