"'We Cannot in Good Conscience Encourage You to Pursue Our Profession" | Hacker News Reader

"'We Cannot in Good Conscience Encourage You to Pursue Our Profession"

indiewire.com

53 pointsquinto_quarto37 comments

For those that don't read to the end...

> Due to an internal technical error, applicants to our Production Design Initiative (PDI) program received an email that had not been edited or fact-checked and was not intended to be widely distributed. As an early draft, the data points included in the email (such as “more than 75% of our members are unemployed and many have not been working for 18 months or more”) were not fact-checked and may be inaccurate...

> ...This temporary pause in our PDI program during a year of contract negotiation gives our staff and membership the ability to focus on our movement of “Many Crafts, One Fight.” This labor movement alongside our peers and colleagues only strengthens our excitement for the future of the industry.

> We plan to resume the PDI program in 2025.

I doubt the "internal technical error" was a technical issue. Someone sent the email unilaterally, and other people were upset by what it said.

They only said it wasn't fact-checked and "may" be inaccurate; they didn't actually say it was false. This is because if they claimed their member employment rate was higher than it is, that could be sued for it.

My bet is someone told a junior employee or intern to write a draft email for the announcement with zero guidance, the junior had no idea what to write so started messing around with a sarcastic letter (imagine being an intern to the production assistant guild!), then some time later accidentally hit send instead of delete and didn't read the popup before clicking "Yes I'm sure"

I doubt they have a realistic employment rate anyway, since it's standard to take non-industry jobs to make ends meet, especially during strikes. The entire industry goes through their own "struggling actor" phases, no one really hides that.

Total opposite. Someone senior who had been around for a while and was completely disgruntled wrote it.

To me, the "updated" statement sounds like they are "halfway" back pedaling due to some external pressure or outcry... Probably the leadership got their mind right by someone, and decided that the original statement is too harshly phrased, so they made up the "draft, technical error" story.

> As an early draft, the data points included in the email (such as “more than 75% of our members are unemployed and many have not been working for 18 months or more”) were not fact-checked and may be inaccurate.

May be inaccurate? Well damn, is it or is it not?

Maybe they will do the same for the majority of PhD programs?

And a ton of undergrad and grad programs

Why stop the money printer

PhDs went through a few years of exponential growth in the 1960s, hit the "resource depletion" limit around 1971 and has been starved for resources ever since.

PhD programs are not the issue. On the average, people with a PhD have higher incomes and a lower unemployment rate than people with a lower degree. It's just that there is a subset of PhDs who can't find a proper job in the academia but choose to stay there anyway.

Doing a PhD may not make sense purely from a financial perspective, but few things in life do. You don't buy a bigger home or have hobbies to make more money either. A PhD is one of those things you don't do for money, but because you find some inherent value in it.

> A PhD is one of those things you don't do for money, but because you find some inherent value in it.

We must not run the same circles. The number of people I know who abandoned a post doc (they were fucking miserable) is probably triple the number of people I know who got a PhD.

If your statement were true I can’t fathom why people would drop out.

People try lots of things like learning to play the guitar, or marathon running, only to discover it’s harder than they thought and drop out.

You can tell when people are in it for the money because they keep doing it even when it makes them miserable.

People typically don't start a PhD with the expectation of making more money. They start it because they think research will be interesting.

Many people drop out once they realize that doing a PhD is not for them. I've seen estimates that the average dropout rates are something like 40-50%. Many of them are high achievers, who are very good at completing well-defined tasks given to them, but who don't enjoy working on more open-ended problems. Others are driven out by the intense pressure and the expectations of long working hours that are present in some labs, particularly in elite universities. And some, in countries where people doing PhD are considered students rather than junior professionals, cannot tolerate the poverty imposed on them.

The post you're responding to said abandoning a postdoc. The PhD was completed. So I'm not sure it has anything to do with not enjoying open ended work.

I assumed that was a mistake. Because the post said they knew about three times more people who abandoned a postdoc than people with a PhD.

