Im sorry but I do feel schadenfreude for all the conversations I had 2-3 years ago with programmers who smugly kept telling me that AI and enshittification wouldn't come for them because you can't bullshit their job. So many computer people weren't interested in talking about politics because they "knew" their little corner of expertise was unassailable and so they put their fingers in their ears and acted smugly above needing to unionize and build community structures in the programming industry.

It turns out, as I had been desperately trying to get across to techbro very linear thinker types, that management doesn't care if AI actually works or if their firing of you sabotages the company, they are still going to do it if they buy the narrative and they already bought the narrative a long time ago.

Organize and unionize or the programming industry will continue to enshittify and programmers will be treated worse and worse even though their skills aren't any less vital and AI code sucks so bad it costs companies more money to fix the problems AI creates than to just hire human programmers to do it right.... None of this has to do with rationality and the idea that capitalism has a tendency to point towards rationality is simply not backed up by evidence.

[–] crusa187@lemmy.ml 1 points 38 minutes ago

Could not agree with you more. Best time for our industry to get serious about unionization was probably after the .com bubble burst. We could have leveraged the degree to which our skills were needed in that era and headed off a lot of today’s problems if we had strong unions in place, but sadly it’s still probably one of the lowest density sectors for organized labor. Now would be a good time to start pulling heads out of asses. I think many of our brothers and sisters in tech are starting to wake up to reality now that we’re in our 5th-6th straight year of widespread layoffs for “reasons.”

It can start with honest and direct 1on1 convos in order to thwart groupthink nonsense, and build on things from there. A simple organizing committee is a great first step.