7 ms·

Because 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 wor

Because 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 ago
      If 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 ago
        Exactly. 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.
        tavavex 2mo ago
        Don't forget: Kill thousands for profit -> no need to care, move along, no one is at fault and nothing of importance really happened Kill one that is responsible for the former -> you must preface your discussion with hundreds of references to murder being bad, and clearly and unambiguously condemn the monster that did this Humans really do have a bias where doing something small-scale but visceral causes horror and outrage, but doing 1000x that harm by building slow and boring bureaucratic machines of death is not noticeable because, after all, the machine isn't literally putting a gun to the face of the victims, so it's all fine.
    - nancyminusone 2mo ago
      the way healthcare companies act now, they deserve bankruptcy
- ang_cire 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - wonderwonder 2mo ago
    Cool so do I get to decide who's decisions I don't like and resulted in death or do only people like you and Mangione get to decide? And to be clear, you are advocting for vigilante justice so you are going to be celebrating when the following happen: Abortion doctors and admins are gunned down Gender change doctors and admins are gunned down Judges who allowed for bail and the person killed after bonding out are gunned down Regular killers and gang members are gunned down Police are gunned down Politicians on both sides are gunned down Mayors that didn't prioritize for natural disasters are gunned down Feel free to add to the list.
    - ang_cire 2mo ago
      Everyone makes decisions in life and lives with the consequences. Your question, as it's stated now, is simply "should we have free will?" I never made any statement about which actions should be legal. And the facile assertion that endorsing one action is either tantamount to, or requiring of, endorsement of any action that shares an arbitrary attribute you identify is sloppy argumentation; somehow I don't think you would argue that someone supporting police having the authority to use force means they are supporting every instance including illegal uses of force.
- akagusu 2mo ago
  Mangione is a murderer but that "innocent man" he killed was not innocent at all, he indeed was a murderer too. The only difference between then is they used different tools. No... Mangione murdered one, the other guy killed much more.
  - baggy_trough 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    - SketchySeaBeast 2mo ago
      > Do you think that there is some health care system in which all requests for care can be approved without limit? I'm not going to wade into the murder tag, but is this the actual incentive? The health care execs don't have enough money to save everyone so they pick who they can help strategically, making sure to help as many as possible, or is the system incentivized to instead maximize finding who can be denied so that the company makes the most money?
    - scottLobster 2mo ago
      If you think all denied claims are denied in good faith, I don't know what to do for you. The insurers are hardly running up against hard resource limits, where there just isn't enough to go around and they have to triage. They are profit driven entities, and if they were legally allowed to deny all claims they would be required to do so by their shareholders. No system is perfect, but patients shouldn't die to boost a stock price. And no patient should be required to fight for coverage at their most vulnerable.
      - baggy_trough 2mo ago
        [flagged]
        scottLobster 2mo ago
        I was presenting an extreme hypothetical to a make a point that the insurers are motivated by selfishness. In the real world, not a hypothetical, your market driven approach ensures they approve the minimum necessary to prevent customers from leaving. They require patients to to fight them for coverage while they're undergoing cancer treatment, because a dead patient they didn't pay out for is more profitable. Paying for insurance in a for-profit marketplace isn't paying for health coverage, it's paying for a CHANCE at health coverage, and you better be willing and able to fight for that chance while you're undergoing cancer treatment/surgery, or be willing to go bankrupt, or not get the treatment and die. That's the choice the insurance marketplace presents to you. Not hyperbole, many such stories. My own father in law died in part because his private medicare advantage plan refused to approve in-patient rehab after a brain surgery that every MD working on him said he needed, but would have cost 6 figures out of pocket that nobody could front. The grim irony is he later tried to get out of bed to use the bathroom, couldn't support his own weight and suffered a skull fracture that resulted in a second brain surgery inside of a week, and that was fully covered. I'll take the bureaucrats. The real world shows they're simply better at this, and Ayn Rand is simply wrong.
- kome 2mo ago
  he didn't murder an innocent man.
- NicuCalcea 2mo ago
