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marginalia_nu 6 hours ago [-]
Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that.
I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become.
If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed.
Going online it's like everyone is really angry and tired and sad all the time, and it's getting worse every year. This really took a nosedive during the pandemic, but looking back this had been going on for several years before. Every election cycle makes things worse too.
It's just been spiraling in a very dark direction for a long time. You have these blackpill depression cirklejerks everywhere. Astroturfing is getting worse every year. Like what Bannon did with gamer gate is an amateurish precursor to what everyone with is doing everywhere now. With AI you can even run these campaigns with a very small budget.
All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom. Used to be more tabloid territory but now I don't know if anywhere is spared. A lot of the focus now is on AI, but when it isn't the world is burning in some other fashion. Reading the news, we've been in a permanent state of crisis for years now.
This information diet just isn't good for your mental health. It isn't just tech workers, but they're probably more exposed than most.
Candide's closing remarks spring to mind. Tend your garden.
m463 5 minutes ago [-]
> '90s going online ... '20s going offline
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.
MarkusQ 5 hours ago [-]
"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."
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.
rob74 6 hours ago [-]
If you also consider that many of us, via the companies we work for, actively contribute to making the Internet (and by extension, the world) a worse place, the question in the article's title kind of answers itself. It also makes "quiet quitting" seem almost the right thing to do: doing only the least possible to advance your company's goals while keeping both your job and your sanity, hoping that you will one day be offered a buyout package and then maybe find something more fulfilling...
marginalia_nu 5 hours ago [-]
A counterpoint would be that you don't really ever see investment bankers reacting in this fashion.
pseudalopex 16 minutes ago [-]
You don't really ever see investment bankers reacting how?
Gud 4 hours ago [-]
Because engineers and investment bankers are wired differently.
marginalia_nu 3 hours ago [-]
There's much more overlap than you'd think. Quants generally have a STEM background, and stay in the field much for the same sort of reasons tech workers stick around building torment nexuses for FAANG.
pseudalopex 38 minutes ago [-]
> All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom.
No. And this shallow dismissal builds the mood you complained about.
marginalia_nu 23 minutes ago [-]
As an experiment, completely stop consuming news and social media for a few weeks. People have lived their entire lives without these information streams, you'll survive unplugging a bit. Now I can't tell you what you will experience if you go through with this, but I can promise it's very enlightening.
tavavex 2 minutes ago [-]
Of course, not being exposed to negativity will make you more positive. But this advice strikes me as a request to plug my ears and close my eyes. Doing these things will not stop the negative things that are happening in the world, and having the information about it at least makes me more knowledgeable about the world and hopefully prepared for when something snaps and there is a crisis that affects me in the most unavoidable and unambiguous ways - in addition to the indirect effects I've been experiencing already.
autoexec 6 minutes ago [-]
I'm sure that ignoring all of the very real problems we have and the ways we're being harmed can make some people feel better, but burying your head in the sand doesn't make any of it actually go away.
You can pretty safely ignore a lot of irrelevant rage bait, but by remaining ignorant to what's going on around you you also risk losing a lot of useful, actionable, information and being blindsided by things that could have been avoided.
I know that if I were corporation hurting and exploiting people for profit or a corrupt politician screwing over the public I'd be very happy to encourage people to "unplug" and stop stressing about things.
Multicomp 5 hours ago [-]
TL;DR: We won't stay here in blackpill-as-entertainment long term, tech/HN will proxy the way forward, but it will take time and will be messy.
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.
dec0dedab0de 4 hours ago [-]
This dropped off the front page in the time I read it, I assume because of the controversial gate that favors upvotes to comments (which I am making worse by replying to others). It is a shame, because this really resonated with me.
I've been working in tech for over 20 years now in various roles, and this is the least I have cared about it. I used to want to get better, and was constantly excited about learning new things just for the sake of it. Now I daydream about being homeless. I look around at all the meaningless crap I have accumulated, and feel shame that I didn't use that money to retire early.
I am surprised that remote work didn't get a bigger mention in the article. In a few weeks I will have been working from home for 12 years, and I believe it is the cause of most of most of my angst. At first, the convivence was such a relief, but it has become a trap. The effort of the commute, forcing me to go out every day and talk to human beings face to face, even just little things like making sure I was showered and dressed every day, they all felt like a burden at the time but they were good for me and I didn't realize it. Not to mention that it makes my house feel like work, and I now I hate it here.
I will say as an anecdote counter to the AI examples given in the article. I have a young co-worker who is very excited about AI and is using it way more effectively than I am. Talking to him gives me hope for the future, the kids will be alright.
But to the point of the article: I have many friends my age that are making less than half of what I do working objectively harder jobs for way longer hours, but they all seem so much happier than I am.
FLeXMurphy 6 hours ago [-]
This article is too inward, clique referential looking. It uses too many "known" things to frame and validate its points, but has very little contributions of its own.
The way that people are described, and the conditions portrayed, have been this way for quite some time. The only thing that is changed is now there is a clearly defined boogeyman to point to that justifies it. Because the other boogeymen make the usual authors too uncomfortable to bring up.
chrisjj 6 hours ago [-]
> This article is too inward
Too inward for what?
VCFundedGenYer 3 hours ago [-]
I feel you had ChatGPT make this comment.
FLeXMurphy 3 hours ago [-]
No, I pained myself reading the article too much for that.
lostaccount 6 hours ago [-]
This is basically office space but for the modern era. Peter found happiness in construction work, but when something physical like that is your job… I don’t know. A lot of those guys have back pain, inflexible schedules, working in extreme weather, and the pay isn’t even that good. Is tech so bad? Or is the world of work broken?
pc86 6 hours ago [-]
> A lot of those guys have back pain, inflexible schedules, working in extreme weather,
And a lot of them don't?
A lot of people who work on a computer all day also have back pain and inflexible schedules. Hell, I'm sure a lot of knowledge workers in other countries work in places with no air conditioning, for example - not exactly "extreme" but not climate-controlled, either.
hiAndrewQuinn 6 minutes ago [-]
It's not for nothing that de facto founder of the Singaporean state Lee Kuan Yew wooed top men and women into working government jobs by ensuring the government buildings had A/C. I would far prefer an inflexible air conditioned 9 to 5 than a flexible perpetual sauna.
jonahrd 5 hours ago [-]
There are definitely downsides to office work, but this post really implies to me that you don't actually personally know anyone who works in the trades. The amount of body pain/damage, extreme conditions, and ridiculous scheduling (as in, last minute decisions that you must be on site at 5:30am the next day, not as in overall hours) are pretty much incomparable to tech work.
pc86 4 hours ago [-]
I didn't say they were comparable. But there is a common refrain that every single person who works in the trades has their body basically destroyed by the time they're 40, which isn't remotely true, and that nobody who works in an office (or a number that is essentially a rounding error) has any physical effects directly caused by that, which also isn't remotely true.
nancyminusone 5 hours ago [-]
Office workers get chronic conditions from sitting around all day too. Yet vary few jobs provide any such balance.
KellyCriterion 1 minutes ago [-]
Actually the only job without all those problems (err,any problems?) is to b a fitness instructor or personal trainer; not on an extreme level,8h a day, but let say you have 2 clients or maybe 3 clients a day, this would be enough movement / workout to never ever run into these problems, I guess?
dec0dedab0de 3 hours ago [-]
The only tech job that had that balance was a network engineer at the headquaters of a global company in a skyscraper with 3 offices and a datacenter in walking distance. Most of the time I was sitting around writing code or configs, but at least once a week I would have to walk to a different floor or building to wire up a switch or rack a new DNS server or whatever. That bit of required physical activity and interaction with others was always a highlight.
dec0dedab0de 3 hours ago [-]
Physical labor is bad for the knees, but good for the soul.
xlii 6 hours ago [-]
Long long time ago people in tech were in tech because of the tech.
Then, at some point, being in tech became a gilded profession and everyone: salesmen, artists, clerks etc. joined in. Not because they wanted to be in tech.
They wanted gold.
For years it was working, but right now things shifted. You can no longer just do the thing you learned for a job and continue doing so, because landscape shifted. So they're miserable and they want to get back to knitting, pottery or whatever thing they want to do but not tech.
For people I know who are in tech for the tech nothing changed. There's new tech in town, one has to adjust, and it's still possible to discover new things and pave new paths. Tech was always shifting and I suppose people who worked in it for it always knew it, and it doesn't derail them.
dec0dedab0de 3 hours ago [-]
I have been in tech for the tech for over 20 years now, heck over 30 years as a hobbyist. I have lost almost all interest in it these days. It feels increasingly meaningless, and actively harmful.
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.
xlii 3 hours ago [-]
The burnout is a separate topic, and it was always difficult to balance in this specific industry.
All these "Working in IT isn't stressful at all - John 25yo" memes didn't come come from nothing.
But I wouldn't really put it on LLMs/AI. It was always like this. Jokes about how hopeless development cycle is, and how everybody have impostor syndrome etc.
dec0dedab0de 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
cholantesh 4 hours ago [-]
Quite a lot of folks who got into tech for the tech are also miserable, because, as the byline rather aptly puts it, a lot of it is pointless. It does not serve a public good, or even a public desire, and 'work for its own sake' is only engaging up to a point.
MarkusQ 5 hours ago [-]
100%.
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".
ang_cire 6 hours ago [-]
Because we see what's coming?
Because we watched our careers go from being in service of an industry of tinkerers and designers, to being in service of the worst people attempting to maximize wealth extraction no matter the human cost?
Because Snow Crash wasn't supposed to be the goal?
Because our daily complicity in what's happening is also a daily reminder that we're not brave enough to be a Mangione?
Take your pick.
dspillett 6 hours ago [-]
In some cases being told "just treat it like you are a manager", when we've always done our level best to avoid anything vaguely like management because we like doing things particularly the nitty gritty details.
JohnFen 5 hours ago [-]
So much this. I've spent my whole career avoiding being promoted into management because I don't want to be or enjoy being a manager.
So it always amuses me when genAI advocates say things like "your job isn't going away, you're just going to be doing management" as if that is a good thing. To my ears, that reads as "you'll still be getting a paycheck, but your job is going to shitty."
