What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

Addressing the question in the title, "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers", look at what happened to printers. That was a good skilled trade for centuries. Then it just went away. Phototypesetting took the high volume end. Desktop publishing took the low end. Computer-controlled presses took press operators. And then the newspaper business died.

I've heard homeless former printers talking about the good days at the Burger King near the cable car turntable at Powell and Market. They thought they had careers. Now they're struggling to survive.

Knitting is not the answer. This is a survival issue. Somehow I suspect the author inherited money.

Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that.

I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed.

Going online it's like everyone is really angry and tired and sad all the time, and it's getting worse every year. This really took a nosedive during the pandemic, but looking back this had been going on for several years before. Every election cycle makes things worse too.

It's just been spiraling in a very dark direction for a long time. You have these blackpill depression cirklejerks everywhere. Astroturfing is getting worse every year. Like what Bannon did with gamer gate is an amateurish precursor to what everyone with is doing everywhere now. With AI you can even run these campaigns with a very small budget.

All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom. Used to be more tabloid territory but now I don't know if anywhere is spared. A lot of the focus now is on AI, but when it isn't the world is burning in some other fashion. Reading the news, we've been in a permanent state of crisis for years now.

This information diet just isn't good for your mental health. It isn't just tech workers, but they're probably more exposed than most.

Candide's closing remarks spring to mind. Tend your garden.

This dropped off the front page in the time I read it, I assume because of the controversial gate that favors upvotes to comments (which I am making worse by replying to others). It is a shame, because this really resonated with me.

I've been working in tech for over 20 years now in various roles, and this is the least I have cared about it. I used to want to get better, and was constantly excited about learning new things just for the sake of it. Now I daydream about being homeless. I look around at all the meaningless crap I have accumulated, and feel shame that I didn't use that money to retire early.

I am surprised that remote work didn't get a bigger mention in the article. In a few weeks I will have been working from home for 12 years, and I believe it is the cause of most of most of my angst. At first, the convivence was such a relief, but it has become a trap. The effort of the commute, forcing me to go out every day and talk to human beings face to face, even just little things like making sure I was showered and dressed every day, they all felt like a burden at the time but they were good for me and I didn't realize it. Not to mention that it makes my house feel like work, and I now I hate it here.

I will say as an anecdote counter to the AI examples given in the article. I have a young co-worker who is very excited about AI and is using it way more effectively than I am. Talking to him gives me hope for the future, the kids will be alright.

But to the point of the article: I have many friends my age that are making less than half of what I do working objectively harder jobs for way longer hours, but they all seem so much happier than I am.

Long long time ago people in tech were in tech because of the tech.

Then, at some point, being in tech became a gilded profession and everyone: salesmen, artists, clerks etc. joined in. Not because they wanted to be in tech.

They wanted gold.

For years it was working, but right now things shifted. You can no longer just do the thing you learned for a job and continue doing so, because landscape shifted. So they're miserable and they want to get back to knitting, pottery or whatever thing they want to do but not tech.

For people I know who are in tech for the tech nothing changed. There's new tech in town, one has to adjust, and it's still possible to discover new things and pave new paths. Tech was always shifting and I suppose people who worked in it for it always knew it, and it doesn't derail them.

> The world does not wait with bated breath for product launches. A marketing campaign will not change the world. Almost no one will remember all the work we do.

It did at one time! I think that’s what’s so alluring initially about Workism. People waited with bated breath for the iPhone and iPad and its new versions. Those iPod commercials and the marketing campaigns for “rip. Mix. Burn.” did change the music world.

But the quote is also right. It doesn’t happen anymore, and I think that’s why the religion of Workism is especially vulnerable at this point.

In someways, it sorta feels like the article is cheering AI on? Like, it judges Workism, and goes on to say that AI shatters the illusion, but then.. that’s it? Deriving value from good work is pointless now and we should all just go volunteer?

I dunno, i clearly identify with those who loved work and now feel a bit lost, and yes i have been thinking about alternatives, but I feel like there must be knowledge work that is still valuable both financially and socially and also provides some sense of pride and purpose… if not, i fear the situation is much more dire than we are prepared for

I'm not even a programmer (by profession, though hobby) and I must say I find the gleefulness in the article off-putting.

