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What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
- MarkWayneNewton 2mo ago[flagged]
- sri9s 2mo agotech people need to become business owners
- dgellow 2mo agohow about just letting us behind? You go on your AI futuristic trip, don't force it on others, and you can then come back and tell us how fantastic your life is while we all missed the boat. That's fine with me. But that's not what will happen, right? AI is being forced on everybody, everywhere. Which means it really doesn't matter if we jump in right now, agentic stuff will still be the norm in 5 years, and at that point you can show us all the magical things you're doing. I'm sure that will convince way more people than the current approach of "join right now or be left behind!!!"
- gverrilla 2mo agothere's no space for everybody. not even near. free market is inherently oligopolic for most cases..
- win311fwg 2mo agoOligopolies are unlikely in a free market because as soon as you do anything interesting a million other people will copy what you are doing wholesale and you will have no advantage to see you rise up to form an oligopoly. We find oligopolies in our regulated markets because regulation, such as copyright, patents, tariffs, etc., legally hinder that competition from emerging. However, even if we accept oligopolies as inevitable, that doesn't mean the tech people cannot collectively own those oligopolies. A business does not have to be owned by just one person. Cooperatives are a thing.
- Draiken 2mo agoTaking aside the fact that free markets are a myth, all we have to do is look at our current society and you'll see how utopic this view is. In the real world, oligopolies are the rule not the exception.
- win311fwg 2mo agoOur current society is shaped by its regulation and the regulation is shaped by our current society. Regulated markets and our society are one and the same. To separate some kind of imagined free market out of that while still clinging to the same society doesn't make sense. They are fundamentally inseparable. In the real world, the markets are regulated. We are talking about where there is a free market. Was your comment posted just to let us know that you don't give things much thought?
- hostyle 2mo agohow will that help? being a business owner magically makes you immune from ai stealing your job?
- seydor 2mo agoHaving just installed the world's most popular software (MS windows), i think they should be.
- sri9s 2mo agogood one
- dec0dedab0de 2mo agoSurely android and ios surpass windows in usage. Though I would argue that none of them are popular.
- alansaber 2mo agoFair enough.
- agys 2mo agoSide note: a half an hour call on a commute train (or in public spaces) is considered extremely rude in many parts of the world.
- neom 2mo agoFrom my experience, (outside of the quiet car), "extremely rude" - only South Korea and Japan?
- ausbah 2mo agoi’m in the US, if you took a call for more than a few mins a busy metro car I’d tell you to knock it off
- qbit42 2mo agoPeople talk on the phone all the time on every US metro I’ve tried. Seems fine if they’re not on speaker or raising their voice
- serf 2mo agoMy dad speaks loudly on speakerphone phones in restaurants and public spaces daily because he's a rude old asshole. No one beside myself has ever told him to stop because I think being old gives one a bit of a 'get out of jail free card ' with regard to social behaviors. I would love for you or someone like you to happen upon him and tell him to knock it off, but alas that seems fleetingly rare.
- honkostani 2mo ago[dead]
- yard2010 2mo agoWhat would he do if I would tell him to knock it off? Wouldn't he just yell at me making the situation worse than it was to begin with?
- 2mo ago
- pm90 2mo agoTech has always had an unhealthy streak; it was ok while workers were being compensated well and treated amazingly. The end of zirp has cut comp and benefits massively so there’s a lot less upside to this lifestyle.
- FLeXMurphy 2mo agoThis article is too inward, clique referential looking. It uses too many "known" things to frame and validate its points, but has very little contributions of its own. The way that people are described, and the conditions portrayed, have been this way for quite some time. The only thing that is changed is now there is a clearly defined boogeyman to point to that justifies it. Because the other boogeymen make the usual authors too uncomfortable to bring up.
- chrisjj 2mo ago> This article is too inward Too inward for what?
- purplemoonx 2mo agoCan't say the inward here (it's racist)
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago[flagged]
- FLeXMurphy 2mo agoNo, I pained myself reading the article too much for that.
- aogaili 2mo ago[flagged]
- Forgeties79 2mo agoIt’s not 1998 man you don’t need to use that word.
- aogaili 2mo agoWhich word? I use what I want..I hope you understood what I said. Also, who said I'm man? I might be they?
- Forgeties79 2mo agoYou know what I’m talking about and this comment is not as clever as you think it is. I’m moving on, have a good weekend.
- aogaili 2mo agoI honestly don't, forgive my ignorance but English is not my first language and I'm from different culture I suppose. I was trying to explain a point that "sadness" as a by product arraignment not the domain. And I personally found the article heavy on generalization. When I read statements like "All knowledge work is pointless" and "Everyone in tech is sad".. I just think it's lousy thinking. But I don't know what word you referring too that was not common since 1998 specifically and why..I find you comment to be really strange, sorry. But anyway, I'm getting used to being flagged and downvoted on this site.
- aogaili 2mo agoBut I'm guessing it's "retarded"? You seem to be sensitive to intelligence ranking, judging by your comment "not as clever as you think". I find a lot tech people sensitive to that in general, given that what they are exchanging in the market is their presumed intelligence. But again, you can keep me honest, instead of leaving me guessing about a banned word since 1998.
- andsoitis 2mo ago> knowledge work is mostly pointless Really, noemamag?
- dreadnip 2mo agoDo you like increasing shareholder value?
- andsoitis 2mo agoAbsolutely! As a part-owner in a company that’s exactly what I expect. I’m not putting my money in a company because I’m feeling generous. I have to prioritize my and my family’s own financial well being. If a company gives poor returns, I’m incentivized to reallocate my capital to companies that give me better results.
- aogaili 2mo agoThat sums up the depth of the author understanding.
- my-next-account 2mo agoDoing pointless things is wonderful, anyway.
- thisisauserid 2mo agoMost of the people in tech I know that have interpersonal relationships and go out and look at a tree every once in a while are not often sad.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- jgbuddy 2mo agoI'm pretty happy I think
- 12912312 2mo ago[dead]
- olooney 2mo agoScholars and academics have been bemoaning the pointlessness of what the article calls "knowledge work" for centuries. A few of my favorites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Scholar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Scholar https://andrewmbailey.com/papers/Higher-order%20truths%20about%20chmess%20(Dennett%202006).pdf https://andrewmbailey.com/papers/Higher-order%20truths%20abo...
- ComputerPerson 2mo agoThere's a well-known book that labels programmers as a specific type of pointless job. "Duct tapers" is the category. Also task masters, who would have a foot under the software development umbrella, have space in the book. "Bullshit Jobs" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
- Der_Einzige 2mo agoWe are socially punished for our extremely cushy jobs SWE has negative social value. Saying you’re a SWE or god forbid anything in AI in a dating/courtship context is basically suicide. We are paid so well as compensation for debasing ourselves socially. A lot of normies intuitively understand the concepts in that book even without reading it and either see you as evil or a grifter, maybe both, when you say you work in tech/AI. A lot of people are going to have extreme schadenfreud as they watch tech workers take L after L. They really hate us, they want us bullied or dead or wishing we were. Still, it was totally worth it because the blue collar pricks that dislike tech workers are even worse in so many ways. At least I’m not a shitty construction worker responsible for contributing to the pathetic state that our housing industry is in.
- ComputerPerson 2mo agoWoah, bad day? I've noticed or experienced absolutely none of this. The closest thing I can relate to is that I operate on a different intellectual plane from some of my blue-collar friends. This causes a divide and probably limits intimacy, but does not result in negative relationships. Regarding the dating world, it impresses people that I'm an SWE. My role is a boon, maybe because it signals intelligence; I'm not sure. Strongly disagree here. Would encourage you to try to reframe some of that. Sorry if that comes across as patronizing.
- mikert89 2mo agoYou used your most prized mental faculties to build software: logical intelligence, creativity, etc to make someone else rich
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- trgn 2mo ago> logical intelligence it's this that AI is stripping. the work is becoming systems thinking. not bad per se, but removing the small scale puzzle aspect of the job
- ang_cire 2mo agoBecause 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 pick.
- wonderwonder 2mo ago[flagged]
- pixl97 2mo ago>an innocent Remember murder is only bad when it's not done with an algorithm and a bureaucratic process.
- wonderwonder 2mo ago[flagged]
- scottLobster 2mo agoIf Mangione was the CEO's health insurer and knowingly denied him cancer treatment the CEO's doctor said he needed, all to boost his quarterly earnings, resulting in his death, would you have this same level of outrage? For-profit claim denials should be abolished unless there's a public backstop.
- ang_cire 2mo agoExactly. It's insane how we've come to just accept corporate profit as a valid reason for allowing people to die, or for shifting responsibility for the outcome away from the corporation. The Joker's monologue to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight about how one group of killings is just normal and "part of the plan", while another is shocking and appalling (specifically when it's a societal 'elite'), was supposed to be at least somewhat outlandish and overly pessimistic as an interpretation of society, but damn these people are trying to prove him right.
- rvz 2mo agoBecause the free ride and the day-care rest and vest ZIRP tech life style is over. In 2012 - 2023, this lifestyle used to be at Google, and Facebook and everyone outside wanted to join. In 2023 - present The day care lifestyle is at NVIDIA, OpenAI and Anthropic and everyone outside wants to join (they are too late) after getting laid off. It's that simple. There will be a new day care somewhere but it if you are looking for a safe and stable job, it does not exist.
- 8by3 2mo agoIt doesn't have to be _that_ extreme, Many of us just wanted vaguely what the promise of a good job was supposed to offer. A decent wage, the ability to afford a home one day, support our families etc. Maybe not everyone but up until about 2022 I had great job security and loved my work. I knew I was extremely lucky. I didn't have a crazy silicon valley salary but I was doing pretty well on any kind of global scale. Job security went quickly out the window, with it came a sense of insecurity and the dread that most other working people live under. So I'd argue we aren't more sad than most people, just lost the warm bubble of being paid well to sit in a comfy chair and daily get the reward of solving interesting problems.
- pixl97 2mo ago>what the promise of a good job was supposed to offe So did the people at car factories, at steel mills, at any number of places that no longer have that either. Your last sentence is correct, we're just coming down to the reality that everyone else is suffering. But hey, tech unions are socialism, we'll pull ourselves up by our bootstraps at any moment now.
- johnnyanmac 2mo agoAt least factories and mills were smart enough to unionize. Tech feels like the fable of the scorpion and the frog as of now in terms of this. rather pretend they are the top of the food chain and bring everyone down with them than do the reasonable thing. On topic: the bigger issue here is that I don't really see the angle of "we'll just retrain and adapt". All white collar work is in danger, and most blue collar work is also on the decline in numbers for other reasons. Are we all going to be nurses for boomers at this rate? Or doordashers and youtubers? I don't see the "next frontier" here and people thinking they they will "be their own manager" are blind to how large an impact this will be.
- dgabriel 2mo agoI'm not sad. As an engineer with decades of experience under my belt, I'm really excited about how AI can democratize software and help me finally complete long-simmering side projects, create value for the greater good, and be a generally fun thing. So far, I have not found myself even remotely replaced by AI at work.
- echelon 2mo agoI have never been happier. I flipping love AI. This is literally what I dreamed about as a kid. I feel like we might get to witness the singularity, and that's exciting. To live and die under cellphone incrementalism is what's depressing. I hated where we were. I love where we're going.
- celsoazevedo 2mo agoYou seem to ignore all negative aspects of AI, so it's not a surprise that you're happy and excited. It's the other side of the coin of "AI is bad and brings no benefits", usually the result of ignoring any positives. I've used AI/LLMs to create tools for myself, which otherwise would have not been created. That's good. But I also know people that are terrible at detecting AI content... it's only a matter of time until a couple of fake videos trigger a mob and something bad happens. I think that's where some of the negativity comes from. Yes, AI can do nice things, but it's not all good.
- gitaarik 2mo agoJust like a sharp knife you mean?
