And they’ll just hire more H-1B visa employees for more and more smaller roles, and they have them in an even tighter place than they could American workers. It’s not like they’re blind to the issue. It’s the plan.
The onus is on us, we senior tech workers, to gouge the absolute shit out of future companies to show them the error of their ways.
And when they start hiring juniors again, insist on onboarding those motherfuckers like you’re teaching a CS degree. The young’ns deserve to learn, this is some bullshit.
Only semi-related but check for local computer clubs/maker spaces in your area. Ours does everything from tutoring/group learning to monthly LAN parties. Learning CAD from Youtube is okay, learning CAD while being able to ask questions of a professional engineer is even better!
I’ve been helping people move to/learn Linux (we have a bunch of donated Windows 10 desktop hardware to play with), it’s pretty rewarding to teach people who actually want to learn (training new hires who are clearly bored is not so much…) and we usually end up giving them the machine that they’re learning on if they need it.
Just another way to pass it on and get some offline nerd socialization, if you’re into that kind of thing.
This is delicious in every way, I really love it. Kudos!!
Here’s my tidbit - if you’re in the US and in a not-tiny or remote part of it, good chance you can find people offloading old Dell business-class laptops, workstations, all the way up to v. spendy server machines, depending directly on number of school systems, corporate office spaces (and etc), and industrial or info-tech type businesses nearby. Respectively, and with some overlap and such 😅
Beyond the obvious benefits for sustainability (reuse!) and affordability - business-class Dell have always been engineered quite well (expensively, and uhhh… opinionatedly, lol).
Arguably even more useful, all those well-engineered things were made in huge volume. You will ~always be able to find cheap parts. And, if buying a
lot, by having a handful of the ~same thing (all destined for a dumpster), you already get redundancy, and…ahem…some very useful teachable moments lol.It feels like a cheat code. Place populated enough and there will def be businesses whose main thing is snapping these up, cleaning up and etc and reselling. But I’m in a not-tiny place and I still see some deals. OTOH, all of that got a lot worse once hardware prices jumped the shark, so, maybe this tip is already outdated.
Warning a company is like talking to a wall. It doesn’t care about tomorrow, hell, it exists on exploitation of tomorrow for today. If you expect the free market or business to save you, youre fucked.
They don’t care. They only care about short term profits. Capitalism only cares about immediate profits and doesn’t plan for the long term. The management at the top know they won’t be there when the system fails. They’ll get their massive paycheques and cash out their stock long before it crashes.
I worked in the energy industry for over a decade and a half and I was amazed at how every CEO we had (because they rotated out every couple of years) seemed to only pick the actions that made stort term money while royally screwing over the next CEO’s tenure. And the crazy part was everyone knew this was happening. Some CEOs even stated the quiet part out loud.
They can’t care. If they don’t relentlessly pursue profit quarter after quarter, they’ll be consumed by companies who will. There is no planning for the future, only profits.
Also the system selects for mental illness so a lot of the worst offenders here literally can’t feel empathy.
Wasn’t Amazon’s whole thing for a while that they weren’t going to relentlessly pursue quarterly profits? So they can care, they just often don’t.
Companies can bleed ridiculous amounts of money if it means that they can push competition out of the market. Couple less profitable, or even negative, quarters are fine, if they’re expecting good enough return for that investment. So, they’re still firmly on track with maximum profit hunting, sometimes it just takes some money to make even more money.
That took an expert?
If you don’t train juniors you don’t get seniors to fix shit or to build you more AI.
Every C-Suite think they will be able to snatch senior devs that other companies will train.
This is already the case at companies like Valve and Netflix. They “don’t hire junior devs”…
I applied for a job at Valve a couple of years ago and was told that my over decade of development experience didn’t make me senior enough.
Valve has the sweetest of all business models: do almost nothing, make tons of money. They have so few employees.
they save money by laying all the work on the low amount of employees they have rather than hiring more people, its probably skeleton crewed. thats probably why they make so money there, dont want to spread around.
This has been the case since way before the LLM boom but it has definitely moved into a higher gear.
They really believe that seniors will move to their slop based company after all the shit they dug themselves into. The heads of these ceos must be full of unicorn shit and rainbows.
The bourgeoisie no longer holds any care whatsoever for sustainability.
