I understand your frustrations, but you can't strike without a union. The power of a strike is all (or most) of the workers stop working at once in a coordinated manner, causing severe impact on the business.
What you're planning and asking people to do (small number of random people here and there temporarily stopping work) is just ineffectual venting.
You need to put your efforts into unionization. You're not going to accomplish anything by yourself without organization.
The best time to start a union is 20 years ago, the second best time is now.
> Most Unions don't even allow the workers to initiate a strike (as part of the work contract) – it must be ordered by LU/hall.
I have no first-hand experience with unions, but wouldn't that be a vitally important coordinating function? The workers have issues with the employer, come to a collective decision to strike (or not), and then collectively implement the plan.
It's not good for workers to act in an uncoordinated and impulsive fashion.
Technically the workers are supposed to express any grievance(s) to on-site stewards, who then coordinate with Union leadership.
I never once saw an on-site steward.
Leaving 520 after the 2.5%->4.5% "dues" increase was among many pyrrhic victories (it was to cover aging healthcare expenditures, which is now making more sense these years later).
Eventually Unions will need sub-unions, separate from their own current LU-management – if only to keep the actual workers working.
What we'd do, instead, was worker-coordinated "slow downs" & two-hour lunches.
It's harder to "do nothing" than you might think. We'd make 10-manhour projects take 10 days. Ten grueling days of do-nothing, but we were physically there, present on our assigned job-sites. Eventually "the hall"-'ll listen, but it can sometimes take awhile...
----
I don't have a better solution. I went "independent" with my own shingle, which has its own (different PITA) problems. Grass-is-greener.
Most HN readers would do better, blue collar, in a commercial environment (IMHO); residential is too knit-picky, individual homeowners too personally-invested. Union is a great way to start your blue collar adventure, getting paid to learn and fuck up (which you will).
I respect your frustrations and can relate to most. But strikes only mean something when they are organised. The best way to organise is through worker unions. If enough employees in a given company join forces, they can achieve a lot.
But here, I’m not optimistic - I’ve never seen another industry where workers have so little class consciousness. Tech workers think they’re very special and they’re so self important, it’s painful. It would be a huge job to get them together to fight for their common interests.
> But here, I’m not optimistic - I’ve never seen another industry where workers have so little class consciousness. Tech workers think they’re very special and they’re so self important, it’s painful. It would be a huge job to get them together to fight for their common interests.
As a software engineer myself, I agree it's painful. So many supposedly-smart people have been so unthoughtful about their own positions and so easily deceived by propaganda (e.g. libertarianism). Now we're all in a much weaker position due to our collective lack of preparation.
And it's not like this was rocket science. You could see it coming from a mile away. Industrial offshoring that lead huge economic disruptions for manufacturing workers (made painfully obvious by Trump's election). Similar offshoring increasingly affecting the technology industry. Then generative AI popped in 2022, and you still have all kinds of software engineers parroting their bosses' talking points.
> I will be on strike for the entire third week of November.
Oh, deer hunting season... when half my team is already on v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike.
I'm already taking the next week for v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike... and two weeks in December too!
And what's more... I'm getting paid for this v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike.
I haven't put the requests in properly - I should do that. I still have 252 hours of v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike time that I need to use in the next two months (or move to other places... some carry over to next year, some moved to the sabbatical time account).
Some of the "you have how much vacation?" is because I am part of a union. Though I'll note that the union also has a "no strike" clause that would prevent me from actually participating in an unauthorized strike (such as this one).
The software that I work on is the boring "line of business" type things for keeping the internals of the organization moving smoothly. No advertising, no dark patterns, no social media (unless you count the internal department message board).
Random techies taking a week (or more) of PTO in November is expected and entire teams moving to a skeleton crew for periods of time in November is something that is already planned for. This is even less impactful if it's scattered across companies.
While my workplace sounds like your ideal, I probably make 1/3 to 1/4 of what my peers do (if I had stayed in working at a company where tech is the revenue generating faucet). Many people have baulked when they see the pay range for the position and the corresponding impact that that would have on their lifestyle.
Reddit is not crazy because of moderators. It’s crazy because it attracted the wrong crowd and gave them all the exposure they can dream of. Have you checked r/popular? It is filled with memes, celeb gossips, aitah posts, random web links about trump, twitter screenshots about Reddit posts.
R/popular used to be an interesting place to discover new forums. But now it’s just a handful of subReddits showing up again and again - Reddit is just a pigpen, with the same mud slinging by the same pigs.
