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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

This feels wrong. Did the vacuum make cleaning worse for employees? What about sewing machines? Modern looms?

It is probably a safe case that most tech revolutions reduced the number of needed employees for most things. But even then, it would be great if this would provide evidence of that!

Notably, it isn't like people strongly missed this work! Yes, there are fewer secretaries. But there aren't none, and the ones that were responsible for being a scribe to bad bosses almost certainly don't miss that work.

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The claim of the article is that expectations increase at a faster rate than the work becomes easier.

It probably feels that way to someone who got comfortable doing their job the old way wishes the world could go back to when they had it all comfortably figured out.

If this does happen, it’s a second order effect from reducing the barrier to entry. Now that anyone can make some code with enough prompts, it’s no longer impressive to be able to make simple apps. You have to bring something different and better to the table. Good developers still do this on top of what AI can do by itself, but I also think there were a lot of relatively easy programming jobs where you didn’t have to be particularly good at anything. You had to know how to follow the rules, get easy tickets from the tracker, make enough changes that you could call it done, and then go on through the dog and pony show of getting the PR approved and getting those story points to count for your standup report. Repeat 5 days per week.

Every mid-size and larger company I worked for had a collection of developers like this: Not really trustworthy or skilled enough to handle big tickets, but you could assign all the loose ends and easy tickets to them. They’d get done eventually while the other devs could focus on bigger efforts.

Now, it’s hard to justify having a lot of those easy ticket solver developers around. An experienced developer can take 10 easy tickets, use their codebase knowledge to write targeted prompts with Opus or Fable, quickly review the code, and have all the easy work done in an afternoon. Then back to the hard tickets.

If you were one of those developers coasting on the easy work, this revolution probably feels like it increased expectations unfairly. If you were one of those devs doing the hard work, you have another tool to use but you’re still grinding away at the hard problems with an extra tool to make some of the parts easier.

> Now, it’s hard to justify having a lot of those easy ticket solver developers around.

This is such a flawed, but common take. Are you seriously going to claim you were never a junior dev that nobody trusted with "hard tickets"?

Note that I am not making a statement about what your skills were like when you started getting paid for dev work.

I'm saying that the "easy ticket solver" devs are an illusion. When they really fail to perform, you should ask yourself whether it's because many years of bad management undermined the motivation they may have once had. Yes it would suck to be one of those unlucky people, and I'm not saying they shouldn't get fired, but you still need to recognize the bias there. I won't comment on why they weren't given opportunities. There are so many.

Choosing dev work while lacking the necessary skills over other career paths that often pay more, whether back then or even now, is so irrational that it breaks your premise.

> This is such a flawed, but common take. Are you seriously going to claim you were never a junior dev that nobody trusted with "hard tickets"?

No I was talking about the older devs who got comfortable not progressing, just taking those tickets that should have been going to the juniors.

If the easy stuff is going to older workers who don't want to rise to the level of seniors, you should replace them with juniors who are interesting in growing.

The expectation is always that employees will do more for less. Employees are considered a cost, while their productive value is considered an entitlement, so the economics always push for cost reduction.

In practice businesses above a certain size accrete layers of make-work and bureaucracy, which is how you end up with "It takes three weeks to change a button" friction.

AI will make it easier to change the button, but it won't necessarily - yet - cut through the processes around it.

> but it won't necessarily - yet - cut through the processes around it.

sounds like a trillion dollar idea were one to actually solve this

The introduction of mechanical looms (is this what you mean by "modern"?) was famously terrible for workers. Weaving went from a high-skill, safe task to a dangerous, low-skill one and was largely responsible for the rise of factories. The original Luddites were weavers.

it was terrible for weavers

it was great for workers around the world who now can afford clothes

Cheap cloth didn't mean cheap clothes. You had to wait a century for the sewing machine for that to happen.

Of course it meant cheaper clothes. Spend some time with a hand loom and you'll see why.

Cheaper doesn't mean cheap.

for some lines of jobs the tooling progress might be objectively worth a lot, but then there's the less mechanical side of things, maybe teamwork, craft went down after power tools became common

something less positive i noticed, in offices, is that technology is not there to help you, management get sold something shiny to replace the old and dusty, the supplier assembles a bad team, implement crappy network, install new web stuff that is sluggish and requires new machines, and employees are left holding the bag. the new tech is often way more limited than the old junk (feature dropped, bad ergonomics for prolonged work, no more scripting options), the integrations are lacking, the people are not trained .. it's often a slow mess full of redundant steps and missed opportunities.

Labour saving devices do not save any labour for the employees, their workday is just as long.

> Labour saving devices do not save any labour for the employees, their workday is just as long.

Anyone who has ever worked a physical labor job will be rolling their eyes at this.

There are more dimensions to labor than the number of hours worked. Imagine doing a construction job without power tools or searching through folders of documents instead of using the search function on your computer. Labor saving devices are everywhere and they’ve reduced the amount of labor required during the workday by a huge amount.

EDIT: I guess I wasn’t clear because the replies are still focusing on hours. The point I’m trying to make is labor isn’t only measured in hours. An 8 hour workday of writing code, checking Slack, and sending emails is vastly easier than 8 hours of construction work in terms of physical labor. If you can only see “labor” as number of hours worked, you probably haven’t had a difficult manual labor job ever.

Yet people still have to work the same number of hours each day - they are performing the same amount of labor, just in a different form.

There’s more to labor than hours worked. Sitting at a computer for 8 hours is a different load than landscaping for 8 hours in the middle of summer.

Number of hours worked has actually been trending down for a very long time.

Most people landscape their own yards recreationally. They do it for fun, in their free time, at their own expense.

When I was a teen, I had a full time summer job doing yard work. At the end of the day I'd be utterly worn out.

Working with my head is a heluva lot easier.

The 8-hour workday movement in the US predates Marxism, let alone communism.

It was signed into law with the fair labour standards act of 1938, as part of the New Deal under FDR.

It was explicitly socialist in the UK.

There was a paternal element of duty-of-care-and-welfare to factory/business ownership in the UK - patchy, but very real - which flared briefly in the US but is completely absent now.

It's still present in Europe, to varying degrees.

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