What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
noemamag.com
noemamag.com
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.
I'm partial to what I call the "doomer effect". If you feel sad or disenfranchised you're just much more likely to spend time online talking. A person with a fulfilling social life and a job they feel satisfied with is going to spend time socializing with friends and working on their job. They may read online feeds, they may write very occasionally, but that will be the extent of most interactions. On the other hand the folks that feel the most negative tend to spend inordinate amounts of time online posting about how sad and angry they are.
In a real life conversation when a depressed friend gets on their soapbox most folks give the friend a subtle clue that it's time to move on. If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative. Nothing like this happens offline. If you're in a bad place, as long as a forum will have your posts you can post to your heart's content. And oh boy is it finally the time to let your hair down and tell everyone how f-ed everything is on the inside. Constantly.
This makes a flywheel. People who want to avoid negativity start avoiding negative online spaces. People who are fine with it or feel similarly keep reading. Eventually negativity becomes the default.
"Misery loves company" is much older than the Internet. There's no doubt to me that the net makes it that much worse.
There has always been that programmer who wanted to quit and run a restaurant, but tech world lost its original soul. We were making people’s lives better, now we are just creating more wealth gap. Majority of the industry is hostile, online communities are extremely hard to get into and very exclusive, if you are new you cannot get in. Majority of the content somewhere between bots, fake news, propaganda and rage bait. Almost all good things about tech and the internet were killed one by one.
Don’t get me wrong there are very exciting things from pure nerd perspective in this AI age but nothing is fulfilling as it used to.
Agreed.
From TFA: "This disillusionment is infectious."
I would suggest it is in part being spread by articles like this one. If you look at the press surrounding earlier advances, it was largely neutral to positive. Nowadays, as you note, it's doom stew everywhere, and the beacons of solace are pieces like this one driving home to anyone who's missed it how demoralized their peers are.
I live in the US and I’ve watched in real time every sad, terrible decision made by the current administration and every sad terrible decision by what’s supposed to be the opposition party. It all makes me want to scream.
And then I’m offline and my life carries on because none it has really affected my white privileged middle class tech worker butt.
It all feels wrong.
It feels to me like the change from:
- old: going downtown to the restaurants and shops of your small village to enjoy a relaxing evening.
- new: downtown is a crowded confusing mishmash of unregulated blaring music, over-the-top blinking flashing signs, intrusive people accosting you and dangerous thieves lurking everywhere. don't go.
there's no "regulated" that makes thing better for anyone, it just gets morphed into oppression of the vistors making them more vulnerable without fixing any problems.
[0]: For example, you can create pretty decent art on the wacom tablets, but that is such a niche use case. There are probably other use cases that are unrealized, because it might distract the precious users from their push notifications and doom-scrolling.
[1]: Which for the most part is _reactive_. It used to be that companies would invest in industrial design (or visual design) to make an aesthetically appealing product. The problem, is that this is very expensive, and difficult to repeat, because there is not exactly a science of aesthetics (nothing beyond philosophy of phenomenology and also some eastern philosophies). And so, companies use the only strategy that can scale: rage-bait, doomerism, etc. Somehow, I do not think that the executives and shareholders of these companies consume the same information diet (how many cigarette company shareholders and executives are chain smokers?). Maybe alignment requires that the people who sell a product are legally required to integrate it into their lifestyle (I wonder how many sex-toy-company executives and shareholders would abandon ship).
Oh my. You need to step up shepherding the algorithms that decide what to put in front of your eyes. If you reject content that contains angry, tired and sad people it stops showing up. And you are left with content by cool people, energetically and optimistically doing awesome things.
A reflection of human nature at scale?
I think a lot of this perception that everything is bad and everybody is sad is projection because people consume mass media which makes them feel doomed and hopeless so they continue to consume that sort of content and they project it on to everyone.
The world is much better than it has ever been.
I see.
You complain of astroturfing, but you seem unaware of things that you have come to believe because of it.
Why take the web seriously? It’s more fun to be some ridiculous person. Of course, some people are genuine and this kind of behavior chews them up when they take it seriously.
As far as the disillusionment sense, I think that’s an active selection bias. I think people (including me) like to feel angry and so we go out there looking for and finding people who will give us that. The key, for me, is to curate one’s feed. On HN, for instance, I usually block the majority of repetitive boring posters using a chrome extension. The majority of these people have very low context sensitivity which annoys me.
