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Comment by timkam | Hacker News Reader

Is it really that LLM-based tools make developers so much more productive or rather that organizations have found out they can do with less -- and less privileged -- developers? What I don't really see, especially not big tech-internally, are stories of teams that have become amazingly more productive. For now it feels we get some minor productivity improvements that probably do not off-set the invest and are barely enough to keep the narrative alive.

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A lot of it is perception. Writing software was long considered somewhat difficult and that it required smart people to do so. AI changes this perception and coding starts to be perceived as a low level task that anyone can do easily with augmentation from AI tools. I certainly agree that writing software is turning more into a factory job and is less intellectually rewarding now.

It's been like this for decades.

Yeah that’s what really worries me, many people have been clinging to this ability as something that’s really special and AI is really going to disillusion them.

When I started working in the field (1996), I was told that I would receive detailed specs from an analyst that I would then "translate" into code. At that time this idea was already out of fashion, things worked this way for the core business team (COBOL on the AS/400) but in my group (internal tools, Delphi mostly) I would get only the most vague requirements.

Eventually everyone was expected to understand a good deal of the code they were working on. The analyst and the coder became the same person.

I'm deeply skeptical that the kind of people that enjoy software development are the same kind of people that enjoy steering and proofing LLM generated code. Unlike the analyst and the coder, this strike me as a very different skill set.

I worry a bit about people who like writing code but don’t like reading and debugging it. There are enough “throw it over the wall” coders.

Yeah, AI will kill all mundane brick layering jobs.

The real software engineering role, with architecture, customer management, discovery phase, risk analysis and all the other kind of stuff, not yet.

I have people skills damnit!

I don't mind reading and debugging my own code, or any other code written with a plan by someone with a clue.

Reading and debugging slop code is not the same thing, not even close.

> I'm deeply skeptical that the kind of people that enjoy software development are the same kind of people that enjoy steering and proofing LLM generated code. Unlike the analyst and the coder, this strike me as a very different skill set.

indeed. people generally hate foreign/alien code, or rather - love their style too much. it is not hard to recognize this pattern - ive seen it with colleagues, with my students, with some topnotch 10x-coders back in the day. so proofing is a skill one perhaps develops by teaching others do things right, but is not something most people entertain about.

on the other hand, people who lack time and patience to implement complex stuff may benefit from this process. particularly if they are good code-readers, and some seasoned devs become such people. i can see little chance they wont be using llms to spit code out.

but the two groups largely don't overlap and are different as astronomers and astronauts.

For me it dependa on scale. Asking AI for something small and specific is a joy. Asking it to make a big change is a nightmare I so far only try every time a new model comes out.

It has been a factory job for decades.

Not everyone gets to code the next ground breaking algorithm at some R&D department.

Most programming tasks are rather repetitive, and in many countries there is hardly anything to look up to software developers, it is another blue collar job.

And in many cultures if you don't go into management after about five years, usually it is seen as a failure to grow up on their career.

Of course it is true. The thing was 90% of Amazon engineers made far more money at their job while essentially doing typical enterprise software work. This money led them believe it is some creative work. And now those task management and time monitoring tools are catching up to Amazon IT workers so they are realizing it is similar to another low end IT job/ factory work.

The pay and benefits at Amazon always seemed to offset the shit work/life balance and on-call rotation. What a gauntlet that was. The only engineers that got recognition were those that fixed high profile bugs, preferably after hours. Shipping a feature was always just "business as usual"

There are lots of jobs with terrible work/life balance AND bad pay. so I dont think that explains it

"usually it is seen as a failure to grow up on their career."

What does that mean?

It means that the company is more likely to fire that person on the logic that they "failed" to be promoted to management, that they're "treading water" as a developer.

Manager is seen as next step in engineers career instead of side track.

Have you wondered why japan, which is a powerhouse of electronics and manufacturing does not have any large software companies ? Software is different from manufacturing.

The mindset, mentality, and culture required to do new software for an ambiguous problem is different from the mentality to produce boilerplate code or maintain an existing codebase. The later is pure execution and the former is more like R&D.

> if you don't go into management after about five years, usually it is seen as a failure to grow up on their career

I don't see how that's possible. Wouldn't such a norm result in something like a 7:1 ration of managers to engineers (i.e., assuming a 40ish year career, the first 5 years are spent as an engineer, and the remaining 35 as a manager)? For team managers, I've generally seen around a 1:10 ratio of engineers to managers. So a 7:1 ratio of managers to engineers just doesn't seem plausible, even including non-people leaders in management.

