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.
Remember when tech workers dreamed of […]
Yes, I remember. I had some of those dreams.
I was never a candidate for starting my own tech company, I was a self-taught dev living with undiagnosed autism and if anything, the plan was to work for a tech giant my whole life or until I could cash in some options and retire with some security.
I worked for Microsoft from the mid-90s to 2014 and it was all going basically to plan until one fine day 18,000 of us were called to a meeting to be told we were being laid off. I understand why they did this (there were groups in the company that did more or less the same things but with different tooling and I’d been working to align those things, because obvs we could use resources better and strangely management didn’t want that) but it hurt a lot to learn that a big part of the mass-layoff logic was not so much about efficiency or doing better work, it was about juicing the stock by making the market happy about cutting labor costs, and it was about depressing the kinds of wages folks like me could bargain for. (There’s nothing quite like a sudden dump of ~18k new job-seekers in a regional market to press those salary offers down by 20%)
It’s 9 years on and I’m working at a smaller shop, writing open-source software and I still don’t make what I was making then (and I’ve been watching as Amazon and Microsoft and Google keep on running this mass-layoff play every other year). I could probably make better money if I jumped around from job to job, but frankly where I’m at is a good fit, they’re accommodating of my neurodivergence, and there isn’t the specter of immanent buyouts or mass layoffs to juice the stock.
Looking down-thread, I see some dispute about whether folks in my position are petit bourgeois or the proletariat, and really I don’t care what label you lot think is the right one- at this point I’m a middle-aged professional, I work for a living, even though in my 20s I was pretty hopeful I was tracking to be able to retire by the time I’d reach my current age. (yeah, short of winning the lottery that’s not happening and when I think too hard about that it’s not bitterness I feel, but chagrin)
Looking back, I recall being abruptly ‘let go’ from a contract when I was passing out union leaflets while working as a contractor at Microsoft, and frankly I hope they press to unionize again and the new rules about union-busting are in effect when they do it.
mishimaenjoyer@kbin.social 1 year ago
imagine getting first replaced by some kid out of a garage, then by indian code farms and now by ai developed by the grown up kids from said garage and trained by indian code farms.
expr@programming.dev 1 year ago
So tired of this rhetoric. AI isn’t replacing any software engineering jobs, nor could it. It’s a joke, quite frankly.
Sneptaur@pawb.social 1 year ago
They set up a ChatGPT based bot at my work just to help our support agents find information faster. It provides straight up factually false information 80% of the time. A solid 30% of the time, it says the opposite of the truth. It’s completely worthless at all times.
FaeDrifter@midwest.social 1 year ago
It was impossible for a computer to be smart enough to beat grandmasters at chess, until it wasn’t. It was impossible to beat Go Masters at Go, until it wasn’t.
No software engineering jobs are getting replaced this year or next year. But considering the rapid pace of AI development, and considering how much code development is just straight up redundant… looking at 20 years from now, it’s not so bright.
It would be way better to start putting AI legislation in place this year. That or it’s time to start transitioning to UBI.
TeenieBopper@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I was listening to a podcast about AI. I think it was one of Ezra Kleins. And he was telling a story that he heard, bout those weird virtual reality games from the 90s or early Aughts. And people shat on those games because they were awful and clunky and not very good so that shitting was well deserved. But one guy was like “yeah, that’s all true. But this is the worst it’s going to be. The next iteration isn’t going to be worse than this.”
And that’s where AI is now. Like, it’s powerful and already a threat to certain jobs. GPT 3/4 may be useless to software engineering jobs now (I’d argue that it’s not - I work in a related field and I use it about daily) but what about GPT 5? 6? 10?
Im not as doom and gloom on AI as I was six months ago, but I think it’s a bit silly to think that AI isn’t going to cause massive upheaval across all industries in the medium to long term.
But also, for the record, I’m less worried about AI than I am about AI in the hands of Capitalism.
Shadywack@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Not yet, but would you agree that businesses desire the ability to automate software engineering and reduce developer headcount by demanding an AI supplemented development work flow?
primbin@lemmy.one 1 year ago
Now that I use github copilot, I can work more quickly and learn new frameworks more with less effort. Even its current form, LLMs allow programmers to work more efficiently, and thus can replace jobs. Sure, you still need developers, but fewer of them.