The recent login-required (to use old-reddit) is stupid [0].
For now, just use this tip: `www.reddit.com/r/RedditYouWant+RandomCharactersHere`
and then your UI will be similar when browsing. Be sure to replace "RandomCharactersHere" with something obscure, or else /r/RedditYouWant will overflow with undesired content.
I understand the frustration. I've been in this industry for over a quarter century myself. The proliferation of advanced computing in the palm of your hand with a fancy touchscreen slapped onto it in 2007 seemed like Star Trek magic at the time, but it quickly turned into dystopian tracking before anyone knew it. Now that compute was out of the realm of the enthusiast with the general public okay with locked down devices; with have access to your own hardware now called "jailbreaking," things quickly spiraled to a technocratic state we're moving towards.
LLMs should actually be the level to oppose such things allowing for rapid reverse engineering of closed systems and custom bespoke software, but it's all dependent on "cloud" architecture, and OpenAI/Anthropic could ban you at any time for any reason. Independent models like Kimi 3 and GLM-5 should hedge that situation, but compute hardware required to run such models (e.g. 4x DGX units) use to sell for <$20k, but have now been pushed to nearly $40k. Enthusiasts can no long affordably buy the hardware that was so prevalent that made the modern compute era possible.
I feel your frustration with your "strike" which is an unplanned vacation. It's won't amount to much and hopefully you won't lose your job. Organizing anything at scale will be impossible, because every large at-scale protest you see is organized by the state or massive private interests. They're all psychological operations, yes even the famous 9 minute clip. When you really dig into all of it, the vast majority of people in this world are in the global control net of the new technocratic religion, and they believe everything they see from a major news site on social media, Google or the TV screen.
I'll be straight up. I have been responsible for performance conversations and hiring decisions, and I use both of these as a tool to ensure that engineers on my team are using AI.
The window for the gunslinging no-AI coder sitting in the basement with Mountain Dew and cranking out thousands of lines a day is essentially closed now.
My previous superstar 10x engineers are now superstar 50x engineers thanks to AI-enhanced output. All metrics are up. There's also no negative effects either, in fact incidents and faults have declined.
This position is the equivalent of the delivery driver in the early 1900s who refused to get an automobile and instead insisted his horse and cart is better.
Know that if you oppose a productivity tool that transforms every other engineer, you will be managed out. I've seen it happen more than once already.
> I use both of these as a tool to ensure that engineers on my team are using AI.
So you could definitely be the first to explain to me why AI is the only "tool" that gets forced on developers from the top down with threats like this.
In my experience, developers have to beg management to get productivity enhancing tools like linters, version control systems, editors and IDEs approved for use. AI is the rare reversal where the decision to use it is often made by non-technical C-suite members and pushed downwards, often with the implicit or explicit threat of job loss, like you are making now. But if the productivity gains are so obvious it turns 10x engineers into 50x, why is that necessary, and why do you need to look at anything other than the quantity of a developer's output to know if they're using it?
If your measure of a 10x engineer was in (thousands of) cranked-LOCs/day, then for sure, AI has taken their "performance" to the moon.
The rest is basic hard truth, but I really hope that the "quantity of output" rationale withers. AI's core value for programming is in input tokens, not output tokens.
I don't think this line of reasoning is very reasonable anymore. LLMs are getting good not only at producing high quality output but even preemptively dealing with architecture and other 'big picture' type designs. And this has been true for quite some time, certainly at least since the Fable gen of LLMs.
And while I do expect progress to eventually slow, there's no reason to yet think we're at the plateau point or necessarily even especially close, so they're probably only going to get better. But at this point, even if they didn't I'd still be saying this. 'Programming' with an LLM is a loathsome and unpleasant task, but that's because it's no longer programming but instead an entirely different design-centric domain where it's handy to have some programming knowledge to nudge it in the right direction sometimes.
I think human programmers are going to go the way of human computers. [1] And I'm obligated to link to that because now most people probably no longer even know such an occupation existed, even though it rather obviously must have if you think about the past for a moment.
Been hearing that for 3+ years now. All the people going "once everything goes to shit they're going to hire me to clean up the AI mess" are still waiting. Meanwhile models get better with every new release.
You've put words in my mouth. In no part of my post have I claimed that we all need to be no-AI coders, or even that I am one.
This is clearly about distributing the fruits of productivity evenly, whether they come from AI or any other way.