What you're describing doesn't sound like something that requires a lot of foreign laborers.

It's been like this for awhile now. Aside from companies like Google and Facebook, most companies are using some CRUD web app where the development consists of gluing code together for multiple third-party services and libraries.

It's these sorts of jobs that will be replaced by AI and a vibe coder, which will cost much less because you don't need as much experience or expertise.

Even before AI I've always had the perception that writing software felt more intellectually on the level of plumbing. AI just feels like a having one of those fancy new tools that tradespersons may use.

Organizations have long had a preference for 'deskilling' to something reliable through bureaucratic procedures, regardless of the side effects or even if it results in it costs more due to needing three people where one talented could do it before. Because it is more dependable, even if it is dependably mediocre. Even though this technique may lead to their long-term doom and irrelevance.

Yes and (adjacently):

Seeing Like a State by James Scott

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

Explains a lot of the confusing stuff I've experienced, in that eureka sort of way.

I feel like managers are having a heyday over tools like cursor having a user-by-user breakdown on AI code generation stats. I feel this is only the beginning and a whole new world of in-editor workplace monitoring will pop up.

The number of organizations that continue to use tedious languages like Java 8 and Golang...

Like, they hadn't realized they were turning humans into compilers for abstract concepts, yet now they are telling humans to get tf out of the way of AI

Please give some worked examples.

I'm not sure what: "'deskilling' to something reliable through bureaucratic procedures" ... means.

I'm the Managing Director of a small company and I'm pretty sure you are digging at the likes of me (int al) - so what am I doing wrong?

Are you familiar with Taylorism?

From the 19th century onwards, businesses have wanted to replace high-skilled craftsmen with low-skilled workers who would simply follow a repeatable process. A famous example is Ford. Ford didn't want an army of craftsmen, who each knew how to build a car. He wanted workers to stay at one station and perform the same single action all day. The knowledge of how to build a car would be in the system itself, the individual workers didn't have to know anything. This way, the workers have limited leverage because they are all replaceable, and the output is all standardized.

You can see this same approach everywhere. McDonalds for instance, or Amazon warehouses, or call centers.

I'm happy to report that for businesses on the scale as mine, we don't work like that.

We give a shit.

I wonder about codebase maintainability over time.

I hypothesize that it takes some period of time for vibe-coding to slowly "bit rot" a complex codebase with abstractions and subtle bugs, slowly making it less robust and more difficult to maintain, and more difficult to add new features/functionality.

So while companies may be seeing what appears to be increases in output _now_, they may be missing the increased drag on features and bugfixes _later_.

I’m concerned that it might not be easy to vibecode a security fix for a complex codebase, especially when the flaw was introduced by vibecoding.

My new favourite genre of schadenfreude are solo-preneur SaaS vibe-coders.

They burn a pile of money. Maybe it’s their life savings, their parents’ money or their friends or some unlucky investors. But they go in thinking they’re going to join the privileged labourers without putting any of the time to develop the skills and without paying for that labour. GenAI the whole thing. And they post about it on socials like they’re special or something.

Then boom. A month later. “Can everyone stop hacking me already, I can’t make this stop. Why is this happening?”

Mostly I feel sorry for the people who get duped into paying for this crap and have their data stolen.

There’s like almost zero liability for messing around like this.

Up until now large software systems required thousands of hours of work and efforts of bright engineers. We take established code as something to be preserved because it embeds so my knowledge and took so long to develop. If it rots then it takes too long to repair or never gets repaired.

Imagine a future where the prompts become the precious artifact. That we regularly `rm -rf *` the entire code base and regenerate it with the original prompts perhaps when a better model becomes available. We stop fretting about code structure or hygiene because it won't be maintained by developers. Code is written for readability and audibility. So instead of finding the right abstractions that allow the problem to be elegantly implemented the focus is on allowing people to read the code to audit that it does what it says it does. No DSLs just plain readable code.

I can imagine that, but... given your prompt(s?) will need to contain all your business rules, someone will have to write prompt(s?) in a way that make it possible for the AI to produce something that works with all the requirements.

Because if you let every stakeholder add their requirements to the prompts, without checking that it doesn't contradict others, you'll end up with a disaster.