  A quarter of Americans (and 40% of young Americans) see Mangione favourably, so it definitely is a society thing. https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/51189-presidential-pardons-billionaires-and-luigi-mangione-december-15-17-2024-economistyougov-poll#:~:text=safe-,Luigi%20Mangione https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/51189-presidential-pardons...
  - wonderwonder 2mo ago
    Be attractive Don't be unattractive
    - swed420 2mo ago
      Alternatively, if you're attractive (or any other useful trait), use it for public good.
    - red-iron-pine 2mo ago
      it's not because the US healthcare system is a gigantic trainwreck that prioritizes F100 companies over suffering people. nah. it's cuz the guy is hot. that's gotta be it. not how the main source of bankruptcy in the US is related to medical bills. it's cuz he's hot.
      - wonderwonder 2mo ago
        yes. You see anyone speaking approvingly of Thomas Crooks after he tried to kill Trump the left's most hated man? Not even a mention. He's not attractive so they dont care about him. Heck the media even digitally manipulated Alex Pretti to make him more attractive after he was killed by ICE so people would care.
  - scottLobster 2mo ago
    The only reason in my mind to view Mangione unfavorably is that vigilante justice, however justified, does not result in a civilization anyone would want to live in. It's the same reason we can't just go around killing everyone in the Epstein files. It's not that they don't deserve it, it's that the resulting corrosion destroys the entire system, including the good parts. If Mangione had killed the UHC CEO by being his insurer and denying his claim for cancer treatment that his doctor said he needed, nobody would be saying anything.
- whattheheckheck 2mo ago
  Systematic over denial of claims is not murdering innocent children, women and men? "Its giving pearl clutching status quo defending cognative dissonance internal identity crisis having mook behavior" as the kids would say
dspillett 2mo ago
In some cases being told "just treat it like you are a manager", when we've always done our level best to avoid anything vaguely like management because we like doing things particularly the nitty gritty details.
- JohnFen 2mo ago
  So much this. I've spent my whole career avoiding being promoted into management because I don't want to be or enjoy being a manager. So it always amuses me when genAI advocates say things like "your job isn't going away, you're just going to be doing management" as if that is a good thing. To my ears, that reads as "you'll still be getting a paycheck, but your job is going to shitty."
  - 9rx 2mo ago
    The last time a programmer wasn't a manager was when they were handed a piece of paper with toggle combinations and their job was to flip the toggle switches as detailed. AI doesn't seem to have much applicability in any other profession, other than maybe graphic arts, but the same holds true there. Artists are also always managers. So, what is this magical not-a-manager but also at risk of AI taking it away career? Are you sure it actually exists?
    - rhsjie294nd 2mo ago
      That's a weird way to put it. Yeah, everyone does a level of management for their own time and work projects. Still, the bulk of the work is in the details. Programmers talked a lot more about data structures and algorithms instead of keeping the LLM on track or sandboxed. How is it not different? We can play semantics on what it means to be a manager but the jobs as they were are going away
      - 9rx 2mo ago
        > That's a weird way to put it. How so? > Still, the bulk of the work is in the details. The bulk of the work is in describing the details of what you want to see happen to another entity, which is what managers do. Someone else, or something else (like a compiler), will carry out the actual work to see your idea become a reality. Are you under the impression that managers don't do anything or something? > We can play semantics on what it means to be a manager but the jobs as they were are going away Are they? It is becoming easier to pass a lot more information off to the worker bees, so conceivably you should be able to do more management now, but the general act of describing what you want to the worker bees to do and seeing them carry out the task is no different. The telephone also increased the capacity of a manager being able to relay information, so while there is still evolution happening, what we're seeing in increasing the information density isn't unprecedented. And, sure, maybe that will go away eventually. It is conceivable that AI can become the manager too, going off and coming up with its own ideas, plans, and delegating it all without any human intervention. But at that point you won't be a manager. Manager would be the very job on the chopping block. If you want to say that managing a computer isn't managing I'd accept that stance in general, but the whole basis behind the idea of "everyone will become managers" is entirely premised on the idea of everyone managing computers, so that angle doesn't work within the context of this discussion. You cannot make that claim here.
pc86 2mo ago
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akagusu 2mo ago
Can I pick all? All options are good because they are all true. I think you can extend them.
brandonagr2 2mo ago
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- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- ang_cire 2mo ago
  That's only okay if they're a politician or business exec, right? It's fine to hold those murderers up as role models, apparently.
