How to join the strike: You simplify inform your employer that you are going on strike. Feel free to send them a link to this thread. Inform them how you feel about your specific situation.
There is no need to debate whether you can do this or not. If enough of us do this, it will work.
I understand your frustrations, but you can't strike without a union. The power of a strike is all (or most) of the workers stop working at once in a coordinated manner, causing severe impact on the business.
What you're planning and asking people to do (small number of random people here and there temporarily stopping work) is just ineffectual venting.
You need to put your efforts into unionization. You're not going to accomplish anything by yourself without organization.
The best time to start a union is 20 years ago, the second best time is now.
src: former IBEW 520 (datacenter sparkie #AMA)
I have no first-hand experience with unions, but wouldn't that be a vitally important coordinating function? The workers have issues with the employer, come to a collective decision to strike (or not), and then collectively implement the plan.
It's not good for workers to act in an uncoordinated and impulsive fashion.
I never once saw an on-site steward.
Leaving 520 after the 2.5%->4.5% "dues" increase was among many pyrrhic victories (it was to cover aging healthcare expenditures, which is now making more sense these years later).
Eventually Unions will need sub-unions, separate from their own current LU-management – if only to keep the actual workers working.
This just sounds like replacing working for one large corporation with working for two large corporations.
Instead, each LU "territory" is made up of several large corporations (the electric contractors). Some employ sub-contractors, often. You can even be a worker for "contracted shops" without even being a union member, which opts-out paying "dues" – Francis-Bacon IIRC?
Hating to quote R+M so casually, but "it [all] just sounds like slavery, with extra steps..." as each sub-universe slowly begins to realize Their Realities.
Even if that's the case, one is at least one is technically accountable to you.
I mean, I suppose you could simply a trial by getting rid of the defense attorney (instead of having two lawyers, you just have one), but I don't think any defendant would think that was a good idea. You'd get really efficient "justice" though, like in China.
Personally, I'm extremely opposed to letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Though it seems like the union he was in could use more direct democracy or something. Having something like an "on-site steward" seems like it would be really challenging for electrical work, where I'd imagine you'd be moving from job-site to job-site frequently.
A major problem in Unions is that cronyism is even good'ole'boy'er than the general US population's. My only touting of "join a union" is for would-be apprentices to "learn the ropes" about construction. Get paid to learn; retire elsewhere... [†]
They no longer allow this (at least not in 520), but I soon realized the best "life balance approach" to being IBEW was: enter in their non-traditional student pathway (i.e: olderfolk, CW/CE) and then never progress beyond 90%er [•] – to me, the extra 10% pay wasn't worth all the headache of working with management to coordinate jobsite goals. Many "ninety-percenters" remain, grandfathered (but slowly retiring).
[†] LU520's payscale isn't among "the best;" if you're in an area where your ticket-out is $70+/hr, then retiring IBEW probably makes sense...
[•] with Mad Respect for my boy Johnboy; hope you're retired by now!
It's harder to "do nothing" than you might think. We'd make 10-manhour projects take 10 days. Ten grueling days of do-nothing, but we were physically there, present on our assigned job-sites. Eventually "the hall"-'ll listen, but it can sometimes take awhile...
----
I don't have a better solution. I went "independent" with my own shingle, which has its own (different PITA) problems. Grass-is-greener.
Most HN readers would do better, blue collar, in a commercial environment (IMHO); residential is too knit-picky, individual homeowners too personally-invested. Union is a great way to start your blue collar adventure, getting paid to learn and fuck up (which you will).
If there is a legal way to lower employment costs (via outsourcing, AI usage, ...) eventually it will happen, as the market will reward companies that will take the option. I know this is not the current meta, but without regulation, things will keep moving in the same direction; unionizing might help in the short term for better buyouts etc. (of course) but if a transformative technology comes out that significantly changes the amount of labor you need to achieve the same result (and it does feel AI is one of those), eventually that technology will permeate the market.
Tech scene can’t even muster enough collective consensus to slow a „this is potentially dangerous“ scenario let alone a vague eroding of humanity.
Still I’m all for people’s right to strike for whatever reason they like
The window for the gunslinging no-AI coder sitting in the basement with Mountain Dew and cranking out thousands of lines a day is essentially closed now.
My previous superstar 10x engineers are now superstar 50x engineers thanks to AI-enhanced output. All metrics are up. There's also no negative effects either, in fact incidents and faults have declined.
This position is the equivalent of the delivery driver in the early 1900s who refused to get an automobile and instead insisted his horse and cart is better.
Know that if you oppose a productivity tool that transforms every other engineer, you will be managed out. I've seen it happen more than once already.
This is clearly about distributing the fruits of productivity evenly, whether they come from AI or any other way.