So you need someone able to gather all the requirements and translate it in a way that the machine (the AI) can interpret to produce the expected result (a ephemeral codebase).

Which means you now have to carefully maintain your prompts to be certain about the outcome.

But if you still need someone to fix the codebase later in the process, you need people with two sets of skills (prompts and coding) when, with the old model, you only needed coding skills.

I wonder whether we have the same talk when the C compiler first came out.

People may worry that the "ASM" codebase will be bit-rot and no one can understand the compiler output or add new feature to the ASM codebase.

My guess is that the discussion trended around performance and not correctness since compilers are pretty well understood. Why a LLM output what they do are not understood by anyone to the same degree.

Yes, big-tech-internally I also see a lot of desire to get us to come up with some great AI achievements, but they are so far not achieving far far more than already existing automations and bots and code generators can do for us

Right. What the article is unsurprisingly glossing over (per usual) is that just because AI is perceived (by higher-ups that don’t actually do the work) to speed up coding work doesn't mean it actually does.

and that probably to some extent all involved (depending on how delusional they are) know that it's simply an excuse to do layoffs (replaced by offshoring) by artificially so-called raising the bar to what is unrealistic for most people

For this narrative to make sense you would have to believe that Amazon management cares more about short-term profit than the long-term quality of their work.

Management has different layers with different goals. A middle manager and a director certainly care a lot about accomplishing short term goals and are ok with tech debt to meet the goals.

So it does make sense?

The narrative reflects a broader cultural shift, from "we are all in this together" (pandemic) to "our organizations are bloated and people don't work hard enough" (already pre-LLM hype post-pandemic). The observation that less-skilled people can, with the help of LLMs, take the work of traditionally more-skilled people fits this narrative. In the end, it is about demoting some types of knowledge workers from the skilled class to the working class. Apparently, important people believe that this is a long-term sustainable narrative.

Why are you using the word "demoting"?

The skilled class is the working class and always has been. The delusion that software developers were ever outside the working class because they were paid well is just that - an arrogant delusion.

Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class. For now, this applies at least to some regions, not only within the US. I agree in that I have at times felt some level of arrogance among some people taking up software engineering jobs, but IMO this just confirms the social class aspect of it. So there may have been some level of delusion to it, but at least temporarily it was, and partially still is, true.

Is the wealth of the average software developer ($122 000/y) in the US closer to the wealth of:

A) a coal miner with $60 000/y salary

B) Elon Musk: $381 000 000 000

Sources: - https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries

- https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coal-miner-salary-SRCH_KO...

- https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-rich-6-8-170106956....

Is the average amount of properties (1-2) owned by a software developer closer to those of:

A) a worker at Walmart

B) Mark Zuckerberg?

> Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class.

That's what they have been telling SEs to prevent us from unionizing :) All so they can put you where you stand now, when they (wrongly) think they don't need you. SE jobs are working class jobs, and have always been.

I don't think that way of defining the working class is very sound. Everyone expect ~50 people would be working class, probably including Taylor Swift and Donald Trump.

Also "working class" has a historical, social component, by which programmers are certainly not included.

Normalize it to a logarithmic scale, and the SWE is still quite obviously a wagie. But the gross and unconscionable concentration of power in a small handful of unelected oligarchs is not the relevant distinction here.

When ownership of things can keep you and your family fed, clothed, and sheltered in comfort, you're part of the owning class. If it can't, you're a worker. Maybe a skilled worker, maybe a highly paid worker, maybe a worker that owns a lot of expensive 'tools' or credentials, or licenses, or a company truck, or a trillion worthless diluted startup shares that have an EV of ~$50, but you're still a worker.

If you're the owner of a small owner-operated business, and the business will go kaput because you didn't show up to do work, you're also a worker. The line is drawn at the point where most of your contribution to it is your own (or other peoples') capital, not your own two-hands labour.

Now, if you're some middle manager, with no meaningful ownership stake - you are still a worker. You still need to go to work to get your daily bread. It just so happens that your job is imposing the will of the owners on workers underneath you.

Yea for concrete numbers:

If you have somewhere between $5M and $10M in a HCoL American city, you are probably no longer working class insofar as you could quit, get on ACA healthcare, and rent a decent house or buy / mortgage a decent house and live a pretty comfortable life indefinitely. But you're on the very low end of not-working-class and are living a modest life (if you quit and stop drawing a salary).

If you have under that threshold (in a big expensive US city), you are probably still working class.

