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The narrative reflects a broader cultural shift, from "we are all in this together" (pandemic) to "our organizations are bloated and people don't work hard enou
by timkam 1y ago
The narrative reflects a broader cultural shift, from "we are all in this together" (pandemic) to "our organizations are bloated and people don't work hard enough" (already pre-LLM hype post-pandemic). The observation that less-skilled people can, with the help of LLMs, take the work of traditionally more-skilled people fits this narrative. In the end, it is about demoting some types of knowledge workers from the skilled class to the working class. Apparently, important people believe that this is a long-term sustainable narrative.
- neom 1y agoWhy are you using the word "demoting"?
- closewith 1y agoThe skilled class is the working class and always has been. The delusion that software developers were ever outside the working class because they were paid well is just that - an arrogant delusion.
- timkam 1y agoWell, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class. For now, this applies at least to some regions, not only within the US. I agree in that I have at times felt some level of arrogance among some people taking up software engineering jobs, but IMO this just confirms the social class aspect of it. So there may have been some level of delusion to it, but at least temporarily it was, and partially still is, true.
- ath3nd 1y agoIs the wealth of the average software developer ($122 000/y) in the US closer to the wealth of: A) a coal miner with $60 000/y salary B) Elon Musk: $381 000 000 000 Sources: - https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries - https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coal-miner-salary-SRCH_KO0,10.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coal-miner-salary-SRCH_KO... - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-rich-6-8-170106956.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-rich-6-8-170106956.... Is the average amount of properties (1-2) owned by a software developer closer to those of: A) a worker at Walmart B) Mark Zuckerberg? > Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class. That's what they have been telling SEs to prevent us from unionizing :) All so they can put you where you stand now, when they (wrongly) think they don't need you. SE jobs are working class jobs, and have always been.
- _9ptr 1y agoI don't think that way of defining the working class is very sound. Everyone expect ~50 people would be working class, probably including Taylor Swift and Donald Trump. Also "working class" has a historical, social component, by which programmers are certainly not included.
- vkou 1y agoNormalize it to a logarithmic scale, and the SWE is still quite obviously a wagie. But the gross and unconscionable concentration of power in a small handful of unelected oligarchs is not the relevant distinction here. When ownership of things can keep you and your family fed, clothed, and sheltered in comfort, you're part of the owning class. If it can't, you're a worker. Maybe a skilled worker, maybe a highly paid worker, maybe a worker that owns a lot of expensive 'tools' or credentials, or licenses, or a company truck, or a trillion worthless diluted startup shares that have an EV of ~$50, but you're still a worker. If you're the owner of a small owner-operated business, and the business will go kaput because you didn't show up to do work, you're also a worker. The line is drawn at the point where most of your contribution to it is your own (or other peoples') capital, not your own two-hands labour. Now, if you're some middle manager, with no meaningful ownership stake - you are still a worker. You still need to go to work to get your daily bread. It just so happens that your job is imposing the will of the owners on workers underneath you.
- dmoy 1y agoYea for concrete numbers: If you have somewhere between $5M and $10M in a HCoL American city, you are probably no longer working class insofar as you could quit, get on ACA healthcare, and rent a decent house or buy / mortgage a decent house and live a pretty comfortable life indefinitely. But you're on the very low end of not-working-class and are living a modest life (if you quit and stop drawing a salary). If you have under that threshold (in a big expensive US city), you are probably still working class. A lot of software engineers can get to $5M-$10M range in like 10-30 years depending on pay and savings rate. But also a lot of software engineers operate their budgets almost paycheck-to-paycheck, and will never get there.
- rynohack 1y agoWorking class is not defined by income level. The working class is those who own no significant means of production and thus must sell their labor at whatever price the market bears. That the market for SE labor is good(for the workers), doesn't mean SE's don't need to work to earn money.
- f33d5173 1y agoThe way a word is defined by communists and the way it is defined by the rest of the world are seldom the same.
- dttze 1y agoYeah, one is right and the other is bs pushed to divide people
- closewith 1y agoThe working class is globally the class of people who must sell their labour. That includes - to a rounding error - all software developers and that is completely uncontroversial.
- SoftTalker 1y agoThis also includes doctors, lawyers, academics, managers and executives, none of whom are traditionally thought of as "working class"
- dragonwriter 1y agoThat group is, in fact, traditionally considered largely working class (proletarian, more specifically the proletarian intelligentsia, though some in that group might be middle class, again, in the traditional class analysis, petit bourgeois sense.) American popular usage defers from traditional economic role-based class analysis to be instead do income-based “class” terminology which instead of defining the middle class as the petit bourgeois who apply their own labor to their own capital in production (or otherwise have a relation to the economy which depends on both applying labor and ownership of the non-financial means of production) defines middle class as the segment around the median income, almost entirely within the traditional working class. This is a product of a deliberate effort to redefine terminology to impair working class solidarity, not some kind of accident.
- Spooky23 1y agoEngineering is always boom/bust. Ask a retired aerospace engineer who got purged in the 90s. Technology always automates jobs away. I had a dedicated database systems team 25 years ago that was larger than an infrastructure team managing 1000x more stuff today. Dev teams are bloated in most places, today.
- tehjoker 1y agos/post-pandemic/after ignoring the pandemic/
- School-Cotton 1y agoThe pandemic is ongoing.
- Elinvynia 1y agoFor anyone downvoting this: look into how many people are currently infected. Compare that to early 2020. Yes, the people who were prone to dying already did so years ago. But the rate of long term disability in every single country is skyrocketing. The average person has had 4.7 covid infections by now. Now look into the literal thousands of studies of long term effects of that. Future generations will never forgive us for throwing them under the bus.
- School-Cotton 1y agoAnd yet, we go on living. Stopping the pandemic is impossible, so what else can we do?
- aaronbaugher 1y agoYeah, I don't see any real difference between "Shut up and take it or we'll outsource your job overseas," which they've been saying since the 90s, and "Shut up and take it or we'll replace you with AI." Same threat, same motives.