Technology

First it was funny, then sad…

Do you mean to tell me it wasn't a quick get-rich scheme and people who aren't interested in the field will have issues after doing math puzzles 8 hours a day in front of a monitor before going home to do more on github?

But the rich non-programmer guy told me so!

I'm not sure that works. There were 20 shillings to the pound.

So £0.75 a week.

This inflation calculator:

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator

£75 in 1843 is equivalent to £8,310.96

So 15s then is equivalent to £83.11 a week, £4321.72 a year.

40 hour week (which is implied to be too low). ~£2.08 an hour

So if he worked over 40 hours you're talking a sub £2/hour wage. Around $2.70 in US money.

I suspect the stat relies on converting to dollars before applying inflation as GBP to USD was about 1 to 5 then instead of about 1 to 1.33

It's fun but I wouldn't want to denigrate Dickens by saying he got poverty wrong to make a political point.

That was from December of '21. It would be $15.69 now.

I know a guy with three degrees and decades of experience on a resume littered with well-known companies and astounding projects.

2.5 years out of work.

This is the guy who should be fixing slopper code and he's working volunteers and startups so his resume isn't toxic from an Uber or Amazon gig.

This has why I’m happy to work in public service. It’s very stable but the salaries aren’t as high.

This is because there isn't a job shortage. It's offshoring. The company I (thankfully willingly) left 2 years ago has shifted all of their software hiring to Europe. And since I left has had multiple US focused layoffs. All while the Euro listings keep popping up. And I get it, the cost of living is much lower and the skill set is equivalent. So yea, get your bank. But, this is companies exploiting Europe/Asia, rather than it being something Europe/Asia is immune to.

It took one year to find a replacement for a colleague who left the company. He was a senior in his field.

Its more than that; companies also continuously propagate the message of "shortage of workers" while continuing to raise the requirements for entry level positions more and more. It reaches a point where "entry level" is not attainable for most fresh grads to get experience, and keeps their starting wages (and continuing wages) very well depressed due to the high supply.

Its a very targeted campaign to make sure educated workers are oversupplied, tied down with student debt, and don't get too many ideas of independence in their heads.

It's not just that. HR departments (who, let's be honest, were never exactly super-clear on what tech roles are or do because they're busy with everything else) have been infected by AI to the point that no one can just see a job and apply for it unless they rearrange everything in the resume to match the job posting verbiage exactly.

Everyone who makes it past that hurdle are sorted lowest-to-highest salary requirements. Oh you have seventeen years experience? Fuck you. Everyone after that is sorted by age/race/ whatever. It's the perfect system for fucking up tech hiring.

Unless you rebrand everything you do as AI. Then you'll get 100 million dollars from Zuckabug. (It used to be "cloud" but that was a long time ago now). So the tech manager who knows what they're looking for gets a bunch of applications from newbies who talk like AI is everything and they don't want that.

It's super fucked.

Homeowning and paying a mortgage, especially now, is the single most important thing maintaining my quality of life.

A neighbor recently sold and it is now a rental. Paying that rent would effectively raise my housing costs about $20k a year.

It's almost exactly the same house and lot. It's insane.

The industry has brought in a ton of soulless goons and uninterested/stupid workers for a decade and it’s destroyed the industry.

I’m not saying there aren’t good people, but I have interviewed hundreds of people over 10+ years for jobs in tech, and the quality bar dropped a lot.

This started well before AI. I met people from Apple/Amazon/Google/etc. who functionally could not do their job, contributed nothing to projects, and were highly paid. Only a few big companies were the exception.

I’ve met a ton of people with phds and advanced degrees from prestigious schools that were total crap too.

We shovelled so many people into the system because the jobs sounded amazing and they’d pay stupid prices for a degree. We fully industrialized low performance hiring, so yeah, no surprise packages are dropping.

Plus, I used to get time to teach interns and new grads too. The staff we taught grew into way better workers than the job hoppers with 6 jobs at fancy companies over 3 years who had never completed a real project beyond the shiny prototype.

The last 3-4 years I had been constantly threatened about looming layoffs, and that we needed to meet targets at all costs. I’ve been perennially told “if we’re just heads down and all out until [6 months from now/project completion] it’ll all be good again”. Only for the cycle to repeat again and again and again.

The big tech machine destroyed my mental health and I’m out, and I’m much much happier and healthier. I still work in tech, but I’m incredibly selective about the jobs I take, and I’ll never work in corporate tech again.

No, the problem is greedy corporations.

There is an active need for many developers, think of every time you've used terrible software, every time a program crashed or you found yourself manually doing something and thought "there should be a tool for this", every bad search and broken social media site.

Hell, we're supposed to be in the middle of an "AI boom" and someone has to actually implement all those pie in the sky "automate away everyone's jobs". While AI can, debatably, write the code for that, it still takes a person to design, architect, implement, test and validate those systems.

No. The entire technical foundation on which "computer science" is built is crumbling due to lack of maintenance and funding and desperately needs people to fix it, however corporations are doing their what they do best; devaluing, destroying, and parasitizing their surroundings.

The ultimate problem is greed and an uncontrolled lust for power.

And that is why we need unions in tech. Tech is a cost center for most companies. It’s a space to beat down as much as possible to get margins up, just the same as the guys working on the line making the thing.