- twodave 2mo agoYeah, it probably is sad to be so unimaginative or pessimistic about your skill set that you see AI as an impediment and not a boon.
- logicchains 2mo agoIt's the same as the old "As hire As, Bs hire Cs".
- paulcole 2mo ago> people who want to pick up pottery, painting, crochet or other old-timey analog hobbies. In coffee shops and in the low-lit corners of bars, professionals are sharing dreams of “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid.” These aren’t fantastical daydreams… Things people say they want to and then don’t do is the dictionary definition of fantastical daydreams.
- zitterbewegung 2mo agoWhen have people in Tech been happy? (Serious question).
- david927 2mo agoThe 1990's
- foobiekr 2mo agoOthr than bubble $, not really. The true "golden time" was the 1980s. Creation of Cisco, Sun and SGI, and so many other things (like the personal computer), all new, incredible energy, mostly positive.
- mixmastamyk 2mo agoInternet was the new frontier in the 90s, and future so bright, “you gotta wear shades.”
- toyg 2mo agoRead Douglas Adams. We were not really happy even back then.
- gitaarik 2mo agoIndeed, the economy was still healthy, and it was the time of waiting for your code to compile and talk nonsense with your colleagues and the management would think you're the best.
- Balinares 2mo agoThere was a time when Google SREs were inventing the profession from the ground up, and it was the stuff of legend.
- lostaccount 2mo agoThis is basically office space but for the modern era. Peter found happiness in construction work, but when something physical like that is your job… I don’t know. A lot of those guys have back pain, inflexible schedules, working in extreme weather, and the pay isn’t even that good. Is tech so bad? Or is the world of work broken?
- pc86 2mo ago> A lot of those guys have back pain, inflexible schedules, working in extreme weather, And a lot of them don't? A lot of people who work on a computer all day also have back pain and inflexible schedules. Hell, I'm sure a lot of knowledge workers in other countries work in places with no air conditioning, for example - not exactly "extreme" but not climate-controlled, either.
- jonahrd 2mo agoThere are definitely downsides to office work, but this post really implies to me that you don't actually personally know anyone who works in the trades. The amount of body pain/damage, extreme conditions, and ridiculous scheduling (as in, last minute decisions that you must be on site at 5:30am the next day, not as in overall hours) are pretty much incomparable to tech work.
- pc86 2mo agoI didn't say they were comparable. But there is a common refrain that every single person who works in the trades has their body basically destroyed by the time they're 40, which isn't remotely true, and that nobody who works in an office (or a number that is essentially a rounding error) has any physical effects directly caused by that, which also isn't remotely true.
- phainopepla2 2mo agoThat's not a common refrain, that's you interpreting reasonable statements in the most extreme possible way.
- catigula 2mo agoThe idea that "knowledge work is mostly pointless" is absurd and only literally true specifically if AI can do it... which it seems to be able to.
- peakdunningkrue 2mo ago[flagged]
- diogenescynic 2mo agoBecause the entire career or job experience is like a never ending marathon where the only reward is keeping your job and not becoming destitute. You never have true job security and if you work at a company long enough to go from start up to mature company then they eventually start trying to outsource or automate your job etc. It's nothing but stress and fake positivity for years and years and hopefully your lottery ticket/RSUs actually increase in value and you're eventually able to afford your freedom. It's brutal. I keep fantasizing about cashing out my retirement and running some kind of small business. I am sick of the corporate world and being a hostage to some corporate executives whims.
- zabzonk 2mo agoToo much web stuff.
- swasheck 2mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs the theory is not without flaws but it seems relevant to the topic and conversation
- win311fwg 2mo agoThe glaring flaw in the theory is that it hypothesizes that jobs are pointless, but in fact they do have a point: Companionship. There are always exceptions, but overwhelmingly those with resources don't like being alone and without social standing and so they use their resources to buy friends, so to speak.
- okwhateverdude 2mo agoA company I used to work at has a CEO/Founder just like that. He's a sad sack of shit. Got up on stage at the company christmas party drunk to sing karaoke and noticed not enough people were paying attention to him, so he "joked" about firing people. Same dude some years later would bribe employees to work over the christmas holidays with him and was bragging about it on LinkedIn. He's rich. Could do any number of things. But its obvious he's got no friends and clings to the company as his identity; likely having been self-sabotaging the IPO that was always right around the corner he was working on.
- pseudalopex 2mo agoGraeber's test of a bullshit job was it could be eliminated without harm to society. Jobs to make people above feel important was 1 type he identified.
- win311fwg 2mo agoWe're talking about the link. It refers to pointless work. - "over half of societal work is pointless" - "workers are required to pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be" Companionship isn't pointless. Nobody in a companionship role is pretending that they are at work for any other reason unless they are so out to lunch as to not notice what the job is. And if one is that far out to lunch, why would they see their job as being pointless rather than believing it useful in some other way?
- surgical_fire 2mo agoEveryone is sad? I'm pretty neutral. I was pretty neutral before too.
- Grombobulous 2mo agoEveryone in tech isn’t sad, the people who are vocal about being sad are sad. This is a universal concept across the Internet. If you’re on your phone all day doom scrolling you’ll only encounter sad people.
- wonderwonder 2mo ago'professionals are sharing dreams of “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid.”' This has been a meme in tech for decades. I seriously considered farming 20 years ago due to my dissatisfaction with tech, its nothing new. I fall into the group of tech workers that never enjoyed their work, I still loathe it but it pays really well. Standups are the worst, every day its "what did you do yesterday". The number of hours worked are far above a normal 9 - 5. Sections of sociery spent years telling people to learn to code and they did and they do. The issue is that for many people that just work to live and don't live to work, code is souless and there is nothing to show for it after decades of grind. This negative outlook is not universal of couse, I am sure this site is full of people that love software and more power to them. For a good deal of us though, its just how we pay the bills and there is nothing else that will come close to paying them as well. Now to add to the general malaise we see companies laying off tens of thousands of engineers to justify their token spend. The feeling of living on borrowed time is prevelant especially for those that never got RSU's or SF salaries
- surgical_fire 2mo agoI enjoy coding, but I always sort of hated working in tech. It's something I do because I get paid well to do it, I happen to be good at it. It was ironic that I was at my most miserable when working for FAANG. Allowed me to save to buy a house, but man, I hope I never have to go through one of those again. Things got better after I started avoiding startup and US companies.
- mariopt 2mo agoLet's see.... Unemployment, AI Lunatics, forced to use AI, AI Slopping... Much of joy we got from coding was taken way, I can not even imagine anyone wanting to get back to a coding role to vibe slop all day long. I even heard from colleagues that presented algorithms better than the AI slop and heard verbatim from their boss: I prefer the AI solution instead of your. So yeah, AI lunatics are ruining tech
- pixl97 2mo ago>So yeah, AI lunatics are ruining tech Eh, this is just the latest rendition. Before that we were still complaining about tech bros ruining tech. With all this said, the demand for ever increasing profits squeezing everything that exists till it bleeds out will eventually ruin anything so even without AI tech would have reached that point.
- CurbStomper 2mo ago[dead]
- marginalia_nu 2mo agoSaw 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 online it's like everyone is really angry and tired and sad all the time, and it's getting worse every year. This really took a nosedive during the pandemic, but looking back this had been going on for several years before. Every election cycle makes things worse too. It's just been spiraling in a very dark direction for a long time. You have these blackpill depression cirklejerks everywhere. Astroturfing is getting worse every year. Like what Bannon did with gamer gate is an amateurish precursor to what everyone with is doing everywhere now. With AI you can even run these campaigns with a very small budget. All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom. Used to be more tabloid territory but now I don't know if anywhere is spared. A lot of the focus now is on AI, but when it isn't the world is burning in some other fashion. Reading the news, we've been in a permanent state of crisis for years now. This information diet just isn't good for your mental health. It isn't just tech workers, but they're probably more exposed than most. Candide's closing remarks spring to mind. Tend your garden.
- rob74 2mo agoIf 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 be offered a buyout package and then maybe find something more fulfilling...
- marginalia_nu 2mo agoA counterpoint would be that you don't really ever see investment bankers reacting in this fashion.
- rarisma 2mo ago"It's good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over." I feel like this can be applied to a lot of things, but this is pretty much how I've felt working in tech for the last 2ish years.
- jebarker 2mo agoWhat makes you feel like that? Is it AI specifically?
- johnnyanmac 2mo agohaving some 6-7 yeras of fruitful work followed by 3 years struggling to make ends meet. I thought getting over the 5YOE hump would mean I'd be set for any future roles, but that delusion is long past.
- luciana1u 2mo ago[flagged]
- ieie3366 2mo agoBecause they don’t exercise, have a terrible diet, lack of socialization, and no family to speak of
- gverrilla 2mo agoDebord without Marx...
- hackeraccount 2mo agoI read about an experiment with pigeons. The birds were given a target. For one iteration if a bird pecked a target it would get a piece of corn. For another it got nothing and for a third... sometimes it would get piece of corn and sometimes it would get nothing. Tech for me is that third variation. Sometimes you get nothing and sometimes it totally delivers (and more!) on what it promises. This is as a user and even as a provider. You take various bits and bobs and suddenly with a slightly clever idea and you've got something that's more then the sum of the parts. Sometimes. Other times it just never comes together. I'm not sure if that makes me happy or sad. Bit of both I suppose but I keep going back to the well because you never know.
- Multicomp 2mo ago> In my experience, there are two broad categories of Knowledge Workers. The first are outcome-first workers. Their focus is on the business, on winning, on efficiency. Human needs and faults and emotions are an obstacle to be overcome. > The second group has an experience-first perspective. These workers love the messy middle. They value the journey. They want their organizations to perform well but as a natural consequence of collaboration, debate and shared struggle with people they actually like. Many experience-first people are artists outside of work. Photographers, directors, screenwriters, sculptors, painters, poets, writers. Many are active volunteers. For these people, to be pulled away from their economically unviable passions requires something in return: a company experience with freedom for exploration, creativity, problem solving and cool colleagues. The first group appears to be correctly compartmentalizing work into its correct location, this is a job I do to meet a goal, how are we doing on that goal, they have healthy limited expectations of the experiences there. The latter group sounds childish or unprofessional or at least unrealistic in their expectations that a job you do for a living will be all you want it to be. I laud people who volunteer, I do as well, I laud creatives, we need more of them, not less of them, but somewhere along the way, people need to work at the sucky starter job so they grow out of wild-eyed views that all jobs will bring one satisfaction. Some jobs are more cushy and give you more of a sense of fulfillment, true, and those are vocations in the article's sense, but most jobs are just jobs, therefore it seems unrealistic to me to expect them to make one happy. Satisfaction in life comes from service to others, because said service drives strong trusting relationships with people, you love what you serve, and those trusting relationships mean you get to see more people and they often reciprocate, thus families (in the nuclear, community, and found senses, all apply) are formed and meaning arises as the gestalt of that support and forward progress gets us what we can handle for this-side-of-life eudaimonia. Beyond that? That's the nature of religion and I know I'm already annoying someone with my too-strong opinions as is, so I will spare you my thoughts there this time.
- eahm 2mo agoBecause everything is ads, lots of propaganda and too much politics. Flame wars used to be about distros and code and now it’s about how people think and opinions. Everyone needs to go outside for a second, smell the flowers, hear the birds chip and calm down.
- xlii 2mo agoLong 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 miserable and they want to get back to knitting, pottery or whatever thing they want to do but not tech. For people I know who are in tech for the tech nothing changed. There's new tech in town, one has to adjust, and it's still possible to discover new things and pave new paths. Tech was always shifting and I suppose people who worked in it for it always knew it, and it doesn't derail them.
- VoodooJuJu 2mo ago[dead]
- MarkusQ 2mo ago100%. I noticed it most when the slurs they used against us became status symbols, as a hoard of grifters traded in their ties (remember ties?) and golf doodads for SF franchise bling and proclaimed themselves "geeks" and "nerds".