- Multicomp 2mo ago
  I'm not happy they do it, but I'm not surprised. There's a lot of media echochambers where Luigi M is lionized and his heinous actions dismissed or celebrated because it advances a grievance/covetousness/envy political narrative, and for the same kind of people who have to be atheist to be fashionable tend to be the ones who can fall into workism as described in TFA and also have a non-trivial chance of falling into media spheres that want to drive that anti-healthcare-exec animus crowd.
  - scottLobster 2mo ago
    Anyone who's lost a loved one over a denied claim can sympathize with Luigi even if they disapprove of his methods. Sounds like you haven't gone through that experience, but a lot of Americans have.
spicymaki 2mo ago
> Because our daily complicity ... Exactly this. We were (still are) complicit in our own destruction and worst yet when other courageous people spoke up we shout them down, hid away, laughed at their folly, or shunned them outright.
stego-tech 2mo ago
I mean, yeah. I got into IT because I loved working with technology, building communities and game servers and chatrooms and computers and the like. I got lucky that someone found me, my interest in these things, and showed me how it could be a career. Nowadays though, so much of my time isn’t spent building so much as debunking the latest grift, scam, or lie. It’s spent unfucking arbitrary vendor changes that didn’t fix any actual problems but created a slew of new ones. It’s bristling at the notion that SAML, SSO, and SCIM remain Enterprise options so that a fraction of players can have total control over identity, instead of letting customers and users build solutions that fit their needs. So much time spent talking, not doing, and almost always in service of making some rich old billionaire fuck that much richer while I struggle to buy a home. I got into this field because it brought disparate people together. People from all over the world, all walks of life, all backgrounds and belief systems and ideologies into a giant melting pot of community. Nowadays there’s so many corporate and nationally-erected fences that everyone is so carefully siloed into approved areas, and any attempts to cross imagined digital borders is viewed as suspect or criminal by default. The technology of today does not enable, or empower, or bring us closer together. By design, it keeps us apart, distanced, agitated at difference or unbalanced from change. The stuff that fucking works - Home Assistant, the Pi-Hole, my Docker containers - are what is good, and leaves me time to deal with shitty OS updates breaking familial devices, or “smart” appliances that get unprompted updates that break connectivity. We are miserable because those in charge of the direction of technology - the shareholders, the Boardrooms, the C-Suites, the VCs - all demand it be miserable and extractive, rather than empowering and liberating. For a lot of folks, AI was the final canary in the toxic coalmine. The realization that this is not a noble cause or profession anymore. That we’re not helping people do better, at least not en masse, but instead making life actively worse for disproportionately more folks than those whose lives we make better. And it’s a goddamn tragedy.
- Terr_ 2mo ago
  > The technology of today does not enable, or empower To say much the same things stuff a slightly different framing: The promise of "personal computers", and then the internet, making your own applications, etc. was that they would democratize and spread certain capabilities so that everyone could have their tool which accomplished their goals to make their life better. One might even call it owning your own "means of [digital] production", although that comes with some political baggage. The depressing parts come as that autonomy is violated, as your computer becomes not your computer, but something rented to you by a remote authoritarian who demands it executes a process that improves their lives rather than yours. In other words, I see it less as connecting groups of people than giving individuals agency--although that agency might be to create (and leave) groups.
Der_Einzige 2mo ago
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- ang_cire 2mo ago
  I don't know where you got the idea my comment is about AI from.
  - Der_Einzige 2mo ago
    "The Librarian" Oh didn't you realize that some people actually READ the books people reference here?
    - ang_cire 2mo ago
      The article isn't only about AI, and neither was my comment.
pc86 2mo ago
"Not brave enough" to shoot an innocent person in the back and then run away?
- scottLobster 2mo ago
  He murdered a guilty man, not an innocent one. Still murder, and murder is wrong, but let's not get things twisted
  - pc86 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    - scottLobster 2mo ago
      The moral crime of excessive claims denials that resulted in many needless death for no better reason than he wanted a to boost UHC's stock price to get a bigger bonus. He deserved death, but the manner in which that death is administered matters. Vigilante justice corrodes the very foundations of the justice system, if we allow it the end result will be far more dead innocent people than guilty ones. I don't want more innocents to die just to kill those who deserve it.
      - pc86 2mo ago
        [flagged]
        scottLobster 2mo ago