A lot of software engineers can get to $5M-$10M range in like 10-30 years depending on pay and savings rate. But also a lot of software engineers operate their budgets almost paycheck-to-paycheck, and will never get there.

I don’t see how something like 160-320k income without working is a “modest life”. By any absolute standard you have it better than almost every human that has ever lived.

The caveat is stated above: in a large expensive US city where a lot of these high paying tech jobs are.

Over 50% of that $160k floor is eaten up by just housing and private or ACA insurance.

So your housing costs for like a 1k-2k sqft spot, all in (rent, or if owning then insurance, upkeep, etc) costs you something like $50k+, your health insurance for two people on ACA costs you like $40k yr assuming kids are out of the picture (more if not), and you have a decent chunk leftover to spend on living a decent life, but not like egregiously large amounts. You're not flying first class, probably not taking more than 2 big vacations a year, driving nice but not crazy expensive car, etc.

If you elect to leave the big expensive US city, then of course you can do it with substantially lower amounts (especially so long as you can swing ACA subsidies and are willing to risk your "not-working-class" existence on the whims of the govt continuing that program).

Obviously if you live in some place (read: everywhere except the US?) where the floor for medical costs of two people not working but still having income from capital isn't around $40k/yr, then the amount can go wayyyy down.

> A lot of software engineers can get to $5M-$10M range in like 10-30

$5-$10M for 30 years, but only if you save every penny in between? Wow, that's very impressive and totally life-changing! Reminds me of the story how millennials are not able to afford buying a house because of avocado toast!

On the contrary, the definition of "working class" has basically included everyone of up (and potentially including) the petit bourgeois.

> I don't think that way of defining the working class is very sound

Oh, really? Is that why both "white-collar worker" and "blue-collar worker" contain the word "worker"? Working class is everyone who has to work for their money. Can most programmers, on a whim, afford to never work again? An average programmer's salary is 2x the average coal miner's. A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2023/.

Programmers are just one prolonged sickness or medical debt away from being destitute, the same as every other member of the working class. Lawyers, teachers, doctors, programmers, those are all working class, along with agriculture, mining, utilities and all people who have to get up and work for their daily bread and a roof over their head. Sure, there is a discrepancy in pay, but it's not as glaring as it is between a worker and the oligarchs like Trump and Elon Musk. The biggest con in society is that you are so far distanced from the obscene wealth of the rich, that it's not in your face to see how little you have and how much they do.

Both the guy in an old Dodge and the guy in the new Tesla are stuck in traffic, and you fail to realize realize there are people out there right now flying on a private jet for a cocktail? You think the guy living in an apartment is so much different than a guy living in a house in suburbia? How about the guy whose real-estate company bought the whole development and now is cranking up prices?

You make $200k yearly as a welder? Still working class.

You own a small business with 10 workers working for you? Still working class.

You manage a team of devs in a FAANG and are doing alright for yourself? Still working class.

Your parents donated a wing to Yale and own a hotel chain? Not working class.

Your savings account and stocks generate enough for you that you never have to work again? You are not working class.

This is because wealth wise, you are still closer to how much an unemployed person on benefits than to a CEO of a multinational company, and that's a fact.

Non-founder (i.e. external hire) CEOs and other corporate executives also have to work for their money, therefore they are working class. The definition may be technically correct (the best kind of correct) but it is useless.

("A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker" you say? If we are nitpicking, that's obviously false; only a tiny, tiny fraction of CEOs are paid that well.)

Aside from that, I'd wager a rather large fraction of HN can easily afford never to work again. This place is crawling with millionaires and they're definitely not embarrassed about it, temporarily or otherwise. Good luck convincing them.

> A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker" you say? If we are nitpicking, that's obviously false; only a tiny, tiny fraction of CEOs are paid that well.

We are nitpicking, and you are wrong:

https://therealnews.com/average-ceo-makes-339-times-more-tha...

https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2023/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/261463/ceo-to-worker-com...

"In 2022, it was estimated that the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 344.3 in the United States. This indicates that, on average, CEOs received more than 344 times the annual average salary of production and nonsupervisory workers in the key industry of their firm."

> Aside from that, I'd wager a rather large fraction of HN can easily afford never to work again. This place is crawling with millionaires and they're definitely not embarrassed about it, temporarily or otherwise. Good luck convincing them.