There are also abrasive people or generally sad people, both groups of which are safely blockable because they have a comment style where P(token|context) = P(token). There is no surfeit of humans on the Internet and no surfeit of interesting information. Almost all humans can be safely excluded from my feed and I can still get information.
By the way, I know you from your search engine. This might be an out there question but do you offer your search index as a downloadable structure? If so, how much does that cost?
No. And this shallow dismissal builds the mood you complained about.
I think you make a strong point here. I will add a note of hope.
In my opinion, besides the 'this too shall pass' nature of life meaning this outrage-focused moment, we on HN have hope here.
I've been a lurker for a while around here, IDK when this account was made and I don't care, I feel confident that I've been watching the great techies of our era and HN celebrities and dang and other mods presiding over it all for at least a decade.
It's probably my own media bubble bias, but I have noticed this trend where HN is discussing a given subject that the general public is not aware of, and it after years filters into the greater consciousness. I don't think HN is necessarily magically head of the curve, but I do think it concentrates where curious and possibly-open-minded people's thoughts are at, before internet-point-seeking/popularity echo chamber communities like Reddit/FB/Twitter or algorithm-driven hivemind homogenziers like YT/Reels/TikTok/Periscope all become aware of something.
HN saw the centralization of control with the SOPA/PIPA/encryption in public fight, that has been ongoing since the clipper chip and before, but in this modern form with end-users not needing PGP and friends and just getting to have e2ee with Signal, HN was talking about and using Signal for years before now our government figures and traditional + social media companies have talked about Signal.
Similarly, the broader privacy questions, turning off Google Location History was happening on HN (and XDA back when custom android ROMs were more popular) as soon as Google Reader was axed, people only now have learned to fear 'the internet' because of how many more egregious things have happened across all powerful web platforms.
And of course we can't ignore HN playing with cleverbot and that dall-e precursor who's name I forget, ML models and markov chains and tech beyond my ability to teach about, before OAI ever released a single product like ChatGPT.
HN still has heavyweights of each industry and titans of tech who pop by on occasion to grace us mere plebians, pushing back the Eternal September for just a few happy moments (looking at you BWK, Walter Bright, and other famous names I can't rattle off) to share with us what happened 'in the room'. Just the other day someone posted 'I was the guy who controlled the rollout for Apple MacOS X Snow Leopard, it was a bugfix only release no really' ... only on HN by the power of the internet do we get that, we don't get that on a TikTok. So HN has still got 'it' at least for now, and therefore I can make a broad observation.
If the HN being directionally appropriate even if getting particulars wrong is true, I'm seeing future trends that will lead us out of this populist/blackpill moment.
People will get emotionally overwhelmed/numbed to overwrought angry moments, they will want to move forward. Americans tend to be keen as a people, whatever the 'thing' is. 90s tech utopia optimism was a keen-thing. Support for or opposition to the Iraq War was a keen-thing, whatever we Americans do, we do with gusto.
So right now, we are all in on outraged doom/gloom/anxiety/this sux!! feelings.
I'm hopeful that perhaps we as a people go with a decision to move in what a figure from my current media bubble named Aaaron Renn says where there are New Constructivists, who are intellectuals on all sides of American political aisles looking to revitalize and create new institutions.
I'm fearful that we will have to fall down hard to learn our lessons first and/or learn the wrong lessons where we decide the fix to ennui is to blame 'those' people over there (whoever that happens to be). The fix to the fear and ennui won't come from us fighting with our families, community members, internet strangers, or political opponents, it will come from us choosing to change our media diets away from garbage in/garbage out (I Know, I know, you who read this and disagree with everything I say and my media diet sources want me to change my media diet, that may very well be true) that is focused on emotional inflammation (didn't we used to ban people from our forums for flaming?) instead of genuine debate and encouragement and online civility.
It's boring and its lame, but circling all the way back to the parent comment: the web used to be a homogenous unified place made up of professionals and nerds and group think. We need more diverse opinions than that, but what has happened is that the internet (and its mobile app/web/private chat mediums) has become a borderless place where people who never encounter each other have diametrically opposed views constantly, and so retreat into echochambers and don't get the media literacy experience needed to peacefully coexist with the rest of the online anglosphere without constant acrimony. Grifters feed the flames for likes/subscribes/patreon subs/etc.
