Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? | NOEMA
www.noemamag.com
A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.
  • staircase@programming.dev
    37·
    1 day ago

    This is not a good article

    A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless

    From wikipedia

    Examples of such professionals include ICT professionals, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, mathematicians, scientists, designers, public accountants, lawyers, librarians, archivists, editors, and academics

    Are they genuinely claiming all most of this work is pointless?

    The article continues

    What’s different about this moment is that the questions are not just economic but existential, the kind of questions that cause high-earning technical professionals to contemplate throwing it all away to start a goat farm in Washington or become a surf instructor in Costa Rica.

    I’m sure I’d seen memes about software engineers wanting become woodworkers before the AI deluge.

    The writing continues with needlessly crass language. I stopped reading.

    • calliope@retrolemmy.com
      2·
      16 hours ago

      I find this kind of navel-gazing so cringey, because this literally happens every 5-10 years. I remember when “hipsters” became a big thing, and that was at least two “tech workers are moving to farms” cycles ago.

      This is an awful article.

      Among my Knowledge Worker peers, I am hearing this more and more often: people who want to pick up pottery, painting, crochet or other old-timey analog hobbies

      I wonder why he thinks this is such a big, revolutionary thing?

      Aaron Horwath is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company where he is focused on implementing AI in a way that supports both humans and business.

      Sure, Jan.

    • vanillama@programming.dev
      7·
      1 day ago

      I also gave up reading it, but from a few paragraphs below, when they said knowledge work they mean stuff like marketing, finances and other relatively high paying jobs that most people aren’t passionate about but choose to do for money. I think it’s a weakness of the article that it isn’t upfront about what it means, so you’re not wrong for looking it up, but yeah, they meant that.

      The article itself seems to be on alienation and stress, but as I said I didn’t finish it, as it’s quite long and not engaging enough, at least to me.

      • staircase@programming.dev
        4·
        1 day ago

        I did suspect as much, but if you’re going to put something in the title, perhaps don’t use limited definitions?

        • vanillama@programming.dev
          4·
          1 day ago

          Yeah it’s just very poorly written, I was trying to be too charitable in my previous comment but I think the article deserves a lot more criticism, like about the random change of tone (ex: professional to swearing for no reason to professional again), missing explanations, and taking several paragraphs to explain that sometimes people do shit they don’t like for money, like, we’re human, we know that lmao