        Where do you think all criminal codes come from? Are they mined out of the earth already written? It's a constantly evolving set of rules based on a society's collective moralities. There are many crimes today that did not exist 100 years ago and vice versa. Yes, there are crimes that should be punished that are not yet present in the criminal code, and you don't need to be a legal scholar to propose new ones. I think most people agree deriving financial profit by knowingly denying people necessary medical treatment is immoral.
salemh 2mo ago
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deleted 2mo ago
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ThrowawayR2 2mo ago
[flagged]
- ang_cire 2mo ago
  Is discussing offshoring that takes away American jobs and has driven much poverty in the heartland equally political and unacceptable, or is it just the political discussions you don't like having that shouldn't be allowed? The "no politics" rule is about not posting constant "x politician said this about tech" articles, not about banning all discussion of real-world consequences of the tech industry.
  - throw-the-towel 2mo ago
    Even by your definition, HN is still full of off-topic politics these days.
scottLobster 2mo ago
As a mid-career software dev I'm just sick of most of my job being a highly paid technical janitor mopping a floor that never gets clean. I've had maybe 2-3 years combined where I actually got to build something I could be proud of, and made all the red tape worth it. The rest has been navigating/paying down other peoples' technical debt and being forced to add some of my own when there's no budget for maintenance and the band-aid becomes permanent. At the start of my career I wondered why anyone retired early when there was so much cool stuff to work on... now I get it. The cool stuff is the extreme minority of available work, and the odds of you getting to work on any of it are down to being in the right place at the right time. As for the rest of the job, I'd sooner step on a nail if it didn't come with the pay and benefits.
- red-iron-pine 2mo ago
  the term your looking for is "worker alienation"
- fl4regun 2mo ago
  never seen a better description than your janitor metaphor
  - dataflow 2mo ago
    I actually can enjoy being the digital janitor, when I'm allowed to. What's frustrating is when things are dirty and they don't even let you clean.
BigTTYGothGF 2mo ago
> industry of tinkerers and designers At no point in history was it ever thus.
- ang_cire 2mo ago
  Yes and no. There were really 2 sides to the original 'tech' industry: military and consumer. The military side was always about profit, because it was just an extension of the already extant WW2 military industrial complex (and frankly, IBM falls here despite their mainframes being largely used in civilian businesses). But the consumer side that really grew out of universities into early gaming, internet, and consumer electronics tech, was very heavily driven by design and garage-start tinkerers. That's not to say no one wanted to make money, but it wasn't MBA-bro-driven back then.
  - BigTTYGothGF 2mo ago
    > early gaming Gaming got very corporate very quickly. Atari sold itself to Warner in 1976. Magnavox was a defense contractor. I don't have to tell you about Fairchild or Mattel or the Connecticut Leather Company. On the arcade side, Bally, Midway, and Williams had been making pinball machines for decades. I'll grant you that there were a lot of "garage-start tinkerers" on the home-computer software side.
cucumber3732842 2mo ago
>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? And this is different than other industries how? Everything from electricity to the railroad to trucking to finance to environmentalism has had this arc from wild west to establishment.
- ang_cire 2mo ago
  I agree about what happened, but I think the timescale is different. Railroads were the tools of robber-barons even in the 1800s. Electricity was captured by the major electric companies before most millennials were born. Finance was a stodgy-suit-wearing-white-guy's game when my dad got into it in the 1970s. I knew that's what "finance jobs" meant back when I was a kid building fan pages on GeoCities. But GeoCities and Limewire and Napster and Gaia Online never led me to think that's were I'd end up if I worked in tech. If our boomer parents had warned us about crapitalism as kids, we might have seen it coming before we had already sunk decades into it as an interest and career path.
  - mrguyorama 2mo ago
    >If our boomer parents had warned us about crapitalism as kids All of American society tried to warn boomers about this their whole lives, and they consciously rejected it in favor of a movie star who promised the economy would magically be amazing if only we didn't allow the government to have any say in how business works. "Hey, don't let industries conglomerate because they will do bad things to customers and in general it's pretty inefficient for the economy" was known when Railroads did it two hundred years ago. But that didn't stop Reagan insisting that letting businesses buy up all their competition would magically make prices fall, and it didn't stop the american public from consuming that bullshit with abandon. Like, I don't know what more you want. My social studies textbooks were pretty clear about the times we had to break up monopolies, why we had to do it, and how it had clear benefits.