The coalition-of-Molochs appears to be finding it much more profitable to make everyone want to kill themselves. (Not sure if that's a great long-term strategy, but they seem to have thought this through.)
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.
Compared to the potential obsolescence of 40% to 60% of the US workforce over the course of 10 - 20 years?
You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is, the plight of the printers is totally incomparable.
Question: What happens when you drive a car at 90 mph into a concrete wall?
Answer: Well, actually just this morning pulling into my parking spot, I bumped into the barrier beneath my tires. It was fine!
https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...
Which is an AI booster:
https://berggruen.org/projects/ai-visionaries
You cannot read these articles posing as human interest without following the money.
It seems to me these changes are much more daunting if you live in a country where no job means no health insurance, and where the pay gap between skilled and unskilled work is huge. That makes an existential question about work into a very material one.
If instead we stick our head in the sand and ignore the human cost so that we can temporarily enjoy maximum technological progress AND maximum wealth accumulation for shareholders, as we have been doing for the better part of a century, things will slowly break down and eventually collapse when the pace of change accelerates to the point that enough people simply can’t keep up, have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much.
Btw, from the author page:
> Aaron Horwath is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company where he is focused on implementing AI in a way that supports both humans and business.
There probably is some strong bias and conflict of interest in this article. I didn’t see any line saying “btw, just so you know, my paycheque is strongly bound to me pushing AI adoption in the workplace for a living (hence exacerbating all the issues i write about)”.
The irony is not lost on me on all those years where people were advised to "just learn to code, bro" in order to escape the personally threatening situation of obsolete jobs. Well, now people feel it's our turn so, "just learn to _something_ dudes"?
This is all, assuming of course, that the end is nigh and our profession really is close to extinction. I personally don't buy it, but if it is, so be it.
On one hand, you could see how it was rewriting shipping, then manufacturing, globalization, etc.
they touched on how the unions handled things, how real estate near waterways was changed (manufacturing and warehousing), and more
But on the other hand you could see how obvious it was the changes were going to happen.
In all seriousness, our jobs are almost certainly going the way of AI coding things, the same way we sorta took over a bunch of unskilled women who merely punched a bunch of cards and ran punched cards through a machine to do basic calculations before computing became something else too.
Before digital and electronic switching systems, you most likely didn't get work in a telephone central office unless you were more of a mechanic than a programmer.
I am more worried about the fact there is nothing "next" to "strive for" or do than about the status of someone that knew the ins and outs of wax sublimation printing (though it is a cool thing).
A bricklayer can be excellent at his job. He can work hard to become so (to paraphrase Inigo Mendoya). He should pride himself on this excellence, but it is unlikely he will think he was put on this earth to be a bricklayer. The despair of the the unemployed skilled laborer is that losing his livelihood imperils the things he does value, family and the ability to provide for them.
In a culture where the highest goods are production so you can feed the appropriate level of hedonic consumption, and without any transcendent meaning its a rough go.
I find this comparison to printers arbitrary, precious, and specious. Aren’t the armies of software engineers in tech more akin to the line-level autoworkers than artisans? The numbers would certainly suggest so. But it’s also silly to pretend such a new profession is anything akin to a generations-old trade. But maybe those tradesmen aren’t such victims either in this context? How privileged to be able to pass your profession down to the next generation! No one in my family has had that since farming, when only the oldest benefited.
They weren't too big to fail.
Support that AI is now threatening.
I increasingly believe that if we really do want to keep moving forward faster and faster, we will be forced to take one of two paths:
(1) Some kind of socialism with a much bigger social safety net, probably basic income, retraining, and universal health coverage.
(2) Absolute totalitarian surveillance state with drones and cameras everywhere and an iron-fist police force to suppress the constant threat of violent revolt as millions upon millions of people constantly lose their careers. This looks like dark cyberpunk, basically, and it's even kind of miserable for those at the very top. You can be rich and powerful, sure, but if you get on the wrong side of it you will be crushed. Look at what happens to oligarchs in Russia.