You can wager whatever you want, but statistically you'd be wrong.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240404-global-retirem...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/retirement-crisis-savings-short...

Dude, your own link https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2023/ says "We focus on the average compensation of CEOs at the 350 largest publicly owned U.S. firms (firms that sell stock on the open market) by revenue."

These 350 largest publicly owned US firms employ a major portion of the US population. Just the top 10 companies by revenue employ 6% of the US work-eligible population. Imagine the total 350 companies!

So, while 350 seems to be a small number, these 350 companies employ the largest chunk of the US market, and that's why they are the most representative to do the study with.

And that's my point! If you select a random worker in the US, there is a HUGE chance they are employed by Amazon, Walmert or one of the big-s. And there is a HUGE chance their salary is 339 times less than their CEO's.

"One medical debt away from being destitute" is socialists trying to make common cause between the upper and lower class. We have great insurance and big piles of savings, there's nothing in common with people who can barely afford their deductible and lose their job for missing too much work.

The boundary between working class and not working class is not at the 99th percentile where you would have it. The diminishing marginal utility of money means you get 90% of the security of being wealthy at 0.1% of the net worth of a billionaire.

Great insurance coming from where exactly?

> We have great insurance and big piles of savings, there's nothing in common with people who can barely afford their deductible and lose their job for missing too much work.

Bullshit.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/23/business/inflation-cost-o...

https://ssti.org/blog/large-percentage-americans-report-they...

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/amid-inflation-more-middle-c...

Between 30 and 70% of Americans can't make ends meet. What used to be called "middle class" is disappearing, making way to only 1%-ers and us, the rest. The fact that I drive a Tesla and some guy drives a Dodge, doesn't mean we are not both stuck in traffic while there is some shcmuck flying on their private jet to reach their yacht.

I think you replied to the wrong person?

Weak argument.

The objective level of reproduction of labor force is about $2 per day. Cheaper for warm climates, slightly more expensive for cold ones.

So by that logic there is no working class in the US whatsoever because you don't have to work to survive. At all. Maybe half a year in your entire lifetime.

You just choose to spend all your money on things you don't need to survive, that's the only reason you needed to work. But that doesn't make you a worker class any more than Elon Musk becomes a worker class by buying 10 companies like Twitter.

So, using your logic, "You are making more than 50 cents an hour? You're not working class. You don't have to work most of your life to survive yourself or to provide for your children. You're closer to Elon Musk than to workers forced to work for $2 a day to survive."

> The objective level of reproduction of labor force is about $2 per day. Cheaper for warm climates, slightly more expensive for cold ones.

I also like making random numbers up. Here are other numbers. 420. 1337. 1911.

> So by that logic there is no working class in the US whatsoever because you don't have to work to survive. At all. Maybe half a year in your entire lifetime.

I have no words to express how weak this argument is. The US has MOSTLY working class people because less and less people can survive on their salaries.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-o...

> So, using your logic, "You are making more than 50 cents an hour? You're not working class. You don't have to work most of your life to survive yourself or to provide for your children. You're closer to Elon Musk than to workers forced to work for $2 a day to survive."

I am not sure if this sentence is a troll, or comes from genuine misunderstanding. I don't know what to advice. I genuinely chuckled. Here are a three numbers, elementary math:

7.25

1 600 000

Which two of these numbers are closer to one another? 7.25 and 53, right (I hope)? Well, let's look what those numbers mean:

7.25 - minimum wage https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/wages/minimumwage

53 - average hourly salary of a software engineer: https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries

1 600 000 average hourly wage of Elon Musk: https://moneyzine.com/personal-finance/how-much-does-elon-mu...

So...who is a software engineer closer in terms of income to? Elon Musk or a minimum wage worker?

And for all of Mark Zuckerberg's wealth and property holdings, it wasn't enough and didn't stop him from trying to take sacred land from native Hawaiians on the island of Kauai.

Let me ask you this, do software engineers in unions enjoy more benefits and compensation than those not in Unions?

They enjoy more benefits and compensation than if they were not in a union. Most importantly more protections.

Comparing those in unions who are more likely to be in the video game making or industry or government to faangs like Amazon where you work day and night for a 4 year vesting offer that pays out very little until the 4th year and where on average most worker work less than 2 years at Amazon.

>They enjoy more benefits and compensation than if they were not in a union.

Please tell me a union SWE shop that has better benefits and comp than I get?