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 ago
    If 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 ago
      Exactly. 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.
      - tavavex 2mo ago
        Don't forget: Kill thousands for profit -> no need to care, move along, no one is at fault and nothing of importance really happened Kill one that is responsible for the former -> you must preface your discussion with hundreds of references to murder being bad, and clearly and unambiguously condemn the monster that did this Humans really do have a bias where doing something small-scale but visceral causes horror and outrage, but doing 1000x that harm by building slow and boring bureaucratic machines of death is not noticeable because, after all, the machine isn't literally putting a gun to the face of the victims, so it's all fine.
  - nancyminusone 2mo ago
    the way healthcare companies act now, they deserve bankruptcy
ang_cire 2mo ago
[flagged]
- wonderwonder 2mo ago
  Cool so do I get to decide who's decisions I don't like and resulted in death or do only people like you and Mangione get to decide? And to be clear, you are advocting for vigilante justice so you are going to be celebrating when the following happen: Abortion doctors and admins are gunned down Gender change doctors and admins are gunned down Judges who allowed for bail and the person killed after bonding out are gunned down Regular killers and gang members are gunned down Police are gunned down Politicians on both sides are gunned down Mayors that didn't prioritize for natural disasters are gunned down Feel free to add to the list.
  - ang_cire 2mo ago
    Everyone makes decisions in life and lives with the consequences. Your question, as it's stated now, is simply "should we have free will?" I never made any statement about which actions should be legal. And the facile assertion that endorsing one action is either tantamount to, or requiring of, endorsement of any action that shares an arbitrary attribute you identify is sloppy argumentation; somehow I don't think you would argue that someone supporting police having the authority to use force means they are supporting every instance including illegal uses of force.
akagusu 2mo ago
Mangione is a murderer but that "innocent man" he killed was not innocent at all, he indeed was a murderer too. The only difference between then is they used different tools. No... Mangione murdered one, the other guy killed much more.
- baggy_trough 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - SketchySeaBeast 2mo ago
    > Do you think that there is some health care system in which all requests for care can be approved without limit? I'm not going to wade into the murder tag, but is this the actual incentive? The health care execs don't have enough money to save everyone so they pick who they can help strategically, making sure to help as many as possible, or is the system incentivized to instead maximize finding who can be denied so that the company makes the most money?
  - scottLobster 2mo ago
    If you think all denied claims are denied in good faith, I don't know what to do for you. The insurers are hardly running up against hard resource limits, where there just isn't enough to go around and they have to triage. They are profit driven entities, and if they were legally allowed to deny all claims they would be required to do so by their shareholders. No system is perfect, but patients shouldn't die to boost a stock price. And no patient should be required to fight for coverage at their most vulnerable.
    - baggy_trough 2mo ago
      [flagged]
      - scottLobster 2mo ago
        I was presenting an extreme hypothetical to a make a point that the insurers are motivated by selfishness. In the real world, not a hypothetical, your market driven approach ensures they approve the minimum necessary to prevent customers from leaving. They require patients to to fight them for coverage while they're undergoing cancer treatment, because a dead patient they didn't pay out for is more profitable. Paying for insurance in a for-profit marketplace isn't paying for health coverage, it's paying for a CHANCE at health coverage, and you better be willing and able to fight for that chance while you're undergoing cancer treatment/surgery, or be willing to go bankrupt, or not get the treatment and die. That's the choice the insurance marketplace presents to you. Not hyperbole, many such stories. My own father in law died in part because his private medicare advantage plan refused to approve in-patient rehab after a brain surgery that every MD working on him said he needed, but would have cost 6 figures out of pocket that nobody could front. The grim irony is he later tried to get out of bed to use the bathroom, couldn't support his own weight and suffered a skull fracture that resulted in a second brain surgery inside of a week, and that was fully covered. I'll take the bureaucrats. The real world shows they're simply better at this, and Ayn Rand is simply wrong.
kome 2mo ago
he didn't murder an innocent man.
NicuCalcea 2mo ago
A quarter of Americans (and 40% of young Americans) see Mangione favourably, so it definitely is a society thing. https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/51189-presidential-pardons-billionaires-and-luigi-mangione-december-15-17-2024-economistyougov-poll#:~:text=safe-,Luigi%20Mangione https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/51189-presidential-pardons...
- wonderwonder 2mo ago
  Be attractive Don't be unattractive
  - swed420 2mo ago
    Alternatively, if you're attractive (or any other useful trait), use it for public good.
  - red-iron-pine 2mo ago
    it's not because the US healthcare system is a gigantic trainwreck that prioritizes F100 companies over suffering people. nah. it's cuz the guy is hot. that's gotta be it. not how the main source of bankruptcy in the US is related to medical bills. it's cuz he's hot.
    - wonderwonder 2mo ago
      yes. You see anyone speaking approvingly of Thomas Crooks after he tried to kill Trump the left's most hated man? Not even a mention. He's not attractive so they dont care about him. Heck the media even digitally manipulated Alex Pretti to make him more attractive after he was killed by ICE so people would care.
- scottLobster 2mo ago
  The only reason in my mind to view Mangione unfavorably is that vigilante justice, however justified, does not result in a civilization anyone would want to live in. It's the same reason we can't just go around killing everyone in the Epstein files. It's not that they don't deserve it, it's that the resulting corrosion destroys the entire system, including the good parts. If Mangione had killed the UHC CEO by being his insurer and denying his claim for cancer treatment that his doctor said he needed, nobody would be saying anything.
whattheheckheck 2mo ago
Systematic over denial of claims is not murdering innocent children, women and men? "Its giving pearl clutching status quo defending cognative dissonance internal identity crisis having mook behavior" as the kids would say

