this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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402
The proletarianization of tech workers (doctorow.medium.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by erlend_sh to c/technology
102 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

https://archive.ph/hMZPi

Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?

Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.

Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

We deserve better than this. We can get it.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think the number of places for an IT engineer to work is going to reduce to just SaaS companies and cloud providers. The guys working at the fortune 500s will be clicking radio buttons in an app and not know how any of it really works.

[–] cybersandwich 32 points 1 year ago

As someone who deals with this and helps make decisions for a large enterprise, SaaS and cloud service providers already have a really bad rep. SaaS especially. Not only is it all fragmented, as soon as you ever so slightly deviate from out of the box, it's fucked. You may have well just custom developed it.

Not to mention the costs and lock-in. I think you'll see a swing back towards custom software (using open standards and owned data centers and equipment soon. It's already happening. The value proposition of the cloud is dwindling (and honestly never existed for 70% of use cases).

There are plenty of tools now that let you do a hybrid where you can use the cloud as minimally as possible but do everything else "in house".

Id love to see a shift from "new, novel, innovation > *" to a, if we just properly supported and maintained the stuff we have it would be much cheaper and more effective.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

eh, I think on prem will have a resurgence when cloud goes the way of streaming, and becomes so fragmented and expensive it becomes cheaper and safer to build your own.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Cloud is just like social media. It’s providing a “too good to be true” model to attract everyone it can to make them dependent on it before the big bait and switch of price hikes.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

For more details read the book Chokepoint Capitalism

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

I hope youre right. I see companies going from having mature change control processes to outsourcing to a saas or cloud provider who operates like the wild west behind the curtains.