1046
Every Family Dinner Now (jemmy.jeena.net)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] 159 points 2 years ago* (23 children)

We do this every 15 years. For anyone less than 15 years into their career, welcome to the party.

Let's see if I can save you some energy:

  • Yes, it made my job massively easier.
  • No, it didn't replace me.
  • Yes, it allowed a bunch of new people to also do the job I do. Welcome newbies!
  • No, my salary didn't go down, relative to inflation.

It turns out that the last mile to a successful product delivery is still really fucking hard, and this magic bullet tool also didn't solve that.

Now... Am I talking about...?

  • AI?
  • Web frameworks?
  • English like programming language syntax?
  • A compiler with built-in type checking?
  • All of the above.

Edit: Formatting for readability.

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    I mean honestly for things like tech, the jobs are going away due to these innovations, just piecemeal. Each of these innovations have shaved hours off of projects. Now someone's salary might be the same and they might still have to go into the office 40hrs a week (or be just as productive working from home, go figure) but the actual work they're doing is that much easier than it used to be, they might only have to work 4 hours a day now to accomplish what might have taken 2 days in the past.

    Sure, certain companies put more demand on employees than others, and as you mentioned there are still human components to the system that remain untouched by technology, but if the tech world was honest with itself tech employees do far less work now than they did 10-20 years ago, disregarding the general expansion of the tech industry. I'm just talking about individual jobs.

    Of course I don't think those employees should be making less. I think if we innovate so much that a person's job disappears we should be able to recognize that that person still deserves to be clothed and fed as if they still had that job.

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Yes, except for the fact that the flip side of those is that software, almost by definition, is automating away jobs in other industries.

    So when it gets easier / cheaper to write software, other industries will spend an increasing amount on it to replace their workers. That's one of the reasons the software industry has continued to grow, even though it's gotten easier to write.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Sure, but also almost by definition, using tech to replace workers in other industries will reduce the total amount of workers needed for that job as you made the tech presumably to make the job easier or faster. My post was talking about the tech industry just because that was the topic, but as you mention, tech definitely replaces jobs in all sectors.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    almost by definition, using tech to replace workers in other industries will reduce the total amount of workers needed for that job

    The data on this is actually uncertain. Installing ATM machines to replace bank tellers should have been a slam dunk, but didn't really cut into bank teller total employment.

    https://www.aei.org/economics/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-robots-and-jobs/

    Don't get me wrong, the ATM was the first step in a long chain of improvements that still ought to soon make bank tellers obsolete, and the dept of labor predicts 15% lower demand next year.

    But even this relatively one-for-one swap of machines for people has taken half a century, so far.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    That goes back to the point I was making earlier. For some reason a bank teller is hired for the same wage for the same hours, but I can almost guarantee you that because of the ATM they spend significantly less of their work day "working" because the ATM was designed to do a significant portion of their job. There certainly is an excuse to keep them around all day, there are some unavoidable tasks that only a human can do and they come up at random times throughout the day, but the ATM has replaced many of the working hours the bank tellers used to have even if the job didn't go away.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago

    tech employees do far less work now than they did 10-20 years ago

    Agreed!

    Of course, if we had truly understood the situation 10-20 years ago, we could have admitted that they were primarily being paid to know how to get the thing* to work, and not actually for the hours they spent typing in new code. Hence the rise of "Infrastructure Engineer" and "DevOps Specialist" as titles.

    *I omiitted the technical term, for brevity. But to be clear, by 'thing', I mean what professionas typically call the "damned fucking piece of shit webserver, and this fucking bullshit framework".

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (15 children)

    No, my salary didn't go down, relative to inflation.

    I'm calling bullshit on that one.

    Everybody's salary except executives has gone down relative to inflation going all the way back the the 80s.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    Not mine. Every year if I don't get a "cost of living" increase that meets or exceeds inflation, I go complain about it to my boss who then negotiates with HR on my behalf and I get a bigger raise. I'm not gonna let inflation kill my salary, and my boss is not gonna risk me leaving for another company. I do wish they would just give it to me up front and stop making me ask each year. We all know what the outcome is gonna be.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    Wow must be nice

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    I'm not saying that the average wage in the country has not fallen against inflation. Data indicates that it has. But what I'm saying is that In the tech industry, if you provide good value to your company and the managers have half a brain, you should be able to negotiate annual raises to AT LEAST match inflation. If your company won't, consider moving to a new company.

    I know this is a privilege that most workers do not have, but this thread is about jobs in tech, where this is a more common case. It's also one of the reasons why the aren't more unions.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (4 children)

    This is comment makes me want to move to US. In Canada what you said is so unrealistic

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    In every country but the US, really. Someday, big tech companies will realise that a person in any other Western country can code just as well for half the price, but for now they won't even consider it cause 'Murica.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    They do. They're looking mostly to Eastern Europe. India is the classic place to look, but the quality of the tech education there is mixed (at best). I've worked with a lot of competent people from Romania.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    There are other countries than the US of A.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    This got passed around as a common fact in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Wages from the early 70s through 2010 or so were flat (not negative, but flat) due to inflation. Things have shifted since then.

    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

    Note that the graph shows median wage; it isn't as affected by a few high earners as average wage would be. The 2010s were a period of relatively low inflation and wages had a chance to catch up a bit.

    What is true is that productivity has leaped massively since the 70s, but median wages have only crept up somewhat. The argument needs to shift to be around how the working class was screwed out of their share of productivity improvements. That's not likely to change until we have more unions and overall something closer to Socialism.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Two mitigating factors for me:

    1. For many years my skillet expanded faster than inflation ate away at my pay. I've been in a high demand specialty (Cybersecurity) for awhile.
    2. I'm now a manager, which does come with extra pay. Perhaps more importantly, it puts me in a position to throw my weight around to get my team and myself better raises.
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