this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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Let the death of the programming industry as a respectable professional job be a warning to centrist workers in other industries what happens when you don’t unionize and just assume your personal talent will always be rewarded by the ruling class.
It won’t.
Also let the rhetoric computer programmers use to defend the intrinsic value of their livelihood be a lesson to all of us. They talk in terms of raw productivity, in terms of securing a living wage through being more savvy than people who are dumb and take manual labor jobs. They speak about the threats of automation with COMPLETE confidence it will only be used by their bosses to create more jobs for people like them.
Finally, let it be a lesson that the confidence of programmers who look at AI/LLMs and think “they can never replace me with that, it would be a disaster” totally misses the point that it doesn’t matter to the ruling class of the tech world that replacing tech worker jobs with shitty automation or vastly more underpaid workers won’t work longterm. The point is to permanently devalue and erode the pride and hard fought professionalism of programming (Coding Bootcamps have the same objective of reducing the leverage of workers vs employers).
^ Programmers make a classic person-who-is-smart-at-computers mistake here of trying to understand business like it is a series of computer programs behaving rationally to efficiently earn money
I have met a nauseating amount of programmers who truly believe that tech companies would have to come crawling back to them if they fired tech workers in the industry en masse and everything began to break. What these programmers don’t understand is yeah, they will come back, but they will employ you from the further shifted perspective that you are an alternative to a worthless algorithm or vastly underpaid human when they do. That change in perspective, that undercutting of the “prestige” of being a skilled programmer is permanent and will never revert.
Shit is dark… but also damn if I don’t have a tiny bit of schadenfreude for all the completely unfounded self confidence and sense of quiet superiority so many people who work with computers project when doing something like teaching a classroom of 20 kids or fixing someone’s plumbing problem is way fucking harder any day of the week.
Generally agree with your points, even though I"m honestly not sure what a union would look like like in practice.
But I just wanted to say that this job is definitely harder than plumbing. I usually do my own plumbing and it's not really that bad. It's not my favorite thing to do and can sometimes be a pain in the ass, but it's way less taxing imo.
Teaching kids is hard as fuck though and good teachers are priceless. Honestly quality caregiving of any sort is massively underrated.
Most programming (simple tasks, scripting data analysis, most common web apps, basic automation) is about as difficult as doing your own plumbing (which likely includes fixing a faucet or doing other minor tasks around the house). But just like in any profession, the "professionals" are able to handle the complex tasks that others can't/don't want to do. For plumbers that means building the whole home systems to maintain proper pressure/temperature at every outlet, suitable for whatever climate the home is built in, or in commercial settings where the systems are much larger and more complicated.
Ask a professional plumber which they find more taxing: being bent into awkward spaces on their hands and knees all day, or sitting at a desk thinking hard about a problem someone has likely already solved.
Borg Voice
"We Are Pipes. "
"Our Voice Is The Expression Of The Pipe."
"The First Technology was The Pipe."
"The Last Technology will be The Pipe."
"Some of us study reflections of the True Pipe through Computer Pipes."
"Some of us study reflections of the True Pipe through Shit Pipes"
"We Are One"
"We Are The Pipe."
10/10 write up
I'm an infrastructure engineer working at a government contractor and I'm in a union with OPEIU 1010, the tech workers' local. Others are unionizing independently, with CWA, etc.. It's still early days for the tech industry but there are examples. We're really not that different from other industries with a larger union presence.
Sure yeah, but like, I work remote and will always work remote (I live in a city with a pretty mediocre tech scene). On top of that, I work in a non-mainstream programming language (Haskell). So it's hard to envision what I could actually do.
I'm very pro-union btw, it just seems like there are certain things that can sometimes make it more difficult to make happen