As someone who has worked in IT support I have seen users habitually click away clearly formulated error dialogs that told them exactly what the cause of their problem was and how to address it. Only problem? They did not read it, as became clear when I asked them what it said.

I have had people who I repeatedly had to explain the the same thing, made sure they got it by having them do it twice and a week later they would come again with the same question like sheep, not even aware they asked that one before.

Some problems are communication problems. Others are actual people problems that could indeed be solved by getting better people. Anybody who says otherwise is invited to do first level support for a year.

Remember that most communication is non-verbal?

For individual workers, the best thing is to work @ something you love && get good pay. Like a compiler engineer, a kernel engineer, an AI engineer, etc.

Many employers actively discourage people from doing work that they are proud of. You cannot be proud of something that is built as cheaply as possible.

You can get employees to care about customers or the product, you cannot get employees to care about profits and dividends.

Anecdotal, but I used to be proud of the work I produced, and then it got old and repetitive. However, as it was getting old, I was earning more. Now I'm in a place where if I were to quit and find something I could be proud of, I would have to accept a huge reduction in compensation. No thanks.

I'd rather have a much higher "just a paycheck" and find things to be proud of outside of work. Plus no one else cares anymore so why should I? Just pay me a lot and I'll keep showing up.

This leader is not going with the quickest or cheapest option. Doing so would probably be laudable. They are going with the claims made by someone that a certain way is going to be quicker or cheaper. It doesn't matter if it actually is, or ends up being, quicker or cheaper. One plan is classified as meeting the requirements while another plan is classified as being cheaper, the cheaper one will be chosen even though it doesn't meet the requirements.

I work in implementation of large enterprise wide systems. When I do projects that span departments/divisions/agencies what you’re describing is the biggest hurdle. The project always starts with “we’re bringing everyone together into one solution” but as time goes on it starts to diverge. It’s so easy to end up with a project per department vs one project for all. You have to have someone with the authority to force/threaten/manipulate all the players onto the same page. It’s so easy to give in to one groups specific requirements and then you’ve opened Pandora’s box as word spreads. It’s very hard to pull off.

I think public sector (governments) is the hardest because the agencies seem to sincerely hate each other. I’ve been in requirements gathering meetings where people refused to join because someone they didn’t like was on the invite. At least in a for profit company the common denominator for everyone is keeping their job.

The rise of AI actually is also raising (from my observations) the engineer's role to be more of a product owner. I would highly suggest engineers learn basic UI/UX design principles and understand gherkin behavior scenarios as a way to outline or ideate features. It's not too hard to pick up if you've been a developer for awhile, but this is where we are headed.

  Build out what that tech debt is costing the company and the risk it creates. Balance that against other goals, and find a plan that pays it down at the right time and the right speed.

Because they want to feel superior as the ‘this was my idea and you executed on my idea’ nonsense. Their answers to most ‘why are we doing this ?’ ‘trust me bro’. I am perhaps generalizing and there are outlier product managers who have earned the ‘trust me bro’ adage, but most haven’t.

This PM behaviour will never change. Engineers have said enough is enough and are now taking over product roles, in essence eliminating the communication gap.

Simple:

1. People lost ownership of the things they work on. In the early 1900s, more than half of the workforce was self-employed. Today, it is 10% in the US, 13% in the EU.

What you produce is not “yours”, it’s “your employer’s”. You don’t have ownership, and very limited to no agency.

2. People lost any tangible connection to the quality and quantity of their output.

Most workers don’t get rewarded for working harder and producing more or better output. On the contrary, they are often penalized with more and/or harder work.

To quote Office Space: “That makes a man work just hard enough not to get fired.”

3. People lost their humanity. They are no longer persons. They are resources. Human resources. And they are treated like it.

They are exploited for gain and dumped when no longer needed.

If anything happens, the company will lay off people without a care for what happens to them.

Even when they do care, such as in a smaller company, their own paycheck is being weighed against the employees, and they will almost always pick themselves, even if they caused the problems.

