The proletarianization of tech workers
doctorow.medium.com
Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?
Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.
Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.
And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
We deserve better than this. We can get it.
Yes, I remember. I had some of those dreams.
I was never a candidate for starting my own tech company, I was a self-taught dev living with undiagnosed autism and if anything, the plan was to work for a tech giant my whole life or until I could cash in some options and retire with some security.
I worked for Microsoft from the mid-90s to 2014 and it was all going basically to plan until one fine day 18,000 of us were called to a meeting to be told we were being laid off. I understand why they did this (there were groups in the company that did more or less the same things but with different tooling and I'd been working to align those things, because obvs we could use resources better and strangely management didn't want that) but it hurt a lot to learn that a big part of the mass-layoff logic was not so much about efficiency or doing better work, it was about juicing the stock by making the market happy about cutting labor costs, and it was about depressing the kinds of wages folks like me could bargain for. (There's nothing quite like a sudden dump of ~18k new job-seekers in a regional market to press those salary offers down by 20%)
It's 9 years on and I'm working at a smaller shop, writing open-source software and I still don't make what I was making then (and I've been watching as Amazon and Microsoft and Google keep on running this mass-layoff play every other year). I could probably make better money if I jumped around from job to job, but frankly where I'm at is a good fit, they're accommodating of my neurodivergence, and there isn't the specter of immanent buyouts or mass layoffs to juice the stock.
Looking down-thread, I see some dispute about whether folks in my position are petit bourgeois or the proletariat, and really I don't care what label you lot think is the right one- at this point I'm a middle-aged professional, I work for a living, even though in my 20s I was pretty hopeful I was tracking to be able to retire by the time I'd reach my current age. (yeah, short of winning the lottery that's not happening and when I think too hard about that it's not bitterness I feel, but chagrin)
Looking back, I recall being abruptly 'let go' from a contract when I was passing out union leaflets while working as a contractor at Microsoft, and frankly I hope they press to unionize again and the new rules about union-busting are in effect when they do it.
No matter how much you make, if you don't actually own capital, and you must work for a living to survive, you're part of the proletariat. It's just a matter of everyone else who thinks they're part of the petit bourgeois finally waking up to that fact.
Except for cops and pinkertons but I repeat myself
imagine getting first replaced by some kid out of a garage, then by indian code farms and now by ai developed by the grown up kids from said garage and trained by indian code farms.
So tired of this rhetoric. AI isn't replacing any software engineering jobs, nor could it. It's a joke, quite frankly.
They set up a ChatGPT based bot at my work just to help our support agents find information faster. It provides straight up factually false information 80% of the time. A solid 30% of the time, it says the opposite of the truth. It’s completely worthless at all times.
I was listening to a podcast about AI. I think it was one of Ezra Kleins. And he was telling a story that he heard, bout those weird virtual reality games from the 90s or early Aughts. And people shat on those games because they were awful and clunky and not very good so that shitting was well deserved. But one guy was like "yeah, that's all true. But this is the worst it's going to be. The next iteration isn't going to be worse than this."
And that's where AI is now. Like, it's powerful and already a threat to certain jobs. GPT 3/4 may be useless to software engineering jobs now (I'd argue that it's not - I work in a related field and I use it about daily) but what about GPT 5? 6? 10?
Im not as doom and gloom on AI as I was six months ago, but I think it's a bit silly to think that AI isn't going to cause massive upheaval across all industries in the medium to long term.
But also, for the record, I'm less worried about AI than I am about AI in the hands of Capitalism.
I love how people always argue this point, "oh it sucks and can't replace x". Computer animation sucked once as well, but look at what can be done with it now.
AI sucks in its current state. It will evolve and improve, and put poor little uneducated admin people like myself completely out of work. I'm learning what I can, but I'm not very bright, and neither is my future!
Let's just say it, AI in the hands of the 1% who use it to become the 0.001%.
It was impossible for a computer to be smart enough to beat grandmasters at chess, until it wasn't. It was impossible to beat Go Masters at Go, until it wasn't.
No software engineering jobs are getting replaced this year or next year. But considering the rapid pace of AI development, and considering how much code development is just straight up redundant... looking at 20 years from now, it's not so bright.
