Hacker News Reader

Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

I think there’s also a lot of people who haven’t quite realized what side they’re on. A ton of techies confused better than average pay with being part of the upper class and didn’t realize that the average CEO/VC views us roughly the same as the janitors except more expensive and less reliable. If you’re currently working at a stable tech job, it’s easy to focus on the cool things you can do and ignore how hungry those guys are for a massive cut in salaries, how much harder it will be to get an new job, and that trying to start your own company is harder than in recent decades with more established gatekeepers and LLMs being very good at copying a successful product.

New graduates haven’t known anything else and don’t have the money to be nostalgic about a party they missed.

View on HN

> I think there’s also a lot of people who haven’t quite realized what side they’re on. A ton of techies confused better than average pay with being part of the upper class and didn’t realize that the average CEO/VC views us roughly the same as the janitors except more expensive and less reliable.

For all those coders who claim "coding is the smallest part of s/ware dev", they're in for a rude awakening when they realise that while it may have been a small part, it was the part that lead to high salaries.

After all, anyone who wanted to be a business analyst (i.e. spec a solution and hand it off to someone else for coding) could have had that job ages ago, but they didn't because it pays so poorly (even more poorly when all coders are moving into that role too).

Exactly what I keep saying. Yet, the reply every time is "my job is to solve problems, not write code."

Ok, bud; sure.

I didn't start my professional career as a BA 20 years ago that did exactly what most devs are being "gently forced" into doing now, but whatever.

Ok, bud; sure.

> New graduates haven’t known anything else and don’t have the money to be nostalgic about a party they missed.

Respectfully disagree. New grads entering the workforce now started college in 2022. This was during the post-COVID "Great Resignation" when offers and employee leverage were at their peak and AI wasn't that useful.

Very different from the "use AI or your fired/blackballed" age we live in now.

I think we’re talking about the same thing but slightly differently: I was thinking more narrowly — someone who graduated this year certainly heard that their degree would be in demand, in many cases that’s why they chose it, but they know now that they’re not going to personally experience that favorable job market.

Even that is very regional.

While tech pays well, in many countries it is seen as a regular office worker, with a similar salary level.

And if you are doing consulting is very much a gig economy job, if you're going on your own.

Yes. I’m reminded of the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” trope thinking of the guys I knew who anchored on the high Silicon Valley salaries as their baseline rather than recognizing that those were an extreme outlier. That doesn’t mean people weren’t paid well but it usually wasn’t even, say, successful dentist level much less actually rich.

Exactly what I was thinking when a recent big bank CEO accidentally let his contempt slip out. He referred to mass layoffs as "It's not cost-cutting. It's replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we're putting in." [1]

That "lower-value human capital" isn't janitors - it's a wide array of highly skilled professions including software engineers and many others. Of course the guy who's at the top engaging in nothing but 'unfalsifiable' fuzzy actions, and could be replaced (sans his connections/corruptions) most easily of all, is ultra-high-mega-untouchable infinity value humanity embodied.

I really don't like what big business does to people, on the bottom and the top. The fact somebody could even use the term lower-value human capital without cringing at themselves, let alone to a reporter in public - that's one hell of a bubble this guy lives in. And now we're dumping "AI" into this bubble. WCGW?

[1] - https://news.sky.com/story/standard-chartered-to-replace-low...

> A ton of techies confused better than average pay with being part of the upper class

False consciousness always strikes back.

One of the funny parts about all of this, is that janitors are likely less threatened by GenAI than information workers are.

Hell, janitors' work is less threatened by GenAI than most of the CEOs who are super-hyped about that very same GenAI.

David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs might actually work as a roadmap of sorts..

> One of the funny parts about all of this, is that janitors are likely less threatened by GenAI than information workers are.

But that's cold comfort, because janitors are already paid shit wages.

The insecurity about AI isn't exactly "will I keep my job?" It's "will I be thrown into a life of precarity as my skills are devalued?"

Janitors aren't threatened by GenAI, because they're already where the threats take you.

Where would information workers go after they get booted out of their market?

Every other market where they could transfer their skills to is threatened by the same hypothetical. And if they jump the collar colour divide, they’d have be limited to the least skilled ones, which includes Janitors.

Now perhaps that would still not threaten the job itself as much, but an increase in supply definitely won’t be good for the wages.

Is that so? What do janitors? They clean offices, right? What's in offices? Oh people. If no people are office workers, no offices need cleaning, no need for janitors. I think the economy is more complex than people think. It's not like "just be a plumber" is going help anyone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com