A teacher out of union is still as much working class as is a teacher in a union. We software engineers are working class because we have to work for our money.

Do you own businesses, land, investments, and other forms of capital that generate wealth independently of direct labor? Enough wealth so you don't have to work for the foreseeable future? Is this the average software engineer for you (in or out of a union)? Because that's the definition of NOT being a part of the working class.

This feels like the wrong question to ask. Someone with a net worth of a "mere" $2 million is also closer to the coal miner, but at a 3% per year withdrawal rate, has a passive income equal to the coal miner's full time work week without lifting a finger.

I don't think it makes sense to group the "don't have to go to work anymore" people with the "can buy anything" people, but they don't have a lot in common with the working class, either.

To what extent are SWEs working class? I guess that depends on how many of them still have to go to work. A salary of $350k certainly puts you on the road to never having to work again.

> Is the wealth

You use that word, it does not mean what you think it means when you immediately talk about income.

Working class is not defined by income level.

The working class is those who own no significant means of production and thus must sell their labor at whatever price the market bears.

That the market for SE labor is good(for the workers), doesn't mean SE's don't need to work to earn money.

The way a word is defined by communists and the way it is defined by the rest of the world are seldom the same.

Yeah, one is right and the other is bs pushed to divide people

The working class is globally the class of people who must sell their labour. That includes - to a rounding error - all software developers and that is completely uncontroversial.

This also includes doctors, lawyers, academics, managers and executives, none of whom are traditionally thought of as "working class"

That group is, in fact, traditionally considered largely working class (proletarian, more specifically the proletarian intelligentsia, though some in that group might be middle class, again, in the traditional class analysis, petit bourgeois sense.)

American popular usage defers from traditional economic role-based class analysis to be instead do income-based “class” terminology which instead of defining the middle class as the petit bourgeois who apply their own labor to their own capital in production (or otherwise have a relation to the economy which depends on both applying labor and ownership of the non-financial means of production) defines middle class as the segment around the median income, almost entirely within the traditional working class.

This is a product of a deliberate effort to redefine terminology to impair working class solidarity, not some kind of accident.

Whose tradition? Not the American working class. Despite the strong labor unions extent I think you'd be hard pressed to find marxists among them. We talk of middle and upper class precisely because we don't ascribe to the "traditional" framing of bourgeoisie v. proletariat, because running a business is actually work too, even if you own the capital. If you sit around and spend money all day we just call you an aristocrat.

It doesn't, because a lot of those people do not sell their labor. Doctors sell a practice, or can anyway. As time goes on fewer and fewer do - they're being pushed out of the capitalist class to the working class. Most now work a salary for a large employer, like you or me.

All professions are traditionally working class.

I guess it depends on whose tradition is under discussion. In the contemporary American usage, "working class" means the trades, or factory and service work. Few people would call a physician or lawyer "working class" even though they are paid for their time (and knowledge).

I wonder about your contemporaries. I imagine that most of them have a completely different definition to you, because you and doctors and lawyers are - to a rounding error - working class and everyone but you is aware of it.

As someone who used to be in the actual working class (plastic factory), it's not the same at all. Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) covers the autonomy and good treatment the working class can't have. Plus just talk to them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria...

Marxism is the most impactful ideology of the history of the 20th century and its vocabulary permeates all of political and economic analysis. Marxist analysis is not the same as communism.

>Marxism is the most impactful ideology of the history of the 20th century

I agree. Let's hope it will have much less impact on the 21th century.

Are you ignoring the rest of the comment?

Most professional economists IMHO would not agree that Marxism's vocabulary permeates their field.

Core economic concepts are things like elasticity of demand, market equilibrium, externality, market failure, network effect, opportunity cost and comparative advantage, and AFAIK Marx and his follower had essentially no role in explaining or introducing any of those.

I think if you had read Capital, you'd find many of these concepts amply addressed, usually with different terminology.

Please list terms in this different terminology that are equivalents or analogs of the terms I listed, so that I can use Ctrl+F to find them in my PDF of volume one of the book.

Here's deepseek's answer. To Deepseek I add: Market failure is addressed even more in Lenin's "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism" which addresses market and financial consolidation in the early 20th century (it's worse now). I would also add that Marx built off of and sometimes critiqued Adam Smith and Ricardo, it's not an entirely different branch of the intellectual tree.