If you work for a salary and aren't a billionaire, I hope you will introspect why you assumed that your fellow working class human being was against productivity - we are on the same team my friend. If you aren't, well, I got nothing to say to you.
Have fun with that. But … I’m not in a position to have such a luxury. I got a family to feed and bills to pay. Idealism died when I got a mortgage and got married.
I am a tech worker. This November 2026, I am going on strike. I want you to join me. This is a 100% human written wall of text. No AI tokens were spent writing/researching this. I will be on strike for the entire third week of November. I invite you to choose your own days that you wish to strike and coordinate with your colleagues.
What am I going on strike for? I've just had enough of a lot of different factors which have, over the last decade or so, completely eroded all humanity and "good" from tech. This is not just about AI. AI is a symptom, not a cause. The cause goes way back. It started with being hostile to the users of software, then to non-users by alienating them from society, and now to those who build software (regardless of whether you write code or not).
What was the point of software? What was the point of building industry, companies, and jobs around software?
It was to empower people. And it HAS empowered people. Software is likely one of the most accessible and cheapest form of relatively advanced technology made available to such a large number of people. What you can do with software today, specially connected to the internet, is pure magic made cheaply accessible to a majority of the world's population. Search, navigation, live communication, live streaming, e-commerce, fintech, health advice are all magic.
The resources you need to build this magic and to use this magic is not very dissimilar. The machine used to develop software is basically the same machine used to utilize that software. This is an engineer's dream.
We envisioned a utopia which would lead to everyone having equal access to information, communication, market access, and general prosperity. I want to emphasize that this is not specific to those who write code. Anyone who could understand the concept of what software can do and had good intentions at heart was part of this.
And then came the greedy grifters. They invested money not just to get returns (they could've gotten returns on any other established field of business), but to gamble for a chance of crazy high returns. They thought software has near-zero marginal cost. They started building walled gardens, to extract rent from users. Build insane profits on that near-zero initial cost.
Then they realized you need to maintain software, specially if you didn't do it well the first time to rush to market (out of greed, to crush any competition). The costs started to rise up. There was still plenty of profit, just not enough to satisfy their greed. So the advertisement business grew, and with it came the largest assault on the privacy of the general public ever.
Advertising essentially took over software. Nearly all software now was being built in the service of getting attention to advertisements in one way or another.
Then they realized they could use this game politics itself. And they did, successfully. And made even more insane amounts of money in the process.
And then they realized they don't want to pay the workers anymore who support the software. So they turned against the workers.
During all this, the general public has lost control of their lives. They need a locked down always online machine tracking their location, health etc. to access their own money, messages, pictures, etc.
The workers building this are forced to rent expensive small apartments near their office, and/or commute regularly, to then video call with other workers, diminishing the utility of the very software they have built, to then further diminish the utility of other software. In a game of pure madness designed to steal everything from the poor and give it to the powerful.
I've had enough.
Fuck their greed. Fuck their pathological necessity to control us.
I'm going on strike. My specific demands from strike may be different from yours depending on your location, your habits, your company, your specific role, etc. But our goals are the same. We want humanity back in software. We want goodness back in software. We want software to finds its way back to empowering the general public, not serve as a resource extraction machine for the rich and powerful.
1. Stop forcing us to write user hostile software. We do not want to lock down software to extract more rent from our users.
2. Stop forcing us to force addictive algorithms. We do not want to force anti-social hate mongering adware junk on people.
3. Stop forcing workers to commute unnecessarily. Not twice a week or once a week or 11.33% of the week. Just no. Let individuals/teams decide how they want to work. If their performance is bad, you already have performance management tools for fixing that.
4. Stop all forms of unnecessary micro-management. The specifics for this depend on your company/role.
5. Stop forcing us to peddle slop. We do not want to shove AI generated bullshit in the face of our users.
6. Stop firing our human customer service staff colleagues to replace them with AI agents. It's one thing to let AI front some of the repetitive work. But AI can't replace a dedicated human who cares about helping the customer.
7. Stop forcing us to deal with slop ourselves. If the software is shit, we need time to fix it. Your deadlines can't go beyond the limits of complexities of real life.
8. Stop forcing "growth". Some of us our happy with our current role/jobs. Not all of us want to write ridiculous long essays praising ourselves for mediocre accomplishments. For many people a job is a job.
I think the specifics of these demands is not important, they shouldn't be universal. Different people have different needs.