- uncivilized 2mo agoThat was just a brief trend. Geeks and nerds are back to being derogatory.
- MarkusQ 2mo agoI suppose I should be grateful, if it means the mercenaries are leaving.
- purplemoonx 2mo agoI think we’re leaving not them haha We’re out! Grads from big schools and frats are in - regardless of ability. It’s like when you build a Wordpress site for your client in 2009, after it’s live they don’t need you anymore (until the domain expires or a plugin breaks). But during that moment they don’t need you they act cold like they will never need you again. This is happening at scale IMO.
- deanc 2mo agoI wrote a little bit about this a few weeks ago [1]. For me, programming, building software has always been a creative expression based on fundamentals. AI sucks all the joy out of it. [1] https://deanclatworthy.com/2026/02/09/the-joy-of-programming/ https://deanclatworthy.com/2026/02/09/the-joy-of-programming...
- ghm2199 2mo agoOn a personal level to remain as a SWE/Dev maintaining your sanity comes down to a few choices: 1. Do I want to have the kind of lived experiences that the field has to offer? The answer can come through some introspection to questions like: "Do I have a good devx talking to AI and understanding how it works? If not am I willing to learn how to?" or "Am I ok if development has become more intense than it was — because you will talk to AI/Machine more than before?". 2. Whatever your introspective questions are, if there answer is: "Yes I am more or less ok.", then pick a goal that lets you get those experiences and hack away. I feel this decision making is more important than ever for people who are banked on more their skill to write decent code and not much else in the recent past. And also people with mental health issues should be more deliberate about their choices.
- matheusmoreira 2mo agoBecause society sucks so people enable Daniel Plainview mode.
- zahlman 2mo ago>Daniel Plainview mode What does this mean?
- matheusmoreira 2mo agoRuthlessly and possibly sociopathically pursuing wealth with the goal of eventually fucking off to a secluded mansion where all of our wants and needs are met and then isolating oneself from the unfixable society we cannot tolerate or meaningfully change.
- tossitawayplz 2mo agoA lot of people truly enjoyed the craft and creativity of building something. That is being stripped away. The building is being outsourced now. In some cases, the design too. Everything they once enjoyed and took pride in is being done by machines now. That is not a good feeling. Imagine you are a master craftsman, a furniture builder. You sourced the wood, designed the furniture, built it by hand, took pride in your work. You adjusted your design or how you used wood based on a knot present in the lumber you got, made custom jigs to improve your efficiency or accuracy. You built skills, you were mastering a craft. Now, suddenly, you manage a factory of outsourced workers who mass produce cheap particle board furniture. At the end of the day both the hand made dresser and the particle board one store your underwear, one is significantly cheaper (even if it falls apart on you after a few years.) so the cheaper one wins and that is what everyone starts producing. Good enough often wins, especially when cost is involved. Some of these crafts people may have never got to the point of being masters yet either, they were working their way towards it, but now it looks like those skills may not be valued by the market, did they waste their most valuable years working towards a goal that no longer exists? A lot of these people in this situation are also millennials that are currently or nearing mid-life, hard to pivot to a new career at this point. That is not a good feeling. Perhaps a new kind of mid-life crisis. A lot of the people I know that are excited about AI weren't craftspeople in the same sense, the process of designing and writing code was just a means to an end, they just wanted something to store their socks at the end of the assembly line regardless of how it was made, the cheaper the better. The worse part is not only is it a craft, its a living and so even when the times are rough you still have responsibilities, housing, family, healthcare so you are forced to use AI even when you know you are feeding the very machine that will grow big enough to eat you. Some craftspeople will say that the AI makes them better at their craft. They can understand and learn things they never could have done before. I think this is the ideal scenario and believed this at first as well but four problems emerged for me: 1. I kept getting lazier and lazier, letting the LLM do more and more until I wasn't learning I was just trying to get to the end goal. 2. The majority of my team pressed the easy-button slot machine and wholesale let the AI do everything, its practically impossible to keep up with the massive PRs and unbelievable code churn in a team like this especially with every level of management (who are not code crafts people) want that outcome. 3. I forgot how to do simple things, syntax, standard library functions, useful libraries. I started forgetting it, I kept finding myself reaching to ask the LLM how to do this or that, things I knew how to do by muscle memory only months prior. 4. You are giving immense amounts of training data to the LLM companies. Its already been proven they give 0 fucks about copyright in any sense, your code, your ideas, your products go right back into the LLM code blender in some shape or form. Anyone reading this far that is the same kind of crafts person that I'm describing I will tell you what I'm doing about it. I'm going to starve the machine. I've cancelled all my LLM subscriptions, I've deleted the apps. I'm going back to hand coding. I don't care about the consequences. I will find a way to provide for myself and my family. I might get "left behind" but so be it, I'll do it on my own terms. I will no longer lose the sense of who I am for companies and people that don't care about me, or even humanity in the first place. Guess who's with us? Artists and Authors other creatives hate this shit too, software is a mix of creativity and engineering so its not as black-and-white as other fields but you get to choose what it is for yourself. Good luck out there.
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- kittikitti 2mo agoObjectively speaking, I'm less miserable than before, even though I am still miserable. I think it's because I always found Workism to be very cringe. Now that the workplace has a good amount of fascism mixed in, adherents to Workism realize their free trial is over. The price to pay is their soul. I really enjoyed reading this article. Thank you for sharing.
- arendtio 2mo agoI think we shouldn't be depressed, but work on ideas and concepts of how this could be changed into something good. I see a lot of people hyping AI and condemning it, but very few seem to be interested in working on what our future should look like.
- johnnyanmac 2mo ago>but very few seem to be interested in working on what our future should look like. That involves policy, and people here are still squeamish to talk about the dreaded P word, despite it controlling every aspect of society.
- JohnFen 2mo agoNone of that is the reason I'm sad. I'm sad because I realized that this industry had grown from something that is a benefit to everyone to something that is the opposite of that.
- mrjay42 2mo agoBecause of the *gap* between the enjoyment of "discovering, learning and practicing tech" and the capitalistic use of tech and the consequence it has on people AND how tech is used.
- asjh15 2mo agoEveryone is so sad because comments that follow the AI money are flagged, everyone knows that there is marketing and censorship and 50% of commenters are useful idiots that swallow the propaganda. Noemamag is a propaganda rag for Berggruen.
- robofanatic 2mo agoBecause most of us are middle aged with mortgages, kids etc. Not old enough to retire and live off of savings or 401ks, not young enough to start all over again.
- chasd00 2mo agoThis is me, if i can keep the train on the tracks for 10 more years I'll be able to stop dancing, collect my tips, and finally get off the stage. I'll be 60 then and may open a coffee shop idk yet.
- johnnyanmac 2mo agoStarting over isn't worth it anyway. Entry level is being hosed the worst, so this isn't an issue you can retrain yourself out of.
- WorldMaker 2mo agoYeah, unfortunately in the US economy most of the rest of the easiest directions to start over are also knowledge work and also impacted by AI layoffs and reframing. I've got 20+ years of software engineering/software development. Three or four years ago I probably could have easily taken a side step into Technical Writing (presumably at the time for a pay cut). In the current economy, in reading between the lines of so many job postings, Technical Writing jobs are also getting replaced by Claude, Gemini, GPT, Qwen, and friends. I was offered an MBA for relatively cheap, but the sort of PM/Middle Management roles that most easily opens up are also feeling pressured by AI Layoffs and seeming to disappear from the job market. Even "relatively cheap MBA" doesn't at the moment look worth the opportunity cost. Of the suggestions from friends and acquaintances, the one that would have sounded bizarre to me four years ago that somehow sounds like one of the most viable suggestions I've heard is applying to Law School and getting a JD. That doesn't sound like a great use of my time either, and I do still have a mortgage to pay (even if no kids to worry about) if I did go back to school, but suddenly in this economy it sounds like one of the more useful suggestions I've heard in recent months since my last layoff.
- SirFatty 2mo agocybersecurity has taken over my life as a IT Manager. Security was always important, and always something I worked on, but now it's all I work on and it's exhausting. Managing patch management)software and firmware. Users who cannot help but enter credentials via phishing regardless of training. Chasing the next best practice (SSL VPN out, IPsec is back, etc).
- dec0dedab0de 2mo agoThis 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 things just for the sake of it. Now I daydream about being homeless. I look around at all the meaningless crap I have accumulated, and feel shame that I didn't use that money to retire early. I am surprised that remote work didn't get a bigger mention in the article. In a few weeks I will have been working from home for 12 years, and I believe it is the cause of most of most of my angst. At first, the convivence was such a relief, but it has become a trap. The effort of the commute, forcing me to go out every day and talk to human beings face to face, even just little things like making sure I was showered and dressed every day, they all felt like a burden at the time but they were good for me and I didn't realize it. Not to mention that it makes my house feel like work, and I now I hate it here. I will say as an anecdote counter to the AI examples given in the article. I have a young co-worker who is very excited about AI and is using it way more effectively than I am. Talking to him gives me hope for the future, the kids will be alright. But to the point of the article: I have many friends my age that are making less than half of what I do working objectively harder jobs for way longer hours, but they all seem so much happier than I am.
- DeluluDon 2mo agoI used to daydream about homelessness until I did it for 6 years. You're surrounded by threats and your limbic system is in overdrive, deindividuation kicks in and takes a year of being rehoused before you're back to being the same person. Those daydreams generally stop after taking a hike or twenty over the weekends.
- gboss 2mo agoI'm really impressed you got out of that! Thanks for sharing, the best thing to help homeless people must be prevent them from being homeless in the first place.
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoWhen every other website (or its content) is AI-generated and not made by humans, we can't buy computers anymore, we're being forced to use AI at work (for no tangible benefit either other than "It's the future! You'll be left behind [citation needed]!!"), endless security vulnerabilities caused by AI burning IT/Infosec out, do you HAVE to ask?
- janpeuker 2mo agoLinking 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)
- SauciestGNU 2mo agoI'm just happy people are still talking about Situationists.
- gverrilla 2mo agoThey're not. This is sanitized Debord, taught in many colleges nowadays. The author even admits it's "impenetrable" even though he's citing it. This is récupération.
- gls2ro 2mo agoI 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.
- lrvick 2mo agoI am finally able to deliver on years of backlog ideas thanks to the GPUs I racked up in my garage. Having a blast. Everyone I know fully dependent on corpotch seems pretty sad though. I frequently suggest that they stop. It has not worked.
- johnnyanmac 2mo ago> I frequently suggest that they stop. It has not worked. Are you offering to make up for their lack of a job yourself? If no, I'm not surprised people don't just upend their lives for... nothing? Especially in the days where getting any job after quitting is a massive ask. It's rough out there.
- lrvick 2mo agoEvery single new innovation in technology wipes out giant swaths of jobs. The invention of the loom, the printing press, the refrigerator, the radio, automobiles, the internet... etc etc. Technological progress is not evil, and those of us that adapt quickly do not have to apologize to anyone for doing so. Those that learn those technologies early and adapt fast have a major advantage. Those that just want complain and hope the technologies are going to go away, and refuse to adapt how they work, should probably move to a country with socialized healthcare and universal basic income ASAP. I know this is harsh, but I do not make the rules. My way of helping is freely mentoring the smart and motivated that shows up in my communities. Beyond that I have to focus on adapting to the transition myself.
