Why Tech Employees Are Ready to Revolt
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One has to be careful around opportunistic gold-rushes; if one is not actively purveying gold, one may be getting rushed.
If the US sets a debt ceiling and inevitably hits it (based on past performance), the ensuing devaluation of the dollar may lead to an even stronger form of corporatism that makes such power plays about wages, hours worked, and work conditions look relatively tame.
People may not all be financial experts, but they can do basic math and realize none of this makes sense.
>If the US sets a debt ceiling and inevitably hits it (based on past performance), the ensuing devaluation of the dollar may lead to an even stronger form of corporatism that makes such power plays about wages, hours worked, and work conditions look relatively tame.
2 years ago we were starting to properly talk about 32 hour workweeks. Sad how quickly things can go backwards. Really hope America isn't stupid and tries to go the Greece route with this inevitable crisis.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-closing-gender-...
What's changed in the last few years is a new focus on bringing white collar labor to heel.
The only play that occurs to me is surviving off of gig work, building the business as a sidehustle. But I've seen so many people who seem to be permanently stuck there, with no real business to grow and no way to explain their resume gap to employers.
From what I've seen lurking here, successful bootstrapped businesses come from experienced people who know what they're doing and have savings to fall back on.
No cheap programmer would copy your "fixes-fences-in-Boston.com" idea. A lot of local services aren't sold properly on the internet, so if you combine the two you can get something out of your time and labour.
Also local bureaucrats love to "regulate" and automating local compliance is also a good niche. Now with all LLMs around the scope of what is possible has grown, thus the niches where it could be applied have grown too.
Don't drink the VC/YC combinator cool-aid, that you "go big or go home". It's better to own 100% of your comany, than 3% of a VC based startup most of the time. You see outliers like Facebook, Airbnb & etc... but as 37Signals has proved for the majority of startup founders the risk/reward ratio is skewed not in their favor.
-Dropped out, no connections, still built stuff.
The education offered by civilization includes logic that's crafted by a pedagogy that's biased toward vulgarity and social skills that don't perform well when it comes to building anything that would help a man get away from a forced commitment to anything more than maximizing viewer impressions on provocative Internet-uploaded content. The average tech entrepreneur isn't any better than a McDonald's hamburger grill operator or a female OnlyFans model or a delivery app driver, once you remove your civilly trained bias toward low resolution videos on socioeconomic dynamics.
To use a great illustration, even a billionaire techno-commercialist like Elon Musk can never hope to achieve independent wealth acquisition. Because his education, personal origin, and development are not really deviant and an instance of someone that can perform beyond the abstract black box that is knowledge given by civilization's life experiences which the life offers to every man. He will always come up short, whenever it's a question of exiting from the liberal-democratic regime and its permanent ironic anti-libertarianism stance. The question is: How to build a business that's not required to conform with all expectations, social and physical/ontological? Leading up to aerospace technology and acquiring science for Earth-to-Mars orbit transfers ain't it. Even having a business starting capital of one hundred dollars in the style of the $100 Startup comes with a history whose financial system component is tied to having a certain social obligation. A certain physical requirement commonly called life.
I think it would be good for U.S. workers as it will help make them more competitive in a global labor market.
That doesn't restrict corporations from generating profit. It just balances how they use said profits.
"Fixing" the national debt problem by putting a ceiling on it without addressing one of the main contributors to the current state of government spending and quality of life in America is a recipe for disaster.
It's okay to rip the band-aid off, but only if you're ready to deal with what may be a mortal wound.
What’s the main contributor to the current government spending ?
At least there probably won't be another eMeringue this time?
2. It is now common knowledge that one can become adequately rich from working on or investing in bad ideas, to the point where an idea isn't even considered bad if you can grift investor money from it. In other terms, it's no longer taboo to scam people richer or stupider than you; it's just "hustling".
If programmers wanted to force companies to maintain wildly irrational staffing levels, they should have unionized a decade and a half ago when they had the leverage. There are too many programmers, now. Current innovation is high-level and academic, and maybe 2% of the people posting on HN are educated enough to ride the bleeding edge of that.
Elite tech workers at top cloud/ software based companies can vehemently disagree but for mid level IT folks at typical enterprise shops situation is far more gloomier than it was even 10 years back.
Now if these employees are ready to revolt I suspect it will most fine by employers.
The promise of automation is that people should be able to work less and still be paid enough to live comfortably.
When has this ever not been true? And how would it be fixed?
"it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism"
I don't think we need to get rid of capitalism. The controls around capitalism like taxes, social safety nets, could use a little fine tuning.
Capitalism at its core is still pretty efficient compared to everything else. The hyper efficiency needs to not throw the baby (regular folks) out with the bath water(cutting expenses), that’s all.
Previously, the general rule was that a business was there to produce a good or provide a service, and the profit they made (if any) was the reward for that. There were some businesses that acted much more greedy, but overall it was clear that this was how business worked.
Now, the rule is much more that a business is there to make as much profit as possible, and the good they produce or service they provide is purely a means to that end—and, in many cases, largely an undesirable one. Again, there are still some businesses that operate based on the older philosophy, but overall this is the prevailing atmosphere.
This is what I would describe as the dividing line between "capitalism" and "late-stage capitalism".
As for an end to capitalism:
"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."
― Ursula K. Le Guin
Ofc, HN with VC funded companies love this model. Generate "wealth" from essentially imagination. Throw more money in and number goes up, end goal find someone to dump whole thing on. Be it public or some established company that found extractive niche.
I find lot less wrong in traditional capitalism. Start making something, sell it for profit, build a factory to sell more. Then use proceeds and possibly loans to build bigger factory. Rinse and repeat. At least you are generating possibly something useful for eveyone and getting money as part of process is not unreasonable.
If any individual could complete the product on their own, then the company itself would be pointless. Individual success is not mutually exclusive to team success, but the people who do not work well on teams are unlikely to return to office (or tolerate similar actions). Companies know this, and they've learned they can't find toxic employees by looking at individual success alone.
There's other ways to find this dysfunction, but looking at team metrics instead of individual means you have to cut an entire team to try and force out maybe a few employees who actively hate the company. RTO is a unique opportunity to try a different, and perhaps more targeted approach. There will still be an some great team members lost for purely physical reasons, but perhaps fewer than firing entire teams.
A big portion of the web is WordPress sites, created by some site builder, etc.
A lot of what Musk cut out was support. the ones answering tickets or talking with adverts/big users to keep them happy. You can't solve that with a chatbot. The corrosion there is exactly why Twitter stock tanked.
I apologize for the loose language, but yes. It's pretty clear that people smarter than me value Twitter much less for a variety of reasons.
But the sibling reply makes an important point: most of the tech from Twitter is there because of scale. That's perhaps part of the 10%.
And somehow the latest improvement to low-code/no-code tooling (LLMs / AI) are making it all worse, maybe because they'll really for real this time finally let business-side people not need programmers.
You can't legislate your way to profitability... Global competition will eat the profit margin and companies won't have enough money to honour their contracts and will go bust (as history shows).
No written law can compete with the invisible hand of the market.
Boeing tried this strategy, and its definitely having noticable results.
( /sarcasm, if it's needed.)