Comment by tacostakohashi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tacostakohashi | Hacker News Reader

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The problem you are getting at is alienation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

Over time, tech work has become totally disconnected from real world users and customers, and everything has become intermediated by JIRAs and tickets, sprints, product managers, and process, so that the developers are interchangeable cogs, with no real domain knowledge or user relationships.

As much as people say AI is killing jobs, even before that, interesting jobs were mostly being killed anyway by agile, sprints, and product managers anyway, to the extent that replacing those kind of jobs with AI is no great loss.

Loading trucks, and manual labor, can potentially be quite satisfying, especially if it's your truck, or your business, or your product being loaded.

I think the main problem is tech workers finally became a commodity. It was a brief time when hiring was hard and it was possible to get some sense of power because you could freely walk away or because you were a craftsmen.

Over the years, power slowly returned back to management and the industry figured out how to slice the creative role into small cogs: QAs, FEs, BEs, SREß, OPSs, POs, PMs. It's ten people now instead of three crafsmen. They can now follow a very strict process to produce average software with a lot of overhead. Customers don't care because one half is forced to use it and the other don't have a taste of what good software is. Partially, because they use abysmal MS products. Apple briefly showed to an average Joe what is possible when people care, but they're slowly losing it.

Now it's node/js everywhere and fierce competition being a ticket taker. People with no passion who are here just for the money and who don't care about the code. People who are here to play promotion politic games. Coding is a regular job now which pays decent and has low barrier to entry. You can fake it very far now with AI assistance.

> Over time, tech work has become totally disconnected from real world users

While we used to use Excel and now use Jira, in my experience even 25 years ago never spoke to users. Spoke to their proxies in house. If lucky those proxies are from the industry and were end users once.

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