- johnnyanmac 2mo agoYou posted about a lot of worldly things when what I was ultimately asking about was "why are you venting about how your friends not taking your advice to quit their jobs?". And your answer is to talk about how disruption is natural and people are screwed if they aren't already living in a place with safety nets? Just to align ourselves here: you responded to the right comment, correct? If you did: well, the answer is unsatisfying. You want your friends to work on a transition to a hazy future which is actively advertising to remove labor from the equation. So instead of keeping their corptech and financially preparing for the storm, they should just quit, try to read the future, and "adapt" to that which has not occurred yet. I wouldn't subscribe to that thought either; why not do both if it's that important? That's my plan when I hopefully get another job. I know I got maybe 1-2 more jobs in a bad timeline before my industry has a soft collapses. but that's still plenty of money (and a bit of time. Not as much as I'd hope, but some) to help me setup my own moat. Lastly: >Technological progress is not evil "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" In other words: intent matters. I don't think Bill Gates developed the PC with the goal to eliminate human computers. I do fully believe the intent of this current "progress" is malicious takeover of techno barons. This is not technological progress with the goals to further humanity, nor preserve the earth, nor even to entertain the masses. It is bordering on the kinds of dystopia we'd call a cheesy movie if we got a script for it. So I will have to agree with your general idea, but disagree with the current context being discussed here.
- monkaiju 2mo agoVery happy to work somewhere where sanity has triumphed over AI madness...
- taswellian 2mo agoWhere is that?
- mjcohen 2mo agoSo glad I am retired.
- _doctor_love 2mo agoSince it's Friday, I'm going to suggest an activity: this evening, invest 30 minutes in watching "The Brain Center at Whipple" from the old Twilight Zone TV series. This conversation is much older than any of us, starting really with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. My read on some of the current melancholy is that the millenial generation is starting to hit their mid-life crisis. Seeing the inherent meaninglessness and inanity of much of corporate work is part and parcel of that. AI makes the contrast more stark, but not new. Or to come at it another way: the system we live in - capitalism - is defined by the process of 'creative destruction' (coined by the economist Schumpeter). We are always iterating on technology, making it better, finding new optimizations. When these are found, very often one class of people is put out of work while another class of people gains employment. Whether this process is desirable, moral, ethical, etc. is not answered by the observation, simply that this is how the system works.
- jselysianeagle 2mo ago> When these are found, very often one class of people is put out of work while another class of people gains employment. I think what's contributing to the sense of dread is that so far at least, it's not at all clear that AI will be similar to past iterations of such "creative destruction". I hope to be wrong but I fear the jobs it does end up creating, if any, will be far lower paid and soul-sucking, and it will likely destroy many more jobs than it creates.
- Animats 2mo agoAddressing the question in the title, "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers", look at what happened to printers. That was a good skilled trade for centuries. Then it just went away. Phototypesetting took the high volume end. Desktop publishing took the low end. Computer-controlled presses took press operators. And then the newspaper business died. I've heard homeless former printers talking about the good days at the Burger King near the cable car turntable at Powell and Market. They thought they had careers. Now they're struggling to survive. Knitting is not the answer. This is a survival issue. Somehow I suspect the author inherited money.
- MichaelZuo 2mo agoObviously there is some latent risk in choosing a career anywhere, that the demand disappears. There can’t literally be zero risk of structural demand changes.
- notsmarthuh 2mo agoThe problem in the Western world is that switching to a different career is made almost impossible. This society pushes people out of the workforce all the time. I'm one of them. I've been "unemployed" since 2012 with apparently ZERO ability to get any kind of skilled job ever again, just due to a "zigged when I should have zagged" situation decades ago.
- tayo42 2mo agoI've been curious about leaving software but it really feels impossible. Theresa no careers that you can learn on the job and you need to go back for another 4year degree to maybe get into the entry level job,no guarantee though.
- dinkumthinkum 2mo agoIf you a degree already, you don't necessarily have to go for four years for another degree, you will have to take the courses for your major and a small amount of additional requirements versus a first degree.
- rindalir 2mo agoI want to address something mentioned in the article about people wishing for for grounded occupations. I have a sheep farm and I could not keep it running without my tech salary. So I kinda view these as false escapes. Unless forced to or of independent means, who is going to throw themselves into the bottom fork of the “K-shaped” economy.
- bell-cot 2mo agoOkay - but for most types of agriculture, the minimum viable farm size is rather larger than it was a century or so ago. Might we ask how large your sheep farm is, by current commercial (vs. hobby) standards?
- rindalir 2mo agoWell, 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.
- ang_cire 2mo agoOr, as any respectable farmer does it, it's though heavy subsidies and crop insurance fraud!
- rindalir 2mo agoYes, honest person that I am even I think “is the reason this isn’t working because I am not capable of gaming the system”. But all that money goes to farms orders of magnitude bigger anyway.
- morley 2mo agoHave you seen this 1-acre Vermont farm? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT6O-4zbP6E 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.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo agoOriginal HN title: "Why Is Everyone in Tech So Sad?"
- RobinL 2mo agoI've often felt my job as a programmer has often been to automate myself (and others) out of my job. But I've always felt in control of that. I suppose there's some cosmic justice to the fact that it's now being done to me.
- bjt12345 2mo agoSerious question though - how are they going with that? In reality, I see a lot of the current unhappiness in the Tech industry is being triggered by their pointy haired bosses wasting millions on their failed AI strategies only to embark on more failing AI strategies.
- RobinL 2mo agoOne example: I've been working for a couple years (not full time) on a high performance FOSS address matcher: https://github.com/moj-analytical-services/uk_address_matcher https://github.com/moj-analytical-services/uk_address_matche... Until recently LLMs have been really bad at this task. I always knew it was coming, but with GPT 5.6 they've suddenly become good. It's pretty clear to me that it won't be long before most of my work on this is rendered pointless because the LLM can either do the classification itself (when given agentic access to the canonical list of addresses), or write a classifier itself if given enough labelled data. Of course these two are complementary
- luke5441 2mo agoGiven it is being trained on your project, the latter isn't that surprising. For the former, you could use LLMs yourself for the probabilistic matching as alternative method? Probably you don't because the trade-offs (like performance) are not worth it...
- RobinL 2mo agoYes - it's certainly the case at the moment that you can run a few thousand through the LLM at a reasonable price, but not, say, ten million. But the rate of progress suggests to me that this argument won't hold up forever. Eventually I think an off the shelf LLM will outperform most and probably all more traditional ML models at this task. Largely because LLMs can identify tricky ones and pick them out for more intensive effort (e.g. looking online, further searches again the canonical list of addresses)
- kstenerud 2mo agoThe author talks as if this were a new phenomenon; it is not. I actually did go buy a farm in the 2010s, grew alfalfa, managed cattle, cared for horses, etc. Except I did it while working remote as a software engineer. Very fun life, and I may return to it again. But it's not an AI thing, and it's not a disappearing job thing. It's just that office work keeps you so separated from the real world that you yearn for something physical.
- asdff 2mo agoIf I could make white collar pay landscaping, that's what I'd do for the rest of my life. One of the best jobs I had but they pay only a couple dollars above minimum wage.
- pavel_lishin 2mo agoHow much time did the farming take, compared to the software engineering aspect? My very limited understanding of farming is that it takes a huge amount of time, and you're usually up and working before sunrise, even with automation.
- kstenerud 2mo agoYes, I was up at 4 am every day. It's hard work.
- IshKebab 2mo agoYeah I had to stop reading after the author thought he could draw some deep insight from the fact that someone with a boring finance job had a hobby...
- tehnub 2mo agoIf you're excited about AI, doesn't that mean you're actually less AI-pilled? You don't believe it will replace you fully.
- Eridrus 2mo agoI am a fundamental believer that technological efficiency is the reason life is better now than it was hundreds of years ago, and will be the reason that life in hundreds of years is better than it is now. There may be disruption to me as a producer, but I think the results for people as consumers will be great. There will be change, there is already change in our careers here, but I do not fear the need to change and do something different. On net for humanity, I am certain the change will be positive even if some people including myself will experience disruption.
- npilk 2mo agoSo the author tells us there is a crisis of meaning in the workplace, and their proposed solution is… to remember none of the work matters? The start of the piece: “These conversations inevitably turn to fundamental questions about careers: What the fuck are we actually doing? What the fuck is the point of all of this?” The end: “For most employees, we owe it to each other to remind one another that this work is not, in the grand scheme of things, all that important. It is illusory.”
- hingler36 2mo agoYeah, this take is wildly out of touch. Sure, it's great when you're able to derive philosophical meaning from your work, but at the end of the day the vast majority of people are here for the paycheck.
- eddyzh 2mo agoThis resonates a lot with me, well worth the long read. And the last part about how to try keep the human part relevant, is exactly what I try for now.
- chasing 2mo ago“Tech” is one of the most rapidly-changing disciplines historically. It was very different in 2016. In 2006. In 1996. In 1986. It will be very different in 2036. If this is your career, part of your job is being aware of those changes and being the person who can help others create value from whatever new technologies come around. I’ve always found these changes exciting and fun, but I’ve also been aware my entire career that whatever I’m doing be year could be out-of-date and not of value the next. Tech is exciting. Trepidation is a part of excitement.
- johnnyanmac 2mo ago>Trepidation is a part of excitement. Sounds like a line I'd hear straight out of Cyberpunk. Or perhaps Outer Worlds.
- mixmastamyk 2mo agoUp-to-date here and still out-of-work.
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- underlipton 2mo agoSomeone is going to chime in about the tone of this post, with the ramifications of a decade-and-a-half of rejection on one's outlook flying right over their head. If the underemployed and NEETs got half the consideration that extroverts jonesing for just one water cooler chat (just one, man) got during the pandemic, we'd be one our way to solving not only their problems, but also the ones that they're uniquely equipped to tackle.
- gamblor956 2mo agoThank you for proving my point. Enjoy being unemployable. You don't need to be an extrovert to be employed. I'm not, and neither are most of my coworkers. But you do need to not be a hyper-aggressive sack of negativity that emotionally drains everyone around you. So deal with that, and you might be able to land a job before you pass.
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- dizlexic 2mo ago>A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers. The pleasure...
- modeless 2mo agoMany occupations have been made obsolete throughout history, and this article examines none of them. I'm not sympathetic to "this time it's different", I think people are just too lazy to try to find out what actually happened in the past.
- IshKebab 2mo agoThis time it has the potential to be different because it might basically obsolete all white collar jobs, which is waaaay more jobs than even the industrial revolution, and in a much shorter time. Maybe anyway. I think that probably depends on at least a couple of more breakthroughs - at least a solution to the hallucination problem, and probably some kind of true on-line learning, not just writing stuff down and reading it again later.
- carlosjobim 2mo agoInformation Technology has always had the purpose of obsoleting white collar jobs. Creating some new jobs along the way, but obsoleting more than it creates. "Computer" used to be a job title for a human being.
- mahogany 2mo agoThe difference now is about the scale. What percentage of the labor force do you think were “computers”? It is not comparable to a potential disruption of huge swathes of the workforce in a short time span. That’s what people are worried about.
- elzbardico 2mo ago[Verse 1] Stand up, all victims of oppression For the tyrants fear your might! Don't cling so hard to your possessions For you have nothing if you have no rights! Let racist ignorance be ended For respect makes the empires fall! Freedom is merely privilege extended Unless enjoyed by one and all [Chorus] So come brothers and sisters For the struggle carries on The Internationale Unites the world in song So comrades, come rally For this is the time and place! The international ideal Unites the human race [Verse 2] Let no one build walls to divide us Walls of hatred nor walls of stone Come greet the dawn and stand beside us We'll live together or we'll die alone In our world poisoned by exploitation Those who have taken, now they must give! And end the vanity of nations We've but one Earth on which to live
- jgerrish 2mo agoI'd like to congratulate Aaron Horwath on publishing this article. As a creative professional, he must feel pride in bringing his ideas to light. Unfortunately, this isn't the movie industry. We don't see a list of credits at the end of his commentary recognizing the thousands of others involved in helping him publish his thoughts. Perhaps we can all chip in and name some of the many people involved in building the tech stack he published with. I'm sure there are THOUSANDS without even looking at the previous technologies those things like blogging platforms, current browsers or current generation phones built from. Is that fair enough? I'm not sad. As I look out to the next few weeks and whatever, I'm not sad. Hopefully those credits will help others also not be sad. Here's to WordPress and Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little.