The main reason for this strike is to send a message that they can't keep controlling us forever. And that if we don't cooperate with them, their house of cards will fall tomorrow. And that software must remain a way to empower people, not to satisfy greedy billionaires.
So please, join me in my strike for one week of your choice in November 2026.
Although I generally agree with this, we software developers are rapidly losing our power to make such demands, thanks to AI. But I wish you all the best.
> What they are telling you is that you have no leverage against them since they will just replace you with 1 person with 100+ agents.
I'm not one to deny that current AI models can take you quite far along. But you know they can't replace all of us with LLMs yet. Strikes work if enough of us do it, that's why I made this post. And if you believe LLMs will eventually be able to indeed replace millions of engineers, then it's better that we strike now rather than in the future.
But honestly, I have no beef with AI technology specifically or people using it. This is all about being ethical, distributing the fruits of work equally.
Nope, he is free to do whatever. I am just telling the truth and looking at where the money (potentially the salaries of tens of thousands of workers) is going. [0]
Tech Giants Double Down on Their Massive AI Spending [0]
Google, Meta and Microsoft boost AI spending forecasts [1]
Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce [2]
I am telling you that these companies don't care about human (tech) workers striking, since they are too busy spending that money on data centers for AI agents.
So you honestly think one of the largest and most powerful AI-enabled corporations on planet earth is being stopped from firing these people because of a technicality or two on the books? Why hasn't it happened already?
No I don't want to. The fact you wrote this yourself doesn't matter. No one works Nov to Jan anyway so the impact is nothing. Ranting about us vs them is completely unpersuasive simplifying drivel.
Your list of demands means nothing to me. Social media addiction is fake. RTO is good. My manager doesn't even talk to me let alone micro manage me. Slop is 2024 criticism you need to update your insults.
There is no we. I don't share your goals or outlook and you make no effort to persuade.
> And then came the greedy grifters. They invested money not just to get returns (they could've gotten returns on any other established field of business), but to gamble for a chance of crazy high returns. They thought software has near-zero marginal cost. They started building walled gardens, to extract rent from users. Build insane profits on that near-zero initial cost.
With no context on who you are, where you live, what this strike is - what the fuck am I suppose to do with this tell HN post? Do you ignorant bastards just assume everyone is from the same 4th world shithole place from where you are?
If you can add some inkling of details, I might empathise with what you are doing, heck even support you. But if you want to be a twat about it, then I wish you all the suffering in the world.
The other commenter is right, this place is infested with Reddit retards.
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50271809
I understand your frustrations, but you can't strike without a union. The power of a strike is all (or most) of the workers stop working at once in a coordinated manner, causing severe impact on the business.
What you're planning and asking people to do (small number of random people here and there temporarily stopping work) is just ineffectual venting.
You need to put your efforts into unionization. You're not going to accomplish anything by yourself without organization.
The best time to start a union is 20 years ago, the second best time is now.
Most Unions don't even allow the workers to initiate a strike (as part of the work contract) – it must be ordered by LU/hall.
src: former IBEW 520 (datacenter sparkie #AMA)
> Most Unions don't even allow the workers to initiate a strike (as part of the work contract) – it must be ordered by LU/hall.
I have no first-hand experience with unions, but wouldn't that be a vitally important coordinating function? The workers have issues with the employer, come to a collective decision to strike (or not), and then collectively implement the plan.
It's not good for workers to act in an uncoordinated and impulsive fashion.
Technically the workers are supposed to express any grievance(s) to on-site stewards, who then coordinate with Union leadership.
I never once saw an on-site steward.
Leaving 520 after the 2.5%->4.5% "dues" increase was among many pyrrhic victories (it was to cover aging healthcare expenditures, which is now making more sense these years later).
Eventually Unions will need sub-unions, separate from their own current LU-management – if only to keep the actual workers working.
> Eventually Unions will need sub-unions, separate from their own current LU-management
This just sounds like replacing working for one large corporation with working for two large corporations.
Which makes perfect sense. The entire point of a union is collective action.
What we'd do, instead, was worker-coordinated "slow downs" & two-hour lunches.
It's harder to "do nothing" than you might think. We'd make 10-manhour projects take 10 days. Ten grueling days of do-nothing, but we were physically there, present on our assigned job-sites. Eventually "the hall"-'ll listen, but it can sometimes take awhile...
----
I don't have a better solution. I went "independent" with my own shingle, which has its own (different PITA) problems. Grass-is-greener.
