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taeric 54 minutes ago [-]
This feels wrong. Did the vacuum make cleaning worse for employees? What about sewing machines? Modern looms?
It is probably a safe case that most tech revolutions reduced the number of needed employees for most things. But even then, it would be great if this would provide evidence of that!
Notably, it isn't like people strongly missed this work! Yes, there are fewer secretaries. But there aren't none, and the ones that were responsible for being a scribe to bad bosses almost certainly don't miss that work.
Aurornis 27 minutes ago [-]
The claim of the article is that expectations increase at a faster rate than the work becomes easier.
It probably feels that way to someone who got comfortable doing their job the old way wishes the world could go back to when they had it all comfortably figured out.
If this does happen, it’s a second order effect from reducing the barrier to entry. Now that anyone can make some code with enough prompts, it’s no longer impressive to be able to make simple apps. You have to bring something different and better to the table. Good developers still do this on top of what AI can do by itself, but I also think there were a lot of relatively easy programming jobs where you didn’t have to be particularly good at anything. You had to know how to follow the rules, get easy tickets from the tracker, make enough changes that you could call it done, and then go on through the dog and pony show of getting the PR approved and getting those story points to count for your standup report. Repeat 5 days per week.
Every mid-size and larger company I worked for had a collection of developers like this: Not really trustworthy or skilled enough to handle big tickets, but you could assign all the loose ends and easy tickets to them. They’d get done eventually while the other devs could focus on bigger efforts.
Now, it’s hard to justify having a lot of those easy ticket solver developers around. An experienced developer can take 10 easy tickets, use their codebase knowledge to write targeted prompts with Opus or Fable, quickly review the code, and have all the easy work done in an afternoon. Then back to the hard tickets.
If you were one of those developers coasting on the easy work, this revolution probably feels like it increased expectations unfairly. If you were one of those devs doing the hard work, you have another tool to use but you’re still grinding away at the hard problems with an extra tool to make some of the parts easier.
giaour 30 minutes ago [-]
The introduction of mechanical looms (is this what you mean by "modern"?) was famously terrible for workers. Weaving went from a high-skill, safe task to a dangerous, low-skill one and was largely responsible for the rise of factories. The original Luddites were weavers.
agumonkey 19 minutes ago [-]
for some lines of jobs the tooling progress might be objectively worth a lot, but then there's the less mechanical side of things, maybe teamwork, craft went down after power tools became common
something less positive i noticed, in offices, is that technology is not there to help you, management get sold something shiny to replace the old and dusty, the supplier assembles a bad team, implement crappy network, install new web stuff that is sluggish and requires new machines, and employees are left holding the bag. the new tech is often way more limited than the old junk (feature dropped, bad ergonomics for prolonged work, no more scripting options), the integrations are lacking, the people are not trained .. it's often a slow mess full of redundant steps and missed opportunities.
Fricken 46 minutes ago [-]
Labour saving devices do not save any labour for the employees, their workday is just as long.
Aurornis 38 minutes ago [-]
> Labour saving devices do not save any labour for the employees, their workday is just as long.
Anyone who has ever worked a physical labor job will be rolling their eyes at this.
There are more dimensions to labor than the number of hours worked. Imagine doing a construction job without power tools or searching through folders of documents instead of using the search function on your computer. Labor saving devices are everywhere and they’ve reduced the amount of labor required during the workday by a huge amount.
EDIT: I guess I wasn’t clear because the replies are still focusing on hours. The point I’m trying to make is labor isn’t only measured in hours. An 8 hour workday of writing code, checking Slack, and sending emails is vastly easier than 8 hours of construction work in terms of physical labor. If you can only see “labor” as number of hours worked, you probably haven’t had a difficult manual labor job ever.
cosmotic 35 minutes ago [-]
Yet people still have to work the same number of hours each day - they are performing the same amount of labor, just in a different form.
Aurornis 14 minutes ago [-]
There’s more to labor than hours worked. Sitting at a computer for 8 hours is a different load than landscaping for 8 hours in the middle of summer.
Number of hours worked has actually been trending down for a very long time.
Fricken 1 minutes ago [-]
Most people landscape their own yards recreationally. They do it for fun, without getting paid.
32 minutes ago [-]
tptacek 43 minutes ago [-]
The 8-hour workday movement in the US predates Marxism, let alone communism.
