Ask HN: Anyone else feeling increasingly alienated from the industry?

completely alienated. I actually enjoy programming again since its now a hobby, but trying to get anything done online even as a mere citizen desiring services can get pretty painful. my bank for instance has to check on my spotify situation before I can view my bank balance, but spotify has banned me because I'm thinking they didn't like my third rate email, so spotify's web page spins, and I suspect thats why my bank hangs for too long. I eventually get there.

Fortunately there's governments that try to help in this sphere by trying (and sure often failing) to regulate things for consumers, except in the US of course haha guess where my sorry ass ended up?!?!.

I do struggle but at least I am thankful to never have to program for a living again. I would not be able to survive at all.

in biology things usually work in self-reinforcing cycles. Most people in here might agree , yet most of them hold directly or indirectly stocks of those companies.

We're building tools that could genuinely make people's lives better, but instead most companies are laser-focused on "how many jobs can we eliminate?" The whole conversation around AI safety isn't even about keeping people employed… it's about making sure the AI doesn't turn on us.

Investors want to hear about efficiency gains and cost savings (aka layoffs). Customers want solutions that work. Trying to balance building something useful while not contributing to the dystopia is genuinely difficult.

What keeps me going is focusing on problems that actually matter and being selective about who I work with. Not everyone can do this, but if you have some leverage, use it to push back on the worst impulses.

I’m struggling as well. I started fresh out of high school’s comp sci class. Circa 1998. I’ve survived the dot com bubble, the housing implosion, the Great Recession, but lately have found myself struggling to find employment and when I do - I’m treated very poorly because I’m new. Yet I have more experience than they do. I don’t want to play that card but it’s like watching the blind lead the blind. I can’t retire. Yet I can’t find a decent dev job where we work on a product or SaaS. A few companies that did reach out to me, gave me a pass after speaking with me so I guess the problem is with me. But I don’t know what.

Also, seeing past coworkers strike it rich and retire early really deflates my spirits after trying to succeed for so long.

Be the change. You don't have to quit overnight. But start paving the better road, brick by brick. Other people are doing it too. Eventually, across years or centuries, it leads to a way out.

Not everything can be bought or killed over.

One of the things that's consistent through history is the tyrants always lose in the end, even though they amass all the resources. Because the average person would rather die than support the tyrants.

It may seem like everything is in SF today, but maybe in a few decades, it will all move to Lisbon or Sydney.

Absolutely agreed. It is disillusioning. We have become completely consumed by 'TC', Bitcoin, vesting, conversion, SaaS, subscriptions, monetization etc.

We are folding ourselves into an ever smaller bubble and disconnecting from the world we live in. Not unlike the finance industry in the 2000s prior to the crash.

It's sad because technology can and does improve so much in the world.

Questions like this that embody existential crisis are bound to emerge in a thinking person's life. History is our guide.

Science has faced such challenges almost always, sometimes by the industry, sometimes by a government. How would have the Manhattan Project scientists (every brilliant scientist was related in some way) felt when General Groves took the charge of the atomic bomb? How about the Bikini Atoll Atomic Bomb testing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_testing_at_Bikini_Atol...)?

Some say that when it comes to industry, this is an inevitable outcome of capitalism, the ism that prefers the "unequal but fair" acts to "equal but unfair" acts.

One way out (of the psychological suffering) is to trust the overall human goodness (even gullibly). We should all support it with our actions, however. Suppose you are contributing to an open-source project. You do your "work" to the best of your ability and then trust that others will do the same. And when the feared dystopian future does arrive eventually, we can at least accept it solemnly.

Have you considered academia? Many say that that is equally (or more) compromised (or just plain "bad").

I somehow think that the professors I grew up admiring and learning from can't be "all bad". Almost every US university has at least a few amazing professors and teachers who teach and contribute to research. Why not work with them? Your pay will be automatically limited (you are not after getting a tenure, are you?) and you won't have the guilt of amassing a fortune that eventually disillusions you. Some really difficult problems, on the other hand, will make you focus on work more than anything else. It may also make you use of AI tools meaningfully. If you like to teach, you may get to do that as well. That way, you can contribute to shape younger minds in more ways than one.

Without working fiercely in your own private Idaho solving objective problems and rather blindly trusting others' conscience, I am not sure how you can remain sane.

If you ask me, React and Typescript is responsible for the enshittification of web development (as well as the plethora of other kludges upon kludges of bundlers and compilers). And since you can't get jobs using them anymore maybe its time to look at something actually - modern? https://newspeaklanguage.org is sublime. Give it a try. Enjoy web dev again. (0n the other hand, i feel completely alienated by using it since no else does :)

It's just a job.