9rx 4 hours ago [-]
The last time a programmer wasn't a manager was when they were handed a piece of paper with toggle combinations and their job was to flip the toggle switches as detailed. AI doesn't seem to have much applicability in any other profession, other than maybe graphic arts, but the same holds true there. Artists are also always managers.
So, what is this magical not-a-manager but also at risk of AI taking it away career? Are you sure it actually exists?
rhsjie294nd 4 hours ago [-]
That's a weird way to put it. Yeah, everyone does a level of management for their own time and work projects. Still, the bulk of the work is in the details. Programmers talked a lot more about data structures and algorithms instead of keeping the LLM on track or sandboxed. How is it not different? We can play semantics on what it means to be a manager but the jobs as they were are going away
9rx 3 hours ago [-]
> That's a weird way to put it.
How so?
> Still, the bulk of the work is in the details.
The bulk of the work is in describing the details of what you want to see happen to another entity, which is what managers do. Someone else, or something else (like a compiler), will carry out the actual work to see your idea become a reality. Are you under the impression that managers don't do anything or something?
> We can play semantics on what it means to be a manager but the jobs as they were are going away
Are they? It is becoming easier to pass a lot more information off to the worker bees, so conceivably you should be able to do more management now, but the general act of describing what you want to the worker bees to do and seeing them carry out the task is no different. The telephone also increased the capacity of a manager being able to relay information, so while there is still evolution happening, what we're seeing in increasing the information density isn't unprecedented.
And, sure, maybe that will go away eventually. It is conceivable that AI can become the manager too, going off and coming up with its own ideas, plans, and delegating it all without any human intervention. But at that point you won't be a manager. Manager would be the very job on the chopping block.
If you want to say that managing a computer isn't managing I'd accept that stance in general, but the whole basis behind the idea of "everyone will become managers" is entirely premised on the idea of everyone managing computers, so that angle doesn't work within the context of this discussion. You cannot make that claim here.
rhsjie294nd 1 hours ago [-]
I was talking about the programming profession. Their work is (was?) in establishing those details. The programming jobs as they were are going away, and are becoming more like management. I think we both agree there. What I don't agree with is saying that programming was always management. That, to me, is over-generalising what management is to the point where the word is becoming almost meaningless.
9rx 29 minutes ago [-]
> What I don't agree with is saying that programming was always management.
I doubt anyone would, and that is why we even talked about the time when programmers weren't managers. Again, there really was a time in early computing where humans mechanically transcribed human-level descriptions into machine code. This is the origin of the term "coder". That was the job — encoding one representation into another. Unless you are trying to draw a distinction between programmers and coders? Most seem to consider them to be one and the same. But it wasn't long before we figured out how to make the computer the coder, so humans only had to worry about management of the coders.
> That, to me, is over-generalising what management is
The key difference in traditional use is that management is expected to manage people. As I mentioned before, I'd totally buy into you holding that same position. Except the idea of "everyone will be managers" hinges on the idea that they will manage computers, same as programmers have already been doing for decades. So that position doesn't work here. You cannot maintain that management is only management if it is people being managed, but then accept that in the future we will all be managers...
Straight up, there is no future where everyone will be managers of people. If everyone is the manager, what people would there be left to manage? It is impossible. Everyone becoming the manager is only possible if you include other things like computers. Which is fine, but we already manage computers. There is nothing new on that front. Computers were built to be managed. They are useless otherwise. Programming, for instance, is already management (where you include computers as something able to be managed).
dspillett 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, it is a sliding scale.
I'd prefer to stay nearer this end of the scale, not that end.
sodapopcan 19 minutes ago [-]
Ya, I've been doing this almost 20 years and never even thought about a manager position. I always tell everyone in interviews that I'm "IC for life."
spicymaki 6 hours ago [-]
> Because our daily complicity ...
Exactly this. We were (still are) complicit in our own destruction and worst yet when other courageous people spoke up we shout them down, hid away, laughed at their folly, or shunned them outright.
pc86 5 hours ago [-]
"Not brave enough" to shoot an innocent person in the back and then run away?
scottLobster 5 hours ago [-]
He murdered a guilty man, not an innocent one. Still murder, and murder is wrong, but let's not get things twisted
pc86 4 hours ago [-]
What crime did he commit? If he's guilty of something for which the just punishment is death, then how can you say it was wrong?
scottLobster 4 hours ago [-]
The moral crime of excessive claims denials that resulted in many needless death for no better reason than he wanted a to boost UHC's stock price to get a bigger bonus.
He deserved death, but the manner in which that death is administered matters. Vigilante justice corrodes the very foundations of the justice system, if we allow it the end result will be far more dead innocent people than guilty ones. I don't want more innocents to die just to kill those who deserve it.
lotsofpulp 20 minutes ago [-]
>The moral crime of excessive claims denials that resulted in many needless death for no better reason than he wanted a to boost UHC's stock price to get a bigger bonus.
Since you know what excessive is, at what level do the premiums become a moral crime?
pc86 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
scottLobster 1 hours ago [-]
Where do you think all criminal codes come from? Are they mined out of the earth already written? It's a constantly evolving set of rules based on a society's collective moralities.
There are many crimes today that did not exist 100 years ago and vice versa. Yes, there are crimes that should be punished that are not yet present in the criminal code, and you don't need to be a legal scholar to propose new ones.
I think most people agree deriving financial profit by knowingly denying people necessary medical treatment is immoral.
BigTTYGothGF 2 hours ago [-]
Wrongful denial of medical treatment. Delay, Deny, Depose.
pfdietz 16 minutes ago [-]
Medical insurance companies in the US are the agents by which health costs are kept down. In centralized government health systems the government itself does this; in our system the insurance companies do it. They have the negotiating power that individual patients do not.
Part of keeping health costs down is rejecting some treatments as too expensive. Without this, costs will balloon forever as there is no one to say "enough".
pc86 2 hours ago [-]
There is literally an entire cottage industry full of people whose entire livelihood depends on getting people medical treatment after it's been denied.
BigTTYGothGF 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, what a waste that is.
timcobb 3 hours ago [-]
not all crime is illegal, unfortunately.
scottLobster 5 hours ago [-]
As a mid-career software dev I'm just sick of most of my job being a highly paid technical janitor mopping a floor that never gets clean.
I've had maybe 2-3 years combined where I actually got to build something I could be proud of, and made all the red tape worth it. The rest has been navigating/paying down other peoples' technical debt and being forced to add some of my own when there's no budget for maintenance and the band-aid becomes permanent.
At the start of my career I wondered why anyone retired early when there was so much cool stuff to work on... now I get it. The cool stuff is the extreme minority of available work, and the odds of you getting to work on any of it are down to being in the right place at the right time. As for the rest of the job, I'd sooner step on a nail if it didn't come with the pay and benefits.
fl4regun 1 hours ago [-]
never seen a better description than your janitor metaphor
dataflow 12 minutes ago [-]
I actually can enjoy being the digital janitor, when I'm allowed to. What's frustrating is when things are dirty and they don't even let you clean.
red-iron-pine 2 hours ago [-]
the term your looking for is "worker alienation"
akagusu 6 hours ago [-]
Can I pick all?
All options are good because they are all true.
I think you can extend them.
ThrowawayR2 5 hours ago [-]
> "a daily reminder that we're not brave enough to be a Mangione"
Sure are a lot of wannabe murderers on HN lately. Mangione, guillotines, what other thinly veiled incitements to violence are HNers using these days?
I fault the HN moderators for not following their own stated guidelines on most political submissions being off topic. "Most" needs to become "nearly all" since the submissions they allow through (or even explicitly unflag at users' request) are nurturing a very unpleasant breed of HN users.
ang_cire 5 hours ago [-]
Is discussing offshoring that takes away American jobs and has driven much poverty in the heartland equally political and unacceptable, or is it just the political discussions you don't like having that shouldn't be allowed?
The "no politics" rule is about not posting constant "x politician said this about tech" articles, not about banning all discussion of real-world consequences of the tech industry.
throw-the-towel 4 hours ago [-]
Even by your definition, HN is still full of off-topic politics these days.
BigTTYGothGF 2 hours ago [-]
> industry of tinkerers and designers
At no point in history was it ever thus.
ang_cire 29 minutes ago [-]
Yes and no.
There were really 2 sides to the original 'tech' industry: military and consumer. The military side was always about profit, because it was just an extension of the already extant WW2 military industrial complex (and frankly, IBM falls here despite their mainframes being largely used in civilian businesses).
But the consumer side that really grew out of universities into early gaming, internet, and consumer electronics tech, was very heavily driven by design and garage-start tinkerers. That's not to say no one wanted to make money, but it wasn't MBA-bro-driven back then.
5 hours ago [-]
brandonagr2 6 hours ago [-]
Are you really holding up a murderer as a role model?
Multicomp 6 hours ago [-]
I'm not happy they do it, but I'm not surprised. There's a lot of media echochambers where Luigi M is lionized and his heinous actions dismissed or celebrated because it advances a grievance/covetousness/envy political narrative, and for the same kind of people who have to be atheist to be fashionable tend to be the ones who can fall into workism as described in TFA and also have a non-trivial chance of falling into media spheres that want to drive that anti-healthcare-exec animus crowd.
scottLobster 5 hours ago [-]
Anyone who's lost a loved one over a denied claim can sympathize with Luigi even if they disapprove of his methods. Sounds like you haven't gone through that experience, but a lot of Americans have.
ang_cire 6 hours ago [-]
That's only okay if they're a politician or business exec, right? It's fine to hold those murderers up as role models, apparently.
3 hours ago [-]
wonderwonder 6 hours ago [-]
"not brave enough to be a Mangione"
If you idolize a man who murdered an innocent then perhaps you should seek mental help. This is a you thing, not a society or industry thing
pixl97 6 hours ago [-]
>an innocent
Remember murder is only bad when it's not done with an algorithm and a bureaucratic process.
wonderwonder 5 hours ago [-]
Is your argument that every new health care ceo should be gunned down as soon as a single claim is denied in perpetuity until all claims are approved and all health insurance companies go bankrupt and then no one gets health insurance?
scottLobster 5 hours ago [-]
If Mangione was the CEO's health insurer and knowingly denied him cancer treatment the CEO's doctor said he needed, all to boost his quarterly earnings, resulting in his death, would you have this same level of outrage?