That said I do think it is useful from a societal perspective that programmers are both doing this and getting hit. I'm not going to celebrate someone's job being threatened but in this particular case I think that symmetry is a major societal win for surfacing the question as to how are we collectively as humanity going to figure this whole AI situation out.

See translator jobs getting wiped out. Nobody even blinked an eye, it didn't spark any discussion, no deep thoughts were had. It did wiped out a bunch of people's lives and did NOTHING to trigger discussions around what are we going to do here.

Twitter connected programmers feeling the heat with a large audience may prove better to spark discussion

I want to address something mentioned in the article about people wishing for for grounded occupations. I have a sheep farm and I could not keep it running without my tech salary. So I kinda view these as false escapes. Unless forced to or of independent means, who is going to throw themselves into the bottom fork of the “K-shaped” economy.

I've often felt my job as a programmer has often been to automate myself (and others) out of my job. But I've always felt in control of that. I suppose there's some cosmic justice to the fact that it's now being done to me.

This is basically office space but for the modern era. Peter found happiness in construction work, but when something physical like that is your job… I don’t know. A lot of those guys have back pain, inflexible schedules, working in extreme weather, and the pay isn’t even that good. Is tech so bad? Or is the world of work broken?

"Knowledge work is mostly pointless" is the author's view, so his article (the fruit of knowledge work) should be measured by it.

Amd that sentiment is hardly surprising, coming as it does from a Director of AI Operations (his title on LinkedIn).

The bigger problem, for me, is that knowledge work has become stupid. If you want to write code by hand and do a good job, you will be ruthlessly replaced by your boss churning out "good enough" LLM code.

The CEO at my company tried to PR code to my repo. It didn't make any sense but it was a whole political thing to make it go away.

The industry has always been stupid and selfish and short-sighted but now the ICs at the bottom of the pyramid are themselves being commoditized like all the workers they "disrupted".

This article is too inward, clique referential looking. It uses too many "known" things to frame and validate its points, but has very little contributions of its own.

The way that people are described, and the conditions portrayed, have been this way for quite some time. The only thing that is changed is now there is a clearly defined boogeyman to point to that justifies it. Because the other boogeymen make the usual authors too uncomfortable to bring up.

> What’s different about this moment is that the questions are not just economic but existential, the kind of questions that cause high-earning technical professionals to contemplate throwing it all away to start a goat farm in Washington or become a surf instructor in Costa Rica.

Because the world sure needs more goat farmers and surf instructors.

It's all pointless, you can't outrun the pointlessness - so just enjoy it!

Side note: a half an hour call on a commute train (or in public spaces) is considered extremely rude in many parts of the world.

I'll never consider my time with programming to be useless. Even if we got sent back to the stone age and programmable computers no longer existed. The way of thinking to me is very valuable

"It's good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over."

I feel like this can be applied to a lot of things, but this is pretty much how I've felt working in tech for the last 2ish years.

The author talks as if this were a new phenomenon; it is not.

I actually did go buy a farm in the 2010s, grew alfalfa, managed cattle, cared for horses, etc. Except I did it while working remote as a software engineer.

Very fun life, and I may return to it again. But it's not an AI thing, and it's not a disappearing job thing. It's just that office work keeps you so separated from the real world that you yearn for something physical.

Scholars and academics have been bemoaning the pointlessness of what the article calls "knowledge work" for centuries. A few of my favorites:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Scholar

https://andrewmbailey.com/papers/Higher-order%20truths%20abo...

Because we see what's coming?

Because we watched our careers go from being in service of an industry of tinkerers and designers, to being in service of the worst people attempting to maximize wealth extraction no matter the human cost?

Because Snow Crash wasn't supposed to be the goal?

Because our daily complicity in what's happening is also a daily reminder that we're not brave enough to be a Mangione?

Take your pick.

Many occupations have been made obsolete throughout history, and this article examines none of them. I'm not sympathetic to "this time it's different", I think people are just too lazy to try to find out what actually happened in the past.