I feel the same way about coding. I teach coding courses but I feel like a hypocrite. The great irony is that there are so few jobs for competent, experienced coders that I can't find a job coding myself so I have to teach it instead.

Though I guess maybe the market for junior coders may be OK? I feel like the last thing companies want are jaded senior engineers. They don't seem to care about security vulnerabilities and such.

I feel like one of the people selling shovels at the end of the gold rush. Though I guess coding is a good supplementary skill to have. A lot of my students are from other industries.

Once you've seen how the sausage is made in this industry, nobody wants you as a coder. They must assume that you're going to be a bitter old fart and cannot be relied on... I'm not even 40. It's particularly ironic since I have a perfect record in terms of integrity. There are millions of dollars of crypto relying on my open source software... The founders of the project are basically my enemies (treated me very badly for no good reason). I've been trusted with millions of dollars of crypto for half a decade in spite of personal financial struggles, being out of a job and having multiple citizenships with non-extradition policies. I'm the embodiment of perfect integrity in the face of adversity, yet seemingly cannot be relied on? That's why I sometimes entertain conspiracy theories about people in high positions being controlled via blackmail... If the system doesn't rely on (and doesn't value) individuals with proven high integrity, it must surely rely on (and value) compromised individuals acting purely in their self-interest.

> Though I guess maybe the market for junior coders may be OK

From my limited point of view, it seems that there's a real market only for devs with about 4-6 years of experience - i.e. when one's proven themselves sufficiently to be called a "senior" but isn't yet fully jaded.

That would correspond. I think it was similar when I myself had 4 to 6 years of experience. There was a stigma that senior devs were slow and didn't adapt well to new tech. Like it was seen as if they had 1 year of experience 20 times instead of 20 years of experience. I feel horrible for ever having bought that.

I think the discrepency is that the market isn't for people who can code, it's for people that can think like engineers. Coding is the easiest part of the job. Developing tools and products that are a force multiplier for the business is what people get hired to do, not write code.

That's not to say that there shouldn't be a division of labor between software engineers and techs. The analog I like to draw is that mechanical engineering has many skilled labors involved with distinct roles in an organization/market (mechanics, machinists, maintenance for both, as well as the engineers). But the software industry is so young that we haven't figured out what those verticals are for developers, and the bean counters(\s) all view us as coders because we type at a keyboard.

This is ironic given that I've worked on many complex projects that were technically successful. Distributed systems, blockchains/p2p systems, front end, back end... I was always one of the top engineers in every company I worked. My code is closer to bug free than I've seen from anyone else.

I've built a deterministic chain-to-chain decentralized exchange from scratch. I've built a real time system that scaled horizontally to support tens of thousands of concurrent users in high-frequency scenarios. I work very well in a team.

So many narratives that exist in this industry seems to gaslight me.

"Coding is not about coding, it's about intangible attribute X."

"There are no 10x engineers"

"There is no such thing as good architecture"

"Most very senior devs don't have 20 years of experience. What they have is 1 year of experience, 20 times over."

Exhausting nonsense!

Take crypto off your resume -- it's a scarlet mark.

Thanks for the advice. I sense that there has been dirty politics going on behind the scenes. I quit a few years ago after the leaders of the project I worked for basically stopped caring. It was a relatively sudden change, as though they had been corrupted to run their own project into the ground. My sense of the space was that it was mostly honest, well-meaning people who were forced to discredit themselves and turn into scams as part of some coercive deal with various powerful entities. I can only speculate as to which entities might be at the root of the corruption but it's unfortunate that the entire space couldn't stop itself from becoming a scam.

Crypto is basically seen as a scam by most employers. You may be a perfectly honest person, but you unfortunately associated yourself with some of the biggest scammers of our times. I think it must be a bit like having had a position at Enron after its fall.

I think there are a lot of things holding back employment for that group, starting with the state of the economy. But multiple things.