Most HN readers would do better, blue collar, in a commercial environment (IMHO); residential is too knit-picky, individual homeowners too personally-invested. Union is a great way to start your blue collar adventure, getting paid to learn and fuck up (which you will).
> If enough of us do this, it will work.
Tech scene can’t even muster enough collective consensus to slow a „this is potentially dangerous“ scenario let alone a vague eroding of humanity.
Still I’m all for people’s right to strike for whatever reason they like
I respect your frustrations and can relate to most. But strikes only mean something when they are organised. The best way to organise is through worker unions. If enough employees in a given company join forces, they can achieve a lot.
But here, I’m not optimistic - I’ve never seen another industry where workers have so little class consciousness. Tech workers think they’re very special and they’re so self important, it’s painful. It would be a huge job to get them together to fight for their common interests.
> But here, I’m not optimistic - I’ve never seen another industry where workers have so little class consciousness. Tech workers think they’re very special and they’re so self important, it’s painful. It would be a huge job to get them together to fight for their common interests.
As a software engineer myself, I agree it's painful. So many supposedly-smart people have been so unthoughtful about their own positions and so easily deceived by propaganda (e.g. libertarianism). Now we're all in a much weaker position due to our collective lack of preparation.
And it's not like this was rocket science. You could see it coming from a mile away. Industrial offshoring that lead huge economic disruptions for manufacturing workers (made painfully obvious by Trump's election). Similar offshoring increasingly affecting the technology industry. Then generative AI popped in 2022, and you still have all kinds of software engineers parroting their bosses' talking points.
> I will be on strike for the entire third week of November.
Oh, deer hunting season... when half my team is already on v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike.
I'm already taking the next week for v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike... and two weeks in December too!
And what's more... I'm getting paid for this v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike.
I haven't put the requests in properly - I should do that. I still have 252 hours of v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike time that I need to use in the next two months (or move to other places... some carry over to next year, some moved to the sabbatical time account).
Some of the "you have how much vacation?" is because I am part of a union. Though I'll note that the union also has a "no strike" clause that would prevent me from actually participating in an unauthorized strike (such as this one).
The software that I work on is the boring "line of business" type things for keeping the internals of the organization moving smoothly. No advertising, no dark patterns, no social media (unless you count the internal department message board).
Random techies taking a week (or more) of PTO in November is expected and entire teams moving to a skeleton crew for periods of time in November is something that is already planned for. This is even less impactful if it's scattered across companies.
While my workplace sounds like your ideal, I probably make 1/3 to 1/4 of what my peers do (if I had stayed in working at a company where tech is the revenue generating faucet). Many people have baulked when they see the pay range for the position and the corresponding impact that that would have on their lifestyle.
If you want to protest these things at your employer, start a union at your employer. Here are the steps: https://www.nlrb.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/pages/n...
This site is really just Reddit now, isn't it..
Where is everyone going next?
It is not though. Moderators aren't as crazy on HN as they were on reddit.
The interface is also worse. I preferred old.reddit.com. Hackernews has this weird "you post too much" limitation, which is so annoying.
Reddit meanwhile killed old.reddit.com anyway; logging in defeats the point of using reddit. Things always get worse - and never seem to get better.
Reddit is not crazy because of moderators. It’s crazy because it attracted the wrong crowd and gave them all the exposure they can dream of. Have you checked r/popular? It is filled with memes, celeb gossips, aitah posts, random web links about trump, twitter screenshots about Reddit posts.
R/popular used to be an interesting place to discover new forums. But now it’s just a handful of subReddits showing up again and again - Reddit is just a pigpen, with the same mud slinging by the same pigs.
>killed old.reddit.com
The recent login-required (to use old-reddit) is stupid [0].
For now, just use this tip: `www.reddit.com/r/RedditYouWant+RandomCharactersHere`
and then your UI will be similar when browsing. Be sure to replace "RandomCharactersHere" with something obscure, or else /r/RedditYouWant will overflow with undesired content.
e.g: <http://www.reddit.com/r/PCMasterrace+fuckUspez123>
e.g: <http://www.reddit.com/r/PCMasterrace+PCBuild> (does not require login, yet)
[0] I go back to the SA>Digg>Reddit transitions, with my oldest (abandoned) /r/account [1] dating to 2007. #Return2RSS
[1] Hey /r/Admin(s): yeah, it's me, Rita... howdy you fatcat bayarea phucks
Moderation is better but the discussion itself is fast devolving into low-effort groupthink.