It would be way better to start putting AI legislation in place this year. That or it's time to start transitioning to UBI.
I am an actual (senior) software engineer, with a background in ML to boot.
I would start to worry if we were anywhere close to even dreaming of how AGI might actually work, but we're not. It's purely in the realm of science fiction. Until you meet the bar of AGI, there's absolutely no risk of software engineering jobs being replaced.
Go or Chess are games with a fixed and simple ruleset and are very suited to what computers are really good at. Software engineering is the art of making the ambiguous and ill-defined into something entirely unambiguous and precisely defined, and that is something we are so far from achieving in computers it's not even funny. ML is ultimately just applied statistics. It's not magic, and it's far from anything we would consider "intelligence".
I do think we need legislation targeting ML, but not because of "omg our jobs". Rather we need legislation to combat huge tech companies vacuuming any and all data on the general public and using that data to manipulate and control the public.
Also, LOL at "how much code development is straight up redundant". If you think development amounts to just writing a bunch of boilerplate as though we were some kind of assembly line putting together the same thing over and over again, you're sorely mistaken.
I think you overestimate what the average software developer is doing.
Do I think in 10 years ai will be patching the Linux kernel or optimizing aws scaling functions, no. Do I think it will be creating functional crud apps with Django or Ruby on rails, yes, and I think that's what a large amount of software developers are doing. Even if it's not a majority a lot of the more precarious developers without a cs degree will probably lose their job. Not every developer is a senior engineer working on ML.
This isn't proof of anything, I would just like to point out that a lot of science fiction has become reality in the last few decades.
At the end of the day, what is a computer except a machine with a fixed and simple ruleset: logic gates.
You don't need AI to write you perfect C or JavaScript or HTML. You just need it to create an interface for an end user to make the computer do what they want. I predict the AI itself won't write the languages, it will tend to replace the languages. Many orders of magnitude more computationally expensive, but the hardware is quickly becoming cheaper to buy than paying software engineers.
Obviously not, that's why libraries and OOP and frameworks exist, I'm aware, not pretending like I have anything to teach you about it either.
And I'll take the L if you have the insider knowledge that there's a requirement for massive creativity behind the scenes in widespread fundamental overhauls of the way software works. But afaik, the fundamentals of code haven't changed in decades. The way users interact has not changed much since smartphones became standard. I don't see a capitalistic incentive to pay for lots of new creativity, instead of just making usable products.
It was impossible for computers to beat chess and go masters when the computers were trying to play like humans -trying to model high level understanding of strategy and abstract values. The computers started winning when they got fast enough to brute force games - to calculate all of the possible outcomes from all of the possible moves, and to choose the best one.
This is basically the same difference between LLMs and 'true' general AI. The LLMs are brute forcing the next line of a screenplay, with no way to incorporate abstract concepts like truth or logic. If you confuse an LLM for an AI, then you're going to be disappointed in its performance. If you accept that an LLM is a way to average past communications, and accept that a lot of its training set were fiction, then it's an amazing tool for generating consensus text (given that the consensus includes fantasies and lies). It's not going to write new code, but it will give you an approximation of all the existing examples of some algorithm. An approximation that may introduce errors, like copy-pasting sequential lines from every stackexchange answer.
Computer graphics, computer game opponents, they're still doing the same things they were doing decades ago, and the improvements are just doing it all faster. General AI needs to do something different than LLMs and most other ML algorithms.
Not yet, but would you agree that businesses desire the ability to automate software engineering and reduce developer headcount by demanding an AI supplemented development work flow?
Sure, just like businesses have always wanted "no-code" solutions to their problems to cut out the need for software engineers. We all know how that turned out. There was no threat then, and there's no threat now.
AI coding is just another tool developers have at their disposal now. It will just raise the bar for expected output. I expect within a few years it will be popular to describe a process, have an AI tool spit out some intern-grade hot mess that maybe compiles, then have a junior developer fix it, and a senior developer write the custom/complex parts. If the AI is good enough, it'll be a significant time saver for it to get you more than half way to done.
It could even be tamed with a test-driven development approach. Write a bunch of good tests and have the AI generate code that passes the tests. What could possibly go wrong... lol
I find it highly overrated in terms of productivity in general, particularly when writing anything remotely non-trivial/company-specific.