    Elasticity of Demand – Marx does not explicitly discuss elasticity, but he analyzes demand fluctuations in terms of "the social need" (gesellschaftliche Bedürfnis) and "effective demand" under capitalism (Capital, Vol. III). He notes how capitalist production responds to demand shifts, though not in the formalized neoclassical sense.

    Market Equilibrium – Marx critiques the idea of equilibrium (a key concept in classical and neoclassical economics), instead emphasizing "anarchy of production" and "tendential laws" (e.g., the tendency of the rate of profit to fall). He sees markets as inherently unstable due to contradictions in capitalism (Capital, Vol. I & III).

    Externality – While Marx doesn’t use this term, he discusses "social costs of production" (e.g., environmental degradation, worker exploitation) as inherent to capitalism’s drive for profit (Capital, Vol. I). His concept of "metabolic rift" (in Capital, Vol. III and his ecological writings) touches on unintended consequences akin to negative externalities.

    Market Failure – Marx’s entire critique of capitalism can be seen as an analysis of systemic "failures," such as "crises of overproduction", "underconsumption", and "disproportionality" between sectors (Capital, Vol. II & III). He attributes these to contradictions in the capitalist mode of production rather than isolated market inefficiencies.

    Network Effect – Marx does not discuss this directly, but his analysis of "general social labor" (the socially necessary labor time underpinning exchange) and the role of "commodity fetishism" (Capital, Vol. I) implies that value is socially determined in a way that could loosely parallel network effects (e.g., the more a commodity is exchanged, the more its value appears natural).

    Opportunity Cost – Marx does not use this term (rooted in marginalist economics), but his labor theory of value centers on "socially necessary labor time", implying that the cost of producing one good is the labor diverted from other uses (Capital, Vol. I). His concept of "alternative employments of capital" in Capital, Vol. III also touches on trade-offs.

    Comparative Advantage – Marx critiques David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage (e.g., in Theories of Surplus Value), arguing that international trade under capitalism exploits unequal exchange and reinforces imperialism. He focuses on "uneven development" and "super-exploitation" rather than mutual gains from trade.

Marx permeates economics like Newton permeates physics.

If this seems like an absurd comparison, I would suggest reading both Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica and Das Kapital.

The obvious and actual analog to Newton is Adam Smith.

Marx builds on Adam Smith and Ricardo among others and contributes an understanding of where money comes from and where profits come from among other things.

This is an interesting perspective, and I assume your definition is the technically correct one. Still, many SEs receive substantial compensation in RSUs, direct stocks, shares in startups, et cetera. So also from this perspective, there are many non-working class SEs. Another aspect is that culturally, the perception has been that SEs don't necessarily sell their work by the hour, but instead sell knowledge that scales tremendously, in exchange for a comfortable upper middle-to-lower upper class life.

To be technical, and to borrow a bit. Proletariat[1] are the working class, they work for the Bourgeoisie[2], the people who own the means of productions. That's why I asked why you used demote. Lower, Middle and Upper are strata or ranks within classes. Within the bourgeoisie, you can distinguish:

Petite bourgeoisie: small business owners, shopkeepers

Haute bourgeoisie: industrialists, financiers

Managerial class (in some frameworks): high-paid non owners who control labor

Within the proletariat, you can distinguish:

Lumpenproletariat[3]: unemployed, precarious

Skilled laborers vs unskilled laborers

Labor aristocracy: better-paid, sometimes ideologically closer to capital

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie [2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpenproletariat [3]

> the Bourgeoisie[2], the people who own the means of productions

> Within the bourgeoisie, you can distinguish: [...] Managerial class [...] non owners who control labor

Contradiction?

Class != Job Title

Managerial Class != Bourgeoisie

This was a loose usage of the term “bourgeoisie”, meant in the sociological rather than economic sense. Sorry.

In late capitalism, the PMC (Professional Managerial Class) occupies a weird liminal space:

Economically they're proletariat

Socially/culturally they're aligned with bourgeois values

Politically they often acts in defense of capital (because of career dependency)

Hence: managerial class != bourgeoisie, even if they act like them or aspire to be them.

It's not technically correct, it's correct.

The distinction here is "do you get your money from owning assets or do you get your money from working" because where you get your money is where you get your incentives and the incentives of owning are opposite the incentives of working in many important regards.