Mastodon
[dead]
ITT we can maybe discuss effective alternatives to strikes
> start alternative better businesses or work for them
> encourage work reforms in society like remote work / 4 day work weeks
> write in
I understand the frustration. I've been in this industry for over a quarter century myself. The proliferation of advanced computing in the palm of your hand with a fancy touchscreen slapped onto it in 2007 seemed like Star Trek magic at the time, but it quickly turned into dystopian tracking before anyone knew it. Now that compute was out of the realm of the enthusiast with the general public okay with locked down devices; with have access to your own hardware now called "jailbreaking," things quickly spiraled to a technocratic state we're moving towards.
LLMs should actually be the level to oppose such things allowing for rapid reverse engineering of closed systems and custom bespoke software, but it's all dependent on "cloud" architecture, and OpenAI/Anthropic could ban you at any time for any reason. Independent models like Kimi 3 and GLM-5 should hedge that situation, but compute hardware required to run such models (e.g. 4x DGX units) use to sell for <$20k, but have now been pushed to nearly $40k. Enthusiasts can no long affordably buy the hardware that was so prevalent that made the modern compute era possible.
I feel your frustration with your "strike" which is an unplanned vacation. It's won't amount to much and hopefully you won't lose your job. Organizing anything at scale will be impossible, because every large at-scale protest you see is organized by the state or massive private interests. They're all psychological operations, yes even the famous 9 minute clip. When you really dig into all of it, the vast majority of people in this world are in the global control net of the new technocratic religion, and they believe everything they see from a major news site on social media, Google or the TV screen.
Also: October 31st is officially "Take the License Plate off your Car for the Day+" (to protest LPR cameras).
Share with your friends.
Reach out if you need moral support at some point.
I’ve been saying we need a general strike for a long time and I’m hoping it will happen
https://generalstrikeus.com/
Thank you, I'm in Europe, not the US. How can I contact you? Could you share an email address?
I'll be straight up. I have been responsible for performance conversations and hiring decisions, and I use both of these as a tool to ensure that engineers on my team are using AI.
The window for the gunslinging no-AI coder sitting in the basement with Mountain Dew and cranking out thousands of lines a day is essentially closed now.
My previous superstar 10x engineers are now superstar 50x engineers thanks to AI-enhanced output. All metrics are up. There's also no negative effects either, in fact incidents and faults have declined.
This position is the equivalent of the delivery driver in the early 1900s who refused to get an automobile and instead insisted his horse and cart is better.
Know that if you oppose a productivity tool that transforms every other engineer, you will be managed out. I've seen it happen more than once already.
> I use both of these as a tool to ensure that engineers on my team are using AI.
So you could definitely be the first to explain to me why AI is the only "tool" that gets forced on developers from the top down with threats like this.
In my experience, developers have to beg management to get productivity enhancing tools like linters, version control systems, editors and IDEs approved for use. AI is the rare reversal where the decision to use it is often made by non-technical C-suite members and pushed downwards, often with the implicit or explicit threat of job loss, like you are making now. But if the productivity gains are so obvious it turns 10x engineers into 50x, why is that necessary, and why do you need to look at anything other than the quantity of a developer's output to know if they're using it?
[delayed]
If your measure of a 10x engineer was in (thousands of) cranked-LOCs/day, then for sure, AI has taken their "performance" to the moon.
The rest is basic hard truth, but I really hope that the "quantity of output" rationale withers. AI's core value for programming is in input tokens, not output tokens.
I don't think this line of reasoning is very reasonable anymore. LLMs are getting good not only at producing high quality output but even preemptively dealing with architecture and other 'big picture' type designs. And this has been true for quite some time, certainly at least since the Fable gen of LLMs.
And while I do expect progress to eventually slow, there's no reason to yet think we're at the plateau point or necessarily even especially close, so they're probably only going to get better. But at this point, even if they didn't I'd still be saying this. 'Programming' with an LLM is a loathsome and unpleasant task, but that's because it's no longer programming but instead an entirely different design-centric domain where it's handy to have some programming knowledge to nudge it in the right direction sometimes.
I think human programmers are going to go the way of human computers. [1] And I'm obligated to link to that because now most people probably no longer even know such an occupation existed, even though it rather obviously must have if you think about the past for a moment.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
There are no negative effects, yet.