CEOs making millions while they lay off massive amounts of people is the norm now, and everyone knows it.

You can't blame the employee for not caring. They didn't start it.

Because there's still people doing less work than you do for a bigger paycheck

Because you'd get fired or laid off for someone working for 1/2 to 1/4th of your pay

Because they make you jump through multiple rounds of interviews and technical tests while people above you have a far less barrier to being hired

Because someone stole credit for your work

Because you'd get re-hired and find a mountain of shit code from a company that off shored their dev team

Because companies stopped giving significant raises that didn't keep up with major inflation in the past few years, while your work might have gotten them many multiples more of profits

Idk it's just a mystery we'll never know

My local grocery stores won’t accept pride as payment for food, and working harder doesn’t make my paycheck increase.

I remembered our conversation well, because it left me a little confused. We were talking about handling large volumes of messages. And when I said "well it really depends on the volume, you could be fine with batch processing in many cases" he jumped on it like I had never heard of a queue.

Then I offered as part of my design (and from my XP in more than 10yrs of working in products with petabyte datastores) that dealing with so many services connecting to the Data store directly could run into scale issues. He flat out rejected the claim (because that didn't fit the current system design).

Guess what we're discussing now and have spun up a whole team to complete? Forcing every micro service to use a single API rather than elasticsearch directly, because of scale.

To solve this, one can be an instrument for change. Network, band people together, evangelize better ways forward, all while not angering management by operating transparently.

Sometimes, that can work... up to a point. To broadcast real change, quickly, you really need anyone managing all the stakeholders to lead the charge and/or delegate a person or people to get it done. So the behavior of directors and VPs counts a lot for both the problem and the solution. It's not impossible to manage up into that state with a lot of talking and lobbying, but it's also not easy.

I'll add that technological transformation of the workplace is so hard to do, Amazon published a guide on how to do this for AWS. As a blueprint for doing this insanely hard task, I think it holds up as a way to implement just about any level of tech change. It also hammers home the idea that you need backing and buy-in from key players in the workforce before everyone else will follow. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/clo...

- Requirements are rarely clear from the beginning;

- We (DE) are not enabling self-service and automation so we are drowned in small requests (add this column for example;

- Upstream rarely notify us about the changes so we only know when downstream alerts us. We end up building expensive pipelines to scan and send alerts. Sometimes the cost of alerts > cost of pipeline itself;

- We have so many ad-hoc requests that sprint is meaningless. If I were the manager I'd abolish sprint completely;

- Shadow knowledge that no one bothered to write down. I tried to write down as much as possible, but there are always more unknowns than knowns;

Working in DE definitely gives me enough motivation to teach myself about lower level CS.

You don't need to be anywhere close to exact, it's just helpful to know whether it costs more like 5 hours a year or 5 weeks a year. Then you can prioritize tech debt along with other projects.

To the great surprise of my younger self I have never seen “it all come crashing down” and I honestly believe this is extremely rare in practice (i.e. the U.K post saga), something that senior devs like to imagine will happen but probably won’t, and is used to scare management and junior devs into doing “something” which may or may not make things better.

Almost universally I’ve seen the software slowly improved via a stream of urgent bug fixes with a sprinkle of targeted rewrites. The ease of these bug fixes and targeted rewrites essentially depends on whether there is a solid software design underneath: Poor designs tend to be unfixable and have complex layers of patches to make the system work well enough most of the time; good designs tend to require less maintenance overall. Both produce working software, just with different “pain” levels.

At a high level nobody works smarter and harder than people working for themselves because they see the direct results in near linear proportion. So basically half the workforce was in that situation vs a tenth. Say nothing about taxation and other things that cost more the higher up you go and serve to fractionally break or dilute the "work harder, make more, live better" feedback loop.

I would hope people would be more responsive to the actions of companies. Earlier in my career I looked for another company when the discrepancy between CEO bonus and employee bonus was larger than what I found reasonable.

And that exactly used to be different and still is in small companies.