There's also the absolutely massive issue of licensing/IP/etc. Any company that's not full of dumbasses should recognize the massive risk and liability involved and stay the fuck away.
Now that I use github copilot, I can work more quickly and learn new frameworks more with less effort. Even its current form, LLMs allow programmers to work more efficiently, and thus can replace jobs. Sure, you still need developers, but fewer of them.
Learning frameworks has never been hard, and frankly does not make up the majority of a developer's job. Maybe you do it while onboarding. Big whoop. Any good developer can do that fairly easily, and LLMs are entirely superfluous. Worse yet, since they are so commonly confidently incorrect, you have to constantly check if it's even correct. I'd prefer to just read the documentation, thanks.
A mature engineering organization is not pumping out greenfield projects in new languages/frameworks all the time. Greenfield is usually pretty rare, and when you do get a greenfield project, it's supposed to be done using established tools that everyone already knows.A tiny fraction of a developer's job is actually writing code. Most of it is the soft skills necessary to navigate ambiguous requirements and drive a project to completion. And when we do actually program, it's much more reading code than it is writing code, generally to gain enough understanding of the system in order to make a minor change.
LLMs are highly overrated. And even if it does manage to produce something useful, there's much more to a codebase itself. There's the socialization of knowledge around it and the thought process that went into it, none of which you gain when using an LLM. It's adequate for producing boilerplate no one reads anyway, but that's such a small fraction of what we even do (and hopefully, you can abstract away that boilerplate so you're not writing it over and over again anyway).
As someone who started his tech career in the mid '90s, this kind of hurts to see put into words so well.
I started my tech career in 2003 and back then I thought I'd work for a startup, get some options, go public, and retire at 35.
That did not happen, and while I'm making more than most I don't have fancy vacations or a brand new Tesla.
Paywall free version
Oh, thanks! I must have followed a gift link via Doctorow’s social because I didn’t encounter the paywall.
Maybe now we'll finally unionize
I think the number of places for an IT engineer to work is going to reduce to just SaaS companies and cloud providers. The guys working at the fortune 500s will be clicking radio buttons in an app and not know how any of it really works.
As someone who deals with this and helps make decisions for a large enterprise, SaaS and cloud service providers already have a really bad rep. SaaS especially. Not only is it all fragmented, as soon as you ever so slightly deviate from out of the box, it's fucked. You may have well just custom developed it.
Not to mention the costs and lock-in. I think you'll see a swing back towards custom software (using open standards and owned data centers and equipment soon. It's already happening. The value proposition of the cloud is dwindling (and honestly never existed for 70% of use cases).
There are plenty of tools now that let you do a hybrid where you can use the cloud as minimally as possible but do everything else "in house".
Id love to see a shift from "new, novel, innovation > *" to a, if we just properly supported and maintained the stuff we have it would be much cheaper and more effective.
eh, I think on prem will have a resurgence when cloud goes the way of streaming, and becomes so fragmented and expensive it becomes cheaper and safer to build your own.
Cloud is just like social media. It’s providing a “too good to be true” model to attract everyone it can to make them dependent on it before the big bait and switch of price hikes.
For more details read the book Chokepoint Capitalism
I hope youre right. I see companies going from having mature change control processes to outsourcing to a saas or cloud provider who operates like the wild west behind the curtains.
Any way to read the article without the paywall?
Yes. But it would be wrong for you to use a site like archive.is to circumvent a paywall.
Absolutely. I certainly wouldn't click this link
Thank you both for warning me against doing something like that.
There are likely so many ways to circumvent these things; it's so good of these two Lemmings to provide further details so we know how to avoid this in the future!
I wish I could read the entire article without an account.
Eric Flint is one of my favorite authors.
There are others above who provide ~instructions~ warnings against bypassing paywalls (⌐■_■)
Wow. Americans were huge back then. Or could only afford clown cars.
That's a normal size for a compact car. American car sizes have inflated to ridiculous proportions.
It is also a drawing that exaggerated how happy the people inside where. (To encourage the viewer to buy one as well.)