If you work for a salary and aren't a billionaire, I hope you will introspect why you assumed that your fellow working class human being was against productivity - we are on the same team my friend. If you aren't, well, I got nothing to say to you.
The rest is basic hard truth, but I really hope that the "quantity of output" rationale withers. AI's core value for programming is in input tokens, not output tokens.
And while I do expect progress to eventually slow, there's no reason to yet think we're at the plateau point or necessarily even especially close, so they're probably only going to get better. But at this point, even if they didn't I'd still be saying this. 'Programming' with an LLM is a loathsome and unpleasant task, but that's because it's no longer programming but instead an entirely different design-centric domain where it's handy to have some programming knowledge to nudge it in the right direction sometimes.
I think human programmers are going to go the way of human computers. [1] And I'm obligated to link to that because now most people probably no longer even know such an occupation existed, even though it rather obviously must have if you think about the past for a moment.
This is because these models act as a productivity enhancer for engineers. A 1x engineer becomes 5x. A 10x becomes 50x. And so on.
Slop is a risk that can be mitigated through team policy, skills and other mechanisms. Nothing we produce is slop, in fact incidents are down dramatically. It's more stable than ever.
Nobody is measuring LOCs. They're up, but that's barely relevant to me. I'd rather measure defect rate, rollback rate, sprint velocity, roadmap adherence etc. Those measure actual progress.
I don't use LOCs as a reason to manage people out. But if they're vehemently refusing to even try AI, other metrics will make it obvious that they're falling behind.
Kindly enumerate the metrics.
"All metrics is up" is a message The Communist Party approves wholeheartedly. 5 year plan delivered in 1 year, give this comrade a medal! anyone?
PRs merged and reviewed is a bit of a joke :)
So you could definitely be the first to explain to me why AI is the only "tool" that gets forced on developers from the top down with threats like this.
In my experience, developers have to beg management to get productivity enhancing tools like linters, version control systems, editors and IDEs approved for use. AI is the rare reversal where the decision to use it is often made by non-technical C-suite members and pushed downwards, often with the implicit or explicit threat of job loss, like you are making now. But if the productivity gains are so obvious it turns 10x engineers into 50x, why is that necessary, and why do you need to look at anything other than the quantity of a developer's output to know if they're using it?
Oh, deer hunting season... when half my team is already on v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike.
I'm already taking the next week for v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike... and two weeks in December too!
And what's more... I'm getting paid for this v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike.
I haven't put the requests in properly - I should do that. I still have 252 hours of v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike time that I need to use in the next two months (or move to other places... some carry over to next year, some moved to the sabbatical time account).
Some of the "you have how much vacation?" is because I am part of a union. Though I'll note that the union also has a "no strike" clause that would prevent me from actually participating in an unauthorized strike (such as this one).
The software that I work on is the boring "line of business" type things for keeping the internals of the organization moving smoothly. No advertising, no dark patterns, no social media (unless you count the internal department message board).
Random techies taking a week (or more) of PTO in November is expected and entire teams moving to a skeleton crew for periods of time in November is something that is already planned for. This is even less impactful if it's scattered across companies.
While my workplace sounds like your ideal, I probably make 1/3 to 1/4 of what my peers do (if I had stayed in working at a company where tech is the revenue generating faucet). Many people have baulked when they see the pay range for the position and the corresponding impact that that would have on their lifestyle.
If you want to protest these things at your employer, start a union at your employer. Here are the steps: https://www.nlrb.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/pages/n...
Having grown up somewhere where about half the school teachers took the week off for deer hunting, I'm pleasantly surprised that there exist places where this might still be the case even for tech workers. Would I be guessing right that you are describing somewhere in Wisconsin?
But here, I’m not optimistic - I’ve never seen another industry where workers have so little class consciousness. Tech workers think they’re very special and they’re so self important, it’s painful. It would be a huge job to get them together to fight for their common interests.
As a software engineer myself, I agree it's painful. So many supposedly-smart people have been so unthoughtful about their own positions and so easily deceived by propaganda (e.g. libertarianism). Now we're all in a much weaker position due to our collective lack of preparation.
And it's not like this was rocket science. You could see it coming from a mile away. Industrial offshoring that lead huge economic disruptions for manufacturing workers (made painfully obvious by Trump's election). Similar offshoring increasingly affecting the technology industry. Then generative AI popped in 2022, and you still have all kinds of software engineers parroting their bosses' talking points.
LLMs should actually be the level to oppose such things allowing for rapid reverse engineering of closed systems and custom bespoke software, but it's all dependent on "cloud" architecture, and OpenAI/Anthropic could ban you at any time for any reason. Independent models like Kimi 3 and GLM-5 should hedge that situation, but compute hardware required to run such models (e.g. 4x DGX units) use to sell for <$20k, but have now been pushed to nearly $40k. Enthusiasts can no long affordably buy the hardware that was so prevalent that made the modern compute era possible.
