I think the other piece of this that comes to mind for me is that, by and large, software developers as a culture lack class consciousness.
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@noracodes @spinach @datarama @xgranade I was waffling a bit on if I should mark 150k as for senior engineers, but I guess it’s hard estimating the summary statistics of this trimodal distribution.
actually, no. four distributions.
There’s four different distributions for non-managerial “tech” roles:
- as much as other white collar employers at the company
- a premium over other white collar employees
- an entirely different scale versus other white collar employees
- an entirely different scale versus other tech employeesrespectively: “in house software development plus IT at school district or small to mid sized company”, “software development at mid to large sized company”, “software development at tech company”, and “shook zuck’s hand for AI money”
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@recursive @noracodes @spinach @datarama @xgranade I don’t like the author for various reasons; unfortunately the author has some of the more accessible and comprehensive writing on industry topics
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There's a massive difference between owning one home, the home you live in, that could burn down and leave you homeless, that you need to work to afford maintenance and utilities and taxes on, and being so incredibly rich that you own a city block that you can charge rent on.
They're both rich, but they're not the same.
One more addendum: my point isn't that people should be nicer to folks at the own-a-home / have-retirements end of rich, it's that folks who have access to roughly $1M of assets (which again, includes one house in high cost-of-living areas) should stop acting like they're so fucking special that they don't need unions, or can betray fellow laborers with AI.
Being a rich laborer doesn't mean you're not a laborer, nor that fucking over other laborers is a good idea.
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One more addendum: my point isn't that people should be nicer to folks at the own-a-home / have-retirements end of rich, it's that folks who have access to roughly $1M of assets (which again, includes one house in high cost-of-living areas) should stop acting like they're so fucking special that they don't need unions, or can betray fellow laborers with AI.
Being a rich laborer doesn't mean you're not a laborer, nor that fucking over other laborers is a good idea.
Capital owners in tech have very successfully sold rich laborers on the idea that they should act and vote more like bosses than like laborers, and seldom have I seen this idea play out in a more heartless manner than watching techbros talk about AI. Owning a home makes you well off, but it doesn't mean that the same people using AI to displace and devalue all other kinds of intellectual labor won't also come for you.
Tech workers, even the very well-off ones, need to understand class.
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Capital owners in tech have very successfully sold rich laborers on the idea that they should act and vote more like bosses than like laborers, and seldom have I seen this idea play out in a more heartless manner than watching techbros talk about AI. Owning a home makes you well off, but it doesn't mean that the same people using AI to displace and devalue all other kinds of intellectual labor won't also come for you.
Tech workers, even the very well-off ones, need to understand class.
It's almost like somebody should write a book about how Capital works
There's a difference between a successful craftsman/person and (landed) gentry
And the difference is often overlooked, because the one wants to be the other, but can only do so by owning land (or other massively generative capital, like AWS)
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One more addendum: my point isn't that people should be nicer to folks at the own-a-home / have-retirements end of rich, it's that folks who have access to roughly $1M of assets (which again, includes one house in high cost-of-living areas) should stop acting like they're so fucking special that they don't need unions, or can betray fellow laborers with AI.
Being a rich laborer doesn't mean you're not a laborer, nor that fucking over other laborers is a good idea.
@xgranade And anyone paying attention to the waves of RTO bullshit, layoffs, mandatory "AI" usage, dismal job markets, etc, over the past few years really ought to realize by now that more and more of the careers that supported owning-your-home and saving-for-retirement are rapidly becoming much less secure...
Which, of course, feeds right back into your point -- the gap between the "merely" rich and the obscenely wealthy is a vast gulf.
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Capital owners in tech have very successfully sold rich laborers on the idea that they should act and vote more like bosses than like laborers, and seldom have I seen this idea play out in a more heartless manner than watching techbros talk about AI. Owning a home makes you well off, but it doesn't mean that the same people using AI to displace and devalue all other kinds of intellectual labor won't also come for you.
Tech workers, even the very well-off ones, need to understand class.
@xgranade well said. we couldn't agree more.
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Capital owners in tech have very successfully sold rich laborers on the idea that they should act and vote more like bosses than like laborers, and seldom have I seen this idea play out in a more heartless manner than watching techbros talk about AI. Owning a home makes you well off, but it doesn't mean that the same people using AI to displace and devalue all other kinds of intellectual labor won't also come for you.
Tech workers, even the very well-off ones, need to understand class.
@xgranade Considering how much recent efforts are explicitly trying to fuck over the "Knowledge Work" sector (which is where programmers find themselves), they would do well to learn fast, because if they keep pretending they're in the upper class, they're gonna have a very rough next few years of rapidly worsening exploitation and diminished value in the labour market.
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@xgranade Considering how much recent efforts are explicitly trying to fuck over the "Knowledge Work" sector (which is where programmers find themselves), they would do well to learn fast, because if they keep pretending they're in the upper class, they're gonna have a very rough next few years of rapidly worsening exploitation and diminished value in the labour market.
@xgranade If their bosses get what they want - AI tools that are actually useful, basically - then programmers are roughly in the same position now, that the craftspeople and artisans were before industrialization, and where industrial workers in the US were before outsourcing manufacturing became more viable.
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@xgranade whether this is true depends on which metric you are using when you say "more in common". it seems the metric you have chosen is one related more to abstract notions of power and what one can get away with as opposed to how much one's basic needs are being met. i find this choice of metric in itself to be a compelling counterpoint.
@imyxh@weirder.earth @xgranade@wandering.shop They are vastly different in terms of having their needs met and even financial security, but they still work for their livelyhood (even if they are arguably overpaid). They're still ruled over by the capitalist class that owns the fruits of their labour. Even if in the immediate short term their interests are aligned with the corporations (often because the corporations do their best to obscure their actual interests), their overall class interests are aligned with the working class.
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@xgranade If their bosses get what they want - AI tools that are actually useful, basically - then programmers are roughly in the same position now, that the craftspeople and artisans were before industrialization, and where industrial workers in the US were before outsourcing manufacturing became more viable.
@xgranade They do not seem to be on a path to actually get their chatbots to be able to replace knowledge workers on any sort of scale - they are bad at most things, too unreliable, can't handle novelty, and need a human expert to verify anything they generate, which means you still need the human experts to at least clean up after the chatbot -
But the companies will keep trying to replace them with a machine, and replace as many of them as they can with machinery. -
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