dspillett 2mo ago

In some cases being told "just treat it like you are a manager", when we've always done our level best to avoid anything vaguely like management because we like doing things particularly the nitty gritty details.

JohnFen 2mo ago
So much this. I've spent my whole career avoiding being promoted into management because I don't want to be or enjoy being a manager. So it always amuses me when genAI advocates say things like "your job isn't going away, you're just going to be doing management" as if that is a good thing. To my ears, that reads as "you'll still be getting a paycheck, but your job is going to shitty."
- 9rx 2mo ago
  The last time a programmer wasn't a manager was when they were handed a piece of paper with toggle combinations and their job was to flip the toggle switches as detailed. AI doesn't seem to have much applicability in any other profession, other than maybe graphic arts, but the same holds true there. Artists are also always managers. So, what is this magical not-a-manager but also at risk of AI taking it away career? Are you sure it actually exists?
  - rhsjie294nd 2mo ago
    That's a weird way to put it. Yeah, everyone does a level of management for their own time and work projects. Still, the bulk of the work is in the details. Programmers talked a lot more about data structures and algorithms instead of keeping the LLM on track or sandboxed. How is it not different? We can play semantics on what it means to be a manager but the jobs as they were are going away
    - 9rx 2mo ago
      > That's a weird way to put it. How so? > Still, the bulk of the work is in the details. The bulk of the work is in describing the details of what you want to see happen to another entity, which is what managers do. Someone else, or something else (like a compiler), will carry out the actual work to see your idea become a reality. Are you under the impression that managers don't do anything or something? > We can play semantics on what it means to be a manager but the jobs as they were are going away Are they? It is becoming easier to pass a lot more information off to the worker bees, so conceivably you should be able to do more management now, but the general act of describing what you want to the worker bees to do and seeing them carry out the task is no different. The telephone also increased the capacity of a manager being able to relay information, so while there is still evolution happening, what we're seeing in increasing the information density isn't unprecedented. And, sure, maybe that will go away eventually. It is conceivable that AI can become the manager too, going off and coming up with its own ideas, plans, and delegating it all without any human intervention. But at that point you won't be a manager. Manager would be the very job on the chopping block. If you want to say that managing a computer isn't managing I'd accept that stance in general, but the whole basis behind the idea of "everyone will become managers" is entirely premised on the idea of everyone managing computers, so that angle doesn't work within the context of this discussion. You cannot make that claim here.

pc86 2mo ago

[flagged]

akagusu 2mo ago

Can I pick all? All options are good because they are all true. I think you can extend them.