- jLaForest 2mo agoMatt burned any leftover good will a long time ago
- jgerrish 2mo agoDo the credits in a movie stop on a name and shame? Maybe some future one will, just to prove this wrong. But most of them let those millions of unheard of crew members, unknown but still important, point to their name proudly when they're watching it with their family and friends. They realize creative works are built on a mountain of contributions. People who may be going through tough times right now due to rising anti-tech feelings. People who have heard one too many "evil developer" jokes. I don't really want to do this unaccountable work either. But here's another: I don't have view source on my phone. I'm guessing maybe jQuery too? Thank you John Resig.
- treszkai 2mo agoTo roll with this idea: soon the credits will include more names like Sol and Opus 5 and various pointy-haired bosses than names like Mike Little. That's not very encouraging either.
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- dsign 2mo agoI personally have been trying to get a financial security cushion for the last ten years or so (and failing) so I don't take my own feelings into account; AI hasn't made me more frustrated. On the contrary, it's a tool I now use in my escape-the-rat-wheel adventures, and there's nothing sweeter than seeing Opus dismantle in ten minutes a problem that would have consumed two full days of my time in this world. But when I speak with colleagues and friends, all of them, now and not before, in all age groups, and with only in common to be knowledge workers, are searching for a way out.
- darepublic 2mo agoI'll never consider my time with programming to be useless. Even if we got sent back to the stone age and programmable computers no longer existed. The way of thinking to me is very valuable
- tines 2mo agoYeah, some people only assign value to things in terms of money and economics. I will never understand these people. You are the art.
- nik282000 2mo agoThe fact that you can think is what is valuable. I work for a slew of drones who will ask the same question 4 or 5 times, to multiple people, hoping that one of them will 'slip up' and reveal that there is actually a hidden easy solution.
- brushfoot 2mo ago"Knowledge work is mostly pointless" is the author's view, so his article (the fruit of knowledge work) should be measured by it. Amd that sentiment is hardly surprising, coming as it does from a Director of AI Operations (his title on LinkedIn).
- uncivilized 2mo agoDo you disagree that your work is pointless?
- entropy47 2mo agoI certainly do. As usual the revolution is weeks away, but I continue to produce work better, faster and more reliably than my colleagues who have outsourced their brains to Claude. You can tell me I'm not gonna make it and the last 5% is going to topple on the next model release, but the work I enjoy doesn't have precedents and it seems the plagiarism machine is quite bad at that specific flavour of knowledge work.
- uncivilized 2mo agoThat has nothing to do with your work being pointless or not (it is), but more you showcasing your insecurity of having to be smarter than your peers because they use LLMs.
- entropy47 2mo agoOh, I hadn't even considered the interpretation here where you're saying knowledge work is pointless and always has been. I'm not even going to engage with that one because I see the value and real world impact of my work every single week. I don't think I'm smarter than my colleagues who use LLMs, for what it's worth. I just have the advantage of continuing to think, try, improve etc.
- uncivilized 2mo ago
- maerF0x0 2mo agoalso: David Graeber's book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory was first published on May 14, 2018
- frollogaston 2mo agoSpeak for yourself.
- epolanski 2mo agoThere is one major difference from previous technological advancements: AI is going to hit many if not most sectors at the same time. And it's not like hitting just one sector has ever been gentle: machines entering manufacturing caused an 80 years slump in British occupation rates and salaries. Machines entering agricultural fields by the end of 1800s caused a similar slump in work conditions in Europe that really ended by the 1960s/1970s (depending on the country). Automation + AI will keep taking more blue collar jobs at speed while also taking more and more knowledge workers out of jobs. Seriously, at no point in history we've seen a single technology threatening so many sectors at the same time. And people telling you "but the workers always recovered" keep ignoring that those recoveries sound good when they were not the ones impacted, and that these recoveries can take a lifetime.
- purplemoonx 2mo agoNot at the rate it is currently gatekept - it will be prohibitively expensive for most people to use AI and AI-based robotics. It's already out of reach for most small businesses to justify spending on it, and some LLM consumer plans are going for $200/mo. If a chatbot is $200/mo, what's a full human AI robot going to cost to do general labor? $100k/year? And let me guess, you have to replace it with newer models each year? Companies will ask: "What's the point?" in losing the people resource, accountability, and everything else in exchange for the same cost of labor (or more). AI tech needs to be freed up so we can innovate with it, like the Internet was. It's currently too locked down and the K-shape thing only works with goods and assets. I don't think you can lock the majority of people out of technology (and it be as good) the way you can lock people out of home ownership (and it improves home value). If the plan is that only a minority of ultra-wealthy have the best technology and everyone else is some underclass who can't afford it, then the technology just won't be very good or useful. It will be like the $200 chatbot or an Apple Watch or a Tesla. Some specific kind of wealthy geek will get it, but it won't be that world changing. If individuals and companies can't meaningfully save time and money without significant additional engineering, then it'll be like flying cars or robotic bartenders and the dream of displacing all people (lol) just won't materialize.
- austin-cheney 2mo agoJust as a reminder this subject of AI replacing developers come up all the time but it has not happened yet. People want to focus on AI but the same problem has always been there for 2-4 decades. Software, as a profession, has no credentials, no common elevation path, no common training criteria. You just show up and everyone is super insecure. AI just provides a name to identify that insecurity. Nothing else has changed.
- aetherspawn 2mo agoI want to open with: I have 20 years exp as a hacker and deep tech software engineer. LLVM and such. I shared your opinion until just last week, when I started using Fable on Autocode and passing it huge requirement specs I had written for desktop apps. $500 in -> 5 days -> an app that would take me a year to write, and the code quality was fine. I just left it running in /loop… I did nothing. Now I, unfortunately, believe the propaganda, and I too am worried. Can the economy support the burn rate of AI companies though? My mission now is to create all the apps and products that are stuck in my head while I still can, before Fable is inaccessible due to bankruptcy or they hike the price or some other thing.
- johnnyanmac 2mo ago>it has not happened yet. That's the worst part. The idea of it replacing people is impacting people. Even though it is not ready yet. >Software, as a profession, has no credentials, no common elevation path, no common training criteria. I don't think that affects much when every field except healtcare and maybe education are down. This isn't about credentials or qualifications. Nor even getting work done. It's a circus today. >Nothing else has changed. The last 10 years changed pretty much everything.
- VoodooJuJu 2mo ago[dead]
- cousin_it 2mo agoThe article makes an interesting point. Like, sure, AI slop is nasty; but also maybe the job itself was bullshit all along (making powerpoints, or coding yet another todo app and so on), and you were only making peace with it by adding a human element which wasn't strictly necessary. Now with AI that illusion is stripped away, and you see the job for what it really is: just how little it means.
- inquist 2mo agoI quit tech a couple of years ago to become a high school teacher. No regrets.
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- annoyingnoob 2mo agoI'm not sure that Hobbies are an existential threat. We had hobbies before the Internet too. It is the non-stop rat race that is the problem. Before cellphones and email we went home from work and left work at work, for the most part. Find a rich life outside of work.
- andix 2mo agoHere in Europe employees turn off their company devices after work. Getting called-in in your time off usually happens not more than once every few months. You're not supposed to check your messages in your time off. But it still feels a lot like described in this article.
- annoyingnoob 2mo agoWell, I said "Find a rich life outside of work". In the article's conclusion, "once freed from the false satisfaction of believing we are changing the world with our day jobs, perhaps we will be inspired to fill that hole with something real". I suppose we agree and are saying something similar. If you've worked for startups then you've delt with existential threats, perhaps hard times and failures. I read the article as a lot of corporate jobs. When you fail you find out quickly what is important in life. You need some not-work to be important in your life too. AI can only mimic your creativity and your emotions. You are not as replaceable as it may seem. Maybe I'm not convinced that Anthropic and OpenAI are going to replace us all just yet. We are living in strange times, not only with threats of automation everywhere but with great political upheaval all over the world. One thing is certain, change, things won't always be this way. I'm going to rely on my grit and remember what is important to me and what makes me happy.
- AlanAAG 2mo ago[flagged]
- andix 2mo agoI have the feeling this goes much deeper than knowledge work and AI. I see it in many places that people seem to not take their job serious anymore. The incentive seems to be gone. Also their managers don't seem to care anymore, as they are also taking their job less seriously. I can't put a finger on it, but it's not about younger people or Gen Z, it also applies to older people. It just feels like good work doesn't matter much anymore, and everyone tries to make the best out of it in their private life.
- FloorEgg 2mo agoSometimes in an effort to understand things I'll try and take them to their limit. One limit, framed as a path to a kind of dystopia is "wire heading". Another more tangible limit is opium addiction. These are basically collapsing of values. Trading a rich and robust value system for pure dopamine. Modern media is on this spectrum (infinite scroll, algorithmically tailored, short form video). When people can get dopamine by pressing a button it's easy for them to trade a rich and diverse set of values for that button. When people can get dopamine by pressing a button, it's hard to maintain a rich and diverse set of values. Values are genuine interest (want) in taking actions and patterns of actions.
- andix 2mo agoInteresting idea. Modern media and social media is probably really the most relevant change we had in the last 15 years. Everything else didn't change that much.
- an0malous 2mo agoYeah something broke during COVID. One factor was the stimulus created enormous wealth inequality, people who owned assets before that live like gods now and people who didn’t can’t even buy a home. The economic policies since then have exacerbated the issue.
- andix 2mo agoI think it started before 2020.
- cupcakecommons 2mo agoI read up until the term "late capitalism" then stopped and rolled my eyes and closed the page. Coin clippers control the money supply and mainstream economics is the sham - it really is that simple. Mass enshittification will continue until monetary debasement and ensuing Cantillon effect is halted and pricing mechanisms can function.
- bonoboTP 2mo agoThings are going to change once again. It's been a long time ago since things really changed. In the 70s, probably. And before that maybe in the 1920s. It will be a generational change. Life went from quaint 19th century stuff to airplanes and medicine and plate tectonics and knowledge of galaxies and washing machines and the contraceptive pill and antibiotics in one or two generations. Then there was a bit of breathing room and things are picking up once again. Life is never constant. It is something you prepare for and deal with. For reference, people in Europe over the last hundred years lived through extreme ups and downs. Cities flattened to the ground. Entire families exterminated. Properties expropriated. All streets renamed multiple times. Entire ideologies swapped out multiple times. The US has enjoyed relative constancy. But now the entire world will change once more. It's not the first time. But history is back. Whether you prepare or put your head in the sand.
- purplemoonx 2mo agoNah this whole thing felt artificial and forced. With Trump and everything else. There is a ton of work to do. We don’t even know how to stop aging and haven’t sent people to Mars, have still not really invented AI, and tons of business is still clunky and offline. The whole anti-smart people (and anyone who tries anything) movement feels very backlashy and full of revenge from a group who felt left out by us - all while we had no idea. We were just going to work. There’s still a lot of work to do IMO and yes money to be made. If we can turn it around. They got us with bullshit and lies but we can get them with hard work and organization.
- Havoc 2mo agoI'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 collectively as humanity going to figure this whole AI situation out. See translator jobs getting wiped out. Nobody even blinked an eye, it didn't spark any discussion, no deep thoughts were had. It did wiped out a bunch of people's lives and did NOTHING to trigger discussions around what are we going to do here. Twitter connected programmers feeling the heat with a large audience may prove better to spark discussion
- zulban 2mo ago> 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.
