Bro lol. You were this close - you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was) and instead of coming to the obvious conclusion (unions) you're like nah I'm just gonna alienate myself further. It's just amazing how thoroughly people have been brainwashed. I'm 100% sure nothing will ever improve.
> you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was)
Marx is the originator of precisely none of those thoughts, you couldn't find an economist that disagrees with them. "Unions" is also not the obvious solution for the problems of an individual. Unless you have a specific, existing union with a contact phone number that you're referring to, one that has a track record of making sure that individuals are not affected negatively by technological progress over the span of their entire careers, you're just lazily talking shit.
If it's the solution, so much easier than keeping ahead of the technology treadmill, and it's so obvious to you, it's strange that you haven't set up the One Big Union yet and fixed all the problems.
> "Unions" is also not the obvious solution for the problems of an individual.
Right, but the observation here is that many, maybe most, individuals in a particular field are having this same problem of labor autonomy and exploitation. So... unions are pretty good for that.
SWE is somewhat unique in that, despite us being the lowest level assembly-line type worker in our field, we get paid somewhat well. Yes, we're code monkeys, but well-paid code monkeys. With a hint of delusions of grandeur.
I'm talking about labor theory of value vis-a-vis this comment
> Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique
Ie "capitalists" are not rewarded for deploying capital and mitigating risk but for extracting as much from the labor as possible.
And yes Marx is absolutely the "originator" of these ideas and yes absolutely you ask any orthodox economist (and many random armchair economists on here) they will deny it till they're blue in the face. In fact you're doing it now :)
Edit: it's the same thing that plagues the rest of American civil society: "voting against your [communal] interests because someone convinced you that your exceptional". Ie who needs unions when I'm a 10x innovator/developer. Well I guess enjoy your LLM overlords then Mr 10x <shrug>.
Gains from productivity will accrue to those with the most bargaining power. Whether that’s the employee or the employer is going to depend on the exact circumstances (realistically it will be some mix). Hence why factory workers today get paid more than in the 1800s (and factory owners as well!)
> Gains from productivity will accrue to those with the most bargaining power.
That's true. And employers have been consistently the one with more bargaining power, and that's why our wages haven't kept up with the productivity gains. This is also known as productivity-pay-gap.
We, the working class, are supposed to be paid roughly 50% more than we are paid now, if the gains from productivity were properly distributed. But they are not, concentrated to a large extent in the owning class, which is what's unfair and why we, the workers, should unite to get what's rightfully ours.
Interesting to see A imagine what B meant, then assert that A believes some metric will always go up because they always saw it go up? It's not clear what they meant, making this response as nonsensical as the response. An AI level exchange.
I know reading skills are in short supply in a group of people that only read code but I thought it was pretty obvious what I was alluding to. But even if it weren't (admittedly you have to have actually read Marx for it to jump out at you) by the time you responded there was another comment that very clearly spells it out, complete with citations.
right; the "ancap" mentality in computing could only last for so long. Eventually, and especially with the refusal of incorporating any ethics or humanity into it, it's now an established industry affecting all walks of life just like every other that has preceded it, and the belief that its technological superiority/uniqueness was a good reason to essentially exempt it from regulation (TV broadcasts for children are required to have "bumper" sections that would clearly define the show vs the advertisement; Why was computing/the internet treated differently? A high-horse mentality that stemmed from "complexity olympics"? no child could ever use or comprehend a sophisticated machine like this!!) has really fucked us. The labor is decentralized at such a scale that I also have a hard time believing anything could be rectified; open source software is mostly just corporate welfare, putting anything at all on the internet has become corporate welfare, and there is no real purpose or goal for building all of this. The computer was supposed to allow us to do less work, right?
