[grapeskin]

Taking a job that screws over workers below you is really just sticking a middle finger up to the world around you.

A typical programming job is more than enough to provide for a family, a home, and early retirement. Burning down the next generation by empowering mega corporations just "for your kids" is the definition of selfish. Boomers did selfish things "for their kids" and now their kids are absolutely screwed with climate change and a worse off economic system.

But yes, they did certainly provide for their own retirement--at the cost of the whole world. FAANG developers are the same. Amazon and Apple can pay fat checks to their tech workers because they cut costs and shamelessly exploit everyone working in their lower level positions. Eventually they'll push everyone down to lower levels and have the technology to enforce it without human interference.

But hey, someone bought their kid a nice car and they retired to the Bahamas and got a few maids with that huge developer check. Got to look at the bright side.

[robertlagrant]

Don't be silly; it's not at the cost of the whole world.

We are still in a pandemic where one of the biggest reasons people could isolate for as long as they did was big tech.

[grapeskin]

Quarantines have existed for a long time. Countries locked down for longer.

The most important thing holding the world together was the people out there risking infection to deliver things to people staying at home. The biggest difference between the 90s and 2020s is that people are doing it by pressing a button on their phone instead of pressing a button on their computer or making a call on their phone, and loads more people are working in the package delivery industry for low wages.

[robertlagrant]

> Quarantines have existed for a long time. Countries locked down for longer.

Can you give some examples?

The rest of your analysis seems incomplete. Some examples:

Zoom, Slack Facebook and WhatsApp able to keep professional, personal and family relationships alive was essential to so much continuing to function, allowing a vast number of employees to shift to online working. One notable point (of thousands) here is that while healthcare waiting lists got longer, many consultations that could be done over video, a thing never thought feasible before, meaning more isolation possibilities for vulnerable patients (and clinical staff).

Having online shops able to update listings in seconds, rather than your example of the 90s where catalogues would be sent out every six months with new stock for you to phone up and buy, or rather, not be able to get through to, was also awesome. Modern logistics means packages and returns can be done incredibly easily and fitted into your day, rather than spending ages on the phone with a human operator.

Uber and derivatives meant that the increased load of shutting down public transport could be transferred onto a dynamic fleet of private citizens' cars, and the traditional taxi firms also didn't require scaling human operators to book, and Google Maps powered the routing for those drivers.

And the rise of cloud infrastructure has meant in general that many services, government and private, have sprung into being in record time.

And those are just the first examples that occur to me.