Quire seriously, their only goal is to obtain enough wealth and power that they won’t feel the effects of losing any of it until they die. That’s their literal goal. All hell is allowed to break loose, but only after they die.
Let the other companies be the suckers that take a loss on training juniors into seniors
You know, those other companies that also use AI instead of hiring juniors.
Not to worry just let them burn the companies down themselves
Gen Z? This bullshit has been ongoing since the early 00’s. Every fucking company wants applicants with 5+ years experience straight out of the gate, with training provided by anyone else but them, and to pay the new hire as if they rolled out of their High School grad through the front door. Look to Gen Y if you want to see what’s going to happen again (more self-service kiosks and useless chatbots). Many of the kids training for these jobs are going to completely abandon their chosen career track in favour of work that’s responsive to their needs - things like actually responding to applications and paying their fucking rent/mortgage. I’m finding to people in their early 20’s who’re already sick of this shit, without a clear understanding of what’s happened to the labour market.
No shit? I guess because it’s not coming from us „luddites“ it‘s suddenly worth paying attention to.
The lost geenration that was denied a place in society should use their skills to create a new society without them
Good, let ‘em ruin themselves. We need the people in healthcare and education anyway. In the meantime, tax the companies to hell because they’ve lost all value now they’re not even “creating jobs” in your country.
Not all that great for the people who now can’t get jobs.
Take me for example. I like to think I’m a pretty good software engineer. And I actually enjoy it. I’d be a pretty bad doctor and an even worse teacher (I’m also a man so that would limit me to teaching teenagers and older anyway, nobody wants men near children in education).
Don’t give much of a fuck about the companies, but a lot of people are now denied a career path that might’ve been THE thing they’re great at and enjoy doing. This is about several different fields, of which mine is one. I’m quite lucky I got in when I did. Otherwise I’d have to start considering suicide by now because I can’t stand manual labour or customer service.
the teachers i see employed at my school when i was in HS early 2000s who are male, that have been washed out from other stem majors, or have been gatekept from those fields altogether, not a good fit it pretty much reflect thier lack of interest in teaching.
Don’t you think that’s a bit much? People committing suicide because they can’t get their favourite career path? I have never heard of it being a problem. Before computers existed there were people like you and they didn’t all commit suicide. They chose the jobs that were available. Sure it takes some adjustment and it may not be a string of everlasting highlights, but let’s not get carried away here.
Not really.
It’s all about the rate of change: neoliberal globalization has brought down wages across industries, so fewer good jobs are left, and the not-so-good ones barely keep up the same standard of living.
From a neutral historical perspective, some serious pearl-clutching about jobs is not ill-founded.
As you say, people in the past facing these circumstances didn’t all commit suicide. Yet some did it explicitly, some did it indirectly with alcohol or other vices, others just lived less fulfilling lives than they otherwise would have. Nonetheless, we are very much encouraging deaths of despair en masse with our current societal outlook.
lower wages is the least of peoples worries if they cant even find a job anymore.
Society will adapt. It always has. People can make much more meaningful contributions to society than working at a desk in some software company. Let the AI do that. Humans are way too valuable for that. Meaningfulness of the work one does is one of the most important features of work satisfaction. Not everyone needs to be a doctor, nurse or teacher. Those are just the most common examples, but there are many more meaningful jobs where you are not simply an AI in human form slaving away at a desk job.
It is also simply not true that things like suicide and addiction rates were higher in the recent past. For example, look at drug overdose rates that have risen sharply in the past decades.
You’re sweeping a lot under the rug with that first sentence: Society will adapt. Yeah sure, barring global catastrophe, it will. Doesn’t mean people won’t die and suffer in the process.
I’m making no claims about good vs. bad jobs here; people can self-actualize however they like in my book. Nor was I making any specific point about epidemiology of deaths of despair in the recent past, but I think that trend serves to illustrate the overall point.
What am I sweeping under the rug? I’m not saying that change will be easy, but I’m talking about the end result. Too many people have made the wrong choices and got fooled by companies dangling big paychecks in front of their noses to work shitty office jobs.
You insinuated that in the past, people killed themselves more and had more addiction problems due to the fact that they couldn’t get the job they wanted. That is simply not true and just guessing at things you can’t back up. I’m showed you that the opposite is true: the data only shows that deaths of despair are getting worse than before we had all these bullshit jobs. Whether that is because of them or not cannot be said, but it shows that what you’re saying is not true.
