[vfclists]

> “If nothing is working, what am I paying you for? If everything’s working, what am I paying you for?”

Bloke is not acquainted with Keynesian economics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OhIdDNtSv0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO_tTnpof_o

All a man needs is food in his stomach and a place to rest at the end of the day. Everything else is vanity

What proportion of global GDP is dedicated to fulfilling our basic material needs?

It is mostly unnecessary. Inspite of the huge productivity gains made since the seventies, the current generation of young Americans are poorer than their parents and grandparents were at their age.

So what does all the IT optimization bring? Just more wealth for the owners and redundancies for their employees, including Joe Bloggs here.

It is time people in IT got to understand this. In the long term their activities are not going to improve their wealth. They are one of the few professions whose job is to optimize themselves out of a living, unless they own the means of the production their are optimizing, which they don't.

It is their employers that do.

[consp]

The problem with the IT crowd is they think they are ahead of the optimization curve, and since everyone does, nobody is.

[grisBeik]

> So what does all the IT optimization bring? Just more wealth for the owners [...] It is time people in IT got to understand this

I understand it alright, but I'm trapped. Closer to 50 than to 40, I've got a family to run. I could be interested in another profession, but our daily lives & savings would tank if I stopped working, for learning another profession. Also, there's no other profession that I could realistically learn that would let me take nearly the same amount of money home every month. If someone lives alone, they could adjust their standard of living (-> downwards, of course); how do you do that for a family?

Furthermore, there is no switchover between "soulless software job for $$$" and "inspiring software job for $". There are only soulless jobs, only the $ varies. Work sucks absolutely everywhere; the only variable is compensation -- at best we can get one that "sucks less".

When I was a teenager, I could have never dreamt that programming would devolve into such a cruel daily grind for me. Mid-life crisis does change how we look at things, doesn't it. We want more meaning to our work (society has extremely decoupled livelihood from meaning), but there's just no way out. Responsibilities, real or imaginary, keep us trapped. I'd love to reboot my professional life, but the risks are extreme.

FWIW, I still appreciate interesting tasks at work; diving into the details lets me forget, at least for a while, how meaningless it all is.

[kortilla]

The current generation of Americans are absolutely rich enough to just get food and have shelter. The ones that struggle are the ones that want to live in popular cities precisely because of the available improvements beyond shelter and food.

The houses of the 50s were shit tier and spread around the entire US. You can go buy them today for cheap in the 98% of locations people don’t want to live in.

[jdbernard]

> I would work for myself, following my own philosophy.

Sounds like he understood it just fine. He owns the means of production.

[vfclists]

He only works for himself only if he gets a steady income stream so long as the systems he manages stay up, which I'm sure he doesn't.

There is a reason for the "you will own nothing and you will be happy" ideology being promoted by "PTB", ie subscriptions for ink cartridges, heated seats and advanced suspensions in newer cars.

Corporations now want a continuous income stream from the services provide by physical products they have "sold", but they don't want their employees and subcontractors from earning some of that income stream.

Some IT administrators have been know to schedule regular "downtimes" on perfectly performing systems just to ensure their users and bosses don't take their service for granted.

[Tor3]

I have kind of scratched my head a bit as to why our local VM provider has all these scheduled downtimes.. while the servers we run in-house have those maybe once or twice a year, at most. Hm..

[quesera]

> why our local VM provider has all these scheduled downtimes

Generally (but not exclusively) this is because they have more complex infrastructure, a larger number of customers, and a contractual commitment to give advance notice of outages when possible.

It therefore makes sense to schedule downtime even if you don't need it (or even use it), so that customers can arrange their own expectations.

[quesera]

> There is a reason for the "you will own nothing and you will be happy" ideology being promoted by "PTB",

No one, and certainly not the "PTB", is promoting this idea.

It was a thought experiment in a book/TED talk that deeply offends a certain percentage of the populace, and is ignored by everyone else. It is nothing more than that.

It does not exist in any discussions outside the circles of those who are offended for profit, and those that listen to them.

Spare yourself (and us), and stop listening to them.