I wish we could have a union at my job. I do data science stuff and I’m borderline incompetent at it, I think a union would really help me out and protect me. I want what the police have where they can be terrible but still have nice jobs. And I don’t want to get laid off. And it would be nice if there was some guarantee that I could work from home forever. And I want a raise. And if I have to go into the office for big meetings, I want the rest of the day off. And I already don’t work Thursday or Friday but I want that to be official. And it would be nice if nobody could send me slack messages until noon because sometimes they wake me up.
You are your worst enemy.
I think they're just being a troll.
This possibility among others lies firmly within my statement. ♥️
No I was serious
Shitpost better pls
I was not shit posting
Calling google workers proletariat is out of touch and borderline insulting to real working class.
3-month salary for a junior at google is what a "real" proletarian do in a full year, with addition of pension, stock options, benefits and bonuses
The line dividing working class from owning class is not their monthly salary. It's their relationship to capital. Do they work for their living, or do they own for their living?
same reason why being an athlete sucks -- even though you're making insane sums, the guys at the top are making far more than that, without putting their body on the line in any way whatsoever, indefinitely [whereas most players retire in their 30s, if they're lucky enough to have that long of a career]
Google engineers have capital, both invested and cash. Enough to start their own company if they wanted. They simply decide that living as googler is easier and more convenient
As long as their livelihood is dependent on labouring, they're working class. You should show some solidarity, rather than trying to divide the working class.
Even bourgeois class works. Even aristocrats... CEOs work.
Working is not what identifies proletariat.
I show solidarity, I have former colleagues working at google. They have all my solidarity, but they are not proletariat.
An average google engineer have more capital than most CEOs around the world.
They need to unionize, but they are not proletariat. My company is unionized, and we are not proletariat. There are unionized people owning multiple porsches. They are not proletariat. They simply find easier to live out of a good salary instead of the stress of having their own company
I didn't say they didn't work. I said that their livelihood isn't dependant on labouring.
I don't know what you gain out of gatekeeping the working class. The whole invention of the middle class has been a tool by the owning class to separate the working class.
I gain nothing other than I prefer politics to be well directed. Unions for tech jobs is clearly needed, and it is fine. As said I work for an unionized company.
Problem of putting together real working class and people like me, or Google engineers that are even in a better position, it's bad to orient policies that helps the real working class. I want everybody to enjoy the privileges of mine and google engineers. Putting as in the same bucket as deliveroo drivers is not good for society. As society, we need to really works on the struggle of real proletariat. As tech workers we are far from the priority. Tech workers need to unionize, yes, but they are not proletariat.
You keep saying that it's bad, but you haven't actually said why. Just this nebulous idea that standing together is somehow bad. Worker's rights benefit all workers. And the more people demanding them, the better. Even more so if the people demanding them have greater access to the resources needed to actually make a difference.
Never once has "divided we conquer" been true.
Tell me you know fuck all about unionization without telling me. Its all the same. We all, the working class, are advocating for the same fucking rights, boundaries, and protections. Deliveroo driver and tech employee both wanna go home at a reasonable time of night and sleep well knowing they can pay their bills.
Working at Google is not what it used to be 20 years ago. Not only would an average CEO be better off but there are plenty of other tech companies better to work at as well. Google engineers are salary workers not much different than any other
Those I know drive tesla and porsche, spend their long holidays traveling the world in expensive places, and have higher entry salaries than management in banks, with larger bonuses.
But apparently you guys know different engineers that struggle to survive... Fine with that. I might know only the lucky ones.
Otherwise we are all proletariat. Which is a news for me. I can finally complain with my "real proletarian" friends that I am as well a proletarian sharing the struggle, although I am definitely not.
Anyway, I will stop arguing. Apparently labeling google engineers as proletariat is an important topic in Lemmy, that users do with extra passion
You are the one who came in and insisted on specific labels. People disagree with you. Don't pretend this was our passion, it was yours.
Title of this post is literally the label I commented on: proletariat
I had spent 6 years fastidiously saving to have 20k in investments when I got hired by Google.
I was laid off in the wave 9 months later.
So no: I didn't (and don't) have enough money to just start my own company.
It's workers of the world unite not workers of the world only allow people who match your purity test. If you're not with us, you're part of the problem.
He said without a trace of irony.
