Comment by akst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akst | Hacker News Reader

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During the transitionary period between WW2 and 2000 we saw massive unemployment in many typical blue collar jobs in the western developed world, yet women weren't impacted to the same degree, why is that?

Is it because women through out the 1960s-2000s had a seat at the table, which men didn't?

Obviously not, they often faced workplace discrimination and their choice of job was limited to what was socially acceptable for a woman to work in and often those were jobs men weren't interested in the 1940-1960s, but they were working in what we now call the service industry and they didn't experience the displacement which came with global trade at the same rate men did.

> Capital/labor in strict sense, sure, but there is also material support, or a “seat at the table”. A decision maker (in service to Capital).

This just is not an informative framing here for why software engineers are more impacted than doctors

> The division is power—-be it Capital or knowledge or labor.

This simply isn't informative, the blog post is clearly focusing on a definite industry and your fixating on a general class (which the impacts are not being felt equally across).

Your argument about gender inequality is hand wavy and unsubstantiated. But I'm not an economist, so maybe you can torture 60 years of cultural, economic and social change into a counterpoint to the last 40 years of software engineering employment facing massive change in less than 10 years--if we had the time and the inclination (a PHD in economics?).

Ideologically, I'm speaking from personal experience. When your career is disrupted by technology, power is the first thing to go. You don't have any of it, and nothing you can do will bring it back. You have to bust a move, pivot, or something.

But don't take my word for it, Cory Doctorow has wrote a book and is on a lecture tour about it. He's not an economist, but does distill the complexity of modern culture and technology into compelling stories. A bit like Mark Twain.

"All this means that blue collar workers are the pioneering early adopters of the bossware that will shortly be tormenting their white-collar colleagues elsewhere in the business." (https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-03-13...)

He's also used his experience as a writer supporting the Hollywood writers strike to comment directly about software engineers. Not long ago engineers had massive power in the workforce. Their labor cost was like a 10x for their employers revenue. But SWE failed to use that power for collective organization when they had that power, and now it's too late. Though, the best time to organize was 10 years ago. The second best time is now.

My point was that there isn’t some kind of universal generalised way of explaining for these things like economic class, some jobs are just less resilient to certain kinds of change.

It has more to do with the demand for the specific skills. Jobs in Western countries had more demand for workers in the service industry, but had less demand for labourers, as globalisation took place. And here we have less demand for software engineer labour because an alternative is available here to an otherwise expensive hire.

We all speak from experience, I’ve had shitty bosses and had shitty workplaces. By all means we should validate the shit people go through, but it doesn’t provide an explanation of the underlying forces

Everything is “supply and demand”. Tell that to a SWE who lost their job. You lost your job because a natural law of economics. (And you can’t fight city hall.)

My suggestion of power at the table is not an “explanation” as you say. I don’t care about tidy explanations. I care about agency. I care about models of relationships that you can grasp and strategize your way back to a “place at the table”.

And the first step is to realize why anyone gives you power and responsibility in the first place.

In the first instance it’s not personal, it’s just business (and not economics).

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