The path to (2) is unfortunately an idea that was just, even noble in the past: the puritan work ethic and its corollaries. It's a great idea when you have a society that doesn't change much where a person can pick a vocation and make a living. It doesn't work in a society that reinvents itself completely every 10-20 years, rendering entire employment verticals totally obsolete.
I think we've been able to ignore it until now. The change was still slow enough to tolerate.
AI is the end of that. It's going to be the end of stable careers.
Edit: I can think of a third option:
(3) Tax anything that is labor-replacing for a period of time equal to the time it usually takes people to retrain. e.g. AI would be taxed for the next 10-20 years in this scenario with the tax rate decreasing each year.
I greatly prefer (1) since the third option is likely to just freeze progress.
So what happens is that the capital class absorbs the capital of all those workers and then they all starve. How uplifting.
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.
Every time I told anyone that I personally didn’t like working from home, and was excited about the return to office that would inevitably come, I got SHOUTED at. Absolutely flayed for not being 110% in support of this thing that made their lives worth living or whatever.
When it first happened I thought it was a weird interpersonal conflict situation. Maybe I had broached it wrong. But it kept happening! So many people were so upset when megacorp said they had to return or find other employment.
But I’m an extrovert and working from home was suffocating.
This part is strange to me. I've worked from home for about 10 years and I've never once had an issue with twice-daily showering, meeting people face-to-face, going out for coffee, going outdoors, going to the gym, etc. The fact I can just go sit in a park, on a hiking trail, or whatever and work there is a genuine "killer app" for me. I'm surprised at people who tell me that they are isolated by home work when there are so many opportunities for social and natural connection everywhere...
It's a miserable grind. Routine includes alarm, after a poor night of sleep, getting ready, commuting in, loud, bright offices where while you enjoy the convivial nature of joking and commiserating with colleagues, it's so distracting and noisy and visually distracting that you can't be productive technically.
Next you go home at 6, 630, sleepy, go to the gym or do your shopping, home, sleep, rinse repeat.
Suddenly six months has gone by. Then a year.
I cannot sympathize with the work from home complainers. You folks are like people who came across a lot of money, retired early and are depressed due to boredom.
If WFH is misery, is it possible it's the town you live in that's causing the misery?
It is hard to keep caring about something where you see repeated patterns of behaviour and failure.
Getting closer to retirement has been a very interesting experience. Turning 50 was very stressful for me. A deep feeling of - I've only got so many rolls of the dice left. Am I in a secure position financially? I've mostly been involved in startups and small companies and wondered if I'd made terrible mistakes in my career. Why wasn't I set for life when so many others had "made it"?
Not everyone is going to get lucky and retire early - it's not a given that this will happen.
I have friends who have run successful startups and are now free to do whatever they want. And I had opportunities to join them at the beginning - I would also now be very wealthy. Equally, I have other friends just like me who have also run and joined startups and completely failed.
I absolutely love the flexibility working from home gives me - but I have a strong group of people around me to meet for coffee and live in a central location in a good city so I'm not isolated at all. But I can really relate to people who don't have that and don't have support around them.
AI is unlocking all sorts of exciting things - there are projects that I've long had on the back burner that are now unlocked. It is going to radically reshape our industry.
This reshaping is tough. What made me good at my job may not necessarily be useful. Deep focussed work delivering highly technical work - maybe that's not needed now.
I'm not sure I want to work until I'm very old. I've got my financial plan that puts me on a trajectory of being able to retire in a couple of years compfortably.
It's worth modelling this. Knowing your position is a real help. Just being able to look at something and say "I'm going to be ok - I can stop in X years if needed". Or even - "I can stop now and it wouldn't be a disaster".
And if the modelling says - you need X more years - at least you know.
For cowork you don’t often have to commute as much (more options around), can arrive late, don’t have to dress to nice. For some you can still change your homebase at least for few months temporarily.
But you can still have physical coworkers (even if you don’t work with them), have chitchat not relate to work, go to lunch together. You can also have routine and separate your professional life from personal one.
This isn’t a disagreement or a hook into some discourse or anything. I don’t have a point. Just thoughts
You will eventually get tired of it, homesick, want to settle down somewhere, but it is a tremendously good brain refresher.
Check my bookcase and you'll find ~60 thick books all about programming languages and frameworks. I've learned something like 9 languages at a professional level, and I've worked up and down the stack all the way from bare metal firmware, to mobile, to web, and server.
