Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I think what happened is that a lot of the wrong personalities entered technology for all the wrong reasons.
Some of us started in the 80s or 90s and got into it with personal projects and treating the PC as a hobby. It is satisfying to be able to command a hunk of metal and get it to do things. And it can do boring stuff really fast and repeatedly. And that alone was exciting. The majority of us would stay up into the morning hours figuring out how to compile something. Or how to get that new driver work correctly in an unsupported OS or setup. It's a lust of computing. The gadgetry. The devices. The awestruck feeling when a new computing device or technology comes out.
I and many others like me still have that yearning and curiosity. I love strolling the aisles of the hardware store and computer stores for this very reason. The energy is electric. The immense amount of technology in every little thing is just mind blowing. THAT's why we do it. THAT's why we got into it. It wasn't the pay. It wasn't the glory. It was a group of us who wanted so desperately to have a computer club or an electronics lab for us to hangout and build stuff.
Unfortunately, as the industry grew, all the wrong personalities entered it. Project managers, product managers, scrum/agile masters, terrible mid level managers, talentless clowns, bozos, cheerleaders, jocks. The lot of them. The non-weird, non-geeky, non-obsessive, non-nerdy types. And then they co-opted the culture. They thought wearing glasses and wearing a backpack and carrying the latest tech devices made them "it".
The good thing is that the burnout hits fast for these folks. Just like the tons of medical school or law school students who are there for all the wrong reasons and realize sooner or later that this isn't at all what they wanted. Some members of this group actually become doctors and lawyers. THIS is the group that the article is talking about. They don't last, because their heart and soul are just not in it.
For the rest of us? AI, no AI, walled gardens, OSS or closed. It doesn't matter. All of this geeky stuff brings us joy. I don't want to "turn off and disconnect", I want to be connected because I love this stuff. I love the simple speaker and amp and the latest LLM. And I love the latest ADAS systems in cars. This work is meaningful to me because of both the end product and the work that it took to get there.
Unfortunately, the issue is that while we enjoy the geekery, the others ruin it for us because their lives suck.
Sorry to be harsh.
by thraway3837 - Oh my god!! You nailed it. I see two categories in tech. One the builder, innovators, tinkerers, those who just wanted to use tech to draw their ideas to life.
Then other is artisan, those who took pride in organizing and craft.
Second one is having miserable time. The former like me are having a blast. I love tech for that reason.
I stopped talking to people who think LLMs are waste. It's because they don't even touch it. They think it's a taboo to touch it.
So anything in tech is exciting because it enables us to do so many random things. Wish more people learnt about it.
- >Unfortunately, as the industry grew, all the wrong personalities entered it. Project managers, product managers, scrum/agile masters, terrible mid level managers, talentless clowns, bozos, cheerleaders, jocks. The lot of them. The non-weird, non-geeky, non-obsessive, non-nerdy types. And then they co-opted the culture. They thought wearing glasses and wearing a backpack and carrying the latest tech devices made them "it".
Something in that sentence reminded me of the following Jobs' quote:
"Many companies forget what it means to make great products. After initial success, sales and marketing people take over and the product people eventually make their way out."
Capitalism suddenly gets gamed to the point where the quality isn't rewarded. I'm not just talking about software, but also hardware. There's a reason why planned obsolescence is a thing. In a way, software bloat is unplanned obsolescence.
by Thanemate - As you say, many entered the field beacause of a natural interest in tech, rather than pay. But that doesn't imply that they uncritically accept every new technology just because it's new. It seems like you're arguing for "tech for the sake of tech", which you're entitled to do. But now tech has a transformative impact on the world, and most did not consent democratically to said transformation. It makes sense for an adult to consider the effect that their role has on the world at large.by amoe_
- It's funny because part of the wave of change you're describing is self-inflicted: we all wanted to get more people into farmsteading the Electronic Frontier, we wanted to make it more accessible and easy to use, hence projects like OLPC, Wikipedia, etc. I felt like the 90s and 00's were about "building a better world for everyone, online". But when "everyone" joined that world, well, they brought their own culture with them, and all the problems etc.
I feel like the rabid flamewars of the bygone era were as nothing compare to what's going on online now.
- I belong to the "hacker-type from the 90s" group and what you wrote really resonates with me.
