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 been wasted to the homeless. Find projects which make sense. Then it does not matter if you use AI or not. You actually build something useful. And if you were making bullshit PowerPoints then AI or not AI is irrelevant. Just stop that.
What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
761–770 of 1001 posts
Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
#762Am I the only one that loves my career more than ever? The one that has seen his productivity explode? Ideas to products in minutes instead of months? Building my own coding agents that help me being even more productive? This is the year I have been the happiest in my 40 year long career as programmer and I feel much more excited for the years ahead of us.
Nope. But crisis-themed doom-bait is an easy way to get clicks these days.
I am actually more excited about tech too in my 15 year career. Coding agents have allowed me to streamline things that were really frustrating to do, the senseless work of updating config files or terraform files etc. and allow me to focus on things that always had more meaning, like solving fun problems with code. At the same time, I can super-rubber-duck with AI around pieces of code or tools that Im unfamiliar with, so it's supercharged my learning (I still read 2-3 tech-focused books per year, try new languages, etc.).
So yeah, I only remember being this engaged when I was a junior developer and spending 90% of my time coding. Now I get to spend a lot more of my time coding because claude can handle most of the "meh" stuff for me--even stuff like cutting jira tickets, filling in reports, etc. (I still write post-mortem because those documents are all about education and communication, but in my org, jira tickets are just loose markers of effort and dont have anything to do with design and very little with planning.)
Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
#763I'm not even a programmer (by profession, though hobby) and I must say I find the gleefulness in the article off-putting. That said I do think it is useful from a societal perspective that programmers are both doing this and getting hit. I'm not going to celebrate someone's job being threatened but in this particular case I think that symmetry is a major societal win for surfacing the question as to how are we collec…
> See translator jobs getting wiped out. Nobody even blinked an eye, it didn't spark any discussion, no deep thoughts were had.
Whenever someone writes something like this "nobody talks about it, nobody cared" I always think that just tells you more about the media sources and community of the author (you) than anything else.
Of course people talked about it. They are still talking about it. Of course they cared. They still care. Don't be ridiculous. Go talk to some human translators in real life.
"Nobody is talking about AI". Sounds even more ridiculous when written like that.
Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
#764Saw 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
Unpopular opinion, but Mastodon is part of the problem as much as Twitter or Facebook, unfortunately.
It's just another riff at something toxic, with the difference it's open source.
Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
#765I 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…
It's funny because part of the wave of change you're describing is self-inflicted: we all wanted to get more people into farmsteading the Electronic Frontier, we wanted to make it more accessible and easy to use, hence projects like OLPC, Wikipedia, etc. I felt like the 90s and 00's were about "building a better world for everyone, online". But when "everyone" joined that world, well, they brought their own culture with them, and all the problems etc.
I feel like the rabid flamewars of the bygone era were as nothing compare to what's going on online now.
Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
#766Saw 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…
I've heard someone say that this has been going on since 2012, because that is the year that 60% of all Americans (and probably most industrialized countries), owned a smartphone. This is qualitatively different from 60% of all Americans owning a computer (the smartphone and tablet, IMHO, is one of the greatest embarrassments of the tech industry: it is a practically sci-fi device that does _less_ than the clunky desktop computers, _by design_, even though they could probably do _more_[0]). The tech companies are feeding people misleading, enraging, and toxic content because this creates a strong emotional reaction, which is the first step to selling advertised products. For example, nobody will buy a thing they can't rationally justify, unless they can justify it emotionally[1].
[0]: For example, you can create pretty decent art on the wacom tablets, but that is such a niche use case. There are probably other use cases that are unrealized, because it might distract the precious users from their push notifications and doom-scrolling.
[1]: Which for the most part is _reactive_. It used to be that companies would invest in industrial design (or visual design) to make an aesthetically appealing product. The problem, is that this is very expensive, and difficult to repeat, because there is not exactly a science of aesthetics (nothing beyond philosophy of phenomenology and also some eastern philosophies). And so, companies use the only strategy that can scale: rage-bait, doomerism, etc. Somehow, I do not think that the executives and shareholders of these companies consume the same information diet (how many cigarette company shareholders and executives are chain smokers?). Maybe alignment requires that the people who sell a product are legally required to integrate it into their lifestyle (I wonder how many sex-toy-company executives and shareholders would abandon ship).
Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
#767Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I should say it was sheep —> artisan cheese, which is in my view one of the few paths to viability for a small sized farm. It’s definitely not big enough for producing a commodity profitably. And farming takes either generational wealth and experience OR being able to go big by forming a farming cooperative like Chris Newman. It’s probably not something most people can “escape” to.
Have you seen this 1-acre Vermont farm? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT6O-4zbP6E I'm not a farmer so I can't speak to how much of this is unreproducible, but it does seem very interesting. The paper pot transplanter blew my mind.
YouTube always makes those things look more feasible than they are in reality.
First of all I doubt the 250K a year number just looking at the amount of produce in the field. Second of all, by the time all the expenses and distribution costs are figured in whatever the real number is shrinks by a lot. Third of all you need to be an area where a large number of people will pay double what it costs at Walmart for your produce. Lastly it takes years and a lot of trial and error to successfully produce efficiently and a couple of mistakes or bad luck and you are wiped out.
I actually have a lot of experience with this. I have a BS in Agronomy and managed a youpick/market garden back in the 90s. I still garden extensively you can see my YouTube channel here https://www.youtube.com/@pecospablo
I wish reality was as rosy as this video I really do. But I don't bother to try to sell my produce or expand, I know better. I just do it because I like it and eating top quality fresh picked food with high nutrient density is important to me.
Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
#768This 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 did the remote thing before Covid and rejected it for many of the same reasons. Then Covid happened and so many people got to experience it and loved it. But I still hated it while I was forced to. Every time I told anyone that I personally didn’t like working from home, and was excited about the return to office that would inevitably come, I got SHOUTED at. Absolutely flayed for not being 110% in support of this t…
I like working from the office for the same reasons. Makes my home feel home and keeps my workplace out. However, I also used to commute for an hour and a half just to go to the office and another hour and a half to come back. This I don’t miss at all.
Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
#769> In their vision for the future, work goes from a messy experience of learning and exploring to something more akin to assembly-line production.
I would argue this, the 'messy place' is where a huge amount of real innovation happens in knowledge working. I see this with my team, only a handful of them can operate effectively in this space ( I refer it to as they grey area) but they are the ones that end up taking bigger bolder bets which payoff more often than not.
It's also the space where you let your mind wander and discover associations between topics that you didn't first realize, it's the place where you ask questions a lot rather than relentlessly focus on solutions, KPIs, OKRs and all that other process driven BS.
This is the space AI can't operate as effectively as those chosen few in my team...but it's getting damn close.
Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
#770This 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 did the remote thing before Covid and rejected it for many of the same reasons. Then Covid happened and so many people got to experience it and loved it. But I still hated it while I was forced to. Every time I told anyone that I personally didn’t like working from home, and was excited about the return to office that would inevitably come, I got SHOUTED at. Absolutely flayed for not being 110% in support of this t…
You probably get/got reactions to that because it apparently mirrors the corporate line that precedes mandated RTO, whether or not there is a frog-boiling hybrid prelude.
Most people prefer remote, but in-office requires bodies to provide interaction for those who like it.
While yes, I do think offices are largely a waste of space and resources, I really do not mind much if you like it and want to do it, as long as you leave me out of it. As soon as the office comes with a demand for me to be there too, even some of the time, then I'll shout.