For-profit claim denials should be abolished unless there's a public backstop.
ang_cire 3 hours ago [-]
Exactly. It's insane how we've come to just accept corporate profit as a valid reason for allowing people to die, or for shifting responsibility for the outcome away from the corporation.
The Joker's monologue to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight about how one group of killings is just normal and "part of the plan", while another is shocking and appalling (specifically when it's a societal 'elite'), was supposed to be at least somewhat outlandish and overly pessimistic as an interpretation of society, but damn these people are trying to prove him right.
tavavex 24 minutes ago [-]
Don't forget:
Kill thousands for profit -> no need to care, move along, no one is at fault and nothing of importance really happened
Kill one that is responsible for the former -> you must preface your discussion with hundreds of references to murder being bad, and clearly and unambiguously condemn the monster that did this
Humans really do have a bias where doing something small-scale but visceral causes horror and outrage, but doing 1000x that harm by building slow and boring bureaucratic machines of death is not noticeable because, after all, the machine isn't literally putting a gun to the face of the victims, so it's all fine.
nancyminusone 5 hours ago [-]
the way healthcare companies act now, they deserve bankruptcy
NicuCalcea 5 hours ago [-]
A quarter of Americans (and 40% of young Americans) see Mangione favourably, so it definitely is a society thing.
The only reason in my mind to view Mangione unfavorably is that vigilante justice, however justified, does not result in a civilization anyone would want to live in. It's the same reason we can't just go around killing everyone in the Epstein files. It's not that they don't deserve it, it's that the resulting corrosion destroys the entire system, including the good parts.
If Mangione had killed the UHC CEO by being his insurer and denying his claim for cancer treatment that his doctor said he needed, nobody would be saying anything.
wonderwonder 5 hours ago [-]
Be attractive
Don't be unattractive
red-iron-pine 2 hours ago [-]
it's not because the US healthcare system is a gigantic trainwreck that prioritizes F100 companies over suffering people. nah.
it's cuz the guy is hot. that's gotta be it.
not how the main source of bankruptcy in the US is related to medical bills.
it's cuz he's hot.
swed420 2 hours ago [-]
Alternatively, if you're attractive (or any other useful trait), use it for public good.
akagusu 6 hours ago [-]
Mangione is a murderer but that "innocent man" he killed was not innocent at all, he indeed was a murderer too. The only difference between then is they used different tools. No... Mangione murdered one, the other guy killed much more.
baggy_trough 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nikole9696 4 hours ago [-]
"And therefore, someone must decide what claims are reasonable."
Yes, that person is MY DOCTOR. There is no world in which it is reasonable that my health care team says I should have particular treatment, and insurance executives get to say no I don't. Sadly I understand this is not the case, and we value money more than human life, but I do not find that reasonable, no matter how common it might be.
I also understand that medical fraud happens, but I'm not sure the tradeoff to reducing it is worth the lives it's taking when we refuse claims.
baggy_trough 4 hours ago [-]
So you think that your doctor should be able to order you any imaginable treatment that they think is medically necessary, and someone else will have to pay for it? Sorry, but that is utterly preposterous. Why would a doctor care how much something costs? What if they order you something that costs multiple millions of dollars? Somebody has to balance costs vs. benefits. And it's not your doctor, since they don't care one bit about costs, if they aren't paying.
There is no way to get around the fact that advanced medical care is expensive and tradeoffs have to be made.
tavavex 15 minutes ago [-]
> So you think that your doctor should be able to order you any imaginable treatment that they think is medically necessary, and someone else will have to pay for it?
Yes. It's the cost of doing business. Why is it that when we talk about the justice system, we think it's better to let a hundred criminals go free to avoid punishing an innocent, but in healthcare suddenly it flips and now it's better to have a hundred people be denied life-saving treatment to avoid one person getting an unnecessary one?
Your hypothetical is frankly insane - nowhere in the world, despite the dozens of types of medical systems, is there a crisis of doctors ordering frivolous multimillion dollar treatments just for fun. There is no incentive for them to do so. Your entire argument hinges on something that doesn't actually happen, just to defend an evil that already exists in the world.
Outrageous idea, but we should trust the people who studied for over a decade to administer medication to decide what medication a person needs, and pry the hands of private business off that process entirely. If someone misuses the system or prescribes obviously wrong treatment, go after that individual. If in 30 years it turns out that doing this does actually cause doctors to order random treatments for fun, then we can talk about scaling it back. Until then, for-profit healthcare is not to be trusted.
nikole9696 3 hours ago [-]
"tradeoffs have to be made" is a great way to say that yes, you agree that instead of focusing on lowering health care costs, you think it's fine that people die because of them. I would posit that no treatment should be allowed to cost multiple millions of dollars - I am aware that's easier said than done, but I'm pretty sure society should try. Maybe if the CEOs didn't make billions of dollars and instead we put those profits back into play, we'd have a chance.
scottLobster 5 hours ago [-]
If you think all denied claims are denied in good faith, I don't know what to do for you.
The insurers are hardly running up against hard resource limits, where there just isn't enough to go around and they have to triage. They are profit driven entities, and if they were legally allowed to deny all claims they would be required to do so by their shareholders.
No system is perfect, but patients shouldn't die to boost a stock price. And no patient should be required to fight for coverage at their most vulnerable.
baggy_trough 4 hours ago [-]
Why would an insurer who denied all claims have any customers? I think you're missing the market competition aspect of the insurance business.
Certainly no system is perfect. I'll take the system where I can shop around for insurers and plans over a one size fits all approach from unaccountable government bureaucrats.
dec0dedab0de 2 hours ago [-]
Why would an insurer who denied all claims have any customers? I think you're missing the market competition aspect of the insurance business.
Most people do not get to choose their own insurance company, they just get whatever their job picks. Most big companies have directors and officers that personally benefit when a particular insurance company does well. The market is completely broken.
Insurance is an arbitrage leach at best, and extortion at worst. It provides no value to society.
Without insurance Market prices would drive down the cost of healthcare.
scottLobster 3 hours ago [-]
I was presenting an extreme hypothetical to a make a point that the insurers are motivated by selfishness.
In the real world, not a hypothetical, your market driven approach ensures they approve the minimum necessary to prevent customers from leaving. They require patients to to fight them for coverage while they're undergoing cancer treatment, because a dead patient they didn't pay out for is more profitable. Paying for insurance in a for-profit marketplace isn't paying for health coverage, it's paying for a CHANCE at health coverage, and you better be willing and able to fight for that chance while you're undergoing cancer treatment/surgery, or be willing to go bankrupt, or not get the treatment and die. That's the choice the insurance marketplace presents to you.
Not hyperbole, many such stories. My own father in law died in part because his private medicare advantage plan refused to approve in-patient rehab after a brain surgery that every MD working on him said he needed, but would have cost 6 figures out of pocket that nobody could front. The grim irony is he later tried to get out of bed to use the bathroom, couldn't support his own weight and suffered a skull fracture that resulted in a second brain surgery inside of a week, and that was fully covered.
I'll take the bureaucrats. The real world shows they're simply better at this, and Ayn Rand is simply wrong.
SketchySeaBeast 3 hours ago [-]
Isn't it also not the direct customer purchasing the insurance, but their employer, who also has to pay into the pot and so is incentivized to find cheap options? (I'm not 100% on this - I'm not American.)
scottLobster 3 hours ago [-]
Depends on your employer/occupation. You can purchase insurance directly as an individual but it's usually the most expensive way to go as you have no group bargaining power. Small businesses are also hit by this, as they're only trying to cover a small group of people.
For this reason many small businesses don't offer insurance directly, but provide a tax-free health insurance stipend to their employees who then source their own insurance, effectively subsidizing the more expensive premiums as a benefit.
Larger employers have more bargaining power due to the number of employees they bring with them and can get better rates/plans from the insurance companies, and these better rates/plans are typically passed along to employees as a benefit for working there. An employer might cheap out, but that's the same as offering a bad salary.
Very large employers (Fortune 500s and such) are often self-insured, where they contract all the bureaucracy out to a private insurer but the company is actually doing all the payouts. The quality of this coverage naturally varies from employer to employer. I once had a co-worker have a claim denied for an expensive psychiatric facility he sent his son to, but because he had the claim pre-approved he had grounds for a lawsuit. He had to sue both the insurance company and the company we worked for while working there.
The elderly have medicare, and the poor have medicaid, which are taxpayer funded but not always 100% coverage, and there's a bunch of private plans you can buy to fill in the gaps if you do desire with various pros/cons.
Our system is a complete fucking mess, although it's arguably still better than it was pre-Obamacare
3 hours ago [-]
BigTTYGothGF 2 hours ago [-]
Eichmann never directly murdered anybody either.
SketchySeaBeast 5 hours ago [-]
> Do you think that there is some health care system in which all requests for care can be approved without limit?
I'm not going to wade into the murder tag, but is this the actual incentive? The health care execs don't have enough money to save everyone so they pick who they can help strategically, making sure to help as many as possible, or is the system incentivized to instead maximize finding who can be denied so that the company makes the most money?
whattheheckheck 2 hours ago [-]
Shame? Where's the shame for these orphan crushing machine administrators? Just doing my job. Just following orders. Just designing and optimizing it
All of it is doing it both. The system is cracking and the ONLY REASON why its brought up is because 1 guy did a murder to an important guy. Otherwise business as usual.
Shame on society
whattheheckheck 3 hours ago [-]
Systematic over denial of claims is not murdering innocent children, women and men?
"Its giving pearl clutching status quo defending cognative dissonance internal identity crisis having mook behavior" as the kids would say
ang_cire 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
wonderwonder 5 hours ago [-]
Cool so do I get to decide who's decisions I don't like and resulted in death or do only people like you and Mangione get to decide?
And to be clear, you are advocting for vigilante justice so you are going to be celebrating when the following happen:
Abortion doctors and admins are gunned down
Gender change doctors and admins are gunned down
Judges who allowed for bail and the person killed after bonding out are gunned down
Regular killers and gang members are gunned down
Police are gunned down
Politicians on both sides are gunned down
Mayors that didn't prioritize for natural disasters are gunned down
Feel free to add to the list.
ang_cire 5 hours ago [-]
Everyone makes decisions in life and lives with the consequences. Your question, as it's stated now, is simply "should we have free will?"
