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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

> and from the public in general

Don't think the public will be that concerned about people in Google's salary bracket losing their jobs.

It’s a disservice to the public to assume they aren’t capable of understanding why AI job losses might be concerning even if they aren’t directly impacted. Most people aren’t so committed to class warfare that they will root for the apocalypse as long as it stomps a rich guy first.

Software engineers and grocery store workers are in different income brackets, but in the same class (labor/prolaterian). It is managers, executives, and investors that are in the capitalist class. Class is determined by your relationship to production.

Software engineer salaries and stock compensation can be enough to shift alignment somewhat, especially after many years of capital accumulation.

if you make the majority of your earnings from passive income or you do not need to work to live you are more part of the leisure class

Two things: capitalists don't not work; and if you have a sizeable portfolio, you may not need to work and may earn plenty of passive income, yet still work because you add more value at the margin working than fiddling with stock allocations or angel investing or whatnot (vs index funds etc.).

It's easy to get a capitalist to come out of retirement. Most of the time you just have to ask them to take a look at your business. Before you know it they accept a board position and shortly thereafter they are running point as President.

For an illustrated example, you can watch Succession

I’ve switched from manager to IC and vice-versa a few times at FAANG. Didn’t strike me as moving between the capitalist and proletariat classes, lol!

You mean poor person. As long as it stomps a poor person. The rich don’t have a habit of getting stomped. They direct other poor people to stomp their contemporaries. The poor don’t have a chance.

I don't think a lot of people realize how few people are "rich" in the sense of not being impacted by the labor market, or how virtually all of them are retirees. CFOs aren't looking forward to a massive shift in the labor market for accountants any more than CPAs. Warren Buffet has a "job," he writes those letters for BH and oversees the firm's investments at a high level... and most of the people who live off of investments have children in the workforce. Even most people whose children live off of their investments have kids in the (nonprofit) workforce.

The public might though be concerned that if they are being replaced, many in other positions at other companies will soon be replaced as well.

That’s not how the mind works. People cheered when Elon fired 80% of the Twitter staff. No one cares when people with high paying jobs suffer.

The people who cheered about the firing of 80% of the Twitter staff largely believed (rightly or wrongly) that they were being adversely affected by them. While Google may be seen with more wariness in tech circles, I don't think the average person believes that Google is actively harming them (again, rightly or wrongly).

I think twitter is an outlier because people hated the employees already for various reasons.

For example they thought that twitter had a bloated workforce because of videos like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buF4hB5_rFs).

And a lot of people heavily disagreed with how they handled moderation. You can take things like the hunter Biden laptop suppression or in the funny category you had the getting banned for saying learn to code (https://reason.com/2019/03/11/learn-to-code-twitter-harassme...).

Take random company without controversies and you will find less vitriol about them getting fired.

These aren't the same types of events. In Twitter's case, it was a one-off act, caused by one-off circumstances. With Google, it'd be more of a precursor to a new trend that might soon take root and impact me or those I care about.

No one cares about self checkout on supermarkets impact on their employees, until their employer does something similar.

I care as a consumer who hates standing in long lines. My former bank branch had thirteen teller stations and two tellers. This wasn't on a bad day. This was for years.

People in Google salary brackets get jobs at Google-1 salary brackets, pushing junior people at Google-1 to Google-2, all the way down to IT departments at non-tech firms. This impacts everybody who's in the industry or capable of switching.

Why would the general public care about Google employees. Google is however a major saas provider. And people might start to worry that their employer is going to soon buy a subscription to whatever that that Google used to automate jobs.

The bank tellers didn't go away: they just became higher paid and higher skilled when cash management was no longer the job.

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