brandonagr2 2mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
ang_cire 2mo ago
That's only okay if they're a politician or business exec, right? It's fine to hold those murderers up as role models, apparently.
Multicomp 2mo ago
I'm not happy they do it, but I'm not surprised. There's a lot of media echochambers where Luigi M is lionized and his heinous actions dismissed or celebrated because it advances a grievance/covetousness/envy political narrative, and for the same kind of people who have to be atheist to be fashionable tend to be the ones who can fall into workism as described in TFA and also have a non-trivial chance of falling into media spheres that want to drive that anti-healthcare-exec animus crowd.
- scottLobster 2mo ago
  Anyone who's lost a loved one over a denied claim can sympathize with Luigi even if they disapprove of his methods. Sounds like you haven't gone through that experience, but a lot of Americans have.

spicymaki 2mo ago

> Because our daily complicity ... Exactly this. We were (still are) complicit in our own destruction and worst yet when other courageous people spoke up we shout them down, hid away, laughed at their folly, or shunned them outright.

stego-tech 2mo ago

I mean, yeah. I got into IT because I loved working with technology, building communities and game servers and chatrooms and computers and the like. I got lucky that someone found me, my interest in these things, and showed me how it could be a career. Nowadays though, so much of my time isn’t spent building so much as debunking the latest grift, scam, or lie. It’s spent unfucking arbitrary vendor changes that didn’t fix any actual problems but created a slew of new ones. It’s bristling at the notion that SAML, SSO, and SCIM remain Enterprise options so that a fraction of players can have total control over identity, instead of letting customers and users build solutions that fit their needs. So much time spent talking, not doing, and almost always in service of making some rich old billionaire fuck that much richer while I struggle to buy a home. I got into this field because it brought disparate people together. People from all over the world, all walks of life, all backgrounds and belief systems and ideologies into a giant melting pot of community. Nowadays there’s so many corporate and nationally-erected fences that everyone is so carefully siloed into approved areas, and any attempts to cross imagined digital borders is viewed as suspect or criminal by default. The technology of today does not enable, or empower, or bring us closer together. By design, it keeps us apart, distanced, agitated at difference or unbalanced from change. The stuff that fucking works - Home Assistant, the Pi-Hole, my Docker containers - are what is good, and leaves me time to deal with shitty OS updates breaking familial devices, or “smart” appliances that get unprompted updates that break connectivity. We are miserable because those in charge of the direction of technology - the shareholders, the Boardrooms, the C-Suites, the VCs - all demand it be miserable and extractive, rather than empowering and liberating. For a lot of folks, AI was the final canary in the toxic coalmine. The realization that this is not a noble cause or profession anymore. That we’re not helping people do better, at least not en masse, but instead making life actively worse for disproportionately more folks than those whose lives we make better. And it’s a goddamn tragedy.

Terr_ 2mo ago
> The technology of today does not enable, or empower To say much the same things stuff a slightly different framing: The promise of "personal computers", and then the internet, making your own applications, etc. was that they would democratize and spread certain capabilities so that everyone could have their tool which accomplished their goals to make their life better. One might even call it owning your own "means of [digital] production", although that comes with some political baggage. The depressing parts come as that autonomy is violated, as your computer becomes not your computer, but something rented to you by a remote authoritarian who demands it executes a process that improves their lives rather than yours. In other words, I see it less as connecting groups of people than giving individuals agency--although that agency might be to create (and leave) groups.

Der_Einzige 2mo ago

[flagged]

ang_cire 2mo ago
I don't know where you got the idea my comment is about AI from.
- Der_Einzige 2mo ago
  "The Librarian" Oh didn't you realize that some people actually READ the books people reference here?
  - ang_cire 2mo ago
    The article isn't only about AI, and neither was my comment.

pc86 2mo ago

"Not brave enough" to shoot an innocent person in the back and then run away?

scottLobster 2mo ago
He murdered a guilty man, not an innocent one. Still murder, and murder is wrong, but let's not get things twisted
- pc86 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - scottLobster 2mo ago
    The moral crime of excessive claims denials that resulted in many needless death for no better reason than he wanted a to boost UHC's stock price to get a bigger bonus. He deserved death, but the manner in which that death is administered matters. Vigilante justice corrodes the very foundations of the justice system, if we allow it the end result will be far more dead innocent people than guilty ones. I don't want more innocents to die just to kill those who deserve it.
    - pc86 2mo ago
      [flagged]
      - scottLobster 2mo ago
        Where do you think all criminal codes come from? Are they mined out of the earth already written? It's a constantly evolving set of rules based on a society's collective moralities. There are many crimes today that did not exist 100 years ago and vice versa. Yes, there are crimes that should be punished that are not yet present in the criminal code, and you don't need to be a legal scholar to propose new ones. I think most people agree deriving financial profit by knowingly denying people necessary medical treatment is immoral.