The economy is inhabited by people who work for a living but it is controlled by people who own things for a living. That's not a conspiracy theory, it's the definition of capitalism. If you do not own things for a living and do not know people who do, spend some time pondering "the control plane." It should seem like an alien world at first, but it's an alien world with a wildly outsize impact on your life and it behooves you to understand it in broad strokes even if you aren't trying to climb into it.

I wouldn’t say the economy is “controlled” by those people. The economy is just an emergent phenomenon. It’s a natural result of unrestricted freedom of exchange.

> The economy is just an emergent phenomenon. It’s a natural result of unrestricted freedom of exchange.

I have a bridge to sell you if you're interested. Let me know.

The means of production for a software engineer is a laptop. Many SEs own them. There are no raw materials or factories needed to produce software, at least not in the sense of traditional production.

You could say the same thing of hands. What really distinguishes capital from labor is not what counts as a tool, but market power. A large number of non-unionized workers are inherently at a disadvantage against a small number of employers with exorbitantly costly infra.

But for the software developer, the tool is also the factory.

That’s not true. The actual means of production are the data centers. It’s true they didn’t use to be hugely expensive either, but now with AI being the backbone of everything we now have really expensive data centers again.

if we're just going to loop this properly, the modern means of production is the stock market's inflated capital. Most of AI floats on cash that does not exist for any purpose except market speculation.

Thats capital, not means of production.

The means of producing an AI is a huge data centre for training. Having a lot of money but no chips of any kind wouldn't get you an AI. We had money 10 years ago, but they did not make AIs out of them.

data, infrastructure, IP, etc You typically don't serve business from your laptop. Without that stuff your code is worthless.

Something I've always puzzled over is whether the means of production are our laptops, or our knowledge and expertise. I still work for a wage, but expect to be paid above subsistence. I don't own the laptop that I use at work, but also don't own the carpeting on the floor. Both are commodities.

Is the concept of "intellectual capital" a figment of my imagination, or a flaw of the traditional class identifiers? Or both?

The means of production are the software you produce, the servers they run on, and the patents, proprietary data, algorithms, and other intellectual property that are the byproduct of your labor.

For factory workers, the means of production is the factory.

What’s “the factory” for software? Our equivalent of the factory is the organization we work in, and our connection to the people who turn our software into money.

You can write software at home by yourself, just like you can do machining on your own. But there are a lot of steps between making software, or machining, and turning that output into money. By working for a company, you can have other people handle those steps. The tradeoff is that this structure is something owned by someone else.

This might be the definition in Marxist theory but in normal colloquial language “working class” absolutely does not mean the same thing as “anyone who doesn’t own the means of production”. But I think you know what OP meant and are just derailing the conversation.

> but in normal colloquial language

Therein lies the propaganda.

Where do people that works in Wall Street fall in this spectrum? They don't own the factories

Engineering is always boom/bust. Ask a retired aerospace engineer who got purged in the 90s.

Technology always automates jobs away. I had a dedicated database systems team 25 years ago that was larger than an infrastructure team managing 1000x more stuff today. Dev teams are bloated in most places, today.

s/post-pandemic/after ignoring the pandemic/

The pandemic is ongoing.

For anyone downvoting this: look into how many people are currently infected. Compare that to early 2020.

Yes, the people who were prone to dying already did so years ago. But the rate of long term disability in every single country is skyrocketing.

The average person has had 4.7 covid infections by now. Now look into the literal thousands of studies of long term effects of that.

Future generations will never forgive us for throwing them under the bus.

And yet, we go on living. Stopping the pandemic is impossible, so what else can we do?

Yeah, I don't see any real difference between "Shut up and take it or we'll outsource your job overseas," which they've been saying since the 90s, and "Shut up and take it or we'll replace you with AI." Same threat, same motives.

Caring is part of it. Having good measures is another. Older measures that worked might need updating to reflect the new, higher spaghetti risk. I expect Amazon to figure it out but I don't see why they necessarily already would have.

[flagged]

I see it more as replacing shitty code monkeys because it leaves the hard parts behind.

But you of course with your superior skills are above that risk?

No. The actual competency of AI won't matter. Lots of corporate executives will prioritize short-term cost savings, with little concern for the degradation for essential systems. They will hop from company to company, personally reaping the benefits while undermining the systems that users and society rely on. That's part of the reason why the current hype is blown way out of proportion by these people. Because who has faced consequences for behaving this way?

> shitty code monkeys

Please don't put others down like that on HN. It's mean and degrades the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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