- whstl 2mo agoI think translators will predict what will happen with developers. So far, what I see: I have a few friends making a proper living translating AAA games from when I worked in the area. So far there's been a lot of talking but AI hasn't been able to replace them. Whether it's "yet" or not, I won't speculate. I also know a few people doing freelance translation online, mainly through marketplaces. Those were mainly done in bulk, for websites/apps they never heard about, probably the websites/apps I worked for. The second group is getting very very few jobs after AI.
- sluggishpudding 2mo agoNah. OP's real point is that people didn't talk about translators _enough_. Of course people in the circle are devastated and are screaming at the top of their lungs right now, but at a societal level no one cared enough to for example seriously consider policy changes (like UBI for example).
- namuol 2mo agoWith or without AI, if I had to talk about EBITDAs for my job, I too would have to take up knitting to feel like I’m doing something real. I’m sure Charlie Munger would agree.
- erikerikson 2mo agoWhat the article describes was already a problem. Business people frequently pushed for broken incomplete work via shortcuts, fell for flattery, and otherwise twisted the work for those of us who cared about doing it well and accomplishing valuable and important things. Early in my career I wrote a product that helped get a startup funding. That product went on to be used, among many other things, to reduce the impacts of genocide. Further actually impactful results were abstract in nature, a framework that was used to start many financially successful companies. The entire 25 years there was an endless tension to balance actually doing good work and slapping together some garbage really fast. There's some good to that tension but discussing that here would be a distraction. I think AI really accelerated the sloppy acceleration and really emboldened the slop crowd. It's the perfect tool for the blowhards playing politics and irresponsibly pushing under the belief that there is endless grift absorption capacity. To me the article makes a strong point but what do I know? I'm too busy farming to really think it through.
- smath 2mo agoThis is a common source of confusion. The knitting / pottery making is not rewarding because its made by hands or is not knowledge work, but because it is done in the direct service of someone. Modern organizations are complex and can put several layers between the knowledge worker and the customer it ultimately serves. This produces the feeling of 'cog in a machine'. It is possible to work such jobs and serve others directly on the side (e.g. friday evening soup kitchen)
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- laughing_man 2mo agoThere is certainly ample precedent for this. How many stable hands lost their jobs as people switched from horses to automobiles? In 1923 there were 863,000 coal miners in the US. There are less than 45,000 today.
- mangoman 2mo ago> The world does not wait with bated breath for product launches. A marketing campaign will not change the world. Almost no one will remember all the work we do. It did at one time! I think that’s what’s so alluring initially about Workism. People waited with bated breath for the iPhone and iPad and its new versions. Those iPod commercials and the marketing campaigns for “rip. Mix. Burn.” did change the music world. But the quote is also right. It doesn’t happen anymore, and I think that’s why the religion of Workism is especially vulnerable at this point. In someways, it sorta feels like the article is cheering AI on? Like, it judges Workism, and goes on to say that AI shatters the illusion, but then.. that’s it? Deriving value from good work is pointless now and we should all just go volunteer? I dunno, i clearly identify with those who loved work and now feel a bit lost, and yes i have been thinking about alternatives, but I feel like there must be knowledge work that is still valuable both financially and socially and also provides some sense of pride and purpose… if not, i fear the situation is much more dire than we are prepared for
- dogomatic 2mo agofor what it’s worth I still get that excited feeling every time there’s a smaller, distilled LLM that I can run locally. I think it unlocks so many use cases that are pro consumer. Probably an edge case though!
- hyperadvanced 2mo agoI think the next frontier for (knowledge) Workists is to use the AI to make sci-fi shit. Someone go make me a schematic for a 3d-printed battery. Someone go make me a an electric (flying?) skateboard kit. Someone go make me an at-home clothes printer. Someone go make me a flying car. Someone go make me an RPG that feels like Morrowind, EverQuest, or WoW did when I was a teenager - let me play it on the couch with my friends and our kids. There are so many possibilities… I feel like the doomers here are (rightly) mad that these kinds of problems are hard and not the same as “write me a web GUI that lets me search a database for music” or even “spend 80 hours writing a custom k8s operator to manage autoscaling for semi-persistent queues” but compared to what tech was 10 years ago, the ability to create anything and everything right now is amazing.
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- hdndjsbbs 2mo agoThe bigger problem, for me, is that knowledge work has become stupid. If you want to write code by hand and do a good job, you will be ruthlessly replaced by your boss churning out "good enough" LLM code. The CEO at my company tried to PR code to my repo. It didn't make any sense but it was a whole political thing to make it go away. The industry has always been stupid and selfish and short-sighted but now the ICs at the bottom of the pyramid are themselves being commoditized like all the workers they "disrupted".
- dan_q 2mo ago> The industry has always been stupid and selfish and short-sighted but now the ICs at the bottom of the pyramid are themselves being commoditized like all the workers they "disrupted". Are you allowed to use the word "union" on this website?
- johnnyanmac 2mo agoSure. Reactions to the word are mixed, though. Tech is still very resistant to the idea for various reasons.
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- xlayn 2mo agoPeople who argue against AI are the same people arguing against the car because of horses... This is going to open a whole field of jobs for... ... ...... someone... but let's not go into those details... Remember that this is going to supercharge economy, sure, in the beginning it'll not be obvious, but then you are going to see how it'll enable people to stop working, just like trickle down economy has redistribut....ed... Ok maybe that's a bad example, sure it's going to take a lot of people out of business, and yes there will be a lot of pain for a "small" part of society, but in general it will be pure gain as a whole... it's not like all that people being laid off means something like stop paying house mortgages, and then a lot of evictions and suddenly a lot of houses going of market... ... I mean even then that's not like it's going to cause all the house market to go down right? Ok maybe a bit... but don't worry if you are near underwater with your loan someone will buy all those houses to keep your loans on check... it's not like it's going to be some private investors with all the money that will go to the top 1% and take them out of the market and make impossible for the rest of us to buy something... I mean, my point is don't be negative, stop fighting progress, if more people can buy super yatches there will be more openings for building them!
- awesomeMilou 2mo agoThis comment is funny, because Berkshire Hathaway's exposure in the housing market uses basically what you said as it's strategy memo.
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- cleandreams 2mo agoI am not excited about tech anymore. I dread it to be honest. I was an early engineer at a AI company that got acquired. From that and related stock (golden handcuffs) was able to retire a couple of years ago. There were some tech problems that I wanted to investigate and I took a bunch of classes. Fun. I loved my career. Wow have my feelings changed. I'm disgusted. It's a moral disgust. The scene turns me off SO MUCH. Just a recent tidbit: I think it is Anthropic that is buying old (some antique, vintage) books, scanning them, then pulping them. There is no restraint at this point. Whether it's Meta and their pervert glasses and child exploitation. Or google trashing their own search. One thing that has turned my stomach is how management has acted after discovering they could trash their skilled workers in the way that so many other industries have been able to do. If you want to know management's true character, remove the moat (that skill used to be) from the workers and watch what happens. ...Okay, I'm editing. There is a bright spot. The other day I was sitting around doing nothing and suddenly out of the blue dreamed up an app that could help build community regarding an activity I care a lot about. With an LLM I could do the whole thing myself. I'm excited about this. I might fit this in among my other projects. It's kind of like taking a hammer and chisel and cutting a piece off of Big Tech. If all of us skilled folks do this we could have an impact and serve community at the same time.
- johnnyanmac 2mo ago> Just a recent tidbit: I think it is Anthropic that is buying old (some antique, vintage) books, scanning them, then pulping them. I wouldn't be surprised if all the companies are doing that, and Anthropic was just the featured company that had someone talk about it. >The other day I was sitting around doing nothing and suddenly out of the blue dreamed up an app that could help build community regarding an activity I care a lot about. Wish you the best of luck. But from my honest experience: the hardest part of building community was never the technology.
- rayoleary 2mo agoBravo
- cadamsdotcom 2mo ago> What’s different about this moment is that the questions are not just economic but existential, the kind of questions that cause high-earning technical professionals to contemplate throwing it all away to start a goat farm in Washington or become a surf instructor in Costa Rica. Because the world sure needs more goat farmers and surf instructors. It's all pointless, you can't outrun the pointlessness - so just enjoy it!
- slowhadoken 2mo agoTech corporations co-opted open source technologies and liberalism by employing a bunch of wokies to act as social interfaces. Feminism has been doing the same thing to tech and media that Mitt Romney and private equity firms have been doing to brick and mortar businesses for the last 25 years.
- throw-the-towel 2mo agoCan you elaborate please?
- slowhadoken 2mo agoIt’s a lot of transnational corporate level head game stuff to realign Democrats towards neoliberalism. It results in gutting companies for ideological and/or post-political globalist ends. Grifting has nearly eliminated civics. It’s like players are trying to buy, strip, and flip America. Like a leveraged buyout of the US or something. Look at everything that came out about Blizzard for example. It’s spooky.
- thraway3837 2mo agoI 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 the morning hours figuring out how to compile something. Or how to get that new driver work correctly in an unsupported OS or setup. It's a lust of computing. The gadgetry. The devices. The awestruck feeling when a new computing device or technology comes out. I and many others like me still have that yearning and curiosity. I love strolling the aisles of the hardware store and computer stores for this very reason. The energy is electric. The immense amount of technology in every little thing is just mind blowing. THAT's why we do it. THAT's why we got into it. It wasn't the pay. It wasn't the glory. It was a group of us who wanted so desperately to have a computer club or an electronics lab for us to hangout and build stuff. Unfortunately, as the industry grew, all the wrong personalities entered it. Project managers, product managers, scrum/agile masters, terrible mid level managers, talentless clowns, bozos, cheerleaders, jocks. The lot of them. The non-weird, non-geeky, non-obsessive, non-nerdy types. And then they co-opted the culture. They thought wearing glasses and wearing a backpack and carrying the latest tech devices made them "it". The good thing is that the burnout hits fast for these folks. Just like the tons of medical school or law school students who are there for all the wrong reasons and realize sooner or later that this isn't at all what they wanted. Some members of this group actually become doctors and lawyers. THIS is the group that the article is talking about. They don't last, because their heart and soul are just not in it. For the rest of us? AI, no AI, walled gardens, OSS or closed. It doesn't matter. All of this geeky stuff brings us joy. I don't want to "turn off and disconnect", I want to be connected because I love this stuff. I love the simple speaker and amp and the latest LLM. And I love the latest ADAS systems in cars. This work is meaningful to me because of both the end product and the work that it took to get there. Unfortunately, the issue is that while we enjoy the geekery, the others ruin it for us because their lives suck. Sorry to be harsh.
- throwaway1183 2mo agoOh my god!! You nailed it. I see two categories in tech. One the builder, innovators, tinkerers, those who just wanted to use tech to draw their ideas to life. Then other is artisan, those who took pride in organizing and craft. Second one is having miserable time. The former like me are having a blast. I love tech for that reason. I stopped talking to people who think LLMs are waste. It's because they don't even touch it. They think it's a taboo to touch it. So anything in tech is exciting because it enables us to do so many random things. Wish more people learnt about it.
- docmars 2mo agoI'm finding that AI is only fun for people with limitless savings or retirement funds. When you have nothing to worry about, and you can create anything you want, at any expense, of course it's great. For everyone else, we're dealing with teams who ship slop, company cultures that devalue workers right in front of their faces, and force them to worry about layoffs at any turn.
- godwinson__4-8 2mo agoYikes. Won't someone think of the software engineers? Many of us have done far better than we deserve. There are so many workers who will never approach the gains even an aborted or partial career in software will accomplish. How many of you are willing to sacrifice to achieve UBI for all? My sympathy for you will depend on the answer.
- aobdev 2mo agoThe author is pretty unsympathetic towards those who give their lives to “Workism” in exchange for money, no?
- godwinson__4-8 2mo agoMaybe so. Yet a "career" is not charity. I think it's important for engineers to remember a career in software is still (as it long has been) a luxury.