I never made any statement about which actions should be legal. And the facile assertion that endorsing one action is either tantamount to, or requiring of, endorsement of any action that shares an arbitrary attribute you identify is sloppy argumentation; somehow I don't think you would argue that someone supporting police having the authority to use force means they are supporting every instance including illegal uses of force.
kome 5 hours ago [-]
he didn't murder an innocent man.
stego-tech 5 hours ago [-]
I mean, yeah.
I got into IT because I loved working with technology, building communities and game servers and chatrooms and computers and the like. I got lucky that someone found me, my interest in these things, and showed me how it could be a career.
Nowadays though, so much of my time isn’t spent building so much as debunking the latest grift, scam, or lie. It’s spent unfucking arbitrary vendor changes that didn’t fix any actual problems but created a slew of new ones. It’s bristling at the notion that SAML, SSO, and SCIM remain Enterprise options so that a fraction of players can have total control over identity, instead of letting customers and users build solutions that fit their needs. So much time spent talking, not doing, and almost always in service of making some rich old billionaire fuck that much richer while I struggle to buy a home.
I got into this field because it brought disparate people together. People from all over the world, all walks of life, all backgrounds and belief systems and ideologies into a giant melting pot of community. Nowadays there’s so many corporate and nationally-erected fences that everyone is so carefully siloed into approved areas, and any attempts to cross imagined digital borders is viewed as suspect or criminal by default.
The technology of today does not enable, or empower, or bring us closer together. By design, it keeps us apart, distanced, agitated at difference or unbalanced from change. The stuff that fucking works - Home Assistant, the Pi-Hole, my Docker containers - are what is good, and leaves me time to deal with shitty OS updates breaking familial devices, or “smart” appliances that get unprompted updates that break connectivity.
We are miserable because those in charge of the direction of technology - the shareholders, the Boardrooms, the C-Suites, the VCs - all demand it be miserable and extractive, rather than empowering and liberating.
For a lot of folks, AI was the final canary in the toxic coalmine. The realization that this is not a noble cause or profession anymore. That we’re not helping people do better, at least not en masse, but instead making life actively worse for disproportionately more folks than those whose lives we make better.
And it’s a goddamn tragedy.
salemh 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Der_Einzige 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ang_cire 5 hours ago [-]
I don't know where you got the idea my comment is about AI from.
Der_Einzige 5 hours ago [-]
"The Librarian"
Oh didn't you realize that some people actually READ the books people reference here?
ang_cire 4 hours ago [-]
The article isn't only about AI, and neither was my comment.
pc86 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
agys 6 hours ago [-]
Side note: a half an hour call on a commute train (or in public spaces) is considered extremely rude in many parts of the world.
mattcantstop 5 hours ago [-]
It's rude to me as well. But I think we are wrong about this.
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!
1123581321 11 minutes ago [-]
That’s a good observation. I think it’s where their heads are facing. Two conversationalists face each other or face the room, but talk quietly with body language that suggests they’re conversing (heads tilted, leaning.)
Someone talking on the phone but facing away from the room isn’t usually considered rude, either.
In a waiting room or train car, if you’re sitting and talking on the phone or Zoom, you’re broadcasting into the room with your posture. Your voice tends to broadcast as well with no wall or other conversant as an immediate barrier.
dec0dedab0de 3 hours ago [-]
I would consider two people talking to each other in a waiting room or on a train very rude too. If they are loud enough that the people next to them or behind them can hear the words they are saying, then it is rude of them. Of course, this is relative to how noisy the place is overall.
elric 6 hours ago [-]
It is rude and annoying in general. But even in quiet cars it seems like many people just don't give a fuck and will simply jabber on obnoxiously without any care for anyone else.
Would be nice if people could keep their noise levels down in general.
Der_Einzige 5 hours ago [-]
These kind of social rules are why I’m very glad that America has garbage public transit culture. Actually I am going to jabber on talking to folks during transportation events. I’m going to do it in my personal vehicle so I don’t have to deal with others crying about my behavior.
Only poor people are required to humiliate themselves by asking every tom, dick, and harry for their opinion on if their behavior is acceptable.
dec0dedab0de 3 hours ago [-]
You're farting with a walkman on.
arendtio 5 hours ago [-]
I think it depends not just on culture but also on the volume of the conversation. Some people manage to have a conversation when you can barely hear them; others seem to have a conversation with everyone on the train.
swat535 4 hours ago [-]
I don't mind people having conversations, just don't blast the volume up or put it on speaker for the whole train to hear..
neom 6 hours ago [-]
From my experience, (outside of the quiet car), "extremely rude" - only South Korea and Japan?
left-struck 6 hours ago [-]
Having lived in both Australia and Japan and visited SK, for me it seems like it’s rude in all those places but only in some places do almost all the people care what strangers think enough to modify their behaviour. Which is not as judgmental a statement as it sounds like, because that care, or some might call it pressure to conform, has upsides and downsides.
neom 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, to clarify my comment, I think it's rude everywhere and I suspect many others generally also, but I've only experienced feeling I couldn't do it/people will absolutely stop you in SK/JP. I've been on trains all through Europe, the UK, almost all of North America and usually hear someone on the phone, but nobody ever says anything.
dspillett 6 hours ago [-]
UK, unless you are quiet about it. Though you might not notice as our reaction only tends to be in body language, or for particularly loud speakers (particularly those who are GOING INTO A TUNNEL or otherwise think shouting will help with bad reception) we might tut.
boelboel 6 hours ago [-]
It's considered rude in Belgium, at least when I commuted there by train. People would leave the wagon to take a call. Maybe it's changed in the past few years. There were also signs that it's prohibited to call in the trains.
margalabargala 6 hours ago [-]
Leave the wagon to where? Like get off the train? The trains are all wagon, no?
NicuCalcea 5 hours ago [-]
There's usually some space between train coaches (I think it's called a gangway?) or at the end of a coach (a vestibule) that is separated from the seats area by doors on both sides. You can take your call there.
margalabargala 4 hours ago [-]
Gotcha. On the trains I'm used to (Amtrak, NYC subway) spaces between cars are either nonexistent, or extremely dangerous.
boelboel 5 hours ago [-]
Leave the department*, the parts where people get on/off trains are closed off from the seats. There's also some gangway connections which have doors between the wagons.
ausbah 6 hours ago [-]
i’m in the US, if you took a call for more than a few mins a busy metro car I’d tell you to knock it off
serf 6 hours ago [-]
My dad speaks loudly on speakerphone phones in restaurants and public spaces daily because he's a rude old asshole.
No one beside myself has ever told him to stop because I think being old gives one a bit of a 'get out of jail free card ' with regard to social behaviors.
I would love for you or someone like you to happen upon him and tell him to knock it off, but alas that seems fleetingly rare.
honkostani 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
qbit42 6 hours ago [-]
People talk on the phone all the time on every US metro I’ve tried. Seems fine if they’re not on speaker or raising their voice
nikole9696 4 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, these days, most of us won't do that because there is a high likelihood it could incite violence.
chrisjj 6 hours ago [-]
UK included.
gls2ro 44 minutes ago [-]
I like an article focused on us, the special tech people.
But the truth is everyone is sad or subjectively unhappy no matter if that is a real or imaginary reflection of wealth or money or access to food, cloths, coffee, restaurants ...
You can see it in SF movies: a lot of the successful ones in the last years maybe 10, maybe 20 years are not optimistic about the future. The same is in all areas of life: we seem to need always something to reach for, or something to fix, to work on, to improve so we can be (maybe have) eudaimonia (for a lack of a better word) or just a normal life.
mjcohen 6 minutes ago [-]
So glad I am retired.
olooney 6 hours ago [-]
Scholars and academics have been bemoaning the pointlessness of what the article calls "knowledge work" for centuries. A few of my favorites:
There's a well-known book that labels programmers as a specific type of pointless job. "Duct tapers" is the category. Also task masters, who would have a foot under the software development umbrella, have space in the book.
We are socially punished for our extremely cushy jobs
SWE has negative social value. Saying you’re a SWE or god forbid anything in AI in a dating/courtship context is basically suicide.
We are paid so well as compensation for debasing ourselves socially. A lot of normies intuitively understand the concepts in that book even without reading it and either see you as evil or a grifter, maybe both, when you say you work in tech/AI.
A lot of people are going to have extreme schadenfreud as they watch tech workers take L after L. They really hate us, they want us bullied or dead or wishing we were.
Still, it was totally worth it because the blue collar pricks that dislike tech workers are even worse in so many ways. At least I’m not a shitty construction worker responsible for contributing to the pathetic state that our housing industry is in.
ComputerPerson 4 hours ago [-]
Woah, bad day?
I've noticed or experienced absolutely none of this. The closest thing I can relate to is that I operate on a different intellectual plane from some of my blue-collar friends. This causes a divide and probably limits intimacy, but does not result in negative relationships.
Regarding the dating world, it impresses people that I'm an SWE. My role is a boon, maybe because it signals intelligence; I'm not sure.
Strongly disagree here. Would encourage you to try to reframe some of that. Sorry if that comes across as patronizing.
rarisma 6 hours ago [-]
"It's good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over."
I feel like this can be applied to a lot of things, but this is pretty much how I've felt working in tech for the last 2ish years.
jebarker 6 hours ago [-]
What makes you feel like that? Is it AI specifically?
janpeuker 2 hours ago [-]
Linking Graeber's Bullshift Jobs to Workism via his concept of "spiritual violence" would have been a nice touch because it explains the drain despite the performativity (or what Baudrillard would call reproduction)
SauciestGNU 22 minutes ago [-]
I'm just happy people are still talking about Situationists.
lrvick 17 minutes ago [-]
I am finally able to deliver on years of backlog ideas thanks to the GPUs I racked up in my garage. Having a blast.
Everyone I know fully dependent on corpotch seems pretty sad though. I frequently suggest that they stop. It has not worked.
