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The proletarianization of tech workers (doctorow.medium.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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https://archive.ph/hMZPi

Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?

Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.

Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

We deserve better than this. We can get it.

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

It's purely in the realm of science fiction.

This isn't proof of anything, I would just like to point out that a lot of science fiction has become reality in the last few decades.

Go or Chess are games with a fixed and simple ruleset

At the end of the day, what is a computer except a machine with a fixed and simple ruleset: logic gates.

ambiguous and ill-defined into something entirely unambiguous and precisely defined, and that is something we are so far from achieving in computers it's not even funny

You don't need AI to write you perfect C or JavaScript or HTML. You just need it to create an interface for an end user to make the computer do what they want. I predict the AI itself won't write the languages, it will tend to replace the languages. Many orders of magnitude more computationally expensive, but the hardware is quickly becoming cheaper to buy than paying software engineers.

If you think development amounts to just writing a bunch of boilerplate as though we were some kind of assembly line putting together the same thing over and over again, you're sorely mistaken.

Obviously not, that's why libraries and OOP and frameworks exist, I'm aware, not pretending like I have anything to teach you about it either.

And I'll take the L if you have the insider knowledge that there's a requirement for massive creativity behind the scenes in widespread fundamental overhauls of the way software works. But afaik, the fundamentals of code haven't changed in decades. The way users interact has not changed much since smartphones became standard. I don't see a capitalistic incentive to pay for lots of new creativity, instead of just making usable products.