The most interesting point here is relating machine speed to intensity. Plenty of tech folks are both working longer hours and overseeing more responsibilities thanks to AI. There are other factors at play though (interest rates and AI-addiction, for two).
Havoc 32 minutes ago [-]
idk I'm pretty glad to not be in the coal mines
blpbloopcmpt 18 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
dude250711 1 hours ago [-]
This one is different. It makes the quality of consumption worse too.
jmclnx 1 hours ago [-]
I personally think a good balance between tech and employees was the late 1980s.
You still had to hire people to do work and tech was good enough to help them out. As tech advanced, people started trusting what the systems said even if blatantly wrong and people started loosing work.
ooterness 26 minutes ago [-]
Agent Smith was right when he was explaining The Matrix. Human civilization peaked in the 90's.
lowsong 1 hours ago [-]
I'm sure forcing workers to use the chatbot that drives people to suicide is going to go great yeah.
wao0uuno 41 minutes ago [-]
I just tried to check if one of my 8BitDo controller buttons can be remapped to guide button and now I want to kill myself too. It’s hard for me to accept that this shit is taking peoples jobs.
It is probably a safe case that most tech revolutions reduced the number of needed employees for most things. But even then, it would be great if this would provide evidence of that!
Notably, it isn't like people strongly missed this work! Yes, there are fewer secretaries. But there aren't none, and the ones that were responsible for being a scribe to bad bosses almost certainly don't miss that work.
It probably feels that way to someone who got comfortable doing their job the old way wishes the world could go back to when they had it all comfortably figured out.
If this does happen, it’s a second order effect from reducing the barrier to entry. Now that anyone can make some code with enough prompts, it’s no longer impressive to be able to make simple apps. You have to bring something different and better to the table. Good developers still do this on top of what AI can do by itself, but I also think there were a lot of relatively easy programming jobs where you didn’t have to be particularly good at anything. You had to know how to follow the rules, get easy tickets from the tracker, make enough changes that you could call it done, and then go on through the dog and pony show of getting the PR approved and getting those story points to count for your standup report. Repeat 5 days per week.
Every mid-size and larger company I worked for had a collection of developers like this: Not really trustworthy or skilled enough to handle big tickets, but you could assign all the loose ends and easy tickets to them. They’d get done eventually while the other devs could focus on bigger efforts.
Now, it’s hard to justify having a lot of those easy ticket solver developers around. An experienced developer can take 10 easy tickets, use their codebase knowledge to write targeted prompts with Opus or Fable, quickly review the code, and have all the easy work done in an afternoon. Then back to the hard tickets.
If you were one of those developers coasting on the easy work, this revolution probably feels like it increased expectations unfairly. If you were one of those devs doing the hard work, you have another tool to use but you’re still grinding away at the hard problems with an extra tool to make some of the parts easier.
something less positive i noticed, in offices, is that technology is not there to help you, management get sold something shiny to replace the old and dusty, the supplier assembles a bad team, implement crappy network, install new web stuff that is sluggish and requires new machines, and employees are left holding the bag. the new tech is often way more limited than the old junk (feature dropped, bad ergonomics for prolonged work, no more scripting options), the integrations are lacking, the people are not trained .. it's often a slow mess full of redundant steps and missed opportunities.
Anyone who has ever worked a physical labor job will be rolling their eyes at this.
There are more dimensions to labor than the number of hours worked. Imagine doing a construction job without power tools or searching through folders of documents instead of using the search function on your computer. Labor saving devices are everywhere and they’ve reduced the amount of labor required during the workday by a huge amount.
EDIT: I guess I wasn’t clear because the replies are still focusing on hours. The point I’m trying to make is labor isn’t only measured in hours. An 8 hour workday of writing code, checking Slack, and sending emails is vastly easier than 8 hours of construction work in terms of physical labor. If you can only see “labor” as number of hours worked, you probably haven’t had a difficult manual labor job ever.
Number of hours worked has actually been trending down for a very long time.
The most interesting point here is relating machine speed to intensity. Plenty of tech folks are both working longer hours and overseeing more responsibilities thanks to AI. There are other factors at play though (interest rates and AI-addiction, for two).
You still had to hire people to do work and tech was good enough to help them out. As tech advanced, people started trusting what the systems said even if blatantly wrong and people started loosing work.