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Rolling the ladder up behind us

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Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#71

Post by thmsths »

whatshisface wrote: post #31
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #8

industry only ever seems to want to hire people with the word Senior in their title. They almost never want to create people with the word Senior in their title. I suggest that the first ladder that got pulled up is the one on the ground. No one wants to train new entrants to the field. Not training junior workers seems like a natural extension to that.

I guess universities will eventually backfill that gap with training that focuses on senior skills. Eventually.

We already require juniors to go through a 4 years university degree. It takes a fair bit of time of real world work to get to the senior level. So unless we expect people to do another 5 years of schooling, I am not sure how this will happen (and even in that scenario I believe there is a difference between hands on, on the job experience and classroom experience).

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#72

Post by WalterBright »

stego-tech wrote: post #16
schmidtleonard wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a whole list of things I'd like from my car that the market does not provide because it is more profitable not to. Why do I get the feeling that instead of seeing this as a horror story you would scold me for unreasonable expectations, even though it is the identical mirror form of the horror story you just told?

Because Mr. Bright has a long, storied comment history of neolibertarian fantasies being wielded as a cudgel against anyone who dares envision a future that does not align with his own. Speaking from experience with them in another thread. Your best bet is to ignore the bait and move on to more fruitful discussions.

I merely point out that economic history shows that economic freedom works better than any other system.

Besides, I enjoy debate, like other people enjoy playing football. If you don't, why are you here?

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#73

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Refreeze5224 wrote: post #2

This is the true problem with AI. It's with who owns it, and what they will inevitably use it for. Whether it can do cool stuff with code or equal a junior developer is irrelevant. What it can do is less important than what it will be used for. The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs, which from their perspective is a cost center and always will be. If you're not an owner, then you have no control over t…

> The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs

Things are cyclic, nothing new; the previous big scare was (is?) outsourcing, where for the same price as one developer in western / northern Europe or SF you can hire five from eastern Europe or India. But that hasn't affected employability of the one developer, as far as I'm aware.

I'm not even thinking of skill level, I'm sure that's comparable (but honestly I don't know / care enough), but both outsourcing and AI require the same things - requirements. I've grown up in this country (the Netherlands) and automatically have intrinsic knowledge of e.g. government, taxes, the energy sector, transportation, etc, so much that I'm not even consciously aware of a lot of things I know. If you spend a LOT of time and effort, you could - eventually - break that down into requirements and work orders or whatever that someone else could process. But it's much more efficient to do it yourself or just hire someone from around here.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#74

Post by riskable »

Groxx wrote: post #48
blakesterz wrote: post #44

There's a photo on that page with this description: "A picture of two patches of wild grass bifurcated by a retaining pond" I was just thinking how I'd describe that different, and how many different ways it could be described.

Perhaps even a thousand words worth of description is possible

A thousand tokens.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#75

Post by vultour »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #41

> We're going to run out of people with the word "Senior" in their title Probably not, but job title inflation has made it so that apparently 5 years of experience is enough to be given a "senior" title. I've got like 15 but still feel like a medior at best. Yeah this is humblebragging, whatever it's a throwaway internet comment.

This is a funny comment because startups have been churning out sub-3 year "seniors" for years. If you're not a principal engineer after 5 years what are you even doing?

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#76

Post by gallerdude »

burlesona wrote: post #65
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, as someone who considers themselves to be a "software craftsman," I have come to the conclusion that the work I do will never be valued, and will always be considered "too expensive." Since I work for free, that's not an issue for me, but that's economically unfeasible for most folks. The issue with an industry awash with cheap dross, is that it becomes prohibitively expensive to produce high Quality stuff. Any…

> The issue with an industry awash with cheap dross, is that it becomes prohibitively expensive to produce high Quality stuff. This seems to be one of the brutal truths of the modern world, and as far as I can tell it applies to everything. There's always a race to the bottom to make everything as cheaply as possible, and the further the industry goes down that "cheapness" scale, the more "quality" loses market share…

I can see both sides of it. There’s a fancy bread bakery by where I live. I go infrequently, the bread is great. But it’s expensive, most of the I just want a cheap loaf from Target, as do most people.