I'm not sure why one would put the weight of the impact of your work on yourself. You've been trained to do certain job, you've been hired to do the job, and you are doing it. You can have moral quarrels with the company mission(like working for defense), but you can't change the whole industry's direction.

Do people who invented printing press and made all the scribes obsolete need to think about their impact on the world? Does inventors of the car who put all horses out of work need to think about their impact? Does people who invented atomic bomb need to put a weight of the devastation that it brought on their chest? All those things have 2 sides, it improved life in one way and worsened it in others.

Professional deformation - is when you treat everything in life as a puzzle that needs to be solved. And when you switch your focus from engineering to societal problems and try to solve that, unfortunately it's not working like that. Sometimes life is just a chaos and it's not your or anyone else fault.

It's just a job.

I do agree with some of this and often feel the same way. However, at the same time we need to be honest about what computers did as well. They had the ability to eliminate many jobs as well. Technologists also pushed forward with little to no regard for the jobs that would be eliminated by their products. It’s been going on for decades.

Programmers have also been trying to code themselves out of a job since the beginning. Low-code and no-code automation products are some modern examples of that, AI is the latest attempt.

This isn’t new, but it’s seen as more of an existential threat.

When we look at computer so far, it’s possible that they’ve created more jobs than they took. The big question is will AI do the same, and how what will the transition be like? Those are uncomfortable unknowns, but the world has been through many such transitions before and humans always seem to come up with something else to do.

You supposedly entered this industry because you loved something, I hope. Don't let other people's actions and opinions destroy your peace.

That being said, when I was young and naive, I took people's words literally (the good and the bad) and it used to drive me crazy. Now I recognize BS much more easily and keep my peace while doing what I love.

So no, not disillusioned at all. If anything, more certain than ever.

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> When I entered the tech industry about a decade ago, it was a time of optimism.

Ten (well, nine) years ago we already had the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The tech industry was already rotten to the core. Heck, you could say it was that already in the nineties, when Microsoft's business practices made millions of people outright hate them - it's just that the reach of the industry wasn't as prevailing as it is now.

“Mission driven” and “change the world” was always marketing to convince technologists to grind to puff up share valuations to be flipped between investors until they could find a bag holder. The shares were (are?) the product. Big Tech was always building a dystopia, it’s simply more stark than it was a decade. are we the baddies? meme here

> What is one to do in this scenario if they have a conscience? Is anyone else struggling with this? How do y'all deal?

Political activity that prioritizes the well being (healthcare, affordable housing, economic security) of the majority over the very wealthy (if that’s your thing), and failing that, working a job that isn’t contributing to harm. We must be reasonable about what we can expect from ourselves.

Ask “what is all of this for?” You don’t have to be Amish, but the other extreme of effective accelerationism and rapidly increasing wealth concentration/inequality isn’t great either (historically speaking, it always ends in sadness). I also consider what side of a pitchfork and history I want to be on if the time comes.

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Even today, not all companies are like this. System76, Purism, Pine64 and others rely on free software and push for the users' rights. I believe they are still changing the world for the better.

In 2015 the tech industry was just as exploitive as it is now. The DE&I and ally ship was always performative. You have finally just woken up.

I was at Amazon when they added the leadership principle about being the “world’s best employee”. Yes Amazon the worst employer of the BigTech crowd.

At the end of the day, it’s a transaction. I give them labor and they give me money. I use that money to support my addiction to food and shelter. I started working in 1996 and now I am on my 10th job. It’s always been transactional for me.

Which tech company was trying to make the world a better place even a decade ago?

I entered the tech industry about the same time as you, worked my way up to Infrastructure Team, been unemployed starting off with the great layoffs of 2022 in biopharma (which weren't really picked up by news but occurred following workforce reduction activities from a flurry of mergers in the industry).

These are important questions to be asking for anyone that cares about the future, and it begs the question where we are going, and how will our children survive.

If you have the appropriate foundations in critical thinking (classical trivium curricula) and think about this deeply for a time, you'll realize some unpleasant truths, and some perspectives that you may have been blind to your entire life because of structured indoctrination.

Here are some of the insights I've found:

Those who choose to go without siring children have no future, and their decision-making subtly reflects this in the incentives they follow.

Evil people, are those people who have willfully blinded themselves through choice, to the consequences of the evil acts they commit and they repeat such acts without resistance unless stopped. Evil acts being any act that does not result in the long-term beneficial growth of self or others, a definition which is somewhat objectively measurable.

Many people have been induced through structure and organization into becoming evil, and this has been done through a strategic separation of objectionable concerns.