I personally have been trying to get a financial security cushion for the last ten years or so (and failing) so I don't take my own feelings into account; AI hasn't made me more frustrated. On the contrary, it's a tool I now use in my escape-the-rat-wheel adventures, and there's nothing sweeter than seeing Opus dismantle in ten minutes a problem that would have consumed two full days of my time in this world. But when I speak with colleagues and friends, all of them, now and not before, in all age groups, and with only in common to be knowledge workers, are searching for a way out.

None of that is the reason I'm sad. I'm sad because I realized that this industry had grown from something that is a benefit to everyone to something that is the opposite of that.

I think what happened is that a lot of the wrong personalities entered technology for all the wrong reasons.

Some of us started in the 80s or 90s and got into it with personal projects and treating the PC as a hobby. It is satisfying to be able to command a hunk of metal and get it to do things. And it can do boring stuff really fast and repeatedly. And that alone was exciting. The majority of us would stay up into the morning hours figuring out how to compile something. Or how to get that new driver work correctly in an unsupported OS or setup. It's a lust of computing. The gadgetry. The devices. The awestruck feeling when a new computing device or technology comes out.

I and many others like me still have that yearning and curiosity. I love strolling the aisles of the hardware store and computer stores for this very reason. The energy is electric. The immense amount of technology in every little thing is just mind blowing. THAT's why we do it. THAT's why we got into it. It wasn't the pay. It wasn't the glory. It was a group of us who wanted so desperately to have a computer club or an electronics lab for us to hangout and build stuff.

Unfortunately, as the industry grew, all the wrong personalities entered it. Project managers, product managers, scrum/agile masters, terrible mid level managers, talentless clowns, bozos, cheerleaders, jocks. The lot of them. The non-weird, non-geeky, non-obsessive, non-nerdy types. And then they co-opted the culture. They thought wearing glasses and wearing a backpack and carrying the latest tech devices made them "it".

The good thing is that the burnout hits fast for these folks. Just like the tons of medical school or law school students who are there for all the wrong reasons and realize sooner or later that this isn't at all what they wanted. Some members of this group actually become doctors and lawyers. THIS is the group that the article is talking about. They don't last, because their heart and soul are just not in it.

For the rest of us? AI, no AI, walled gardens, OSS or closed. It doesn't matter. All of this geeky stuff brings us joy. I don't want to "turn off and disconnect", I want to be connected because I love this stuff. I love the simple speaker and amp and the latest LLM. And I love the latest ADAS systems in cars. This work is meaningful to me because of both the end product and the work that it took to get there.

Unfortunately, the issue is that while we enjoy the geekery, the others ruin it for us because their lives suck.

Sorry to be harsh.

On a personal level to remain as a SWE/Dev maintaining your sanity comes down to a few choices:

1. Do I want to have the kind of lived experiences that the field has to offer? The answer can come through some introspection to questions like: "Do I have a good devx talking to AI and understanding how it works? If not am I willing to learn how to?" or "Am I ok if development has become more intense than it was — because you will talk to AI/Machine more than before?".

2. Whatever your introspective questions are, if there answer is: "Yes I am more or less ok.", then pick a goal that lets you get those experiences and hack away.

I feel this decision making is more important than ever for people who are banked on more their skill to write decent code and not much else in the recent past. And also people with mental health issues should be more deliberate about their choices.

I'd like to congratulate Aaron Horwath on publishing this article. As a creative professional, he must feel pride in bringing his ideas to light.

Unfortunately, this isn't the movie industry. We don't see a list of credits at the end of his commentary recognizing the thousands of others involved in helping him publish his thoughts.

Perhaps we can all chip in and name some of the many people involved in building the tech stack he published with. I'm sure there are THOUSANDS without even looking at the previous technologies those things like blogging platforms, current browsers or current generation phones built from.

Is that fair enough?

I'm not sad. As I look out to the next few weeks and whatever, I'm not sad. Hopefully those credits will help others also not be sad.

Here's to WordPress and Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little.

Tech has always had an unhealthy streak; it was ok while workers were being compensated well and treated amazingly. The end of zirp has cut comp and benefits massively so there’s a lot less upside to this lifestyle.