Find me a meaningful and challenging job that doesn’t get boring over time, that I don’t need a degree or any sort of artistic talent for.
I doubt you’ll be able to. The only job I ever held before my current career was refurbishing laptops and I can tell you most of us wanted to kill ourselves. Half the guys were on antidepressants.
What do you mean? There are plenty of jobs in health care alone that don’t require extensive training at all. They don’t get boring since you meet new people every day and it is meaningful work, which in turn is a big part of why people are satisfied with their jobs.
Edit: can the downvoters at least explain why they are downvoting? What I wrote is 100% true, unless I am missing something big here. So please enlighten me why you feel the need to downvote something so obviously true.
Doctors need an M.D. Nurse is a 4 year degree. What can you do in healthcare other than janitorial work without a degree?
Do you really think doctors and nurses are the only people who work at a hospital or in healthcare in general? Even in a hospital doctors and nurses are about half of all personnel. People need daily care, need food, need someone to help them get from one place to another, like when they need to get medical exams.
Outside of a hospital there are plenty of jobs that bring you into contact with people that don’t need an extensive degree. Maybe a couple months of training.
Those are not jobs that would give me any fulfillment whatsoever. What are the complex technical problems to solve in feeding someone? In moving them around? It’s exactly the same as factory assembly line work. A monotonous grind with no end in sight, nothing gets “done” because there’s a bunch more of the same every day until you retire.
I’m psychologically incapable of doing these types of jobs. Yes I’m medicated and no it doesn’t help too much. I have crippling ADHD. I’ve done factory work before and like I said, it makes me want to off myself. This was the type of job we were supposed to let robots handle, not the ones where we actually get to use our brains.
I also don’t see “bring you into contact with people” as a positive for a job in any way. I’ve found that any time I have to work with customers, they can be absolutely annoying idiots. Just hanging out with people I actually like is a completely different proposition. It’s just that when people need something, they rarely know what they need and you have the options of either making them angry by suggesting they’re wrong, or making them angry by letting them be wrong. To be clear, I don’t consider myself immune to this. See me walk into an automotive paint store or a doctor’s office and my questions and ideas are probably very stupid. But I make up for it by not arguing when I’m being corrected by the person that actually knows what they’re doing.
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i dont think tech can suddenly switch to education/bio as easily, because you will have to go through school all over again. the vice versa might different though. other than nursing other job markets are not as available, and usually geared towards woman , as they get a large leg up in the universities through many initiatives. the cost is also more expensive assuming a person in tech decides to try to get into bio, as a post-bacc.
tech was the only good way to make a living outside of most other stem fields, which has poor prospects in thier industries.
Do you have any examples and proof about how women are “getting a leg up in the universities”?
Point is: sulking never helped anyone. Take control of your life.
That generation began as quite conservative. It is going to be real fun watching their brains get scrambled and refried. We have to be ready to catch them when they fall.
Don’t worry. They’ll figure smth out. Probably some kind of pay-to-work scheme, like a reverse internship
But how will it effect next quarter?
AI has many glaring fundamental flaws that there has yet to be any determined solutions to.
New technology isn’t adopted when its good and ready to be. Its adopted when the bourgeoisie who have all the money, and no brains, think it’s ready to save/make them money.
As well AI, even by automated agents and the best models so far, cannot reach the ethical and quality match of a human in terms of being limited by the input it receives. Sure it can gather some of the finest research and paths towards solving a problem quickly. However, the value of the input and outputs are predictions that sometimes do not match the quality needed for well-being. Whatever the size of the model and memory available, it is a failure to think that it will keep refining to a point of perfection. It is a matter of some probability, and every case is based on the limits of its inputs. Thereby I treat it as a tool that expands my abilities rather than a business focus to focus on profit and making it an ability that replaces quality. You cannot replace quality for speed of quantity in processing and calculation. For instance, processes in programming schools allow for quality, now being abandoned for automated checks which in themselves are the wrong way to look at things. Someone said you cannot automate quality. Oh how I wish I could find work to make sure development processes are adjusted for AI as a tool, and its automation reaches the needs of people, designers, and engineers rather than the whims of a business role.
AKA “The great corporate filter of the 21st century”.