It does seem like we are rapidly moving towards a world where most jobs are basically configuring groups of AIs or robots to work towards some kind of goal. And pretty quickly the AIs can do the configuration better than a person.

Graphical creatives who can use AI will be demand, surely?

> Given this situation we cannot in good conscience encourage you to pursue our profession while so many of our members remain unemployed. This is due to multiple reasons, the 2023 strikes, the on-going 2024 labor negotiations, and a once in a generation change within the entertainment industry as it searches for new business models to govern its content creation and distribution.

Let this be a lesson who think that labor relations are some sort of battle between good and evil and if only the "right" side wins, then your industry will be saved.

No. There are only markets and incentives. And if an industry is being massively disrupted, attempts to freeze that industry in time are going to fail. With broken hearts and lives along the way.

Yeah, sure, you might be able to push a little bit against the largest players in a market, but if you are too successful then that is only going to cause the smaller players to use the disruption to their advantage and to overtake said larger players.

Instead of staking your career or life on an unwinnable battle against disruption that could only possibly delay things by a few years, you are going to be much better off getting with the times and seeing how you can modify your career and work so it is compatible with or takes advantage of said disruption.

> No. There are only markets and incentives. And if an industry is being massively disrupted, attempts to freeze that industry in time are going to fail. With broken hearts and lives along the way.

Nah. Declining industries take plenty of time to decline, more than enough for those there to finish out their careers in comfort. Just look at west coast shipping and the rise of containerisation. Labour solidarity absolutely works, not for saving industries but for saving humans.

> Declining industries take plenty of time to decline

Thats depends on the specific disruption that is happening to the market.

As stated, you can push at the edges. But no amount of incremental pushing stops 100X cost reducing disruptive technologies that are widely available to the public and that can't be banned unless all personal PCs are confiscated.

You say that, but people with simple returns go to tax prep companies every year…

Inertia really does seem to keep dying industries around for longer than seems reasonable because humans aren’t completely rational actors.

> Labour solidarity absolutely works, not for saving industries but for saving humans.

In my personal experience, unions will prioritise the interests of senior members approaching retirement over fresh graduates coming into an industry. If you are in the latter group, breaking with “solidarity” may be more in your personal best interests than going along with it

Who suggested fresh graduates should enter declining industries?

To clarify, I’m not talking about declining industries. I am talking about union membership in non-declining industries. When I was young I was a member of Australia’s tertiary education union (the NTEU), and I really got the sense the union was prioritising the interests of senior staff over what was best for me personally. e.g. opposing performance-based pay, even though I personally was likely to get paid more under it

The aversion of unions to performance based pay always put me off. I think the fear is that management will rig performance metrics to punish union members in general and “troublemakers” in particular, but seniority systems always seem to reward the worst kind of coworkers.

> modify your career and work so it is compatible with or takes advantage of said disruption

You say this like it's something that anyone can do. Reskilling takes time, and not everyone is such the tech entrepreneur (or aspirant) as—perhaps—you are. I'd wager that most people that make these kind of pronouncements to others to lift themselves up by the bootstraps, have never experienced hardship, wouldn't know how to adapt to disruption, and were born into privilege. And those that really have the chops to 'take advantage of said disruption' in spite of having no privilege or leverage, are the minority.

> You say this like it's something that anyone can do.

They can either do that now or lose their entire livelyhood later, with less time to transition. Its their choice I guess. If they want to be in an even more doomed situation, I guess they are free to do so. But I wouldn't recommend it.

> Its their choice I guess.

It's the lack of choice that I'm pointing out. Sheer force of will isn't going to get you employed in a completely different discipline.

Labor relations are what allow people to have the financial wiggle room in times like these (e.g., decent compensation, redundancy packages). Instead the industry overworked and underpaid the labor pool, and then dumped them as soon as they could to fend for themselves.

This is a lesson that if you work in any industry where you're liable to be outsourced or automated—ahem, software engineering—best you start organizing now, or saving your pennies if you're on FAANG wages.

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