I feel your frustration with your "strike" which is an unplanned vacation. It's won't amount to much and hopefully you won't lose your job. Organizing anything at scale will be impossible, because every large at-scale protest you see is organized by the state or massive private interests. They're all psychological operations, yes even the famous 9 minute clip. When you really dig into all of it, the vast majority of people in this world are in the global control net of the new technocratic religion, and they believe everything they see from a major news site on social media, Google or the TV screen.
Where is everyone going next?
The interface is also worse. I preferred old.reddit.com. Hackernews has this weird "you post too much" limitation, which is so annoying.
Reddit meanwhile killed old.reddit.com anyway; logging in defeats the point of using reddit. Things always get worse - and never seem to get better.
R/popular used to be an interesting place to discover new forums. But now it’s just a handful of subReddits showing up again and again - Reddit is just a pigpen, with the same mud slinging by the same pigs.
The recent login-required (to use old-reddit) is stupid [0].
For now, just use this tip: `www.reddit.com/r/RedditYouWant+RandomCharactersHere`
and then your UI will be similar when browsing. Be sure to replace "RandomCharactersHere" with something obscure, or else /r/RedditYouWant will overflow with undesired content.
e.g: <http://www.reddit.com/r/PCMasterrace+fuckUspez123>
e.g: <http://www.reddit.com/r/PCMasterrace+PCBuild> (does not require login, yet)
[0] I go back to the SA>Digg>Reddit transitions, with my oldest (abandoned) /r/account [1] dating to 2007. #Return2RSS
[1] Hey /r/Admin(s): yeah, it's me, Rita... howdy you fatcat bayarea phucks
> start alternative better businesses or work for them
> encourage work reforms in society like remote work / 4 day work weeks
> write in
Share with your friends.
Imagine for a moment star trek like society where one needs not toil for corpos to have their basic needs met. In such a scenario is better LLM good or bad? Would you fight to go back to cubicle then?
I posit we should not scrutinize technological progress itself or try to resist it's adoption, but rather look at people who shape the policies around it and how our society is structured, which is politicians and to larger extent us who live in democracies around election time.
In fact, I believe we should accelerate AI adoption in order to emphasise the impacts of the disruption and shortcomings of current societal structures and norms thus shortening the Unstable Era ushering a new AI driven heaven on earth...
... or we all just get marched into the recycling vats, it's a coin toss at this point I guess...
I’ve been saying we need a general strike for a long time and I’m hoping it will happen
What am I going on strike for? I've just had enough of a lot of different factors which have, over the last decade or so, completely eroded all humanity and "good" from tech. This is not just about AI. AI is a symptom, not a cause. The cause goes way back. It started with being hostile to the users of software, then to non-users by alienating them from society, and now to those who build software (regardless of whether you write code or not).
What was the point of software? What was the point of building industry, companies, and jobs around software?
It was to empower people. And it HAS empowered people. Software is likely one of the most accessible and cheapest form of relatively advanced technology made available to such a large number of people. What you can do with software today, specially connected to the internet, is pure magic made cheaply accessible to a majority of the world's population. Search, navigation, live communication, live streaming, e-commerce, fintech, health advice are all magic.
The resources you need to build this magic and to use this magic is not very dissimilar. The machine used to develop software is basically the same machine used to utilize that software. This is an engineer's dream.
We envisioned a utopia which would lead to everyone having equal access to information, communication, market access, and general prosperity. I want to emphasize that this is not specific to those who write code. Anyone who could understand the concept of what software can do and had good intentions at heart was part of this.
And then came the greedy grifters. They invested money not just to get returns (they could've gotten returns on any other established field of business), but to gamble for a chance of crazy high returns. They thought software has near-zero marginal cost. They started building walled gardens, to extract rent from users. Build insane profits on that near-zero initial cost.
Then they realized you need to maintain software, specially if you didn't do it well the first time to rush to market (out of greed, to crush any competition). The costs started to rise up. There was still plenty of profit, just not enough to satisfy their greed. So the advertisement business grew, and with it came the largest assault on the privacy of the general public ever.
Advertising essentially took over software. Nearly all software now was being built in the service of getting attention to advertisements in one way or another.
Then they realized they could use this game politics itself. And they did, successfully. And made even more insane amounts of money in the process.
And then they realized they don't want to pay the workers anymore who support the software. So they turned against the workers.
During all this, the general public has lost control of their lives. They need a locked down always online machine tracking their location, health etc. to access their own money, messages, pictures, etc.
The workers building this are forced to rent expensive small apartments near their office, and/or commute regularly, to then video call with other workers, diminishing the utility of the very software they have built, to then further diminish the utility of other software. In a game of pure madness designed to steal everything from the poor and give it to the powerful.
