I think there’s also a lot of people who haven’t quite realized what side they’re on. A ton of techies confused better than average pay with being part of the upper class and didn’t realize that the average CEO/VC views us roughly the same as the janitors except more expensive and less reliable. If you’re currently working at a stable tech job, it’s easy to focus on the cool things you can do and ignore how hungry those guys are for a massive cut in salaries, how much harder it will be to get an new job, and that trying to start your own company is harder than in recent decades with more established gatekeepers and LLMs being very good at copying a successful product.
New graduates haven’t known anything else and don’t have the money to be nostalgic about a party they missed.
> New graduates haven’t known anything else and don’t have the money to be nostalgic about a party they missed.
Respectfully disagree. New grads entering the workforce now started college in 2022. This was during the post-COVID "Great Resignation" when offers and employee leverage were at their peak and AI wasn't that useful.
Very different from the "use AI or your fired/blackballed" age we live in now.
Exactly what I was thinking when a recent big bank CEO accidentally let his contempt slip out. He referred to mass layoffs as "It's not cost-cutting. It's replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we're putting in." [1]
That "lower-value human capital" isn't janitors - it's a wide array of highly skilled professions including software engineers and many others. Of course the guy who's at the top engaging in nothing but 'unfalsifiable' fuzzy actions, and could be replaced (sans his connections/corruptions) most easily of all, is ultra-high-mega-untouchable infinity value humanity embodied.
I really don't like what big business does to people, on the bottom and the top. The fact somebody could even use the term lower-value human capital without cringing at themselves, let alone to a reporter in public - that's one hell of a bubble this guy lives in. And now we're dumping "AI" into this bubble. WCGW?
[1] - https://news.sky.com/story/standard-chartered-to-replace-low...