salemh 2mo ago

[dead]

deleted 2mo ago

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ThrowawayR2 2mo ago

[flagged]

ang_cire 2mo ago
Is discussing offshoring that takes away American jobs and has driven much poverty in the heartland equally political and unacceptable, or is it just the political discussions you don't like having that shouldn't be allowed? The "no politics" rule is about not posting constant "x politician said this about tech" articles, not about banning all discussion of real-world consequences of the tech industry.
- throw-the-towel 2mo ago
  Even by your definition, HN is still full of off-topic politics these days.

scottLobster 2mo ago

As a mid-career software dev I'm just sick of most of my job being a highly paid technical janitor mopping a floor that never gets clean. I've had maybe 2-3 years combined where I actually got to build something I could be proud of, and made all the red tape worth it. The rest has been navigating/paying down other peoples' technical debt and being forced to add some of my own when there's no budget for maintenance and the band-aid becomes permanent. At the start of my career I wondered why anyone retired early when there was so much cool stuff to work on... now I get it. The cool stuff is the extreme minority of available work, and the odds of you getting to work on any of it are down to being in the right place at the right time. As for the rest of the job, I'd sooner step on a nail if it didn't come with the pay and benefits.

red-iron-pine 2mo ago
the term your looking for is "worker alienation"
fl4regun 2mo ago
never seen a better description than your janitor metaphor
- dataflow 2mo ago
  I actually can enjoy being the digital janitor, when I'm allowed to. What's frustrating is when things are dirty and they don't even let you clean.

BigTTYGothGF 2mo ago

> industry of tinkerers and designers At no point in history was it ever thus.

ang_cire 2mo ago
Yes and no. There were really 2 sides to the original 'tech' industry: military and consumer. The military side was always about profit, because it was just an extension of the already extant WW2 military industrial complex (and frankly, IBM falls here despite their mainframes being largely used in civilian businesses). But the consumer side that really grew out of universities into early gaming, internet, and consumer electronics tech, was very heavily driven by design and garage-start tinkerers. That's not to say no one wanted to make money, but it wasn't MBA-bro-driven back then.
- BigTTYGothGF 2mo ago
  > early gaming Gaming got very corporate very quickly. Atari sold itself to Warner in 1976. Magnavox was a defense contractor. I don't have to tell you about Fairchild or Mattel or the Connecticut Leather Company. On the arcade side, Bally, Midway, and Williams had been making pinball machines for decades. I'll grant you that there were a lot of "garage-start tinkerers" on the home-computer software side.

cucumber3732842 2mo ago

>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? And this is different than other industries how? Everything from electricity to the railroad to trucking to finance to environmentalism has had this arc from wild west to establishment.

ang_cire 2mo ago
I agree about what happened, but I think the timescale is different. Railroads were the tools of robber-barons even in the 1800s. Electricity was captured by the major electric companies before most millennials were born. Finance was a stodgy-suit-wearing-white-guy's game when my dad got into it in the 1970s. I knew that's what "finance jobs" meant back when I was a kid building fan pages on GeoCities. But GeoCities and Limewire and Napster and Gaia Online never led me to think that's were I'd end up if I worked in tech. If our boomer parents had warned us about crapitalism as kids, we might have seen it coming before we had already sunk decades into it as an interest and career path.
- mrguyorama 2mo ago
  >If our boomer parents had warned us about crapitalism as kids All of American society tried to warn boomers about this their whole lives, and they consciously rejected it in favor of a movie star who promised the economy would magically be amazing if only we didn't allow the government to have any say in how business works. "Hey, don't let industries conglomerate because they will do bad things to customers and in general it's pretty inefficient for the economy" was known when Railroads did it two hundred years ago. But that didn't stop Reagan insisting that letting businesses buy up all their competition would magically make prices fall, and it didn't stop the american public from consuming that bullshit with abandon. Like, I don't know what more you want. My social studies textbooks were pretty clear about the times we had to break up monopolies, why we had to do it, and how it had clear benefits.