- matrix87 2mo agoPersonally I'm pretty excited for the future. I feel like LLMs make reading papers way easier than what it is before. If I ever run into a roadblock, I can just keep digging and probing until it makes sense to me. If anything, the amount of work that needs to be done has been amplified because it makes learning new things that much easier. The business culture at F50 companies is several decades behind tech. The business culture in middle america is even further behind. If these people can remain employed, I'm not sure why anyone in SV is worried. The nature of white collar work is that it changes over time and frankly I think getting attached to one job title is nonsensical. Also, half of the battle with white collar work is information asymmetry. The effectiveness of the models with real systems in the field is limited by the amount of context that people are willing to provide. This problem existed before AI, if teams document literally everything, management could see this as an outsourcing opportunity. If management forces them to document stuff, why would they do a good job? Also, why the hell would management even try to do this in the first place if it by implication eliminates their job as well? There's a social problem here: how do you get people to give high quality information if there is no incentive? How do you know that they're not telling you things or intentionally explaining something badly (as opposed to the AI just being "bad" at something)? Especially now that the billionaire class has done enough saber rattling over it and gotten everyone thoroughly freaked out for the next decade at least? (This is also a problem in high churn corporate cultures as well, the fear fucks up the signal to noise ratio)
- purplemoonx 2mo agoAlready happened, next
- paulorlando 2mo agoThis came up in a few responses below as various roles have been replaced by machines (gas station attendants, printers, travel agents...) so I'm responding in a new thread. When it comes to revolting against industry change, there's a good paper by Eric Hobsbawm called The Machine Breakers. Yes, he's focused more on the Luddite-style reaction of destruction. But interestingly, he notes two types of machine breaking. There is the type that is not hostile to the machine itself, but which was used to coerce employers to improve conditions and pay. Unpopular employers and owners were often the ones targeted with what has been called “collective bargaining by riot.” Those machine breakers were more pro trade-unionist than anti-machine. Hobsbawm mentions that a benefit of machine breaking was that destruction built the “habit of solidarity which is the foundation of effective trade unionism.” That solidarity was more naturally built in places like coal mines where workers were closely collocated and was more difficult to build in framework knitting, where workers were scattered. But the second type of machine breaking was more about resistance to machines themselves, especially those that were labor-saving devices. That type of anti-tech Luddism is where I’ve mostly focused my own recent research. For that second type, Hobsbawm notes that workers, manufacturers, and the general public often shared in the discomfort of machine impact on peoples’ livelihoods. Unlike the conditions and pay, this other type of machine-breaking helped workers slow down the loss of control on their employment. That included situations where machines made workers more productive and where, as a result, fewer of them were required. Or situations where machines enabled pay to decrease, as highly-skilled and highly-paid workers were replaced by less-skilled and lower-paid workers. The alternative was the impossibility that Hobsbawm describes as follows: “The small shop-keeper or local master did not want an economy of limitless expansion…. His ideal was the secular dream of all 'little men,' … a small- scale society of modest property-owners and comfortably-off wage- earners, without great distinctions of wealth of power.” I'm due to update this, but I've been keeping a running list of examples: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRWXNXRq4ZOAAwDgQ08CIN3pec/edit?usp=drive_web&ouid=105168767172733387368 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRW...
- throw-the-towel 2mo ago> That solidarity was more naturally built in places like coal mines where workers were closely collocated and was more difficult to build in framework knitting, where workers were scattered. Did someone just say "WFH"?
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- raiyanr 2mo agoI dont think it will happen
- jimt1234 2mo agoFor me it's not just AI. The industry just doesn't feel the same anymore. Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon - I've been in this industry since the 80s, but things really seemed to change, or I finally noticed it, around 2010 or so. It seemed like everything we were building wasn't to help people, it was to extract data from people and generally just harass people into buying shit. We transformed society through email, the web, mobile, and so on. But now we're recording everything your car does and delivering ads on refrigerators. It just doesn't feel the same anymore.
- purplemoonx 2mo agoI agree on ~2010 at least in San Francisco, that's when it all started to turn toward social media and VC hype. a16z, Sequoia, Accel - people like that started showing up. (a16z invested in the first startup I worked at, they were only founded 1 year prior in 2009). The Facebook movie, Justin Timberlake, I mean Sean Parker, I mean Justin Timberlake. Ashton Kutcher? Wtf It got out of control, but at least the cash was flowing. 2016 is the year I use for "when it all fell apart". The young guns always point to 2020s as the "overhiring boom" etc. but they have no idea what a frenzy it was in ~2010. If you knew basic HTML and jQuery you could literally get a $1M Series A in the right circles of people. It was like they could not find enough web designers and would do anything to get one. Fun times. But of course, that could not have lasted.
- alexbelyanin 2mo ago[flagged]
- anovikov 2mo agoThey always have been. As an outsourcer, i observed, for decades, organisations with lots of American tech workers who did almost nothing except nodding on meetings, most being utterly incapable. All actual work was done by outsourcers - bulk by Indians, complex parts by Russians and Poles. Now AI does it instead, with outsourcers out of work. With the productivity growth since late 19th century, vast majority of employees only exist by tradition, for political and social purposes. It's not "work", it's "service" (not as in "held in service or labor" but as in "public service"). They exist to make organisations they work for, look big and respectable. They exist to make their boss feel like a real boss. They are cheap - famously real compensations have been stagnant since early 1970s while productivity skyrocketed - so keeping them as essentially, pets, wasn't too expensive for business and keeps getting cheaper. They do bullshit work (Cory Doctorow). This is why i am not at all worried for those workplaces. There is no AI can replace what was useless from the beginning. Oh well, one thing will change. RTO will be mandatory nearly everywhere.
- testerius 2mo agoCurrently, I have 3 main issues with AI, LLMs and so on. Generally speaking I am happy that I can use Claude Code and Codex to help building, fixing and maintaining software in my job. To be honest it is so helpful, I am less stressed bacause most of the time I can "find out" solution without asking collegues for help or I do not have spend a lot of time struggling myself. Yeah, if you understand what feeling it is that you know you can't solve problem then you will know what I am writing about. But... There are exceptions which make me bad feeling about AI, LLMs and so on: 1. Paid, subscribtion based payment model - you have to pay for tokens. 2. Local models are not "ready yet". You still have to own decent hardware and it will not be the same level of frontier models. I am big fan of local first, offline and "unlimited usage" compared to paid solutions. But probably I have to wait few or several years to get to that point. 3. Feeling "I did not do it myself". This is the most what could make bad feel. You "cheated". You did not write this great app or solve problem alone. You just did modern "copy and paste". You did not write or design this class, function alone by hand. And you know you probably could not do it without help of AI, LLM.
- CodeCompost 2mo ago2. Local models are not "ready yet". You still have to own decent hardware and it will not be the same level of frontier models. I am big fan of local first, offline and "unlimited usage" compared to paid solutions. But probably I have to wait few or several years to get to that point. This is why tech companies are working hard to make sure you can never build your own computer again.
- Godsend69 2mo ago[dead]
- Godsend69 2mo ago[dead]
- Jtarii 2mo agoAstroturfing AI spam.
- tediousgraffit1 2mo agomaybe I'm missing something, I'll admit I haven't made it through the whole smug article, but critiquing knowledge work, especially IT work, just a few years after that field yielded it's...what, fourth?... major contribution to society in the last say 40 years is pretty funny imho. I'm counting: 1. the pc (80's) 2. the web (90's-early 2000's) 3. the cloud (early 2010s) 4. the computers that speak natural langage (early 2020s) a big chunk of gdp in the most prosperus nation on earth is dedicated to knowledge work but sure, it's abstract so I guess it doesn't feel as useful.
- altern8 2mo agoI've been trying to figure out how to make money with trading for years (and I _might_ be getting closer, now). Trading is the only way to make money I can think of where you don't have customers/clients and are truly in control of your own destiny. But of course it's not that easy.
- crnkofe 2mo agoI have this nagging feeling that the depression, anxiety and pessimism is as-of-late coming from people from all the companies that risked it by adopting token maxing and AI usage enforcement. Its not representative of the whole industry though. There are still many places where engineers or knowledge workers are respected and left to lead (or not) AI adoption.
- dan_q 2mo ago> There are still many places where engineers or knowledge workers are respected and left to lead (or not) AI adoption. Please start naming names
- cocoto 2mo agoN = 1. The company I’m working for, (a hundred employees, EU), we basically build projects on data science, ML, optimization, operational research and such for many industries (transportation, manufacturing, finance, engineering, etc). We are basically the first to know about the latest advances in AI and we have internal optional workshops on LLM assisted development. And yet nobody is pressured to use these tools. At most we are incentivized to at least try these tools.
- johnnyanmac 2mo ago>There are still many places where engineers or knowledge workers are respected and left to lead (or not) AI adoption. And they sure aren't hiring.
- gste 2mo agoThe author wants to draw a contrast between the powerful businessman discussing EBITDA and the creative expression of knitting. In my opinion they are equally dull and well matched.
- OroPla 2mo agoCan't say that I agree with the premise. It's not AI that has people feeling that their jobs are pointless. If your job isn't directly contributing to make the world a better place, which is most jobs, then you know it. And if your job isn't even producing anything tangible, then you know it, too. Same for when your job isn't at the very least benefiting other people in some way. But that's where hobby's come into place. You can just pick up something you do for fun that makes the world a better place, or leaves something tangible or otherwise benefits someone you know.
- MrJobbo 2mo agoNot having kids was the best decision of my life...the world is headed to really really bad place.
- paganel 2mo ago> “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.
- Obscurity4340 2mo agoWho's Uncle Ted and how does ine see thru his eyes?
- paganel 2mo ago> Who's Uncle Ted Sub's gone, literally. Assuming you were honest in your not knowing.
- WesolyKubeczek 2mo agoOh, I know what happens: most will fail to reinvent themselves and will spiral themselves into drugs or alcoholism. Seen that happen once before.
- Oras 2mo agoMy personal take is it’s not the tech or AI, it’s the lack of leadership to make things correct. I’ve seen it a lot in tech. Working on your own project doesn’t seem tiring or as exhausting as a job, because it has the sense of achievement, you work, learn, make something that you believe is making a change. On the other side, you see how pointless the work is when it’s just contributing to a number in a slide for a manager that has no idea what they are doing. The solution is not technical though, it’s human, and that is more challenging to fix.
- applyboost 2mo ago[dead]
- hn1rig3rak 2mo agoYeah I came around to this too
- wigster 2mo agoif?
- anotheryou 2mo agoMy only problem is making money. Need that shit, never build my life around work... (I'm well paid, just wished I could work less. But well paid part time is harder to come by)
- hn_submit 2mo agoLLMs are not going to put large numbers of software developers out of work. It may have some influence on copywriters, artists and musicians, but to which extent is unknown at the moment. Most workers lament having to give up their cozy desk jobs and having to do work which currently can't be automated, like health care and service jobs like plumbers and roof repair men, construction etc.
- johnnyanmac 2mo agoThis isn't a good market to transition into anyway. Healthare is the only growing sector and that sector will start declining once boomers start dying out in the coming decades (which is just starting to happen).
- gaigalas 2mo agoYou think IT professionals lost faith? You should look at teachers. Hate to break it to you, but we're on a dark age, and this whole thing is just another unremarkable development that follows a trend that has been going on for about two centuries now.
- Kuyawa 2mo agoAm 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.
- awaythrow9191 2mo agoNope. 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.)
- johnnyanmac 2mo agoNot being laid off helps with that mentality. I was not so lucky. Owning assets also helps. I was not so lucky.
- mixmastamyk 2mo agoAgreed, now tell me again how “exciting” that is.
- flaburgan 2mo agoI 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.
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo agoI wonder how long it'll be before you can ask an LLM to investigate, run surveys, and figure out what to build. It feels like it's not that far away. Hm, this may actually be an interesting business for someone to found. It's definitely farther away for this than it is for coding, but 2 years ago it was also totally useless for coding.
