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Comment by nocman | Hacker News Reader

> It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.

That's an awfully wide swath you are cutting there. I can't think of a single tech person that I've worked closely with in the last 20 years that I would describe as "riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale". The majority of tech workers do not work for FAANG, or anything close to it.

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And you're cutting an awfully wide swath in the opposite direction; most tech gains value by exploiting or displacing people. Economies of scale don't just exist at the absolute top of the economy. The computer cut out entire classes of people from jobs they had specialized in by decreasing the education or effort required to successfully complete tasks, at the cost of massively increased infrastructure costs.

I'm all for pushing back against what AI might do, but doing it in this massively dishonest way just opens the door to obvious counters.

Name any tech job and I will tell you how it exploits the average people through economies of scale

I cut my teeth in tech building a regional classifieds website for a local newspaper

Tell me all about how it was worse than the print classifieds that already existed

I'm very curious to hear your take

Not the original poster, but moving classifieds online lost newspapers a whole lot of money, money that previously financed quality journalism, not to mention the people in charge of maintaining the classifieds ads business.

If you are working for the newspaper, your job is a reaction to the death of the original business, and you are the automation that came in their stead

> moving classifieds online lost newspapers a whole lot of money

I was part of the online division of a newspaper. Online classifieds did lose them money, but for my company at least, moving them online was an effort to stop losing all of the money from them.

> you are the automation that came in their stead

Sure. We hired fewer people to answer phones for managing their classified ads, but we hired more people to moderate the site and make sure people weren't posting obscene stuff. And it also employed a handful of software developers.

I'm not convinced it was a total loss. I can't speak to the quality journalism part though

Surely you jest. How often have we seen tech types say "learn to code", suggesting that people whose careers are disrupted just retrain into a different career, telling businesses to adapt or die (pre-LLM), or make condescending analogies about buggy whip makers on HN and /. before it? Quite a lot over the past 20 years.

Software ate the world and the techbros were very blatantly unsympathetic about those affected by their industry and careers being upended. Don't think that anyone forgot about that now that we're the ones in the crosshairs.

You're looking a massive selection bias. Most people in tech are _not_ saying those things (e.g. most software engineers in my circle would agree learning to code at a non trivial level is decidedly NON trivial). The vocal elite at the top of the tech pyramids (who have a vested interest in sweeping externalities under the rug) are the ones spewing that shit.

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