I have the feeling this goes much deeper than knowledge work and AI. I see it in many places that people seem to not take their job serious anymore. The incentive seems to be gone. Also their managers don't seem to care anymore, as they are also taking their job less seriously.

I can't put a finger on it, but it's not about younger people or Gen Z, it also applies to older people. It just feels like good work doesn't matter much anymore, and everyone tries to make the best out of it in their private life.

Yikes. Won't someone think of the software engineers?

Many of us have done far better than we deserve. There are so many workers who will never approach the gains even an aborted or partial career in software will accomplish.

How many of you are willing to sacrifice to achieve UBI for all?

My sympathy for you will depend on the answer.

Because most of us are middle aged with mortgages, kids etc. Not old enough to retire and live off of savings or 401ks, not young enough to start all over again.

Personally I'm pretty excited for the future.

I feel like LLMs make reading papers way easier than what it is before. If I ever run into a roadblock, I can just keep digging and probing until it makes sense to me. If anything, the amount of work that needs to be done has been amplified because it makes learning new things that much easier.

The business culture at F50 companies is several decades behind tech. The business culture in middle america is even further behind. If these people can remain employed, I'm not sure why anyone in SV is worried. The nature of white collar work is that it changes over time and frankly I think getting attached to one job title is nonsensical.

Also, half of the battle with white collar work is information asymmetry. The effectiveness of the models with real systems in the field is limited by the amount of context that people are willing to provide. This problem existed before AI, if teams document literally everything, management could see this as an outsourcing opportunity. If management forces them to document stuff, why would they do a good job? Also, why the hell would management even try to do this in the first place if it by implication eliminates their job as well?

There's a social problem here: how do you get people to give high quality information if there is no incentive? How do you know that they're not telling you things or intentionally explaining something badly (as opposed to the AI just being "bad" at something)? Especially now that the billionaire class has done enough saber rattling over it and gotten everyone thoroughly freaked out for the next decade at least? (This is also a problem in high churn corporate cultures as well, the fear fucks up the signal to noise ratio)

Linking Graeber's Bullshift Jobs to Workism via his concept of "spiritual violence" would have been a nice touch because it explains the drain despite the performativity (or what Baudrillard would call reproduction)

This is a common source of confusion. The knitting / pottery making is not rewarding because its made by hands or is not knowledge work, but because it is done in the direct service of someone. Modern organizations are complex and can put several layers between the knowledge worker and the customer it ultimately serves. This produces the feeling of 'cog in a machine'. It is possible to work such jobs and serve others directly on the side (e.g. friday evening soup kitchen)

I am not excited about tech anymore. I dread it to be honest. I was an early engineer at a AI company that got acquired. From that and related stock (golden handcuffs) was able to retire a couple of years ago. There were some tech problems that I wanted to investigate and I took a bunch of classes. Fun.

I loved my career.

Wow have my feelings changed. I'm disgusted. It's a moral disgust. The scene turns me off SO MUCH. Just a recent tidbit: I think it is Anthropic that is buying old (some antique, vintage) books, scanning them, then pulping them.

There is no restraint at this point. Whether it's Meta and their pervert glasses and child exploitation. Or google trashing their own search.

One thing that has turned my stomach is how management has acted after discovering they could trash their skilled workers in the way that so many other industries have been able to do. If you want to know management's true character, remove the moat (that skill used to be) from the workers and watch what happens.

...Okay, I'm editing. There is a bright spot. The other day I was sitting around doing nothing and suddenly out of the blue dreamed up an app that could help build community regarding an activity I care a lot about. With an LLM I could do the whole thing myself. I'm excited about this. I might fit this in among my other projects. It's kind of like taking a hammer and chisel and cutting a piece off of Big Tech. If all of us skilled folks do this we could have an impact and serve community at the same time.

Everyone in tech isn’t sad, the people who are vocal about being sad are sad.

This is a universal concept across the Internet.

If you’re on your phone all day doom scrolling you’ll only encounter sad people.

Most of the people in tech I know that have interpersonal relationships and go out and look at a tree every once in a while are not often sad.

>A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.

The pleasure...

> knowledge work is mostly pointless

Really, noemamag?

There is certainly ample precedent for this. How many stable hands lost their jobs as people switched from horses to automobiles?