AI has gutted my passion for software development. It seems people in this industy can be loosely bucketed as follows:
* Went into software because you love writing code to solve problems, where the actual design and writing of said code is as important as the outcome.
* Went into software purely for the outcome, love building things, don't care how it gets built.
At the end of the day I'm a craftsman. I became passionate ~20 years ago about the design and architecture of software, and it fueled a beautiful career. Now, what?
I've spent the last year just throwing prompts at claude and seeing how well it does. Despite having built more in the last year than would have ever been possible before, I feel empty. The outcomes work, they work well, but I didn't write the code. I explained some high level directives to claude, maybe jumped in here or there with a technical angle to fix something when claude got stock... but by and large... the skills I've built over the last 20 years don't really apply anymore.
Yea, I'm not honestly not sure what is going to happen. Your comment about dreaming to be homeless really resonated with me. I either need to find a joy in this AI coding, or I don't know what will happen with me.
My Mom once said something to me as a kid that resonated deeply, even then. Human beings' most valuable skill is adaptation. If you cannot adapt, you will die. As long as I can enjoy this fight, this life, this grind, this mystery... then I will make it my priority to adapt and to reframe my thoughts such that joy is possible again.
It doesn't have to be the end if I don't want it to be. The world will always change, it's on me to change with it.
Literally the world’s easiest ambition to achieve.
Not if current leadership has any say in it (and they do). I'm never really one who thinks "this generation is screwed" in the same way people go "kids these days". But I still use such sentiment. Because the generations before us did the exact opposite of leaving a seed for a tree they will never sit under. They are in fact trying to burn the forest down and kids will inherit the fire.
The kids will adjust, once the adults strop strangling them. Which at this point will probably need nature to work its course.
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.
I know it is my own fault for neglecting my health and relationships, but I can't help but feel this career makes the most important things more difficult.
Yeah it did. The environments became a lot more toxic and the decisions became a lot more stupid.
I also miss working with people who actually cared about the craft. They exist on the IC level but they're burned out and on the executive level it's mostly just insecure morons these days.
Meanwhile, I had taught myself coding the hard way without the internet or proper reference materials or community, by trial-and-error in front of a debugger/profiler/disassembler in the mid 80's - late 90's. Apparently, that holds no economic value now because all that matters is # of PRs, tokenmaxxing, and "impact" like savings and features. But really, the deal breaker for me is the brazen and/or clueless evil aims of the ownership class such that working for them enables rather than reduces societal harm. Thus, tech isn't for me. Also, the number and distribution of cool, decent, clever people has been driven out of both the startup scene and the megacorp scene; maybe there's better hope in obscure SMBs or nonprofits.
I'd say I'm in tech for tech. Everything changed, the social contract was defiled. The gold rush was always temporary, but the act of "getting a job in tech" (which was already an excessive process) became a wild goose chase itself. I can't even just hope for a boring bank job making 90k anymore (which was always told as my reassurance "if all else fails). We're just in a broken system, now.
My goals aren't derailed, but my career sure was.
Management is quite happy with the resulting output, and I'm fine with matching their energy. I can do things that I care about on my own time.
I got into computer science because the problems in physics were either already solved or couldn't be solved without trillions of dollars invested in new accelerators.
From my point of view the tech side of things is a gig I did on the side to pay the bills. LLMs are amazing and useful. Even Knuth thinks so: https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf
Now instead of spending weeks on side quests I can just burn some money and get either a counter example or proof without sinking hours/days/weeks into it.
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".
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
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.
They also have this to say about AI:
>Computer tools, including artificial intelligence (AI), are making the work of translators and localization specialists more efficient. However, many of these jobs cannot be entirely automated because computers cannot yet produce work comparable to what human translators do in most cases.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/interpreters...
Might we ask how large your sheep farm is, by current commercial (vs. hobby) standards?
Amd that sentiment is hardly surprising, coming as it does from a Director of AI Operations (his title on LinkedIn).
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.
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.
Cleaning up the slop from a faceless machine is just... not something I want to do. And even if you do get it done, the sense of satisfaction at the end is reduced.
I think the only way I can be truly "productive" with AI is to drop my bar for quality. For some cases that's easy (e.g. run-once-and-throw-away scripts), but for everything else I just can't do it.