Been hearing that for 3+ years now. All the people going "once everything goes to shit they're going to hire me to clean up the AI mess" are still waiting. Meanwhile models get better with every new release.
It's not only about maintenance, I'm waiting to see for example what kind of long term mental effects this will have.
Three years ago the ai struggled to write a single function correctly.
It’s always been like this in reality. Managers matter, engineers do not.
> All metrics are up.
Kindly enumerate the metrics.
"All metrics is up" is a message The Communist Party approves wholeheartedly. 5 year plan delivered in 1 year, give this comrade a medal! anyone?
Oh don't you dare to say the truth or you will be downvoted into oblivion by those who seek comfort dodging reality
You've put words in my mouth. In no part of my post have I claimed that we all need to be no-AI coders, or even that I am one.
This is clearly about distributing the fruits of productivity evenly, whether they come from AI or any other way.
If you work for a salary and aren't a billionaire, I hope you will introspect why you assumed that your fellow working class human being was against productivity - we are on the same team my friend. If you aren't, well, I got nothing to say to you.
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Have fun with that. But … I’m not in a position to have such a luxury. I got a family to feed and bills to pay. Idealism died when I got a mortgage and got married.
Wouldn't idealism be believing you can do nothing and everything will be absolutely fine?
Your idealism manifested as practical flourishing when you started a family.
I am a tech worker. This November 2026, I am going on strike. I want you to join me. This is a 100% human written wall of text. No AI tokens were spent writing/researching this. I will be on strike for the entire third week of November. I invite you to choose your own days that you wish to strike and coordinate with your colleagues.
What am I going on strike for? I've just had enough of a lot of different factors which have, over the last decade or so, completely eroded all humanity and "good" from tech. This is not just about AI. AI is a symptom, not a cause. The cause goes way back. It started with being hostile to the users of software, then to non-users by alienating them from society, and now to those who build software (regardless of whether you write code or not).
What was the point of software? What was the point of building industry, companies, and jobs around software?
It was to empower people. And it HAS empowered people. Software is likely one of the most accessible and cheapest form of relatively advanced technology made available to such a large number of people. What you can do with software today, specially connected to the internet, is pure magic made cheaply accessible to a majority of the world's population. Search, navigation, live communication, live streaming, e-commerce, fintech, health advice are all magic.
The resources you need to build this magic and to use this magic is not very dissimilar. The machine used to develop software is basically the same machine used to utilize that software. This is an engineer's dream.
We envisioned a utopia which would lead to everyone having equal access to information, communication, market access, and general prosperity. I want to emphasize that this is not specific to those who write code. Anyone who could understand the concept of what software can do and had good intentions at heart was part of this.
And then came the greedy grifters. They invested money not just to get returns (they could've gotten returns on any other established field of business), but to gamble for a chance of crazy high returns. They thought software has near-zero marginal cost. They started building walled gardens, to extract rent from users. Build insane profits on that near-zero initial cost.
Then they realized you need to maintain software, specially if you didn't do it well the first time to rush to market (out of greed, to crush any competition). The costs started to rise up. There was still plenty of profit, just not enough to satisfy their greed. So the advertisement business grew, and with it came the largest assault on the privacy of the general public ever.
Advertising essentially took over software. Nearly all software now was being built in the service of getting attention to advertisements in one way or another.
Then they realized they could use this game politics itself. And they did, successfully. And made even more insane amounts of money in the process.
And then they realized they don't want to pay the workers anymore who support the software. So they turned against the workers.
During all this, the general public has lost control of their lives. They need a locked down always online machine tracking their location, health etc. to access their own money, messages, pictures, etc.
The workers building this are forced to rent expensive small apartments near their office, and/or commute regularly, to then video call with other workers, diminishing the utility of the very software they have built, to then further diminish the utility of other software. In a game of pure madness designed to steal everything from the poor and give it to the powerful.
I've had enough.
Fuck their greed. Fuck their pathological necessity to control us.
I'm going on strike. My specific demands from strike may be different from yours depending on your location, your habits, your company, your specific role, etc. But our goals are the same. We want humanity back in software. We want goodness back in software. We want software to finds its way back to empowering the general public, not serve as a resource extraction machine for the rich and powerful.
1. Stop forcing us to write user hostile software. We do not want to lock down software to extract more rent from our users.
2. Stop forcing us to force addictive algorithms. We do not want to force anti-social hate mongering adware junk on people.