I will be held to the standards of billionaires and politicians. Not one micron more.

There's a small but substantial number of engineers out there who haven't operated at the kinds of scales where hyperscalers' limits become normal architectural problems and don't have the humility to imagine that it could be the case. (e.g. blob stores do in fact have limits you can hit, and when you operate at petabyte scales you have to anticipate in the architecture that you can hit them for even trivial operations.) I also work on petabyte datastores and have encountered a bunch of those engineers over time.

To be fair though, that's the small minority of engineers I've encountered, and if it wasn't arguing about the types of scale problems unique to petabyte scales, it'd be about some other nuanced subject matter. It's a humility problem.

I once had an interviewer expected me to answer "message queue", despite all of his answers to my questions pointing to an MQ not solving the issue.

He was getting really frustrated with the "it depends" and the questions, until I answered "Message Queue" and he sighed in relief.

I passed the interview but rejected the job offer.

Honestly failing candidates in an interview put of a sense of superiority is just about saddest thing I've heard. I mean how lonely do you have to be ?

/endrant.

Aso, it's crazy that an employer would yell you which individual employees voted for/against your hire.

Yup, this is the key issue and what makes it primarily a people problem. Technical solutions don't work if the main problem is getting buy-in to spec/build/adopt one, unless you're willing to build a lot of things you end up throwing out. So instead the bulk of the high risk work is actually negotiation between people.

even without perverse incentive, it seems to be human nature that work expands to fill available time (this is another kind of perverse incentive)

maybe best to frame problems of human nature as technical problems. ex, the preferred path should be the easiest path

sadly, people do not behave like the utopian ideal

> Their answers to most ‘why are we doing this ?’ ‘trust me bro’.

I've profoundly annoyed so many PMs asking this question, I don't get it. I believe it's because they don't want to admit it's because it's an exec's-idea-of-the-week rather than market/biz/customer research and analysis.

> Engineers have said enough is enough and are now taking over product roles

Fingers crossed. It's about time we up our communication- and managing-upwards skills. I feel many PMs are sustaining their roles just because they're sycophantic yes-men to the execs, because execs got tired of engineers saying "no".

Having read a few criticms of PMs on HN, I can imagine the "your companies just didn't hire the good PMs" comments incoming

A furniture maker builds a chair, ships it out, and they don’t see it again. Pride in their craft is all about joy of mastery and building a good external reputation.

In most software jobs, the thing you build today sticks around and you’ll be dealing with it next month. Pride in your craft can be self serving because building something well makes life easier for future-you

Now of course you I can’t blame people for wanting more money and better standards of living, and that’s always been a thing. But many jobs that used to afford you a middle class life don’t anymore for young people.

I saw my engineering school software engineer department going from the least sought after specialty to the most in one year. The number of people passionate about tech didn’t suddenly jump, but each year we have a report about the last promotion average starting salary and software engineering was at the top for the first time.

It can be annoying to say, but modern factory produced things are in an absurdly higher quality spectrum than most of what proceeded them. This is absolutely no different from when machined parts for things first got started. We still have some odd reverence for "hand crafted" things when we know that computer aided design and manufactured are flat out better. In every way.

As for ownership, I hate to break it to you, but it is very likely that a good many of the master works we ascribe to people were heavily executed by assistants. Not that this is too bad, but would be akin to thinking that Miyazaki did all of the art for the movies. We likely have no idea who did a lot of the work we ascribe to single artists throughout history.

On to the rest of the points, even the ones I somewhat resonate with are just flat out misguided. People were ALWAYS resources. Well before the modern world.

Lololol

Edit: I'm already down one - for people that don't read wikipedia here are the 4 dimensions of alienation of a worker as listed in the wiki:

1. From a worker's product

2. From a worker's productive activity

3. From a worker's Gattungswesen (species-being)

4. From other workers

Edit2: People [in America] will moan about their jobs, their bosses, their dwindling purchasing power, their loss of autonomy, etc etc etc but then come back as champions of capital. You see it all the time - "my job sucks but entrepreneurialism is what makes America great!!!!!!!". I've never seen a more rake->face take than this (and on such an enormous scale). It's absurd. It's delusional.