Yet.
I worked with clueless managers leading whole dev teams to burnout because they read a book and apply it verbatim, without understanding anything about it.
In a team full of great "hacker-types", a new project manager arrives and in one of the first meetings says "You know you are all very intelligent, you don't need to prove it all the time".
We delivered ahead of schedule, having a lot of fun, and all coders agree that he was the reason for it.
I "managed" a 2 person team where the "just-in-for-money" dev was reliably churning out one API endpoint after the other one. He loved it, because it was repetitive boring work. The codebase was really consistent, no extra patterns, all code he wrote was really easy to read.
The other dev, "hacker-type", in 40 hours of work across 3 days, writes a beautiful, perfect plugin system, i was hoping for a prototype in 2 weeks. Of course, he loved it. At the same time, I gave him a "boring endpoint" once, he proposed a "solution" to a "problem" that was never there, his brain needed to over-engineer the problem until it was fun.
I agree with the sentiment of what you wrote: if your job is your passion, a new tech innovation like AI feels exciting rather than scary.
But i don't see staying up until morning as a requirement for being a good coder.
As a "hacker-type", my early growth ladder towards being professional in a business environment included a few steps about finding work "less fun".
by rufasterisco - 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.
by FLeXMurphy - > This article is too inward
Too inward for what?
by chrisjj - 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?by lostaccount
- Physical labor is bad for the knees, but good for the soul.by dec0dedab0de
- Office workers get chronic conditions from sitting around all day too. Yet vary few jobs provide any such balance.
- I have no idea why we go down the route of "us" vs "them" type of thinking. Have you considered both sides to be an abstract kind of hell?by mawadev
- > 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.
by pc86 - > The world does not wait with bated breath for product launches. A marketing campaign will not change the world. Almost no one will remember all the work we do.
It did at one time! I think that’s what’s so alluring initially about Workism. People waited with bated breath for the iPhone and iPad and its new versions. Those iPod commercials and the marketing campaigns for “rip. Mix. Burn.” did change the music world.
But the quote is also right. It doesn’t happen anymore, and I think that’s why the religion of Workism is especially vulnerable at this point.
In someways, it sorta feels like the article is cheering AI on? Like, it judges Workism, and goes on to say that AI shatters the illusion, but then.. that’s it? Deriving value from good work is pointless now and we should all just go volunteer?
I dunno, i clearly identify with those who loved work and now feel a bit lost, and yes i have been thinking about alternatives, but I feel like there must be knowledge work that is still valuable both financially and socially and also provides some sense of pride and purpose… if not, i fear the situation is much more dire than we are prepared for
by mangoman - for what it’s worth I still get that excited feeling every time there’s a smaller, distilled LLM that I can run locally. I think it unlocks so many use cases that are pro consumer. Probably an edge case though!by dogomatic
- I think the next frontier for (knowledge) Workists is to use the AI to make sci-fi shit. Someone go make me a schematic for a 3d-printed battery. Someone go make me a an electric (flying?) skateboard kit. Someone go make me an at-home clothes printer. Someone go make me a flying car. Someone go make me an RPG that feels like Morrowind, EverQuest, or WoW did when I was a teenager - let me play it on the couch with my friends and our kids. There are so many possibilities… I feel like the doomers here are (rightly) mad that these kinds of problems are hard and not the same as “write me a web GUI that lets me search a database for music” or even “spend 80 hours writing a custom k8s operator to manage autoscaling for semi-persistent queues” but compared to what tech was 10 years ago, the ability to create anything and everything right now is amazing.
- Currently, I have 3 main issues with AI, LLMs and so on. Generally speaking I am happy that I can use Claude Code and Codex to help building, fixing and maintaining software in my job. To be honest it is so helpful, I am less stressed bacause most of the time I can "find out" solution without asking collegues for help or I do not have spend a lot of time struggling myself. Yeah, if you understand what feeling it is that you know you can't solve problem then you will know what I am writing about.
But...
There are exceptions which make me bad feeling about AI, LLMs and so on:
1. Paid, subscribtion based payment model - you have to pay for tokens.
2. Local models are not "ready yet". You still have to own decent hardware and it will not be the same level of frontier models. I am big fan of local first, offline and "unlimited usage" compared to paid solutions. But probably I have to wait few or several years to get to that point.