3. Stop forcing workers to commute unnecessarily. Not twice a week or once a week or 11.33% of the week. Just no. Let individuals/teams decide how they want to work. If their performance is bad, you already have performance management tools for fixing that.
4. Stop all forms of unnecessary micro-management. The specifics for this depend on your company/role.
5. Stop forcing us to peddle slop. We do not want to shove AI generated bullshit in the face of our users.
6. Stop firing our human customer service staff colleagues to replace them with AI agents. It's one thing to let AI front some of the repetitive work. But AI can't replace a dedicated human who cares about helping the customer.
7. Stop forcing us to deal with slop ourselves. If the software is shit, we need time to fix it. Your deadlines can't go beyond the limits of complexities of real life.
8. Stop forcing "growth". Some of us our happy with our current role/jobs. Not all of us want to write ridiculous long essays praising ourselves for mediocre accomplishments. For many people a job is a job.
I think the specifics of these demands is not important, they shouldn't be universal. Different people have different needs.
The main reason for this strike is to send a message that they can't keep controlling us forever. And that if we don't cooperate with them, their house of cards will fall tomorrow. And that software must remain a way to empower people, not to satisfy greedy billionaires.
So please, join me in my strike for one week of your choice in November 2026.
Your fellow working class techie.
> I will be on strike for the entire third week of November.
My man that is called PTO.
Generally when you are on strike you do not get paid.
Probably will be UTO
Please turn over?
Paid Time Off
> We envisioned a utopia which would lead to everyone having equal access to information, communication, market access, and general prosperity.
I'm curious how you think general prosperity can be achieved by the things you mention. Like, lay it out.
Although I generally agree with this, we software developers are rapidly losing our power to make such demands, thanks to AI. But I wish you all the best.
They are not forcing you to do anything. In fact, companies like Microsoft want you to leave and go on strike forever.
These companies don't care and are too busy building homes (data centers) for agents.
What they are telling you is that you have no leverage against them since they will just replace you with 1 person with 100+ agents.
> So please, join me in my strike for one week of your choice in November 2026
You are free to leave your job and play GTA 6 in November.
> What they are telling you is that you have no leverage against them since they will just replace you with 1 person with 100+ agents.
I'm not one to deny that current AI models can take you quite far along. But you know they can't replace all of us with LLMs yet. Strikes work if enough of us do it, that's why I made this post. And if you believe LLMs will eventually be able to indeed replace millions of engineers, then it's better that we strike now rather than in the future.
But honestly, I have no beef with AI technology specifically or people using it. This is all about being ethical, distributing the fruits of work equally.
> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative. [1]
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Nope, he is free to do whatever. I am just telling the truth and looking at where the money (potentially the salaries of tens of thousands of workers) is going. [0]
Tech Giants Double Down on Their Massive AI Spending [0]
Google, Meta and Microsoft boost AI spending forecasts [1]
Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce [2]
I am telling you that these companies don't care about human (tech) workers striking, since they are too busy spending that money on data centers for AI agents.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/tech-giants-double-down-on-their...
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/b934037d-7fc6-4f93-acdf-a3ec75f45...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50245524
So you honestly think one of the largest and most powerful AI-enabled corporations on planet earth is being stopped from firing these people because of a technicality or two on the books? Why hasn't it happened already?
No I don't want to. The fact you wrote this yourself doesn't matter. No one works Nov to Jan anyway so the impact is nothing. Ranting about us vs them is completely unpersuasive simplifying drivel.
Your list of demands means nothing to me. Social media addiction is fake. RTO is good. My manager doesn't even talk to me let alone micro manage me. Slop is 2024 criticism you need to update your insults.
There is no we. I don't share your goals or outlook and you make no effort to persuade.
> And then came the greedy grifters. They invested money not just to get returns (they could've gotten returns on any other established field of business), but to gamble for a chance of crazy high returns. They thought software has near-zero marginal cost. They started building walled gardens, to extract rent from users. Build insane profits on that near-zero initial cost.
It looks like you are talking about enshittification: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/. There are strong NGOs fighting for the user rights like https://eff.org and https://edri.org.
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With no context on who you are, where you live, what this strike is - what the fuck am I suppose to do with this tell HN post? Do you ignorant bastards just assume everyone is from the same 4th world shithole place from where you are?
If you can add some inkling of details, I might empathise with what you are doing, heck even support you. But if you want to be a twat about it, then I wish you all the suffering in the world.
The other commenter is right, this place is infested with Reddit retards.