JohnFen 5 hours ago [-]
None of that is the reason I'm sad. I'm sad because I realized that this industry had grown from something that is a benefit to everyone to something that is the opposite of that.
ghm2199 6 hours ago [-]
On a personal level to remain as a SWE/Dev maintaining your sanity comes down to a few choices:
1. Do I want to have the kind of lived experiences that the field has to offer? The answer can come through some introspection to questions like: "Do I have a good devx talking to AI and understanding how it works? If not am I willing to learn how to?" or "Am I ok if development has become more intense than it was — because you will talk to AI/Machine more than before?".
2. Whatever your introspective questions are, if there answer is: "Yes I am more or less ok.", then pick a goal that lets you get those experiences and hack away.
I feel this decision making is more important than ever for people who are banked on more their skill to write decent code and not much else in the recent past. And also people with mental health issues should be more deliberate about their choices.
robofanatic 4 hours ago [-]
Because most of us are middle aged with mortgages, kids etc. Not old enough to retire and live off of savings or 401ks, not young enough to start all over again.
pm90 6 hours ago [-]
Tech has always had an unhealthy streak; it was ok while workers were being compensated well and treated amazingly. The end of zirp has cut comp and benefits massively so there’s a lot less upside to this lifestyle.
_doctor_love 4 minutes ago [-]
Since it's Friday, I'm going to suggest an activity: this evening, invest 30 minutes in watching "The Brain Center at Whipple" from the old Twilight Zone TV series. This conversation is much older than any of us, starting really with the advent of the Industrial Revolution.
My read on some of the current melancholy is that the millenial generation is starting to hit their mid-life crisis. Seeing the inherent meaninglessness and inanity of much of corporate work is part and parcel of that. AI makes the contrast more stark, but not new.
Or to come at it another way: the system we live in - capitalism - is defined by the process of 'creative destruction' (coined by the economist Schumpeter). We are always iterating on technology, making it better, finding new optimizations. When these are found, very often one class of people is put out of work while another class of people gains employment.
Whether this process is desirable, moral, ethical, etc. is not answered by the observation, simply that this is how the system works.
Grombobulous 6 hours ago [-]
Everyone in tech isn’t sad, the people who are vocal about being sad are sad.
This is a universal concept across the Internet.
If you’re on your phone all day doom scrolling you’ll only encounter sad people.
deanc 6 hours ago [-]
I wrote a little bit about this a few weeks ago [1]. For me, programming, building software has always been a creative expression based on fundamentals. AI sucks all the joy out of it.
That sums up the depth of the author understanding.
my-next-account 6 hours ago [-]
Doing pointless things is wonderful, anyway.
dreadnip 6 hours ago [-]
Do you like increasing shareholder value?
andsoitis 2 hours ago [-]
Absolutely! As a part-owner in a company that’s exactly what I expect. I’m not putting my money in a company because I’m feeling generous.
I have to prioritize my and my family’s own financial well being. If a company gives poor returns, I’m incentivized to reallocate my capital to companies that give me better results.
thisisauserid 6 hours ago [-]
Most of the people in tech I know that have interpersonal relationships and go out and look at a tree every once in a while are not often sad.
6 hours ago [-]
6 hours ago [-]
hackeraccount 6 hours ago [-]
I read about an experiment with pigeons. The birds were given a target. For one iteration if a bird pecked a target it would get a piece of corn. For another it got nothing and for a third... sometimes it would get piece of corn and sometimes it would get nothing.
Tech for me is that third variation. Sometimes you get nothing and sometimes it totally delivers (and more!) on what it promises. This is as a user and even as a provider. You take various bits and bobs and suddenly with a slightly clever idea and you've got something that's more then the sum of the parts. Sometimes. Other times it just never comes together.
I'm not sure if that makes me happy or sad. Bit of both I suppose but I keep going back to the well because you never know.
arendtio 5 hours ago [-]
I think we shouldn't be depressed, but work on ideas and concepts of how this could be changed into something good.
I see a lot of people hyping AI and condemning it, but very few seem to be interested in working on what our future should look like.
eahm 6 hours ago [-]
Because everything is ads, lots of propaganda and too much politics.
Flame wars used to be about distros and code and now it’s about how people think and opinions.
Everyone needs to go outside for a second, smell the flowers, hear the birds chip and calm down.
Multicomp 6 hours ago [-]
> In my experience, there are two broad categories of Knowledge Workers. The first are outcome-first workers. Their focus is on the business, on winning, on efficiency. Human needs and faults and emotions are an obstacle to be overcome.
> The second group has an experience-first perspective. These workers love the messy middle. They value the journey. They want their organizations to perform well but as a natural consequence of collaboration, debate and shared struggle with people they actually like. Many experience-first people are artists outside of work. Photographers, directors, screenwriters, sculptors, painters, poets, writers. Many are active volunteers. For these people, to be pulled away from their economically unviable passions requires something in return: a company experience with freedom for exploration, creativity, problem solving and cool colleagues.
The first group appears to be correctly compartmentalizing work into its correct location, this is a job I do to meet a goal, how are we doing on that goal, they have healthy limited expectations of the experiences there.
The latter group sounds childish or unprofessional or at least unrealistic in their expectations that a job you do for a living will be all you want it to be. I laud people who volunteer, I do as well, I laud creatives, we need more of them, not less of them, but somewhere along the way, people need to work at the sucky starter job so they grow out of wild-eyed views that all jobs will bring one satisfaction. Some jobs are more cushy and give you more of a sense of fulfillment, true, and those are vocations in the article's sense, but most jobs are just jobs, therefore it seems unrealistic to me to expect them to make one happy.
Satisfaction in life comes from service to others, because said service drives strong trusting relationships with people, you love what you serve, and those trusting relationships mean you get to see more people and they often reciprocate, thus families (in the nuclear, community, and found senses, all apply) are formed and meaning arises as the gestalt of that support and forward progress gets us what we can handle for this-side-of-life eudaimonia.
Beyond that? That's the nature of religion and I know I'm already annoying someone with my too-strong opinions as is, so I will spare you my thoughts there this time.
luciana1u 6 hours ago [-]
we spent a decade being told we were building the future, and now the future is a subscription fee and a quarterly layoff email
mikert89 6 hours ago [-]
You used your most prized mental faculties to build software: logical intelligence, creativity, etc to make someone else rich
trgn 6 hours ago [-]
> logical intelligence
it's this that AI is stripping. the work is becoming systems thinking. not bad per se, but removing the small scale puzzle aspect of the job
6 hours ago [-]
MarkWayneNewton 7 hours ago [-]
Standing on the precipice gives all a new perspective.
ieie3366 6 hours ago [-]
Because they don’t exercise, have a terrible diet, lack of socialization, and no family to speak of
mrjay42 5 hours ago [-]
Because of the *gap* between the enjoyment of "discovering, learning and practicing tech" and the capitalistic use of tech and the consequence it has on people AND how tech is used.
the theory is not without flaws but it seems relevant to the topic and conversation
win311fwg 6 hours ago [-]
The glaring flaw in the theory is that it hypothesizes that jobs are pointless, but in fact they do have a point: Companionship. There are always exceptions, but overwhelmingly those with resources don't like being alone and without social standing and so they use their resources to buy friends, so to speak.
okwhateverdude 2 hours ago [-]
A company I used to work at has a CEO/Founder just like that. He's a sad sack of shit. Got up on stage at the company christmas party drunk to sing karaoke and noticed not enough people were paying attention to him, so he "joked" about firing people. Same dude some years later would bribe employees to work over the christmas holidays with him and was bragging about it on LinkedIn. He's rich. Could do any number of things. But its obvious he's got no friends and clings to the company as his identity; likely having been self-sabotaging the IPO that was always right around the corner he was working on.
SirFatty 4 hours ago [-]
cybersecurity has taken over my life as a IT Manager. Security was always important, and always something I worked on, but now it's all I work on and it's exhausting.
Managing patch management)software and firmware. Users who cannot help but enter credentials via phishing regardless of training.
Chasing the next best practice (SSL VPN out, IPsec is back, etc).
zitterbewegung 6 hours ago [-]
When have people in Tech been happy? (Serious question).
Balinares 6 hours ago [-]
There was a time when Google SREs were inventing the profession from the ground up, and it was the stuff of legend.
david927 6 hours ago [-]
The 1990's
seydor 6 hours ago [-]
Having just installed the world's most popular software (MS windows), i think they should be.
dec0dedab0de 6 hours ago [-]
Surely android and ios surpass windows in usage. Though I would argue that none of them are popular.
alansaber 6 hours ago [-]
Fair enough.
sri9s 6 hours ago [-]
good one
jgbuddy 6 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty happy I think
knicholes 6 hours ago [-]
How long have you been working in tech?
jgbuddy 3 hours ago [-]
2 years, maybe that's the problem
matheusmoreira 5 hours ago [-]
Because society sucks so people enable Daniel Plainview mode.
twodave 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it probably is sad to be so unimaginative or pessimistic about your skill set that you see AI as an impediment and not a boon.
logicchains 6 hours ago [-]
It's the same as the old "As hire As, Bs hire Cs".
wonderwonder 6 hours ago [-]
'professionals are sharing dreams of “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid.”'
This has been a meme in tech for decades. I seriously considered farming 20 years ago due to my dissatisfaction with tech, its nothing new.
I fall into the group of tech workers that never enjoyed their work, I still loathe it but it pays really well. Standups are the worst, every day its "what did you do yesterday". The number of hours worked are far above a normal 9 - 5.
Sections of sociery spent years telling people to learn to code and they did and they do. The issue is that for many people that just work to live and don't live to work, code is souless and there is nothing to show for it after decades of grind.
This negative outlook is not universal of couse, I am sure this site is full of people that love software and more power to them. For a good deal of us though, its just how we pay the bills and there is nothing else that will come close to paying them as well.
Now to add to the general malaise we see companies laying off tens of thousands of engineers to justify their token spend. The feeling of living on borrowed time is prevelant especially for those that never got RSU's or SF salaries
surgical_fire 5 hours ago [-]
I enjoy coding, but I always sort of hated working in tech. It's something I do because I get paid well to do it, I happen to be good at it.
It was ironic that I was at my most miserable when working for FAANG. Allowed me to save to buy a house, but man, I hope I never have to go through one of those again.
