The Downgrading of the American Tech Worker | Hacker News Reader

The Downgrading of the American Tech Worker

nymag.com

42 pointssizzle13 comments

This is one of the main reasons behind all of the technological inventions applied to labour and production: to homogenize the work, remove artisanal knowledge from the worker and add it to the organic capital of industry and last but not least remove the bargaining power of the workers.

Yup. Good ol' Karl Marx called this process proletarianisation.

That is the stupidest thing I have heard all year - and that has quite a bit of competition. Because nobody is going to be grateful for you de-homogenizing work and adding requirements of artisanal knowledge, and removing capital from industry to a productive task. Because all of that translates to adding needless toil to the task, reducing productivity and making everyone poorer!

It utterly antithetical to the practice of engineering, productivity, making sense or making things better.

Get out of here and go worship Dis someplace else.

Are you sure? If all coding labor, for example, becomes a commodified product through coding agents, there will be zero bargaining power for people who write code. If you can't manage to move upward into the small number of management roles—which will likely be agentic by then anyway—your labor becomes just another part of the general tech labor market. This is similar to what most AI leaders are talking about regarding the labor market. You can go and tell them that this is really stupid while they are counting their billions of dollars in bulk.

If that’s the stupidest thing you’ve heard in 2026 you must spent your time at the bottom of a mineshaft or something.

NY Mag looooves these status-anxiety, class warfare social commentary "what's in and what's out" style articles. It's their favorite genre and catnip to their social-climbing Yuppie core reader audience.

> It’s also worth nothing here that Meta, a successful social-media company that is struggling to catch up with newer AI labs, has tended to chase industry trends, not lead or correctly anticipate them, for the past decade.

Interesting disclaimer at the end of the article. Generally, the article seems to be much more about Meta than the headline implies. But of course the broad trend is undeniable.

Interesting and accurate.

But I believe Meta already had a reputation as a toxic workplace.

I wonder whether this is what gets tech workers to finally see the reason for unions to exist?

This will not work until unions deal with the reality of globalization, and push to form a worldwide union, which ensures compensation has no more than 2x difference based on one's country. This is the multiplier where people will not want to transfer work for cost vs skill level.

This is unpalatable to HCOL engineers, because their pay will significantly compress in this union to support the growth of compensation of similarly skilled LCOL regions/countries.

QED: Unions will not happen.

I had not considered that angle. A good, but depressing point

>push to form a worldwide union

I think Marxists did intuitively realize this part, hence why they tried to push for it to be an international movement

>The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The working men have no country.

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