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
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.
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.
Too inward for what?
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.
Yet.
I worked with clueless managers leading whole dev teams to burnout because they read a book and apply it verbatim, without understanding anything about it.
In a team full of great "hacker-types", a new project manager arrives and in one of the first meetings says "You know you are all very intelligent, you don't need to prove it all the time".
We delivered ahead of schedule, having a lot of fun, and all coders agree that he was the reason for it.
I "managed" a 2 person team where the "just-in-for-money" dev was reliably churning out one API endpoint after the other one. He loved it, because it was repetitive boring work. The codebase was really consistent, no extra patterns, all code he wrote was really easy to read.
The other dev, "hacker-type", in 40 hours of work across 3 days, writes a beautiful, perfect plugin system, i was hoping for a prototype in 2 weeks. Of course, he loved it. At the same time, I gave him a "boring endpoint" once, he proposed a "solution" to a "problem" that was never there, his brain needed to over-engineer the problem until it was fun.
I agree with the sentiment of what you wrote: if your job is your passion, a new tech innovation like AI feels exciting rather than scary.
But i don't see staying up until morning as a requirement for being a good coder.
As a "hacker-type", my early growth ladder towards being professional in a business environment included a few steps about finding work "less fun".
I feel like the rabid flamewars of the bygone era were as nothing compare to what's going on online now.
Something in that sentence reminded me of the following Jobs' quote:
"Many companies forget what it means to make great products. After initial success, sales and marketing people take over and the product people eventually make their way out."
Capitalism suddenly gets gamed to the point where the quality isn't rewarded. I'm not just talking about software, but also hardware. There's a reason why planned obsolescence is a thing. In a way, software bloat is unplanned obsolescence.
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.
Would be nice if people could keep their noise levels down in general.
I was in the doctor's office and a person was on the phone talking in the waiting room. I thought it was weird. But then I thought "if a person was sitting in the seat next to them and they were talking, would that be weird?"
I don't think we'd see two people talking as being weird. Why is it weird if someone is by themself speaking to someone that isn't around on the phone? If two people can speak in that place, it's not weird for someone to have a phone discussion.
Now playing music speakers or watching TikTok videos on your phone in a public place...psychotic!
On a recent plane ride some old guys were watching movies on their phones on full volume. I complained and they stopped, but another guy in another row started doing it again. It gets tiring.
Last week I was on a NYC subway train to JFK Airport and there was a guy blasting some loud hip-hop/trap and a small kid playing some loud game, totally oblivious to the people on the train. After they left some older guy stepped in talking on full speaker to someone for 10 minutes.
It was quite crazy tbh, and I guess people here have already given up and start accepting it since it is tiring to police somebody new every 5 minutes and could also end in violence.
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.
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.
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.
For the older folk, it does seem like they gave up but also refuse to cede poewr. They lived their full careers and are comfy in retirement on assets. They are just enjoying the rest of life and have no regards for the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Scholar
https://andrewmbailey.com/papers/Higher-order%20truths%20abo...
"Bullshit Jobs"
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".
Are you allowed to use the word "union" on this website?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All options are good because they are all true.
I think you can extend them.
At no point in history was it ever thus.
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.
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.
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!
[1] https://deanclatworthy.com/2026/02/09/the-joy-of-programming...
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.
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
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.
Things people say they want to and then don’t do is the dictionary definition of fantastical daydreams.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Really, noemamag?
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_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRW...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The pleasure...
This is a universal concept across the Internet.
If you’re on your phone all day doom scrolling you’ll only encounter sad people.
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Everyone I know fully dependent on corpotch seems pretty sad though. I frequently suggest that they stop. It has not worked.
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.
the theory is not without flaws but it seems relevant to the topic and conversation
In 1923 there were 863,000 coal miners in the US. There are less than 45,000 today.
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.
Noemamag is a propaganda rag for Berggruen.
(I'm well paid, just wished I could work less. But well paid part time is harder to come by)
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.
> 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.
Seen that happen once before.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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/. 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.
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.
I'm pretty neutral. I was pretty neutral before too.
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.
I'm really not sure what the big deal is?
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.”
I really enjoyed reading this article. Thank you for sharing.
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)
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!
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.
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.
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.