My dad worked as an engineer in the same firm for 30 years and retired. The company was founded before his father was born, and was publicly listed before he was born.

Substantially every company I have worked for didn't even exist 30 years before I joined, let alone before I or my father were born. Most won't be around in 30 years.

Several employers nearly went out of business, had substantial layoffs, or went thru mergers that materially impacted my department/team/job. The guys at the very top were always fine, because how could the guy in charge be responsible?

Even within the companies I stayed 5 years, I had multiple roles/bosses/teams.

Your housing costs keep going up.

Your food costs keep going up.

Your transport costs keep going up.

Your healthcare costs keep going up.

Your education costs keep going up.

Your family costs keep going up.

And why? Not for any good reason, no. Just because they can. Your landlord isn't content when you pay $2,500 per month for an apartment, no. They need $2,600. $5 isn't enough for a dozen eggs, it needs to be $6. And what if we slapped 10-200% tariffs on random things, depending on the day? Wouldn't that be neat?

The collective delusion it requires to not see what the problem is is astounding. It's actually quite depressing, because it makes me think we're never going to meaningfully solve this problem. Maybe companies have to start executing employees or something, I don't know. Maybe then people will be bold and decide to re-organize society.

But - sometimes drastic measures and hurt feeling are needed to break out of a bad attractor. Just be sure you’re OK with leaving the company/org if your play does not succeed.

And know that as the OP describes, it’s a lot about politics. If you convince management that there is a problem, you have severely undermined your technical leadership. Game out how that could unfold! In a small company maybe you can be the new TL, but probably don’t try to unseat the founder/CTO. In a big company you are unlikely to overturn many layers above you of technical leadership.

Yeah I did that in my last job as a platform engineer, I particularly intented for other teams to be able to work in parallel and also not blocked on me so I have more time to refactor or generally things to make life easier for future-me.

Long story short, I got laid off.

There are real customers that want cost reductions that lead to reduced lifetimes, because they have no intention of using the thing they are buying for decades. It isn't just manufacturers looking to make money through planned obsolescence.

Everything you said in your post is true, especially about 90% of PMs being presenteeist yes men. Indeed most PMs are at best a waste of time, and at worst a net negative to the company and anything they touch.

However, a good PM is worth their weight in gold. I maintain the cynical view that 80% of the work done at any large company is useless. That's why a good PM is so invaluable

A good PM is the difference between your project aimlessly spinning its wheels and changing directions for 8 quarters (like most projects), or relentless execution with full focus and rewards from higher-ups.

Clarifying what executives want, nudging their worst impulses towards something more productive, maintaining focus and clear communication amongst multiple teams with competing priorities, working with engineers to design features and schedule them realistically on the road map, exploring the company beyond your current team to find impactful projects to work on or to join forces with... All these things are exhausting, painstaking, and take a level of attention to technical details and human affairs which most of us don't have the patience or energy to deal with. It's more than a full time job.

But if a PM does it successfully, you actually ship important stuff, and that stuff is so important that it moves the whole company forward, and improves the bottom line so much that no one can ignore it. And that's why the PM role continues to exist, despite most of its practitioners being useless suckups. The impact just one PM can deliver by shipping a successful and important project at a large company outweighs all the useless baggage that is the rest of their colleagues. And that's why you continue to invest in your PM org, and hope you get a few nuggets of gold amongst all those turds.

Tech workplaces are incredibly ephemeral too. Reorgs, departures, constant hiring - so if you leave today, in 5-10 years, there might be no single person left who still remembers or thinks highly of the heroic all-nighters you pulled off. In fact, your old team probably won't exist in its current shape.

If you build quality furniture for your customers, chances are, it will outlive you. If you work on some frontend piece at Amazon, it won't. I think the amount of pride in your workmanship needs to scale with that.

