alt Hacker NewsI think a key goal of senior management at any big company in the last 6 months is to make rank and file fungible or obsolete. It’s one big experiment. There are precedents like the Industrial Revolution. Things get worse for the workers for a generation or so.
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georgemcbay • today at 6:15 AM
> There are precedents like the Industrial Revolution. Things get worse for the workers for a generation or so.
And things only got better post-Industrial Revolution when labor organized and forced the issue.
There's no guarantee that will work again if labor has reduced leverage due to AI reducing their value.
I think in one way or another this all works itself out, but I'm not convinced it won't be a very painful (and possibly violent) transition to whatever comes next.
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I've worked at Amazon since 2018 and they've always talked about the software engineers being fungible during my tenure there. Technically everyone is supposed to be able to do everything, but in practice it's a huge headache if you want to hire for a more specialized role. They started creating some, like Frontend Engineer and Embedded Systems Engineer, but in practice these are still extremely broad