Things got better after I started avoiding startup and US companies.
paulcole 6 hours ago [-]
> people who want to pick up pottery, painting, crochet or other old-timey analog hobbies. In coffee shops and in the low-lit corners of bars, professionals are sharing dreams of “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid.” These aren’t fantastical daydreams…
Things people say they want to and then don’t do is the dictionary definition of fantastical daydreams.
rvz 6 hours ago [-]
Because the free ride and the day-care rest and vest ZIRP tech life style is over.
In 2012 - 2023, this lifestyle used to be at Google, and Facebook and everyone outside wanted to join.
In 2023 - present The day care lifestyle is at NVIDIA, OpenAI and Anthropic and everyone outside wants to join (they are too late) after getting laid off.
It's that simple. There will be a new day care somewhere but it if you are looking for a safe and stable job, it does not exist.
8by3 6 hours ago [-]
It doesn't have to be _that_ extreme,
Many of us just wanted vaguely what the promise of a good job was supposed to offer. A decent wage, the ability to afford a home one day, support our families etc.
Maybe not everyone but up until about 2022 I had great job security and loved my work. I knew I was extremely lucky. I didn't have a crazy silicon valley salary but I was doing pretty well on any kind of global scale.
Job security went quickly out the window, with it came a sense of insecurity and the dread that most other working people live under. So I'd argue we aren't more sad than most people, just lost the warm bubble of being paid well to sit in a comfy chair and daily get the reward of solving interesting problems.
pixl97 5 hours ago [-]
>what the promise of a good job was supposed to offe
So did the people at car factories, at steel mills, at any number of places that no longer have that either.
Your last sentence is correct, we're just coming down to the reality that everyone else is suffering. But hey, tech unions are socialism, we'll pull ourselves up by our bootstraps at any moment now.
zabzonk 6 hours ago [-]
Too much web stuff.
surgical_fire 6 hours ago [-]
Everyone is sad?
I'm pretty neutral. I was pretty neutral before too.
catigula 6 hours ago [-]
The idea that "knowledge work is mostly pointless" is absurd and only literally true specifically if AI can do it... which it seems to be able to.
asjh15 5 hours ago [-]
Everyone is so sad because comments that follow the AI money are flagged, everyone knows that there is marketing and censorship and 50% of commenters are useful idiots that swallow the propaganda.
Noemamag is a propaganda rag for Berggruen.
mariopt 6 hours ago [-]
Let's see.... Unemployment, AI Lunatics, forced to use AI, AI Slopping...
Much of joy we got from coding was taken way, I can not even imagine anyone wanting to get back to a coding role to vibe slop all day long.
I even heard from colleagues that presented algorithms better than the AI slop and heard verbatim from their boss: I prefer the AI solution instead of your.
So yeah, AI lunatics are ruining tech
pixl97 5 hours ago [-]
>So yeah, AI lunatics are ruining tech
Eh, this is just the latest rendition. Before that we were still complaining about tech bros ruining tech.
With all this said, the demand for ever increasing profits squeezing everything that exists till it bleeds out will eventually ruin anything so even without AI tech would have reached that point.
diogenescynic 6 hours ago [-]
Because the entire career or job experience is like a never ending marathon where the only reward is keeping your job and not becoming destitute. You never have true job security and if you work at a company long enough to go from start up to mature company then they eventually start trying to outsource or automate your job etc. It's nothing but stress and fake positivity for years and years and hopefully your lottery ticket/RSUs actually increase in value and you're eventually able to afford your freedom. It's brutal. I keep fantasizing about cashing out my retirement and running some kind of small business. I am sick of the corporate world and being a hostage to some corporate executives whims.
tossitawayplz 5 hours ago [-]
A lot of people truly enjoyed the craft and creativity of building something. That is being stripped away. The building is being outsourced now. In some cases, the design too. Everything they once enjoyed and took pride in is being done by machines now. That is not a good feeling.
Imagine you are a master craftsman, a furniture builder. You sourced the wood, designed the furniture, built it by hand, took pride in your work. You adjusted your design or how you used wood based on a knot present in the lumber you got, made custom jigs to improve your efficiency or accuracy. You built skills, you were mastering a craft.
Now, suddenly, you manage a factory of outsourced workers who mass produce cheap particle board furniture. At the end of the day both the hand made dresser and the particle board one store your underwear, one is significantly cheaper (even if it falls apart on you after a few years.) so the cheaper one wins and that is what everyone starts producing. Good enough often wins, especially when cost is involved.
Some of these crafts people may have never got to the point of being masters yet either, they were working their way towards it, but now it looks like those skills may not be valued by the market, did they waste their most valuable years working towards a goal that no longer exists? A lot of these people in this situation are also millennials that are currently or nearing mid-life, hard to pivot to a new career at this point. That is not a good feeling. Perhaps a new kind of mid-life crisis.
A lot of the people I know that are excited about AI weren't craftspeople in the same sense, the process of designing and writing code was just a means to an end, they just wanted something to store their socks at the end of the assembly line regardless of how it was made, the cheaper the better.
The worse part is not only is it a craft, its a living and so even when the times are rough you still have responsibilities, housing, family, healthcare so you are forced to use AI even when you know you are feeding the very machine that will grow big enough to eat you.
Some craftspeople will say that the AI makes them better at their craft. They can understand and learn things they never could have done before. I think this is the ideal scenario and believed this at first as well but four problems emerged for me:
1. I kept getting lazier and lazier, letting the LLM do more and more until I wasn't learning I was just trying to get to the end goal.
2. The majority of my team pressed the easy-button slot machine and wholesale let the AI do everything, its practically impossible to keep up with the massive PRs and unbelievable code churn in a team like this especially with every level of management (who are not code crafts people) want that outcome.
3. I forgot how to do simple things, syntax, standard library functions, useful libraries. I started forgetting it, I kept finding myself reaching to ask the LLM how to do this or that, things I knew how to do by muscle memory only months prior.
4. You are giving immense amounts of training data to the LLM companies. Its already been proven they give 0 fucks about copyright in any sense, your code, your ideas, your products go right back into the LLM code blender in some shape or form.
Anyone reading this far that is the same kind of crafts person that I'm describing I will tell you what I'm doing about it. I'm going to starve the machine. I've cancelled all my LLM subscriptions, I've deleted the apps. I'm going back to hand coding. I don't care about the consequences. I will find a way to provide for myself and my family. I might get "left behind" but so be it, I'll do it on my own terms. I will no longer lose the sense of who I am for companies and people that don't care about me, or even humanity in the first place. Guess who's with us? Artists and Authors other creatives hate this shit too, software is a mix of creativity and engineering so its not as black-and-white as other fields but you get to choose what it is for yourself.
Good luck out there.
kittikitti 5 hours ago [-]
Objectively speaking, I'm less miserable than before, even though I am still miserable. I think it's because I always found Workism to be very cringe. Now that the workplace has a good amount of fascism mixed in, adherents to Workism realize their free trial is over. The price to pay is their soul.
I really enjoyed reading this article. Thank you for sharing.
gverrilla 6 hours ago [-]
Debord without Marx...
5 hours ago [-]
CurbStomper 6 hours ago [-]
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12912312 6 hours ago [-]
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aogaili 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Forgeties79 6 hours ago [-]
It’s not 1998 man you don’t need to use that word.
aogaili 6 hours ago [-]
Which word? I use what I want..I hope you understood what I said. Also, who said I'm man? I might be they?
Forgeties79 5 hours ago [-]
You know what I’m talking about and this comment is not as clever as you think it is. I’m moving on, have a good weekend.
aogaili 5 hours ago [-]
But I'm guessing it's "retarded"? You seem to be sensitive to intelligence ranking, judging by your comment "not as clever as you think".
I find a lot tech people sensitive to that in general, given that what they are exchanging in the market is their presumed intelligence.
But again, you can keep me honest, instead of leaving me guessing about a banned word since 1998.
aogaili 5 hours ago [-]
I honestly don't, forgive my ignorance but English is not my first language and I'm from different culture I suppose.
I was trying to explain a point that "sadness" as a by product arraignment not the domain. And I personally found the article heavy on generalization. When I read statements like "All knowledge work is pointless" and "Everyone in tech is sad".. I just think it's lousy thinking.
But I don't know what word you referring too that was not common since 1998 specifically and why..I find you comment to be really strange, sorry.
But anyway, I'm getting used to being flagged and downvoted on this site.
Der_Einzige 5 hours ago [-]
Pretty much every slur is ableist. You better not use “lame” as just another of the myriad examples of how slippery of a slope that is.
aogaili 5 hours ago [-]
I'm guessing it's also the culture and I'm reading about the history of the word "retarded". In my mind, it means slow/delayed, or slow comprehension. Which, I can comfortably use on myself sometimes.
But it seems since 1998 it has been used for diagnosis and people are shunning the word, but that is mostly in western culture.
But I think it was clear from my post what I mean when I said this, I don't know why I'm defending words, I don't know the author, I'm merely expressing my dissatisfaction with the author's position and broad generalizations.
What would someone coming to tech think when they read articles like this?
Forgeties79 5 hours ago [-]
You looked at an article, didn’t like what it said, and called somebody “retarded.” I’m not going to sit here and let you attempt to dress this up as some casual description after the fact. It is a personal attack that depends on commenting on someone’s cognitive ability using a word that is clearly controversial and offensive to many.
If this is new information to you, then you should go look more into the subject and try to understand where I am coming from rather than simultaneously saying “English is not my first language so how could I know” and digging in your heels
aogaili 4 hours ago [-]
I understand.
But then you sat their reading a published article labeling an entire domain/knowledge workers as useless/sad and you took it, so that sits alright with you?
I don't know the person, I can see the work that produced and the cognition behind it, and in my mind it was lousy thinking dressed in uniform published and shared that could lead to damage, just imagine young people at university reading this..
And are you their lawyer? you took offence at the word because it is sensitive to you. Just like I took sadness personal to me. Again, I don't know the person, but I think their work was weak. Perhaps I didn't use the right adjectives but that was my point, it was a weak article and poorly reasoned, that stigmatized an entire domain.
aogaili 4 hours ago [-]
And yes English is not my first language and the definition and perception of this word changes in the west with the last 20 years as you noted.