But, it doesn't. It's not as if you get to sit around doing nothing if you did a great job, you just get some new software project. The company gets to enjoy the benefit of a job well done.

In guitar manufacturing, CNC machines were a revolution. The quality of mid-range guitars improved massively, until there was little difference between them and the premium ones.

In furniture, modern manufacturing techniques drastically worsened the quality of everything. MDF and veneers are inherently worse than hand-crafted wood. The revolution here was making it cheaper.

CNC and other machining techniques raise the high bar for what's possible, and they have the potential to lower costs. That's it. They don't inherently improve quality, that's a factor of market forces.

It says early 1900s, so no. It does largely refer to farming, but farming was insanely lucrative during that time. Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.

Remember, subsistence farming first had to end before people could start working off the farm. Someone has to feed them too. For 50% of the workforce to be working a job off the farm, the other 50% being subsistence farmers would be impossible.

Advising on where to go from there in an actionable way that produces good results is the hard part. Marx didn't do it. Those attempting implementation of his ideas have an exceptional record and not in a good way. And worse still, some of the worst aspects of those movements are the ones that stuck around to be peddled again and again under different brands.

Worker alienation is perfectly visible on the real world. I don't think anybody disagrees it's common.

But software development is different. There has been many decades where software developers suffered very little alienation. It only changed with the universal adoption of "corporate agile".

As a millennial kid at the time, I remember the 90's movies and sitcoms (Office Space, Friends, the Matrix, Fight Club, etc) where the biggest problem GenX had at the time was, *checks notes*, the lack of purpose from being bored out of their minds by a safe and mundane 9-5 cubicle job that paid the bills to support a family and indulge in mindless consumerism to fill the void.

Oh boy, if only we knew that was as good as it would ever be from then on.

I remember the mass layoffs Yahoo had at the dot com bubble crash, when they had a 5-15 minute 1:1 with every worker they laid off. Now you just wake up one day to find your account locked and you put it together that you got laid off, then you read in the news about mass layoffs happening while they're now hiring the same positions in India and their stock is going up.

No wonder young people now would rather just see the whole system burn to the ground and roast marshmallows on the resulting bonfire, when you're being stack-ranked, min-maxed and farmed like cattle on the altar of shareholder returns.

Also you know what, some code is disposable. Sure, we all want to craft amazing sculptures of metaphorical beautiful wooden chairs that will last a lifetime, but sometimes what the customer needs is a stack of plastic chairs, cheap, and done next week. Who cares if they break after like 1 year.

So, sometimes when I accept that my boss wants something rushed through, I don’t complain about the tech debt it’ll cause, I don’t fight back about how it should’ve designed to have wonderful code… not because I have no pride in my work, but because I understand the businesses needs.

And sometimes the business just wants you to make plastic chairs.

Particularly, furniture benefits greatly from hard wood. At least, the furniture that is old that you are likely to see. It also benefits heavily from being preserved, not used.

TLDR: survivorship

The typically large farms with nice houses were making reasonable money, and in a lot of places, only the house remains of the farm. My old neighborhood was a large farm, subdived into about 1000 postage stamp lots around 1900; the owner's house got a slightly larger lot and stuck around as your mansion.

The small farms that were within the means of more people tended to have shanty houses and those have not persisted. If the farm is still a farm, it's likely been subsumed into a larger plot.

Wrong answers only please.

I'm guessing you're a PM or have been? You did the classic 'opening agree to disarm, then disagree with a long sales pitch' that they're so good at ;)

It seems to me you're vastly overselling the impact of even the 50th percentile of PMs

I think project management is useful (I'm not going to get in the weeds of PM vs PM vs PO etc). But I feel we've over-promoted classic project managers into roles driving product direction without them having the experience or acumen for it.

Generally incorrect, but it depends. Wear can cause mdf/veneer to have "bad optics" compared to solid wood, but mdf/veneer can have more suitable physical properties and enables more consistent visual quality and design possibilities.