Instead of broad employment of artisan breadsmiths, we have people doing email work, because it’s more economically valuable. If the government mandated a higher quality of bread, we’d be slightly richer and bread and slightly poorer in everything else.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#77

Post by daedrdev »

schmidtleonard wrote: post #40
WalterBright wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The workers did reap the benefits. The Law of Supply and Demand ensures it. 1.1% of the US labor force works at minimum wage jobs. When wages are raised by the government, job losses happen. 16,000 to 36,000 people lost their jobs when California raised the minimum wage for fast food workers. > Do you really think capitalists would choose to shorten the working day with no loss of pay as productivity increases? Durin…

> if you track employee total compensation (not just wages) against productivity increases, the two lines form the same curve If you count inflation in medical and housing costs as an increase in wages, the "wedge" disappears, yes -- but why would you do that for any other purpose than making the wedge disappear? No, it's very telling that labor saving devices, which have squished the largest industry into economic i…

employers pay for the massively increased medical costs directly though? Its not hard to see that when medical costs increase by 6-10% they would hesitate to increase wages

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#78

Post by edwardbernays »

boogieknite wrote: post #32
kevmo314 wrote: post #6

> Actually, what are we going to do when everyone that cares about the craft of software ages out, burns out, or escapes the industry because of the ownership class setting unrealistic expectations on people? Nothing, I guess? There's an implicit assumption that software written by humans is a necessity. If the future finds that software written by computers is more profitable then that's just what it is. The univers…

this comment implies the real "other shoe" for which im waiting to drop. im ok with nothing. if software dev is nearly completely automated to the point there are effectively no dev jobs then there is a much more important economic condition to address im a basic state-school student who learned the memorable bit about Keynes regarding automating labor which still hasnt come to pass. at the time i kind of found it un…

If you're in America, there probably will not be a chill-out. Look into the philosophy of Curtis Yarvin, whom has been cited favorably by J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel. We are heading towards techno-fascism. The working population which would have been furloughed is probably going to be redirected to the manual labor jobs currently being vacated by the aggressive deportation of "the worst of the worst" immigrant workers within our borders. The loss of these displaced people will necessitated a new underclass to work the fields, clean the chickens, etc. This underclass will be composed of prisoners-cum-indentured servants and slaves, which are legally provided for by the 13th amendment.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#79

Post by teeray »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #8

industry only ever seems to want to hire people with the word Senior in their title. They almost never want to create people with the word Senior in their title. I suggest that the first ladder that got pulled up is the one on the ground. No one wants to train new entrants to the field. Not training junior workers seems like a natural extension to that.

It’s a Volunteer’s Dilemma: why train juniors when you can hire the juniors other companies trained to become seniors?

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#80

Post by Cthulhu_ »

dontlaugh wrote: post #3
Refreeze5224 wrote: post #2

This is the true problem with AI. It's with who owns it, and what they will inevitably use it for. Whether it can do cool stuff with code or equal a junior developer is irrelevant. What it can do is less important than what it will be used for. The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs, which from their perspective is a cost center and always will be. If you're not an owner, then you have no control over t…

This was the Luddites’ position. Organised labour should one again take up this principled position. Join a trade union!

Even unions are up against it though. in the Netherlands, there have been multiple strikes from e.g. the train operators; they demand a 10% wage increase, after the train company downsized a lot during the pandemic, but who were then unable to upsize again as traffic resumed and who even now don't have the same amount of travelers as they did in 2020.

But they're not profitable. They've made a loss for five years in a row, requiring government subsidies to stay operating (because them going bankrupt would make big parts of the country grind to a halt). Ticket prices are so high that it's barely cheaper than driving, and as soon as you travel with two or more people it's cheaper to just own a car. (Or even rent one; I traveled to the other side of the country once for a concert, my own car was in the garage. Did the math, it was cheaper and more convenient (door-to-door) to rent a car, pay the surcharge for long distance, pay the €35 in fuel, etc than it was to buy return tickets for three people)

The answer (I think, I'm no economist / politician / etc) isn't unionising and demanding better treatment, because the limits of the capitalist system they operate in have been reached. The answer is to stop trying to make it profitable. Re-privatize it: trains and public transit are a huge and hugely important nationwide economic driver, an essential service that capitalism can't be trusted with because the owners will try and get as much money out of it as possible, the employees get overworked and exploited and will shut the system down (as is their right) out of protest, and the people will have to deal with the consequences.

Just in my small bubble, the train strikes led to people not going to the office, missing events, lunch orders that either had too much stock that had to be discarded or that were cancelled entirely, costing that company thousands in income, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-union. I'm anti-capitalist though.

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