The labour struggle for rights we see as basic today (40h work weeks, free weekends) was bloody and deadly.
And this was without surveillance tech and automated police drones or w/e else Palantir is working on right now. If we're going by historical precedent this transition won't be pretty, even if you're hoping for a nice optimistic end result.
I'm not so sure having a beefy 401k and maybe a couple of rental properties will be enough to insulate some of the more comfortable HN posters from all the potential chaos.
I am pretty sure we are running towards a big 1929 style system correction. I may be wrong, but that people doesn't even try to contemplate this possibility seems bonkers too me. And in that case, those 401k are not going to be worth much, viz. the price of butter, and neither you can count on rental properties as a income source when everywhere became Flint, OH.
It's a general anxiety of where the industry is headed. Things like marketing, personal branding, experimenting are increasing in relevance while things like detailed meticulous engineering are falling to the wayside.
At least when it comes to these tales of super fast rise to wealth and prominence. Meticulous engineering still matters when you want to deliver scale, but is it rewarded as much?
My feel is that the attention economy is leaking into software. Maybe the classic bimodal distribution of software careers will become increasingly more like the distribution in social-media things like streaming, youtube, onlyfans etc.
European leaders fundamentally have no issue with Americans dominating tech and were happy to have their entire digital infrastructures rely on US companies. If the Trump admin could give them some sort of nod behind the scenes that all of this is just a big show and they're not actually going to break NATO or invade or w/e insane shit they're saying I guarantee you a sizeable amount would just say hey no worries then let's keep the status quo going.
But that's not what's happening. It's a clear and obvious security risk to their sovereignty. If the government can't guarantee that to its citizens then what even is its purpose? The Trump admin has already tried to use American tech dominance as leverage.
Ask yourself this question, what if there was a foreign tech competitor that managed to scale up to be basically a better cheaper AWS. Would the US government ever allow it to encroach its market to the point that AWS or Azure did in Europe? Look at what happened to tiktok if you want to see what approach they'd likely take.
So how exactly would you envision an objective and neutral provider in a world of geopolitical competition?
In a country where every single facet of life is being increasingly politicised, you think this wouldn't cause a fuss?
Oddly enough if any government could just push and shove this through it might be Trump. I bet 20 years later you'd have a sizeable constituency who could be convinced that the change from imperial to foreign units was the beginning of the fall and decline and that everything could be fixed if you went back.
Some are saying "finally, AI does all the busywork and we focus on the business domain"
But what if the business is soulless? As in what if the business you're working on is just milking value out of people through negative patterns which... is ... well a lot of tech businesses these days. Maybe the busywork enabled engineers to be distracted from the actual impact of their work which makes people demotivated.
Because wallstreet just needs to see that AI adoption number go up. No one really cares about if it's accidental clicks, or hell just mandatory running in the background. We just need that number to go up, and next quarter it has to go up even more.
It’s just generic advice that doesn’t even really apply to the fresh grads, their issue is not having any entry point to a career anymore.
I graduated 10 years ago and it’s a day and night difference. Whatever worked for me in 2015 will not work for a fresh grad today, the game is completely different.
But crying about not having a door to walk through isn’t going to change anything.
I graduated 20 years ago and it was different when you graduated just as it is different now. Things change. Economies change. Life changes. The advice I give is simply because that’s the only thing you can change. You and your habits.
I’m all for revolution.
I’m all for socialism w/ a sprinkle of free market capitalism.
I’m all for the better good of all fellow humans.
I empathize with fresh graduates who were told there would be ample jobs in their fields when they graduate 4-6 years from when they started. I struggle to empathize with those who see there are no jobs and do nothing. Anything is better than nothing.
>But crying about not having a door to walk through isn’t going to change anything.
Why is it such a problem for you that people talk about it openly? Why the need to pretend that everyone can have this under control? It seems to me that your advice is just about making you feel better about the situation, about pretending to ourselves that all issues are individual failures, that the world is fair.
I do not see people who argue with you calling for revolution, I am seeing them trying to talk about objective state of the world. You seem to be rejecting that description, because it involves things you or them cant control.
Constructive discussion on what we can do to fix this is welcome but open complaining isn’t going to change anything. It may be cathartic but it’s not productive.
I’m not blaming anyone or saying it’s anyone’s failure. I’m simply saying the only thing you can control is you and so it’s up to you to master your habits and desires so that you can afford a future you want.
Constructive discussion on HN wont change anything either. Moreover, looking at the politics, claiming that constructive discussions is how things are achieved seems to simply not be true. It actually seems like cathartic complaining and making noise has massively better to achieve a change or being heard, practically.
> ’m simply saying the only thing you can control is you and so it’s up to you to master your habits and desires so that you can afford a future you want.
Nah, there is no possibility "future you want" in your advice. It is just about hiding the reality creating vague feeling that people can control things. Even if they cant.
What you are actually saying is that there is no hope for change. Everybody knows your advice wont lead to a change. Worst, if one believes to your advice, they will vote for politicians who created current situation. Because they are the ones constantly blaming individuals for result of policies they pushed for.
"It is just about hiding the reality creating vague feeling that people can control things. Even if they cant."
Still, people have agency. If one doesn't see it like that in relation to their material stance then there must be a lot of things that are simply disconsidered from the list of possible options, for whatever reason. Nobody said the world is fine as is and that the blame is somehow all on the ones that are in unsavory positions now. The world is not fine (and never was, for a lot of folks that almost nobody talkes about). It's winter time in this industry and the new hatchlings have their future in question. Yes, there are factors out of their control (like LLMs) that led to this winter, but there's also the colective decision for a lot of kids of pursuing these cushy well-paid office jobs that made things worse by oversaturating the market. Now, of course that, being saddled with student debt and heavily invested by an already acquired degree, to consider the long-term career prospects outside the industry seems like a non-starter, yet it may be exactly what the labor market (and younglings' individual well-being) needs. Such a decision is just of the same kind as the one that brought them here. That's agency on the individual level. And lastly, it's best for everyone to understand, internalize, and accept (the more the better) the fact that nobody else should be expected to step in and fix things for you. Yes, there are many people trying to make the world a better place (as there are many who don't care), there are also people in power that are even supposed to do the same, yet if they manage or not to make it better for you is not a given. That's, whenever it happens, just a bonus. The rest is up to you, the adult.
It also permeates culture to the point that people imitate the LLM style because they believe that's just what you have to do to get your post noticed.
The worst offender is that LinkedIn type post
Where you purposefully put spaces.
Like this.
And the clicker is?
You get my point. I don't see a way out of this in the social media context because it's just spam. Producing the slop takes an order of magnitude less effort than parsing it.
But when it comes to peer reviews and papers I think some kind of reputation system might help. If you get caught doing this shit you need to pay some consequence.
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