The appropriate comparison is which is better for the same price

Those are usually large plantations, and the people who owned them weren't just farmers but vast landholders with very low paid labor working the farm (at one time usually enslaved). I doubt they were representative of the typical turn of the 20th century farm.

If we're speaking from vibes rather than statistics, I'd argue most 19th century farmhouses I've seen are pretty modest. Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious.

Also hard to ignore the survivorship bias there. The small/bad/ugly/whatever houses are gone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

That is wildly inaccurate. Do you think people were flocking to cities to flee the "insanely lucrative" jobs they already had?

Farm labor paid significantly less than industrialized labor at the time. I suspect in addition to just making things up, you're looking at a few landowners who were quite wealthy due to their land holdings (and other assets) and what they have left behind while completely ignoring the lives led by the vast majority of farmers at the time.

There was a brief ray of hope in the late 90s, with the startup gold-rush idea that we would all be millionaires soon. Then the I realized the founders had 4000x my equity those companies...

Lol are you really gonna go with "I'm a software developer, fuck all the restaurant workers, teachers, plumbers, janitors!"

This is why Marx's ideas failed in the West - toxic individualism - and flourished in the East.

Lol alienation of labor is not a single "sentiment" - it's a core principle. So like it or not you share a core principle with Marx.

The 80's and 90's saw the beginning of the "fuck you, got mine" mentality that pervades all but the most egalitarian societies. Reagan and Thatcher deregulated and privatized everything, and as a result a select few made a mountain of money and destroyed the middle class. "Shareholder value" and mass layoffs became the order of the day way before the dot com bubble burst. GenX knew we'd never have it as good as our parents - we just didn't know how fucked we were going to end up.

What really killed corporate loyalty for a lot of us was the lack of jobs that have lifetime pensions, if I understand it correctly. Why would I agree to work somewhere til retirement if I would be better jumping somewhere else to make more money now?

This is why I incessantly preach to my coworkers: "you are not your job". Do not attach to it emotionally, it's not your child, it's a contraption to solve a puzzle. It should be easy and relieving to scrap it in favor of a better contraption, or of not having to solve the problem at all.

I agree with everything else you wrote. Especially the bit about over promoted project managers. That's my thinking as well.

It's not ignored. It is already encoded into the original comment. No need to repeat what is already said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecom_Gold

I mean, one of those reasons is "When I leave this job will I be able to get another job" is a huge deeply life affecting one.

If you want me to work on COBOL from 1988 then you've limited my work prospects to one of a very few employers in the country at a very specific pay range. If I instead tell you to eat a fat one and go with $language_de_jour the number of employers and potential salary range is much, much larger.

There are no plantations around here. This was cattle and grain country in that time. Farmers got rich because all of sudden their manual labour capacity was multiplied by machines. The story is quite similar to those who used software to multiply their output in our time, and similarly many tech fortunes have built mansions just the same.

> Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious.

Well, they weren't palaces. You're absolutely right that they don't look like mansions by today's standards, but they were considered as such at the time. Many were coming from tiny, one room log cabins (stuffed to the brim with their eight children). They were gigantic, luxurious upgrades at the time. But progress marches forward, as always.

There is more to alienation than equity.

The non-farmers were already accounted for. Did you, uh, forget to read the thread?

No, I agree. But pulling the ladder from under them is not the biggest issue per se since every generation after them did them same if they could get on the ladder, the big problem with boomers is their immense hypocrisy.

GenX and Millennials knew that the situation was every man for himself grab everything you can while the going is still good, but crucially IMHO they didn't try to gaslight the next generations that this system of gains is somehow fair or the result of hard work and self sacrifice.

But boomers indulged in the period of sexual liberation and drug use, while then preaching about conservative family values and war on drugs when they got older, they enjoyed crazy good housing market and unionized jobs while preaching you should pull yourself by your bootstraps for a job that treats you like a disposable cog and won't buy you a house, they vocally hate socialism while depending on a generous social security system they designed for themselves and costing the taxpayer a huge amount on socialized government healthcare programs paid by the younger generations, etc the examples could go on. You can't hate boomers enough for this. Granted, not all are this hypocritical, but enough for the dots to form a line on the graph.