- tootie 2mo agoI've been hearing about quitting tech to open a bakery forever. I even know several people who did it long before ChatGPT. It's the nature of any corporate job. The politics and focus on shareholder value are incompatible with most human ethos.
- amoe_ 2mo agoBut for a large proportion of people, "what they build" is meaningless (in social terms). Doing as you suggest would eliminate the majority of work.
- flaburgan 2mo agoWell then we would have more time to make art, play music, enjoy time with friends... Being fulfilled. I don't see work as a goal, just a way to accomplish something in our current society, but I would be perfectly fine in a society with no jobs the way we see them at the moment. I just spent my Saturday to take care of my grandmother. I was not paid for that, it isn't my job. But I for sure created more "value" than a day in the office.
- monkeydust 2mo ago> 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.
- socketcluster 2mo agoI lost faith in my career long before AI.
- jongjong 2mo agoI think the part that's hard to absorb is that software engineering was a brutal path. You had to restructure your entire identity, ego, personality, social relationships around that career choice. People didn't expect their career to last forever, but they thought it was a ticket out to gain autonomy. Back in 2010-ish, many developers thought that, in the future, they'd all be running their own systems and servicing their own customers and making a good living like that (there would be enough customers for every dev). They didn't expect that the entire industry would be monopolized by a tiny number of companies, everyone using the exact same product, no alternatives or competition, and that the value of our labor would be artificially suppressed down to $0... This happened long before AI. AI is just the latest assault. It's impossible for a solo developer to find their own customers nowadays. You could literally offer the same product or a better product for cheaper, but you won't be able to find a single customer because it's too centralized. The trust barriers are massive. Nobody has money to try anything except large corporations and they never try any product based on what it offers; it's all business networking. It's like; the same conditioning which caused business people to pretend that Linux didn't exist for the first few decades has now spread to all non-VC-funded software.
- salawat 2mo agoAlmost like all western civilization is architected to ensure the benefit of a few at the expense of the many by design doesn't it? If not by design than by emergent consequence of how it executes.
- jongjong 2mo agoYes, the full extractive structure is much more visible now. Used to be discussed as "conspiracy theory" but now it's obvious that such structure exists and it doesn't require any conspiracy; shared incentives suffice. So yes, I would say that this structure is emergent.
- johnnyanmac 2mo agoBeing a ignorant college student in the early 2010's certainly didn't help. 2016 was a wakeup call but I still figured the checks and balances would be there. 2024 was my "fool me twice" moment. It won't happen thrice without some proper resistance; I'll make sure of that next time.
- mancerayder 2mo agoAny finance tech workers? I spoke to someone from a Mag 7 recently, and he said, isn't it true that you guys are treated like second class citizens? Yes, it's true. It's been true for a long time. It's a bifurcated world where the people that made it big in finance /tech ended up climbing the corporate hierarchy. Even a "distinguished engineer" in an investment bank is a politically savvy project manager who goes home after work to code. How people have lives outside of work, when work is meetings, is a mystery to me. Are the rest of you joining the misery since 2023? We've been in this boat for a decade already.
- lbrito 2mo agoAgree with the dread, but the point is often just making money so one can survive. While the jobs might be meaningless in an ontological sense, the surplus value is very real. All the billionaire yachts are there to prove it
- christkv 2mo agoThis has been happening for a while before the LLMs coming around. A lot of people are over educated doing jobs you only need a high school diploma for if even that. There was a whole book published about this called bs job. Everyone knows people who are basically doing nothing of real value and in some cases actually negative value as they try to justify their paycheck. The amount of busywork with no value in big organizations is very high (private and public).
- uwagar 2mo agopeople want to work by themselves with themselves. they are disillusioned working for and with other people.
- InfinityByTen 2mo agoI went through the whole article, agreeing to most of it and I was baffled by how skeptical people were in the comments here, with remarks of "follow the money". I didn't read all of it in one shot, but in breaks over the course of 2 days and when I finally got to the last paragraph I understood what people in the comments were on about. I grew up in a culture where hustle and work was the way out of a terrible life. I've spent several years unlearning that work is not everything while living in Europe. But then, work is not everything and not all that important because some AI agents can do all* of it... Nice try, but work is still a lot of what I derive meaning from and taking meaning from a person might not have a positive outcome: for the person and for the society.
- johnnyanmac 2mo ago> but work is still a lot of what I derive meaning from Not work directly. But my rent sure does threaten to take my meaning away. Can't create when I'm begging for scraps on the street.
- internet2000 2mo agoI don't need faith, I need a paycheck. How I earn it has changed over the years, and will continue to change.
- ChuckMcM 2mo agoFrom the article -- In coffee shops and in the low-lit corners of bars, professionals are sharing dreams of “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid.” Because I spent my career working in tech in the Bay Area there are some things that I just think of as 'normal' that other people, without that exposure, are surprised by. During the last 40 years start ups and tech companies have minted tens of thousands of millionaires across a wide distribution of 'net worth just over a million dollars' to 'net worth of tens of millions'. The largest chunk of that cohort leave tech directly and go do 'fun' work. The smallest chunk of that cohort are still working for someone else trying to get a bigger score. What I realized was the most people aren't sociopathic wannabe billionaires. They don't get headlines, they don't show up "out of place", they are just the people who are living their lives doing things that matter to them. So when the author is on about 'sharing the dream of doing what you want' I was like, "Yup, same as it ever was." The author also does not appear to have the benefit of having been in the area when semiconductor manufacturing became 'foundries' and all the process engineers and other workers in all of the small fabs in the SF Bay Area were now displaced. That was a class of workers who lost faith in their careers. But what was true then, and is true today, in the US we take kids out of High School and spend four years teaching them how to think and generally how to think about some topic in college and then they go out and get jobs. For someone who has been through college, getting a new Bachelor's degree in an entirely new subject takes two and a half years tops. You don't need the general ed, if its another STEM topic you don't need to redo the math, its just "lets take the classes that are specific to the <foo> major." And before everyone jumps on this and says "But Chuck, now I've got a mortgage and responsibilities and I can't be taking a couple of years off just to go to school." Yeah I get it. That's especially true if you don't have a support network. So it sucks and is depressing and you don't want to even get out of bed because you feel like years of your life were just wasted and now you need to start over. The alternative though just gets you deeper and deeper into a hole.
- nunez 2mo agoAs the kids say, "it ain't that deep bro." Before, we got paid well to do what we loved, and we were sought out for our ability to code. Now, the "fun" has been automated...by our own hands. Seeing the thing that was so highly-prized be minimized and ground into dust is fucking depressing. Well, that and the massive layoffs from "efficiencies" brought about by AI. And the compensation "rationalizations" that come from an employers' market with no end in sight. And the ABSOLUTELY LEGENDARY amounts of cope, especially on this forum. "It was never about the code," they say, as they write the equivalent of a TRD [^0] into a slot machine and pull the lever, hoping to get their hit of efficiency for the hour. So, yeah, I get the BA dude in the article who lights up when they pull out the piece they're knitting. The end is coming for us; might as well take up knitting while waiting for the fall. [^0] https://www.timelytext.com/technical-requirements-document/ https://www.timelytext.com/technical-requirements-document/. I did a stint as a BA in college for a pharma company and converted FRDs into these all of the time. You had to be technical enough to translate business-speak into nerd-speak, but not necessarily technical enough to actually implement these solutions. As a result, we never saw a line of code, since these were handed off to some PM who, I'm assuming, turned these into tickets in whatever their ticketing system was. This was during the waterfall days, so it was probably something god-awful. Writing these was soul-sucking to the maximum degree. How people get satisfaction from this process befuddles me. Maybe it's the real-time back-and-forth arguing that's fun? I'll never know.
- Schlagbohrer 2mo agoEntire article fails to mention "alienation from one's labor"
- MichaelMoser123 2mo agoWe usually see this kind of discussion around weekends. To me it looks a bit like psychological warfare, designed to drive up the mega valuation of some IPO candidates, in other words: to make LLM based systems more valuable by bashing an entire class of workers. I don't quite believe in the doom scenario: a lot of stuff depends on the correct functioning of software. However language model don't have a complete model of reality, they won't be able to evaluate if a given change is sufficient. Therefore systems based on language models will not be able to provide complete solutions - for some time to come. There will still be quite a bit of work in software development.
- cyanmoonx 2mo ago[dead]
- dnnehgf 2mo agofunny how we have ~10x the usual volume of hn front page commenters, here, for the most part eagerly saying that this article made them think and feel approximately nothing.
- gaiagraphia 2mo agoProgrammers should be happy. Their entire career has revolved around automating everything and replacing people with tech. I'm really not sure what the big deal is?
- zmmmmm 2mo agoI will say here that there are meaningful jobs that especially tech people can engage with. There are gigantic unsolved problems. Climate change, cancer, thousands of rare disorders with no therapy or even good diagnostics. And many of these fields have actual roles for technical people to fill and usually can't find highly qualified people to do them because a software eng salary is far out of reach of the average research funding. Before burning out, retiring or checking out altogether, I really recommend people look at the concept of halving your salary and taking a job that still employs your skills but is directly attached to actual meaning.
- Tomis02 2mo agoIt's insane that jobs involving cancer research pay half of what a regular VC-funded web company pays.
- johnnyanmac 2mo ago>Before burning out, retiring or checking out altogether, I really recommend people look at the concept of halving your salary and taking a job that still employs your skills but is directly attached to actual meaning. I'm trying. No one is hiring and the interviews I got seem to fall through much faster than they would have 4 years prior (despite having more experience). My peak earnings were 160k, and 80k (plus my freelancing gigs) would be more than enough for me to pick myself up. But all I see locally in LA for my skillset (mostly C++) is defense, defense, defense. And all those want higher and higher clearance these days, too (I have none).
- ChaitanyaSai 2mo agoI don't understand this part. How did they not test the HF credentials? OpenAI reached out to Hugging Face for help to revoke the Hugging Face credentials they found in their investigation. Hugging Face told them they were already revoked... and that’s when OpenAI realized that the Hugging Face breach was the same incident!
- casey2 2mo agoIt was a historically unique thing for software companies to hire script kiddies anyway it was never going to last. As for actual programmers there are still plenty jobs open and there will be for the foreseeable future since AI is incapable of reasoning.
- jstrebel 2mo agoI haven't lost faith in my career and I've been an IT specialist all my life. AI will elevate my game to a new level. I see zero evidence that it will make me redundant in any way. I guess the role of IT will shift - specialized tech companies are less important, while business use of IT will thrive. (Yes, the code-monkey style of work will disappear, but nobody is going to miss this anyway, I hope)
- rphv 2mo agoThis sounds like the lament of a group of people who have nothing in their lives they consider more valuable than work.
- voganmother42 2mo agoValuable in terms of being able to afford to have healthcare, to live?
- purplemoonx 2mo agoHaving a roof over your head and food and stuff, yeah
- sicktriple 2mo agoI don't know about anyone else, but I still quite enjoy knowing and learning things. I'm probably not going to stop knowing and learning things just because we made the knowing and learning things machine.
- purplemoonx 2mo agoYou probably actually like it. Few of us left. Most are in it for the money. Like doctors etc. the job becomes an immigrant dream job for the ez money but they have no passion for it
- tungnk1850 2mo agoThis is gonna hit the hardest on the young fellows who will soon start their tech career. Maybe this can help them review their choice
- MetroWind 2mo agoOh look, "white collar" workers lost their jobs due to automation like the blue collar workers have for decades and now it's an issue instead of advancement.
- realaaa 2mo agomaybe it's good ! we go back to real world
- restlessforge 2mo agoI just wanted to say I read this and it really got me. Maybe I should also start knitting
- miljanm 2mo agoi was working for outsourcing companies for about 15 years. software engineering was already pointless in that circumstances. this is just a culmination, but now you are affected.