[tptacek]

Just as long as you understand that this is how everybody else not in technology, from accountants to East Coast dockworkers and all points in between, have felt about everything we do in this field for the past 50 years. It's awfully tough to adopt a morally rigorous position about "lower compensation" when you're literally in the business of automating jobs away.

[mplanchard]

It does feel a bit karmic, doesn’t it? I’ve never worked in a part of tech that was explicitly doing this, but I still feel as though all the current anxiety and uncertainty I myself am currently going through is in some way “earned” by my participation in this industry.

[tptacek]

A lot of things in the technology field's internal debate about AI feel extremely karmic to me.

[arvid-lind]

Really? Not sure if you like to work on your own cars, but would you also feel like you're accumulating negative karma for associating with the automotive and fossil fuel industries? We're not responsible for the world that is here right now, but we have to figure out how to operate within it. The idea that "we earned this" like we're all at fault for the state of things seems pretty far off.

Not trying to say you're wrong but long way of saying don't be so hard on yourself, its not like you're Elon, Altman, any of the other awful figures steering our tech world right now.

[thunky]

I don't think your analogy fits. Tech is directly responsible for automation, which impacts jobs. Tech workers didn't cry moral outrage then. But mow that tech may automate their job, suddenly it's evil.

[arvid-lind]

My point was that the world we have is here, for better or worse, and "reaping what we sowed" seems like a wildly reductive and self-defeating interpretation. There's no way this guy who says he never worked directly on automation-related tech should feel like he's banking bad karma by earning a living doing the best he can. I'm assuming that not working in automation was a conscious decision, like I've also been very selective about my employers based on their general operating philosophies.

The analogy wasn't the best, but the whole of tech isn't on the hook for this. Just like a typical daily driver or someone who works on their own car can't be directly responsible for the climate crisis. There are major players making the decisions that are causing the state we're in.

[mplanchard]

I think you’re objectively right, and I try to maintain that perspective. But, I think of this karma not necessarily in a negative way, just kind of like the chickens coming home to roost for us all.

I’m (and presumably many of us are) feeling the destabilizing effects of my industry now in a similar way to how many other professions have felt its effects before. Given our industry’s impact on society, it’s important that we feel this effect directly, so that we can do a better job of empathizing with the industries we’re “disrupting.” Whether or not I have personally participated in those aspects of the industry, I share inescapably in its overall karma, which is why it’s important to not just opt out of the parts of it I feel are immoral, but try to push for it to be better where I can.

[tptacek]

Virtually everybody in the industry is a participant in the impacts our industry has on the broader economy!

This isn't a nit. It changes the way you have to look at this. You can't say "we need to better feel the impacts IT has on the broader workforce, therefore I should avoid working on things that automate jobs away". So long as you take anything resembling a market salary anywhere, you're supplying labor to the system that does that.

Your options therefore are:

* Adopt an ethical stance that doesn't intrinsically penalize work that increases global productivity and thus exerts downward pressure on labor.

* Do work that somehow works against that pressure, for instance by donating 20-40% of your compensation to labor causes, or something like that.

* Leave the industry.

I don't look at this quandry and see an ethical imperative; I look at it and see a broken ethical calculation. From that observation, I get to: "I should shut up about things that impact employment for software developers, because there's nothing intrinsically bad about that."

(Whether or not developers, or dockworkers, come out on net positive or negative is a separable question.)

[w29UiIm2Xz]

Those people could've traded up. And plenty of people in the trades have done that. But now, it is not obvious what 'trading up' in this situation is. There was optionality: upskill and increase your compensation. Now, there may be no opportunity to upskill. And that is a meaningfully different environment.

The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living (and many of us still do so) -- we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training.

[SoftTalker]

Ironically, the trades are now desperate for smart people who show up as scheduled and sober. Upskilling might be learning to be a plumber or electrician or carpenter.

[phil21]

> Those people could've traded up. And plenty of people in the trades have done that.

This is precisely the karma that is coming to us as a group. Because of this sort of stuff.

No, a 50 year old trade worker cannot "trade up" in any realistic sense. That's idiotic on it's face. And that also ignores that many folks don't want to trade up because they get satisfaction in what they do - just like some tech workers do. Man of those folks also had moral and ethical reasons to not want to join an industry assisting in putting their friends and family out of work.

> The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living

AKA automating other jobs away in many (perhaps most?) cases. Either directly or indirectly. These line-of-business applications tend to be automation of some sort which reduces manual labor. Be it on the factory floor, enabling that factory to be outsourced to China, or just making "paperwork" more efficient putting an office full of secretaries out of a job. Or working in some ad-tech enabled field which put entire industries out of work altogether.

> we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training.

Factory workers, skilled machinists, tool and die manufacturers, secretaries, accountants, journalists - effectively an infinite list - did not contribute to the IT over the past 30 years that replaced them either. That's the point being made in this sub-thread.

But hey, you could always pivot your career to be a plumber, roofer, or electrician! While I'm certainly going to be part of the targeted group, I can't really say I'll be surprised at the working class laughing at us and enjoying IT folks getting their comeuppance.

I haven't found a way to articulate my thoughts very well on this subject, others do it better even on HN. But coming from a working class family with most of my old school friends from growing up still working blue collar jobs - I can say it's been incredibly uncomfortable listening to the narratives from tech workers on these subjects for 25 years. It's been utterly amazing to me how people switched on a dime within a couple years on the subject now that their livelihoods are on the line. The calls for free markets, pro-automation, "just learn to code", anti-regulation, etc. all instantly changed the moment such folks had even a trivial amount of similar pressure put on them.