I'm sorry to break your bubble but if you step out of this forum and the culture you are in, you will be offended every day.
sri9s 6 hours ago [-]
tech people need to become business owners
dgellow 6 hours ago [-]
how about just letting us behind? You go on your AI futuristic trip, don't force it on others, and you can then come back and tell us how fantastic your life is while we all missed the boat. That's fine with me. But that's not what will happen, right? AI is being forced on everybody, everywhere. Which means it really doesn't matter if we jump in right now, agentic stuff will still be the norm in 5 years, and at that point you can show us all the magical things you're doing. I'm sure that will convince way more people than the current approach of "join right now or be left behind!!!"
hostyle 5 hours ago [-]
how will that help? being a business owner magically makes you immune from ai stealing your job?
gverrilla 6 hours ago [-]
there's no space for everybody. not even near. free market is inherently oligopolic for most cases..
win311fwg 6 hours ago [-]
Oligopolies are unlikely in a free market because as soon as you do anything interesting a million other people will copy what you are doing wholesale and you will have no advantage to see you rise up to form an oligopoly. We find oligopolies in our regulated markets because regulation, such as copyright, patents, tariffs, etc., legally hinder that competition from emerging.
However, even if we accept oligopolies as inevitable, that doesn't mean the tech people cannot collectively own those oligopolies. A business does not have to be owned by just one person. Cooperatives are a thing.
VCFundedGenYer 3 hours ago [-]
When every other website (or its content) is AI-generated and not made by humans, we can't buy computers anymore, we're being forced to use AI at work (for no tangible benefit either other than "It's the future! You'll be left behind [citation needed]!!"), endless security vulnerabilities caused by AI burning IT/Infosec out, do you HAVE to ask?
peakdunningkrue 6 hours ago [-]
Its because everytime they see Zuck or Musk punchable face and they see the world becomes worse because of what they did and the tech workers helped made that.
dgabriel 6 hours ago [-]
I'm not sad. As an engineer with decades of experience under my belt, I'm really excited about how AI can democratize software and help me finally complete long-simmering side projects, create value for the greater good, and be a generally fun thing. So far, I have not found myself even remotely replaced by AI at work.
echelon 6 hours ago [-]
I have never been happier.
I flipping love AI.
This is literally what I dreamed about as a kid. I feel like we might get to witness the singularity, and that's exciting.
To live and die under cellphone incrementalism is what's depressing. I hated where we were. I love where we're going.
celsoazevedo 2 hours ago [-]
You seem to ignore all negative aspects of AI, so it's not a surprise that you're happy and excited. It's the other side of the coin of "AI is bad and brings no benefits", usually the result of ignoring any positives.
I've used AI/LLMs to create tools for myself, which otherwise would have not been created. That's good. But I also know people that are terrible at detecting AI content... it's only a matter of time until a couple of fake videos trigger a mob and something bad happens.
I think that's where some of the negativity comes from. Yes, AI can do nice things, but it's not all good.
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.
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.
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.
No. And this shallow dismissal builds the mood you complained about.
You can pretty safely ignore a lot of irrelevant rage bait, but by remaining ignorant to what's going on around you you also risk losing a lot of useful, actionable, information and being blindsided by things that could have been avoided.
I know that if I were corporation hurting and exploiting people for profit or a corrupt politician screwing over the public I'd be very happy to encourage people to "unplug" and stop stressing about things.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
All these "Working in IT isn't stressful at all - John 25yo" memes didn't come come from nothing.
But I wouldn't really put it on LLMs/AI. It was always like this. Jokes about how hopeless development cycle is, and how everybody have impostor syndrome etc.
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".
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.
So it always amuses me when genAI advocates say things like "your job isn't going away, you're just going to be doing management" as if that is a good thing. To my ears, that reads as "you'll still be getting a paycheck, but your job is going to shitty."
So, what is this magical not-a-manager but also at risk of AI taking it away career? Are you sure it actually exists?
How so?
> Still, the bulk of the work is in the details.
The bulk of the work is in describing the details of what you want to see happen to another entity, which is what managers do. Someone else, or something else (like a compiler), will carry out the actual work to see your idea become a reality. Are you under the impression that managers don't do anything or something?
> We can play semantics on what it means to be a manager but the jobs as they were are going away
Are they? It is becoming easier to pass a lot more information off to the worker bees, so conceivably you should be able to do more management now, but the general act of describing what you want to the worker bees to do and seeing them carry out the task is no different. The telephone also increased the capacity of a manager being able to relay information, so while there is still evolution happening, what we're seeing in increasing the information density isn't unprecedented.
And, sure, maybe that will go away eventually. It is conceivable that AI can become the manager too, going off and coming up with its own ideas, plans, and delegating it all without any human intervention. But at that point you won't be a manager. Manager would be the very job on the chopping block.
If you want to say that managing a computer isn't managing I'd accept that stance in general, but the whole basis behind the idea of "everyone will become managers" is entirely premised on the idea of everyone managing computers, so that angle doesn't work within the context of this discussion. You cannot make that claim here.
I doubt anyone would, and that is why we even talked about the time when programmers weren't managers. Again, there really was a time in early computing where humans mechanically transcribed human-level descriptions into machine code. This is the origin of the term "coder". That was the job — encoding one representation into another. Unless you are trying to draw a distinction between programmers and coders? Most seem to consider them to be one and the same. But it wasn't long before we figured out how to make the computer the coder, so humans only had to worry about management of the coders.
> That, to me, is over-generalising what management is
The key difference in traditional use is that management is expected to manage people. As I mentioned before, I'd totally buy into you holding that same position. Except the idea of "everyone will be managers" hinges on the idea that they will manage computers, same as programmers have already been doing for decades. So that position doesn't work here. You cannot maintain that management is only management if it is people being managed, but then accept that in the future we will all be managers...
Straight up, there is no future where everyone will be managers of people. If everyone is the manager, what people would there be left to manage? It is impossible. Everyone becoming the manager is only possible if you include other things like computers. Which is fine, but we already manage computers. There is nothing new on that front. Computers were built to be managed. They are useless otherwise. Programming, for instance, is already management (where you include computers as something able to be managed).
I'd prefer to stay nearer this end of the scale, not that end.
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.
He deserved death, but the manner in which that death is administered matters. Vigilante justice corrodes the very foundations of the justice system, if we allow it the end result will be far more dead innocent people than guilty ones. I don't want more innocents to die just to kill those who deserve it.
Since you know what excessive is, at what level do the premiums become a moral crime?
There are many crimes today that did not exist 100 years ago and vice versa. Yes, there are crimes that should be punished that are not yet present in the criminal code, and you don't need to be a legal scholar to propose new ones.
I think most people agree deriving financial profit by knowingly denying people necessary medical treatment is immoral.
Part of keeping health costs down is rejecting some treatments as too expensive. Without this, costs will balloon forever as there is no one to say "enough".
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.
All options are good because they are all true.
I think you can extend them.
Sure are a lot of wannabe murderers on HN lately. Mangione, guillotines, what other thinly veiled incitements to violence are HNers using these days?
I fault the HN moderators for not following their own stated guidelines on most political submissions being off topic. "Most" needs to become "nearly all" since the submissions they allow through (or even explicitly unflag at users' request) are nurturing a very unpleasant breed of HN users.
The "no politics" rule is about not posting constant "x politician said this about tech" articles, not about banning all discussion of real-world consequences of the tech industry.
At no point in history was it ever thus.
There were really 2 sides to the original 'tech' industry: military and consumer. The military side was always about profit, because it was just an extension of the already extant WW2 military industrial complex (and frankly, IBM falls here despite their mainframes being largely used in civilian businesses).
But the consumer side that really grew out of universities into early gaming, internet, and consumer electronics tech, was very heavily driven by design and garage-start tinkerers. That's not to say no one wanted to make money, but it wasn't MBA-bro-driven back then.
Remember murder is only bad when it's not done with an algorithm and a bureaucratic process.
For-profit claim denials should be abolished unless there's a public backstop.
The Joker's monologue to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight about how one group of killings is just normal and "part of the plan", while another is shocking and appalling (specifically when it's a societal 'elite'), was supposed to be at least somewhat outlandish and overly pessimistic as an interpretation of society, but damn these people are trying to prove him right.
Kill thousands for profit -> no need to care, move along, no one is at fault and nothing of importance really happened
Kill one that is responsible for the former -> you must preface your discussion with hundreds of references to murder being bad, and clearly and unambiguously condemn the monster that did this
Humans really do have a bias where doing something small-scale but visceral causes horror and outrage, but doing 1000x that harm by building slow and boring bureaucratic machines of death is not noticeable because, after all, the machine isn't literally putting a gun to the face of the victims, so it's all fine.
https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/51189-presidential-pardons...
If Mangione had killed the UHC CEO by being his insurer and denying his claim for cancer treatment that his doctor said he needed, nobody would be saying anything.
it's cuz the guy is hot. that's gotta be it.
not how the main source of bankruptcy in the US is related to medical bills.
it's cuz he's hot.
Yes, that person is MY DOCTOR. There is no world in which it is reasonable that my health care team says I should have particular treatment, and insurance executives get to say no I don't. Sadly I understand this is not the case, and we value money more than human life, but I do not find that reasonable, no matter how common it might be.
I also understand that medical fraud happens, but I'm not sure the tradeoff to reducing it is worth the lives it's taking when we refuse claims.
There is no way to get around the fact that advanced medical care is expensive and tradeoffs have to be made.
Yes. It's the cost of doing business. Why is it that when we talk about the justice system, we think it's better to let a hundred criminals go free to avoid punishing an innocent, but in healthcare suddenly it flips and now it's better to have a hundred people be denied life-saving treatment to avoid one person getting an unnecessary one?
Your hypothetical is frankly insane - nowhere in the world, despite the dozens of types of medical systems, is there a crisis of doctors ordering frivolous multimillion dollar treatments just for fun. There is no incentive for them to do so. Your entire argument hinges on something that doesn't actually happen, just to defend an evil that already exists in the world.
Outrageous idea, but we should trust the people who studied for over a decade to administer medication to decide what medication a person needs, and pry the hands of private business off that process entirely. If someone misuses the system or prescribes obviously wrong treatment, go after that individual. If in 30 years it turns out that doing this does actually cause doctors to order random treatments for fun, then we can talk about scaling it back. Until then, for-profit healthcare is not to be trusted.
