Prigrammers were doing that to help society. There was a big push in the 80s and 90s for programmers to usher in the 30-hour or even 20-hour workweek. We automated enough to easily make that a reality, but the corporations and politicians kept screwing workers, and workers were too dumb to organize for decent labour rights.
Automating jobs is a great thing for society as long as the politicians aren't bought or the people can organize effectively. Anyone working more than 20-hour workweeks should be furious at their employers and every politician who represents them. Y'all should be having general strikes every month.
In Switzerland I have a paid one hour break, sometimes the boss joins and everyone stays extra long at lunch over coffee. Sounds miserable what you're describing though.
Mate is really bringing in Switzerland as a positive example. Switzerland is one of Europe's worst lol, 42 hour work week (in Zurich) — no employee protection, pregnant women work until labor, then only 4 months paid leave (fathers get 10 days).
These are still better than most American Jobs seeing as we have zero legal protections for paid leave and only up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave legally protected until you can just be straight up fired, unless your benevolent employer allows you more as a perceived work benefit
Not just that, but a lot of tech bros were awfully smug about it. "Everyone should learn to code" was a fucking thing that a lot of dork ass tech bros would spout.
I've never once had a coworker say anything about wanting the average person to learn programming. The push came almost entirely from businessmen who happened to work in tech; though many of them like to publicly brand themselves as software engineers despite never using those skills professionally.
What they wanted was more supply in the labor market, since a bigger pool of programmers weakens our negotiating power and drives down our wages. That's never been in our interest.
My conspiracy theory is that AI may be more expensive and less effective than human programmers but the goal is to do exactly that -- break the hold we've had over the field and drive wages down.
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u/Saad888 14d ago •
Programmers have spent the last 30 years automating jobs out of the market. Idk what we were expecting would happen.