In 1923 there were 863,000 coal miners in the US. There are less than 45,000 today.

I wrote a little bit about this a few weeks ago [1]. For me, programming, building software has always been a creative expression based on fundamentals. AI sucks all the joy out of it.

[1] https://deanclatworthy.com/2026/02/09/the-joy-of-programming...

I like an article focused on us, the special tech people.

But the truth is everyone is sad or subjectively unhappy no matter if that is a real or imaginary reflection of wealth or money or access to food, cloths, coffee, restaurants ...

You can see it in SF movies: a lot of the successful ones in the last years maybe 10, maybe 20 years are not optimistic about the future. The same is in all areas of life: we seem to need always something to reach for, or something to fix, to work on, to improve so we can be (maybe have) eudaimonia (for a lack of a better word) or just a normal life.

we spent a decade being told we were building the future, and now the future is a subscription fee and a quarterly layoff email

You used your most prized mental faculties to build software: logical intelligence, creativity, etc to make someone else rich

With or without AI, if I had to talk about EBITDAs for my job, I too would have to take up knitting to feel like I’m doing something real. I’m sure Charlie Munger would agree.

People who argue against AI are the same people arguing against the car because of horses... This is going to open a whole field of jobs for... ... ...... someone... but let's not go into those details...

Remember that this is going to supercharge economy, sure, in the beginning it'll not be obvious, but then you are going to see how it'll enable people to stop working, just like trickle down economy has redistribut....ed...

Ok maybe that's a bad example, sure it's going to take a lot of people out of business, and yes there will be a lot of pain for a "small" part of society, but in general it will be pure gain as a whole... it's not like all that people being laid off means something like stop paying house mortgages, and then a lot of evictions and suddenly a lot of houses going of market... ... I mean even then that's not like it's going to cause all the house market to go down right?

Ok maybe a bit... but don't worry if you are near underwater with your loan someone will buy all those houses to keep your loans on check... it's not like it's going to be some private investors with all the money that will go to the top 1% and take them out of the market and make impossible for the rest of us to buy something...

I mean, my point is don't be negative, stop fighting progress, if more people can buy super yatches there will be more openings for building them!

I quit tech a couple of years ago to become a high school teacher. No regrets.

I read about an experiment with pigeons. The birds were given a target. For one iteration if a bird pecked a target it would get a piece of corn. For another it got nothing and for a third... sometimes it would get piece of corn and sometimes it would get nothing.

Tech for me is that third variation. Sometimes you get nothing and sometimes it totally delivers (and more!) on what it promises. This is as a user and even as a provider. You take various bits and bobs and suddenly with a slightly clever idea and you've got something that's more then the sum of the parts. Sometimes. Other times it just never comes together.

I'm not sure if that makes me happy or sad. Bit of both I suppose but I keep going back to the well because you never know.

Things are going to change once again. It's been a long time ago since things really changed. In the 70s, probably. And before that maybe in the 1920s. It will be a generational change. Life went from quaint 19th century stuff to airplanes and medicine and plate tectonics and knowledge of galaxies and washing machines and the contraceptive pill and antibiotics in one or two generations. Then there was a bit of breathing room and things are picking up once again. Life is never constant. It is something you prepare for and deal with. For reference, people in Europe over the last hundred years lived through extreme ups and downs. Cities flattened to the ground. Entire families exterminated. Properties expropriated. All streets renamed multiple times. Entire ideologies swapped out multiple times. The US has enjoyed relative constancy. But now the entire world will change once more. It's not the first time. But history is back. Whether you prepare or put your head in the sand.

I think we shouldn't be depressed, but work on ideas and concepts of how this could be changed into something good.

I see a lot of people hyping AI and condemning it, but very few seem to be interested in working on what our future should look like.

Because everything is ads, lots of propaganda and too much politics.

Flame wars used to be about distros and code and now it’s about how people think and opinions.

Everyone needs to go outside for a second, smell the flowers, hear the birds chip and calm down.

Because of the *gap* between the enjoyment of "discovering, learning and practicing tech" and the capitalistic use of tech and the consequence it has on people AND how tech is used.