This is a strategy used by both the Nazi's and Stasi, and its used fairly broadly. The complacent fuel the radical evil. The individual who materially supports an organization through work or otherwise, is equally responsible for the same misdeeds of bad actors within that organization, whether they know about it or not.

> It seems like we're openly building a dystopia, making the very few even more wealthy and powerful while dooming the rest.

This observation is partially misplaced. People are only blindly following the short-term incentives driven by money-printing, and steeped in survivor bias.

There is a lot of historical material by great thinkers on how society actually works and was built historically, but you have to go back to some pretty ancient books if you weren't taught it in your education. This generally speaking falls under Social Contract Theory, and Political Economy.

You are incorrect because you imply that the wealthy and powerful will survive the dynamics they are creating. That is quite unlikely for the same reason that perceptual blindness can be malignant. These people couldn't survive without the masses. If you can't see something you can't react, and when you cannot react you cannot adapt and then fail Darwin's fitness and die off. Malthus/Catton have a lot to say about how this would go do.

> What is one to do in this scenario? Is anyone else struggling with this.

Anyone with a brain is struggling with this.

The general consensus in my group, is that once a point of no return is reached, and in all likelihood we've already reached it given lagging indicators and lack of visibility, then the only thing one can do is withdraw the only thing of value they have and focus on efforts that will help them and their group survive which would involve building your own independent grid/community.

The likelihood of socio-economic collapse increases as money printing nears the 3rd stage of ponzi; where debt growth exceeds productive capacity and outflows exceed inflows. Chaos increases, shortage sustains eventually spreading to famine.

That third stage is usually when monetary properties of money break down, along with society, and its rule of law; at least historically.

You'll need to have the skills to defend yourself, make your own things, and be ruthless towards your own survival and the survival of others you care for.

I emphasize group because the lone wolf dies and is snuffed out easily by groups. You need community to survive, and you need to know how to make and produce what you need without modern supply chains.

Centralized hierarchies above a certain population fail to unavoidable dynamics given sufficient time, where they drag every member down with them.

Mises from the Austrian School of Economics covers this in his collected works on Socialism. The failures are indirect, but inevitably occur, and the intractable problems he describes cannot be solved.

The intelligent and competent withdraw to areas they can control when the environment becomes disadvantaged. This has already started happening in migrations from disrupted business sectors to other sectors. If the disruption spreads, you'll see a general withdrawal from society as a whole. Atlas will shrug. Violence always occurs when the rule of law fails. The primary purpose of a rule of law which has required components that have been broken, is non-violent conflict resolution.

If these things are new to you, I'd suggest you start off with Thomas Paine's Right's of Man, and then check out material introducing Austrian economics. It is fundamental education that will change your entire perspective and by extension life.

A long dark is coming, and the many alive today have been forcibly unprepared by past generations through the withholding of a proper first-principled education. That generation instead chose to replace it with torture furthering control and indoctrination.

If you are not familiar with what constitutes torture, and you'd be surprised because its everywhere today.

Torture is the imposition psychological stress. There are specific elements, structuring, and clustering designed for the purpose of thought reform, control through involuntary hypnotism, reduction of rational thought, or to the point of psychological break (disassociation/psychosis).

Isolation is one such element. (established authors on that subject matter include Robert Lifton, and Joost Meerloo circa 1950s).

Totalism based cultures die out. Protean-ism based cultures often survive.

Well, try to explain how could that ever be possible that an industry that by very definition of what software is - something that can be infinitely copied and reused for free having being created once - is an inequality engine - was a source of optimism? It could only be a source of optimism of stakeholders because it promised, and indeed make, many of them near infinitely rich. It was the goal and purpose of it all along - to eat the world.

> they will replace most of the work force

Never gonna happen. Next question :)

> It seems like we're openly building a dystopia

Im not sure, but there are signs that you have been sold a distorted view of the world. Probably modern media and all sorts of propagandists who prey on people’s fears have caught you on the hook.

Yes, world is not a perfect place. It has its problems, ups and downs. It was always like that.

No. It’s not getting worse and no, you can’t predict the future and long term consequences of your actions.

For example there is a strong argument to be made that if not for nuclear weapons we would currently have massive wars (because no reason to restrain yourself).

While current conflicts (as terrible as they are) are magnitudes less deadly (in relative numbers) than ever before. At least in some parts of the world.

How can you be so confident AI will not create more jobs?

I personally don’t see current LLMs being such a major disruption as steam engines etc before.

But even if it is - I know from history that eventually all economy shifts make humanity better longterm.

Even current standards of “poverty” in some regions are so high that it would look like a luxury for people 200 years ago. Imagine having cheap internet and electricity.