3. Feeling "I did not do it myself". This is the most what could make bad feel. You "cheated". You did not write this great app or solve problem alone. You just did modern "copy and paste". You did not write or design this class, function alone by hand. And you know you probably could not do it without help of AI, LLM.
by testerius - Three really good points. Specially the third one. Not sure why HN readers are downvoting you…by punkbit
- The third point, on its own, doesn't bother me so much. What does bother me is the "clean it up for publication/PR/etc." phase. It was never especially fun in the first place, but cleaning up my own mess is something I can contend with, and you get a sense of satisfaction once you're done.
Cleaning up the slop from a faceless machine is just... not something I want to do. And even if you do get it done, the sense of satisfaction at the end is reduced.
I think the only way I can be truly "productive" with AI is to drop my bar for quality. For some cases that's easy (e.g. run-once-and-throw-away scripts), but for everything else I just can't do it.
by Retr0id
This is why tech companies are working hard to make sure you can never build your own computer again.2. Local models are not "ready yet". You still have to own decent hardware and it will not be the same level of frontier models. I am big fan of local first, offline and "unlimited usage" compared to paid solutions. But probably I have to wait few or several years to get to that point.by CodeCompost- "Knowledge work is mostly pointless" is the author's view, so his article (the fruit of knowledge work) should be measured by it.
Amd that sentiment is hardly surprising, coming as it does from a Director of AI Operations (his title on LinkedIn).
by brushfoot - Do you disagree that your work is pointless?by uncivilized
- I’m only surprised how deliberately he avoided using the term alienation - I guess he was just afraid of invoking Marx but not Debord or Graeber.by stevenwoo
- I want to address something mentioned in the article about people wishing for for grounded occupations. I have a sheep farm and I could not keep it running without my tech salary. So I kinda view these as false escapes. Unless forced to or of independent means, who is going to throw themselves into the bottom fork of the “K-shaped” economy.by rindalir
- Okay - but for most types of agriculture, the minimum viable farm size is rather larger than it was a century or so ago.
Might we ask how large your sheep farm is, by current commercial (vs. hobby) standards?
by bell-cot - I have a friend who owns an organic farm (with a couple partners). They mostly scrape by and work long hours and there’s a lot of stress. People really really under-appreciate how nice the remote tech daily routine is: “I wake up, drink coffee, and solve a few abstract problems each day with an army of AGI bots at my fingertips, and for a high salary”. Compare to roasting in 95 degree heat and wildfire smoke to make sure your veggies don’t die, living in a trailer on the farm, and working retail in offseason/relying on GoFundMe to recover from the inevitable natural disasters.
- I'm not even a programmer (by profession, though hobby) and I must say I find the gleefulness in the article off-putting.
That said I do think it is useful from a societal perspective that programmers are both doing this and getting hit. I'm not going to celebrate someone's job being threatened but in this particular case I think that symmetry is a major societal win for surfacing the question as to how are we collectively as humanity going to figure this whole AI situation out.
See translator jobs getting wiped out. Nobody even blinked an eye, it didn't spark any discussion, no deep thoughts were had. It did wiped out a bunch of people's lives and did NOTHING to trigger discussions around what are we going to do here.
Twitter connected programmers feeling the heat with a large audience may prove better to spark discussion
by Havoc - Translator jobs aren't really getting wiped out according to the stats (in the US). Growth is still projected at 2% in the next 10 years.
They also have this to say about AI:
>Computer tools, including artificial intelligence (AI), are making the work of translators and localization specialists more efficient. However, many of these jobs cannot be entirely automated because computers cannot yet produce work comparable to what human translators do in most cases.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/interpreters...
by evan_a_a - > See translator jobs getting wiped out. Nobody even blinked an eye, it didn't spark any discussion, no deep thoughts were had.
Whenever someone writes something like this "nobody talks about it, nobody cared" I always think that just tells you more about the media sources and community of the author (you) than anything else.
Of course people talked about it. They are still talking about it. Of course they cared. They still care. Don't be ridiculous. Go talk to some human translators in real life.
"Nobody is talking about AI". Sounds even more ridiculous when written like that.
by zulban - 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.
by xlii