I've had enough.
Fuck their greed. Fuck their pathological necessity to control us.
I'm going on strike. My specific demands from strike may be different from yours depending on your location, your habits, your company, your specific role, etc. But our goals are the same. We want humanity back in software. We want goodness back in software. We want software to finds its way back to empowering the general public, not serve as a resource extraction machine for the rich and powerful.
1. Stop forcing us to write user hostile software. We do not want to lock down software to extract more rent from our users.
2. Stop forcing us to force addictive algorithms. We do not want to force anti-social hate mongering adware junk on people.
3. Stop forcing workers to commute unnecessarily. Not twice a week or once a week or 11.33% of the week. Just no. Let individuals/teams decide how they want to work. If their performance is bad, you already have performance management tools for fixing that.
4. Stop all forms of unnecessary micro-management. The specifics for this depend on your company/role.
5. Stop forcing us to peddle slop. We do not want to shove AI generated bullshit in the face of our users.
6. Stop firing our human customer service staff colleagues to replace them with AI agents. It's one thing to let AI front some of the repetitive work. But AI can't replace a dedicated human who cares about helping the customer.
7. Stop forcing us to deal with slop ourselves. If the software is shit, we need time to fix it. Your deadlines can't go beyond the limits of complexities of real life.
8. Stop forcing "growth". Some of us our happy with our current role/jobs. Not all of us want to write ridiculous long essays praising ourselves for mediocre accomplishments. For many people a job is a job.
I think the specifics of these demands is not important, they shouldn't be universal. Different people have different needs.
The main reason for this strike is to send a message that they can't keep controlling us forever. And that if we don't cooperate with them, their house of cards will fall tomorrow. And that software must remain a way to empower people, not to satisfy greedy billionaires.
So please, join me in my strike for one week of your choice in November 2026.
Your fellow working class techie.
These companies don't care and are too busy building homes (data centers) for agents.
What they are telling you is that you have no leverage against them since they will just replace you with 1 person with 100+ agents.
> So please, join me in my strike for one week of your choice in November 2026
You are free to leave your job and play GTA 6 in November.
Tech Giants Double Down on Their Massive AI Spending [0]
Google, Meta and Microsoft boost AI spending forecasts [1]
Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce [2]
I am telling you that these companies don't care about human (tech) workers striking, since they are too busy spending that money on data centers for AI agents.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/tech-giants-double-down-on-their...
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/b934037d-7fc6-4f93-acdf-a3ec75f45...
I'm not one to deny that current AI models can take you quite far along. But you know they can't replace all of us with LLMs yet. Strikes work if enough of us do it, that's why I made this post. And if you believe LLMs will eventually be able to indeed replace millions of engineers, then it's better that we strike now rather than in the future.
But honestly, I have no beef with AI technology specifically or people using it. This is all about being ethical, distributing the fruits of work equally.
It looks like you are talking about enshittification: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/. There are strong NGOs fighting for the user rights like https://eff.org and https://edri.org.
My man that is called PTO.
Your list of demands means nothing to me. Social media addiction is fake. RTO is good. My manager doesn't even talk to me let alone micro manage me. Slop is 2024 criticism you need to update your insults.
There is no we. I don't share your goals or outlook and you make no effort to persuade.
I'm curious how you think general prosperity can be achieved by the things you mention. Like, lay it out.
>>And then came the greedy grifters. They invested money not just to get returns (they could've gotten returns on any other established field of business), but to gamble for a chance of crazy high returns. They thought software has near-zero marginal cost. They started building walled gardens, to extract rent from users. ... So the advertisement business grew, and with it came the largest assault on the privacy of the general public ever. ... Then they realized they could use this game politics itself. ... then they realized they don't want to pay the workers anymore who support the software. So they turned against the workers.
And organizing a strike may help. But even assuming the best case, your idea spreads like wildfire and 80% of all tech workers touch no keyboards starting mid-November, the likely result is management makes a few changes and lies they are far larger and more permanent than they are in reality, and back to extraction-mining the rest of humanity for private profit.
Perhaps the very best thing would be for tech workers to self-organize to create an EFFECTIVE alternative to the extractive social media currently plaguing society. A new way for people to stay in touch that is easier to use and migrate to than Xitter/BlueSky/Farcebook/etc. (and no, Mastadon ain't it; wish it were, but...). When I try to get people off those sites, they object to not having an as-easy way to stay in touch with people they connect with. Hitting them at the root of their interests —profits— is what will hurt them, and free us.
If you can add some inkling of details, I might empathise with what you are doing, heck even support you. But if you want to be a twat about it, then I wish you all the suffering in the world.
The other commenter is right, this place is infested with Reddit retards.