Oh man, guy saved 3k a year, so rich /s
I love when you guys tell on yourselves lol
Jesus Christ, I guess the capitalists are still winning. Keep us fighting amongst ourselves so we never unite. What, exactly, would convince you to have solidarity with a person able to save 3k a year? To quit and work for less? To donate all non-living expenses to charity until their QOL is on par with yours?
Seriously though, there is no reason why labor at all levels can't work together to improve the system and demand better treatment across the board.
I hope the capitalists will always be winning. Capitalism is awesome.
Also the person you're talking about saved that money and invested it, making them a capitalist.
Class solidarity is nonsense.
I make a lot of money and live in a moderate COL area. It's almost certain my QOL is higher than theirs.
Fun fact: almost no one has the money to just start a business from scratch. That's why investors exist. Banks give out business loans all the time. That's capitalism, and that's why it's awesome.
Apologies, I didn't realize that your goal was to promote capitalism and defeat class solidarity.
Can't defeat something that isn't real.
You know it's not terribly difficult to save a couple hundred a month so long as you're not making minimum wage and budget for it
6 years saving 20k is legitimately the "skip lattes and cancel Netflix" levels of saving.
It's $270 a month extra.
Only saving $270 a month in NYC means 1 month of layoffs wipes out 6 months of saving in rent alone.
If you don't see the violence inherent in that system then you're fucking blind.
That took a hella weird twist lol
Ah yes, just what the working class desperately needs, a gatekeeper.
I am not a gate keeper. I work in an unionized company in fintech. But I also recognize that calling me "proletarian" is detrimental for battles of real proletariat. Because I have a better salary than a medical doctor with a 5th of the stress. And I don't make near google salary. I have former colleagues who went to google... They are not absolutely struggling. They need to unionize? Surely. But let's keep it real, use words properly, because there are people in the current economy who are struggling. Proletariat means that the only "capital" owned by someone is their children. It evolved to mean working class, where only capital is ability to do a work.
Google engineers have real capital invested in stock market and pension funds, a great salary and benefits, transferable skills, and their biggest asset is their knowledge. They need to unionize only to fight back to mass lay offs, and have more saying on the company direction. Other than that they are doing pretty fine.
I work in tech, not Google but I am compensated similarly. The reason you are getting my downvotes is because you're missing the point. We worked our asses off to get where we are only to say we're "not struggling" anymore and have early retirement plans in place because we were thoughtful in our career choices and personal budget. That's a lot different from someone who had a retirement plan set from birth or doesn't need to work for a living.
Ultimately as long as tech workers continue to sell their labor then they are working class.
Than read again my comment. You are not proletariat. I am not proletariat. A manager at your bank is not proletariat. A doctor is not proletariat. We face issues of life, but we are absolutely privileged compared to proletariat
I grew up in one of the poorest region of Europe. To study I had to live in 2 of the worst ghettos of UK. There you see proletariat.
Anyone who call google engineers proletariat is as out of touch as a wall street ceo.
And I am surprised how lemmy can be this out of touch with the real word
Stop using the word "proletariat" when you clearly do not understand what it means and clearly have not read any of the theory from which the word was popularized
"Proletariat" != "impoverished"
I grew up reading gramsci... You are here claiming that modern version of petite bourgeois are proletariat. We need the "we are not the same" meme.
The difference between the people you call proletariat and the people you refuse to call proletariat is often luck. Luck is fickle and can swing both ways. A manager at a bank is absolutely proletariat, they've just been given a bit more money and told they're no longer proletariat. This is because it's way easier to keep workers and management at each other's throats than to have everyone target the real source of the "orders from above".
Obviously not everyone has the same situation and some people are more privileged than others. But there is a huge difference between someone who has to work everyday VS someone who doesn't. That doctor has to go to work, same as the programmer, or the manager. They all have unique lifestyles but they are all workers. They are the proletariat
Ah, the "true Scotchman" fallacy.
I guess it's your gut deciding who's a "real" worker?
The whole piece that we are commenting is a guy who said that some people were not proletariat and now they are. It is a gut piece. He's the one deciding that some people are now randomly proletariat
Dog the shadeholders who let google pay you that high wage to convince people to join this profession also own the fucking overpriced housing and grocery stores that take it riiiight back.