The insurers are hardly running up against hard resource limits, where there just isn't enough to go around and they have to triage. They are profit driven entities, and if they were legally allowed to deny all claims they would be required to do so by their shareholders.
No system is perfect, but patients shouldn't die to boost a stock price. And no patient should be required to fight for coverage at their most vulnerable.
Certainly no system is perfect. I'll take the system where I can shop around for insurers and plans over a one size fits all approach from unaccountable government bureaucrats.
Most people do not get to choose their own insurance company, they just get whatever their job picks. Most big companies have directors and officers that personally benefit when a particular insurance company does well. The market is completely broken.
Insurance is an arbitrage leach at best, and extortion at worst. It provides no value to society.
Without insurance Market prices would drive down the cost of healthcare.
In the real world, not a hypothetical, your market driven approach ensures they approve the minimum necessary to prevent customers from leaving. They require patients to to fight them for coverage while they're undergoing cancer treatment, because a dead patient they didn't pay out for is more profitable. Paying for insurance in a for-profit marketplace isn't paying for health coverage, it's paying for a CHANCE at health coverage, and you better be willing and able to fight for that chance while you're undergoing cancer treatment/surgery, or be willing to go bankrupt, or not get the treatment and die. That's the choice the insurance marketplace presents to you.
Not hyperbole, many such stories. My own father in law died in part because his private medicare advantage plan refused to approve in-patient rehab after a brain surgery that every MD working on him said he needed, but would have cost 6 figures out of pocket that nobody could front. The grim irony is he later tried to get out of bed to use the bathroom, couldn't support his own weight and suffered a skull fracture that resulted in a second brain surgery inside of a week, and that was fully covered.
I'll take the bureaucrats. The real world shows they're simply better at this, and Ayn Rand is simply wrong.
For this reason many small businesses don't offer insurance directly, but provide a tax-free health insurance stipend to their employees who then source their own insurance, effectively subsidizing the more expensive premiums as a benefit.
Larger employers have more bargaining power due to the number of employees they bring with them and can get better rates/plans from the insurance companies, and these better rates/plans are typically passed along to employees as a benefit for working there. An employer might cheap out, but that's the same as offering a bad salary.
Very large employers (Fortune 500s and such) are often self-insured, where they contract all the bureaucracy out to a private insurer but the company is actually doing all the payouts. The quality of this coverage naturally varies from employer to employer. I once had a co-worker have a claim denied for an expensive psychiatric facility he sent his son to, but because he had the claim pre-approved he had grounds for a lawsuit. He had to sue both the insurance company and the company we worked for while working there.
The elderly have medicare, and the poor have medicaid, which are taxpayer funded but not always 100% coverage, and there's a bunch of private plans you can buy to fill in the gaps if you do desire with various pros/cons.
Our system is a complete fucking mess, although it's arguably still better than it was pre-Obamacare
I'm not going to wade into the murder tag, but is this the actual incentive? The health care execs don't have enough money to save everyone so they pick who they can help strategically, making sure to help as many as possible, or is the system incentivized to instead maximize finding who can be denied so that the company makes the most money?
All of it is doing it both. The system is cracking and the ONLY REASON why its brought up is because 1 guy did a murder to an important guy. Otherwise business as usual.
Shame on society
"Its giving pearl clutching status quo defending cognative dissonance internal identity crisis having mook behavior" as the kids would say
Abortion doctors and admins are gunned down
Gender change doctors and admins are gunned down
Judges who allowed for bail and the person killed after bonding out are gunned down
Regular killers and gang members are gunned down
Police are gunned down
Politicians on both sides are gunned down
Mayors that didn't prioritize for natural disasters are gunned down
Feel free to add to the list.
I never made any statement about which actions should be legal. And the facile assertion that endorsing one action is either tantamount to, or requiring of, endorsement of any action that shares an arbitrary attribute you identify is sloppy argumentation; somehow I don't think you would argue that someone supporting police having the authority to use force means they are supporting every instance including illegal uses of force.
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.
Oh didn't you realize that some people actually READ the books people reference here?
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!
Someone talking on the phone but facing away from the room isn’t usually considered rude, either.
In a waiting room or train car, if you’re sitting and talking on the phone or Zoom, you’re broadcasting into the room with your posture. Your voice tends to broadcast as well with no wall or other conversant as an immediate barrier.
Would be nice if people could keep their noise levels down in general.
Only poor people are required to humiliate themselves by asking every tom, dick, and harry for their opinion on if their behavior is acceptable.
No one beside myself has ever told him to stop because I think being old gives one a bit of a 'get out of jail free card ' with regard to social behaviors.
I would love for you or someone like you to happen upon him and tell him to knock it off, but alas that seems fleetingly rare.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Scholar
https://andrewmbailey.com/papers/Higher-order%20truths%20abo...
"Bullshit Jobs"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
SWE has negative social value. Saying you’re a SWE or god forbid anything in AI in a dating/courtship context is basically suicide.
We are paid so well as compensation for debasing ourselves socially. A lot of normies intuitively understand the concepts in that book even without reading it and either see you as evil or a grifter, maybe both, when you say you work in tech/AI.
A lot of people are going to have extreme schadenfreud as they watch tech workers take L after L. They really hate us, they want us bullied or dead or wishing we were.
Still, it was totally worth it because the blue collar pricks that dislike tech workers are even worse in so many ways. At least I’m not a shitty construction worker responsible for contributing to the pathetic state that our housing industry is in.
I've noticed or experienced absolutely none of this. The closest thing I can relate to is that I operate on a different intellectual plane from some of my blue-collar friends. This causes a divide and probably limits intimacy, but does not result in negative relationships.
Regarding the dating world, it impresses people that I'm an SWE. My role is a boon, maybe because it signals intelligence; I'm not sure.
Strongly disagree here. Would encourage you to try to reframe some of that. Sorry if that comes across as patronizing.
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.
Everyone I know fully dependent on corpotch seems pretty sad though. I frequently suggest that they stop. It has not worked.
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.
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.
This is a universal concept across the Internet.
If you’re on your phone all day doom scrolling you’ll only encounter sad people.
[1] https://deanclatworthy.com/2026/02/09/the-joy-of-programming...
Really, noemamag?
I have to prioritize my and my family’s own financial well being. If a company gives poor returns, I’m incentivized to reallocate my capital to companies that give me better results.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
it's this that AI is stripping. the work is becoming systems thinking. not bad per se, but removing the small scale puzzle aspect of the job
the theory is not without flaws but it seems relevant to the topic and conversation
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).
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
It was ironic that I was at my most miserable when working for FAANG. Allowed me to save to buy a house, but man, I hope I never have to go through one of those again.
Things got better after I started avoiding startup and US companies.
Things people say they want to and then don’t do is the dictionary definition of fantastical daydreams.
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.
Many of us just wanted vaguely what the promise of a good job was supposed to offer. A decent wage, the ability to afford a home one day, support our families etc.
Maybe not everyone but up until about 2022 I had great job security and loved my work. I knew I was extremely lucky. I didn't have a crazy silicon valley salary but I was doing pretty well on any kind of global scale.
Job security went quickly out the window, with it came a sense of insecurity and the dread that most other working people live under. So I'd argue we aren't more sad than most people, just lost the warm bubble of being paid well to sit in a comfy chair and daily get the reward of solving interesting problems.
So did the people at car factories, at steel mills, at any number of places that no longer have that either.
Your last sentence is correct, we're just coming down to the reality that everyone else is suffering. But hey, tech unions are socialism, we'll pull ourselves up by our bootstraps at any moment now.
I'm pretty neutral. I was pretty neutral before too.
Noemamag is a propaganda rag for Berggruen.
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
Eh, this is just the latest rendition. Before that we were still complaining about tech bros ruining tech.
With all this said, the demand for ever increasing profits squeezing everything that exists till it bleeds out will eventually ruin anything so even without AI tech would have reached that point.
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.
I really enjoyed reading this article. Thank you for sharing.
I find a lot tech people sensitive to that in general, given that what they are exchanging in the market is their presumed intelligence.
But again, you can keep me honest, instead of leaving me guessing about a banned word since 1998.
I was trying to explain a point that "sadness" as a by product arraignment not the domain. And I personally found the article heavy on generalization. When I read statements like "All knowledge work is pointless" and "Everyone in tech is sad".. I just think it's lousy thinking.
But I don't know what word you referring too that was not common since 1998 specifically and why..I find you comment to be really strange, sorry.
But anyway, I'm getting used to being flagged and downvoted on this site.
But it seems since 1998 it has been used for diagnosis and people are shunning the word, but that is mostly in western culture.
But I think it was clear from my post what I mean when I said this, I don't know why I'm defending words, I don't know the author, I'm merely expressing my dissatisfaction with the author's position and broad generalizations.
What would someone coming to tech think when they read articles like this?
If this is new information to you, then you should go look more into the subject and try to understand where I am coming from rather than simultaneously saying “English is not my first language so how could I know” and digging in your heels
But then you sat their reading a published article labeling an entire domain/knowledge workers as useless/sad and you took it, so that sits alright with you?
I don't know the person, I can see the work that produced and the cognition behind it, and in my mind it was lousy thinking dressed in uniform published and shared that could lead to damage, just imagine young people at university reading this..
And are you their lawyer? you took offence at the word because it is sensitive to you. Just like I took sadness personal to me. Again, I don't know the person, but I think their work was weak. Perhaps I didn't use the right adjectives but that was my point, it was a weak article and poorly reasoned, that stigmatized an entire domain.
I'm sorry to break your bubble but if you step out of this forum and the culture you are in, you will be offended every day.
However, even if we accept oligopolies as inevitable, that doesn't mean the tech people cannot collectively own those oligopolies. A business does not have to be owned by just one person. Cooperatives are a thing.
I flipping love AI.
This is literally what I dreamed about as a kid. I feel like we might get to witness the singularity, and that's exciting.
To live and die under cellphone incrementalism is what's depressing. I hated where we were. I love where we're going.
I've used AI/LLMs to create tools for myself, which otherwise would have not been created. That's good. But I also know people that are terrible at detecting AI content... it's only a matter of time until a couple of fake videos trigger a mob and something bad happens.
I think that's where some of the negativity comes from. Yes, AI can do nice things, but it's not all good.