I will add that I grew up with rich kids, like kids of CEOs of corporations you would know well, and we also learned about carbon footprints from an early age. Most of the class did not score well, obviously. But every time a neglectful powerful person births a baby leftist educated by the greater community, we win.
I know I’m in the minority here, but I don’t blame AI for the conditions he’s describing at all. I’m a little jealous that as an older millennial, he got to experience the golden years of tech work where everyone was getting rich off work marketed as meaningful and socially progressive. Us younger folks that got into tech because of that era are kicking ourselves for not being born a decade or two earlier.
As a gen z-er, I’ve only experienced exploitation. Skeleton crews where you are saddled with way too much work at all times, and your seniors have no time to train you to do it properly, so you bury yourself in a cycle of burn out and tech debt. Oh, and our starting wages have likely not increased since OP graduated college. So my perspective is that work for large corporations is a joke, and no one actually cares about the output beyond how much money they can extract out of shittier (i.e., cheaper) work. This enshittification of the workplace is why people are using AI first and asking questions never. I don’t blame them. I’m using copilot for side projects and it’s 10x faster at coding than I am, although I agree with OP, the code can be sloppy and should absolutely require human supervision.
I think what he hasn’t quite arrived at as the logical conclusion of his laments is that tech workers need to unionize. It sucks because I do think people of his generation who benefited most from the tech boom would never consider that they would benefit from class consciousness (a lot of them aren’t just temporarily embarrassed millionaires, they are actually ashamed millionaires). But yeah, if he wants privacy protections in the workplace to be taken seriously, if he wants assurance that AI will not literally take his job because it was trained to do just that by his company, if he wants to find meaning in human connection, he’s looking for a union.
That sounds painful. Absolutely no shade to the lovely older person I overheard today say: “so how do you get the little folks on the screen to know what buttons I pressed?”
But I’m guessing it could be similar to music copywrite law where jurors don’t have to understand audio engineering to know two samples sound the same.
That’s the most well written account of something similar I experienced, but not to that extent.
You start out doing something because you enjoy it, then you hyperfocus because your brain is built in that way, then the praise and accolades start pouring in (for me it was academic success and getting into MIT), then it becomes your identity and you/others (mainly yourself as he pointed out) start expecting that level of output from you, you try to maintain it to unhealthy levels because your brain was built without the normal guardrails to keep itself safe, and in one way or another you just break.
For me, as my body was breaking down from stress and sleep deprivation in my 20s, I went to doctor after doctor who diagnosed me with one rare incurable diagnosis after another. A lot of young women may relate with the progression: POTS, then EDS, maybe autoimmune diseases or CFS, likely MCAS and gastroparesis, then sleep apnea and narcolepsy, also migraines with severe aura symptoms towards the end. I believed I did have a rare disease because I had Bells Palsy at 15 (from school stress!) and I still have lingering effects from that ever since.
It actually mainly ended up being sleep apnea, but to his point, an earlier diagnosis and treatment would’ve been great, but it wouldn’t have solved my lack of boundaries and identity outside of “MIT grad” either. My breaking point was being so sleep deprived I literally stopped having thoughts and desires. I just…stopped showing up for work because all my brain wanted was sleep at every moment and couldn’t conceptualize any other thought. I’m past that now thankfully, and I’m grateful for the things that part of my life brought me, but yeah, being that “smart and accomplished” has a very dark side. Especially if you don’t come from a privileged background.
Genuine question, what are the alternatives not called Azure/GCP?