I got about 3/4 through before I decided “TL;DR”. He weaves a well integrated story and many aspects ring true-ish. However, I disagree with the foundational concept - “Workism” - which renders the well woven narrative less “true”.

Let’s face it, while people generally would love to have a “vocation” in which they have positive impact on the world, they don’t need to make a religion out of “bullshit jobs”. We are motivated by survival. In our societies, we need money to acquire shelter, food, transportation, spouses (if you’re male), children, and the ability to have time for leisure. We choose our careers based on the signs of the times, a creative mental projection of possible futures, and what we enjoy doing.

If we’re lucky, we get to build a career on what we enjoy doing, even if it is abstract and has no direct, visible positive impact on society as a whole.

When one has one’s ability to survive ripped from them mid or late career (how come nobody talks about the ageism that throws so many people out of work?), it causes one to assess their situation and life. It is literally an existential catastrophe, never mind “threat”.

I was a teen during the bloodbath that was the manufacturing outsourcing. Millions of jobs - people - destroyed when the steel, mining, textile, furniture, and manufacturing industries were unceremoniously obliterated in the name of profit. Whole regions went through the equivalent of a depression for years during the decade of “greed is good”. I saw the fiasco of “job retraining” and the humiliation of workers 40 to 60 years old who couldn’t go back to college and train for a professional job, and those who did and still couldn’t get a job.

It was hell. I was in Pennsylvania. I know. We’re going through that right now. I’m going through that right now. I know what comes next and what my chances are. Thank goodness for me that I knew something like this would eventually happen and saved as much as I could for my whole career. I have just enough saved that I can scrape by - IF the stock/bond market doesn’t crash soon (and it will). I knew I would see Social Security collapse (and It is scheduled to do that two years before my “scheduled” retirement). Sure, it will limp along, paying 70% of what was promised - for a while.

The issue here is not “bullshit jobs finally being exposed as bullshit”. It’s much worse than that. I leave it to you all to ponder what that is.

How do we thrive?

Accept that change happens. Be equal parts curious and critical about the new stuff.

That is not the solution. One cannot thrive if one cannot be seen or has been discarded as a relic no matter how up to date that person is. They will never be granted the opportunity to thrive as they have before as an employee. Their only hope to thrive is if they (magically) gain all the skills and networks necessary to be an entrepreneur that can do it all themselves. Nearly a unicorn.

Meantime while trying, they burn through what savings they have on the hope and dream of “being relevant again” and have about a 5% chance of success.

Maybe the author is misunderstanding the gist of the original article. Regardless, he raises an obviously accurate assessment of those who hold the hiring power. When I was recently out of college learning my craft, it was a common sarcastic refrain of either, “What could be so hard about it, it’s all 1’s and 0’s” or “What’s taking so long - you’re just typing on a keyboard”.

This has been a problem since long before I graduated from college (when classifieds called for 10 years experience on an IBM system that was released two years ago) (see, things don’t change so much - names and places, sure, but not much else). People who are in leadership positions, who think they’re better and smarter than most everybody else, frequently belittle those who do the grunt work, both physical and mental. It’s gotta be a corollary to dunning-kruger theory (or maybe an example of it).

Oh, they “come home to roost” almost immediately - you just don’t see it because whole teams are doing everything they can to hide it or ignore it - nightly manual data update statements, etc… Here’s just one real example.

In my last (read: final) job as a senior software engineer, I discovered dozens of serious problems with the system I was assigned to “maintain”. They ignored all of them - wouldn’t let me fix anything. Meanwhile I was responsible to solve production problems on the daily (duplicate data, insert failures, performance slow-downs, etc).

It wasn’t long before the fact those problems weren’t going away that they became problems I “caused”. Meanwhile, all the fixes I wanted to make were ignored. I had one problem I dissected and and gave my boss a brief write-up of the scenario. He told me I needed to do deeper analysis. When I came back a few hours later with a considerably more detailed explanation, he didn’t read it and complained of a “wall of text”, which he literally told me to write. Then he created a random-number hack to “fix” the problem.

They did not grasp the concept of data normalization and primary keys as they had one particular table that represented two levels of detail (for example, account -> order). They put both in one table and had a code based special update to the “account” number so they would not get a PK violation rather than just fix the data structure.

They had as single database connection open all the time to handle all inserts in a singleton service, then launched as second one on the same database to process messages faster - and couldn’t understand why it didn’t double performance.

The main routine had a cyclomatic complexity of 360! I shit you not! And everybody agreed it was “95% working” even as we continued manually fixing (the same) problems daily.

Week after week, the customer (internal) would raise more data issues as “new” problems. I’d routinely ask two to three questions about the data set and explain that’s the same problem that’s been going on for six months, and if we could just get my PR reviewed, we can test it and deploy it.

All these problems were in a single service.

I was let go not long after the 1 month probation they soon initiated and told I was not performing at the level of a senior developer.

This is how delusional these people are. They refuse to acknowledge their flaws even after hiring someone specifically to solve them. They blithely call their monstrosities “successful” while committing many staff to late nights and weekends “managing” it.

Haven’t read this story, just some of the comments. I’m guessing this is similar to the story I read a decade or two ago about the boy (in China) they discovered who could see in the dark like cats.

Isn’t this how the 3rd Terminator movie started? Software going haywire all over the place?

Well, for me, when this comes to the U.S.A., that’s when I stop using the technology unless I get my hands on pirated software and alternate hardware.

I’m quite capable of walking away from all this. Heck, I swore off video games for 20 years because World of Warcrack was eating my life, so I have receipts.

I recently commented somewhere here on Lemmy that our technology idiots keep reading classic science fiction and fail to grasp that much of it is warning about the horrific effects or uses of the technology. These people are so devoid of human decency and compassion that they think those horrors are the goal. Hell, it’s pretty clear to me that Elon Musk read some Cyberpunk and decided this was a future he wanted to create. Right down to the neuro-chips.

Since you mention Neal Stephenson, I feel compelled to add that Cryptonomicon was about the creation of Bitcoin, a decade before someone created Bitcoin. It’s a dense read, but absolutely amazing.

It’s sad when citizens have to actually bring physical proof of just how angry they are. Good leadership should see that their people aren’t with them well before guillotines and nooses start showing up to the public meetings.