[tptacek]

The exact same thing has happened with IPR.

[queenkjuul]

Ah yeah, lowly web dev me, self-taught with no capital, is responsible for the choices of faceless corporations and sinister magnates I've never worked for nor interacted with nor influenced in even an infinitesimal way.

I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away. But because I'm a programmer at all, it's partially my fault?

[tptacek]

Like everyone else in the industry, you're almost certainly the beneficiary of an industry predicated on automating people's jobs away. Your labor is fungible. Your comp is based on supply and demand. Whatever work you do, you are subsidized in large part by the demands of projects that improve productivity elsewhere in the workforce.

I'm not saying you personally set out to take anyone's job away. But our field is unusually well compensated because of its function in the broader marketplace. The point is that moralisms like "fault" don't operate here.

[phil21]

> I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away.

I think this would be very difficult to do as a web-dev. The web itself is a form of global scale automation in-itself.

I am also a self-taught tech nerd. I have not "directly" worked on any specific automation project in terms of "come put this group out of work" - but I can't think of a single project I worked on that wasn't making current processes more efficient and automated - by largely removing remaining manual steps involved. This is why we exist to begin with, otherwise no one would be paying us to do the work.

I wrote software that took server provisioning from a process that involved a tech typing on a keyboard every time, to clicking a button on a webUI to install an OS. A task many here at HN have done just for their home lab environment so as to make their own lives more efficient.

This put zero people out of work. But it probably prevented hiring of at last a handful of low-level technicians over the course of that software's lifecycle. Which is the same thing to an industry at large.

Even stuff as simple as writing code to put up a new post on a company website is contributing towards automating someone's job away.

I have often stated computers are the ultimate robot. They fit in nearly every industry to automate things and make processes more efficient. These are code words for "less human labor needed" - aka less jobs.

[queenkjuul]

It's perfectly possible for software to enable people to do things they couldn't do before without putting anyone out of work. I'm sorry you're struggling to imagine such a thing.

[phil21]

As opposed to hiring someone to do it? Or rather, that software not competing with the wider market as a whole? Those areas are exceedingly small in the web-dev space. Or even technology as a whole.

I recently used AI to make me a custom song for a silly thing. It put no one out of work and I'd not hire someone to make such a thing. But the fact the tech exists to enable such a thing means its absolutely putting musicians out of work. My trivial usage of the technology is part of what enables it to exist at all and put others out of work. Those devs probably point to things I use it for to pretend it doesn't impact anyone negatively. But what I did with it makes using it for stuff like a 30s advertising jingle even more trivial.

My very first web-dev work in the late 90's to enable a pet store to sell their wares on-line absolutely put folks out of work, even though I could have easily seen it as it enabling a small company to do something they could not have done before.

Same goes for my first "real job" where I was debugging Java Applets for an expense management company. This was in direct competition with the existing industry that did it via paper receipts and phone calls. It put massive numbers of folks out of work if you zoom out to the larger industry, while also enabling many other folks to do things they never could haven even thought to do before.

There are extremely small use-cases along the margins where you won't be using technology that directly competes with an existing industry, I can certainly imagine them but you'd have to go extremely out of your way to ensure you are only in these spaces. I will certainly admit it is unlikely but possible to find a way to make a living in these edge cases while still working within the IT space.

As a hobby? Sure. Easy. Making a living as a web-dev at it over a longtime career? I do find it very difficult to imagine - since that's where the money comes from to pay overhead such as IT folks and programmers.

As an industry ? IT (and especially web tech over the past 30 years) exists to make things more efficient and put entire categories of folks out of work.

[queenkjuul]

An example:

Retail investors largely didn't exist. Digital retail trading platforms greatly expanded the pool of retail traders, which actually increases the demand for brokers (as in, people trained for the purpose of facilitating financial transactions). Nobody using Robinhood would have hired a broker. Now, thousands of such people work servicing their accounts.

I have no love to for finance industry, much less fintech; i would accept practically any argument that the finance sector as a whole, or retail trading as an idea, is a bad thing for working class people. But i don't see how creating a whole new market for people that didn't previously exist, and which increases overall demand for the specific specialized labor in question, has removed jobs from the pool in aggregate.

I don't think this applies for example with "well former shop clerks are now Amazon delivery drivers" -- that may well be true (or less than true) but still materially worse for everyone involved, etc.

I just don't accept, as axiom, that every every single technology has had an exclusively negative effect on overall employment prospects.

For clarity, I'm very much a socialist, i have no issue with the idea fundamentally that technology in the hands of capitalists is detrimental to the working class writ large in basically all cases. I just take umbrage with the assumption that it's impossible to work in tech without facilitating such things. Much of my work, I'm happy to say, has been about helping people do their jobs better; it hasn't been directed at making them do more in less time, reduce headcount, or some abstract efficiency. It's been to help people do the jobs they already have to do, more effectively. A job a person still has to do, but can be done less stressfully with help from technology.

I wish every thing I've ever touched was such, admittedly it isn't. But i think there's lots of places where that might still be true: aircraft engineers? Pilots? (Fewer trains i guess but that's mostly a US phenomenon). There are administrative jobs working systems that couldn't exist without "automation" as in they would not have existed before the computer created the system.

Idk. I can be swayed, i just get sick of this implication that people working for a living have influence over their employers. They don't, by design, except for managers maybe (but I'm not and never will be one of those, either)