stevenlangbroek

That's not what I mean. You can't just retrain and get a job in a new field and maintain your mortgage, rent or your kid or partner's needs, and downward social mobility is incredibly painful (think personal bankruptcies, pretty grim mental health outcomes).

Thanks man, that means a lot <3

haha close! i saw my mom get frustrated not remembering where her programs were located, so I wrote a little numerical menu for her with her programs listed in order of use. each number was secretly another .bat script that would then go to the right directory and run, for example, WordPerfect for her.

Nothing to apologize for!

Depends on who & what you ask. Aggregates hide important nuance. For who? At what cost to who? Do the people who bare the cost have a say? Would they agree that it's worth it? What's their life worth?

Is all demand equal? How is demand induced, by who and for what benefit?

Correct. But don't you want something from the future? What do you imagine it to look like? How far is it from what you hope it might? What are you willing to do to bring them closer together?

So? We produce enough food for 10 billion people every year, there's only 8 billion of us and a billion are hungry. Those seem like legible KPIs for shareholders (i.e. humanity) to pursue, no? And while World GDP is up, it's come at the expensive of the systems we depend on.

I want my son to live on a livable planet, and not under the constant threat of destitution. And I want that for all children, not just mine.

I have bad news for you...

Keep writing please! Where can I find your writing?

No, there's a difference between doing well for yourself and exploiting the labor of others to capture stupendous amounts of excess capital, then reinvesting part of that to make even more.

it sounds like you should learn a bit more about grief. also, please, for god's sake, read the original. I've linked to it in at the top of the article. As to envious, I'm a Director of Engineering. What exactly do you think is left for me to be envious of? The levels above (VP, SVP, CTO at a non-startup) are outside of my interest.

"technology is neutral, deployment is not"

is that a reasonable statement? if so, congratulations, welcome to the club bud! you're a luddite now. we meet on tuesdays, please bring cookies if it's your first time.

Not much for a while, then when I was a teenager I got into Flash / ActionScript, this was around the 2advanced era, if that means anything to you. I did a little bit of that & HTML, CSS and PHP throughout high school, then landed a job in e-mail marketing a few years after I dropped out of school, slicing templates for customers. Been climbing my way up since.

As a typography nerd, I am also mourning the death of typographic style. Em-dashes and ligatures <3

Hey! I'm not insulted at all. My position is that of a Luddite: I think technology is neutral, but deployment is not. My critique is structural, and I don't blame people in or out of tech for adopting AI to be able to survive.

No AIs were harmed in the writing of this post, either physically or by the sharing of earlier (cringe) drafts.

You mean after the dot-com bubble and after the financial crisis? I mean, not to disagree, but what point are you making here?

You're giving "yet you participate in society" vibes that I don't love, but let me address a few things:

- We're not indentured workers yet. We should always have been fighting for their dignity & rights, because they're ours too. - Might I invite you to read the original, it's linked at the top of the article. Sure, programming isn't physically demanding, but that doesn't mean we should just accept the bad parts. - All of that being said, yes I agree, other jobs are more valuable and it's insane that we get paid what we do. That's why I'm a socialist. Your value shouldn't depend on a grabbag of accidental circumstances outside of your control.

As to selling consulting on the side: I've been an employee for 2 decades, and am striking out on my own to build a better life for my newborn son & fiance. Sorry for wanting to be a more present father.

I'm sorry, or you're welcome :D

I agree, but would dare you to go one step further: there is no accountability for harm because, being the "bourgeoisie" under neoliberal capitalism, capital insulates them from consequences.

What you're describing is akin to Jevon's paradox. Let's see. The Industrial Revolution, I think a good analogy, caused years of death & suffering before raising standards of living, and even then only so because of mass organizing & uprising.

i zoomed in on a specific aspect of the experience, that of course doesn't mean everything is bad across the board. i've gotten great joy from programming, especially with other cool people, for most of my life. i'm grieving the loss of that joy, and hopefully, inspiring a few people to start talking to their peers about it, rather than suffering in silence.

> Ah you textile workers are so whiny...

hell yeah baby, I'm a proud Luddite.

i dunno. i'm happy to read in the comments here (and elsewhere) that my experience is not unique, many others have similar experiences and are going through the same feelings: grief. i think we're allowed to grieve, don't you?

oh I probably should, but I'm kinda busy with checks notes trying to feed my family :D

I can't speak for all managers obviously, but that's what we want. Now though, suddenly we're expected to contribute code again and C-level is completely ignorant about the tradeoffs they're making. Compounding this is the fact that the feedback loop for the tradeoffs is likely still a year+ away, far longer than their incentives take to materialize.

I've worked at many over the past 20 years.

heh yeah the irony is not lost on me. should be fixed now.

Yeah this was just a failure on my part, I was too lazy to go the ISR route and was on the Cloudflare free plan. I was not expecting any traffic haha.

the writing is a tribute to a 2014 similar article, based on my experiences since. it is absolutely a reasonable articulation of reality, although through a sarcastic or satirical lens. you might have different experiences, that doesn't invalidate mine.