One of the issues with the system, was it couldn’t generate reliable billing.

One customer had been running the system for free, for years, because we couldn’t send them an accurate bill.

One look at that bowl of spaghetti, and it’s easy to see why.

> There are no plantations around here.

FWIW you haven't really stated where "here" is for you. It's not necessarily going to be the same for everyone, and based on the parent comments, the potential area under discussion could include the entirety of the US and Europe (although the initial comment only mentioned UK specifically, it doesn't seem clear to me that it's explicitly only talking about that). I'm not sure you can categorically state that no one in this conversation could be talking about areas that have plantations.

Few teams other than green-field start-ups have flexibility regarding tools or technology. My first job was COBOL, 'nuff said about that. Even at start-ups the leads / architects choose most of the technology, and many of my ideas were shot down, such as using C++ in the late 90s, and using Scala in 2010.

People seem to think agile has increased alienation, when in fact the pre-agile world was also terrible. What matters is the quality of the team, not the methodology.

I also see survivorship bias keep coming up. Each time it claims to be have been addressed in the original comment, and that's that. Yet I don't see how the existence of surviving mansions today proves anything about the prevalence of wealthy farmers at the time

Similarly, there's no inherent reason subsistence farming should prove or disprove work outside the farm. The existence of farms large enough to grow and sell surplus food, that doesn't mean all farms could do so

This sounds like a semantic disagreement.

I think you are using the word "farmer" to mean "large agricultural landlord". Today, those terms may have a lot of overlap, because most of us don't work in agriculture like we did then, but in the past, it wasn't so much the case.

Back then, the landlord who had the "big house" wasn't called a farmer, but often a "Lord" or "Master".

"Farmers" were mostly people who worked as tenants on their land. The confusion in US history started early as the local feudal lords of the time (the founding fathers) rebranded themselves as farmers in opposition to their British rulers, but the economic structure of the societies was scarcely different.

I don't know how delusional you have to be to look at the conditions behind the Iron Curtain, where nations had to build walls to keep their citizens from leaving and a meaningful number of people were willing to risk death to get out, and say they were flourishing, but I'm glad I don't have what it takes to get there.

...

> theory

these two words aren't interchangeable

> Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Wilhelm von Ketteler, Louis Blanc

...

> generic cog-in-the-machine critique that is explored by many other people

literally only one of the names you mentioned were writing post industrial revolution - the rest had literally no notion of "cog in the machine"

you're trying so hard to disprove basically an established fact: Marx's critique of exploitation of labor post industrial revolution is certainly original and significant in his own work and those that followed.

Exactly. That's why you can't jump from "people don't feel like they own their labor" and "people bemoan their boss" to Marx's theory of alienation.

> literally only one of the names you mentioned were writing post industrial revolution - the rest had literally no notion of "cog in the machine"

But the very framing that this is an ill that is unique to industrial society is Marxist. Slavery, corveé labor, taxes, poor laborers, marginalisation existed for thousands years in one form or another.

> you're trying so hard to disprove basically an established fact: Marx's critique of exploitation of labor post industrial revolution is certainly original and significant in his own work and those that followed.

I don't dispute that Marx's critique of exploitation of labor post industrial revolution is original or significant. I dispute your claim that people who share similar sentiment have to agree with Marx's theory of alienation.

I know devs like to say they would hire anyone, but they're not the ones hiring. At best you get to interview people already prefiltered by HR which... looks for keywords in CV.

Feudalism in North America, in the 1900s? Your geography and timelines are way off.

Name the Eastern nations plural that built these walls please. As far as I am aware, the G in GDPR stands for Germany, a country/nation/state which is (and always has been) firmly Western. People on here have such an infantile recollection of actual history.

Anyway, leaving aside debates of where the prime meridian of West vs East falls, it should've been manifestly obvious that in 2025 I was talking about China...

Edit: DPRK counts I guess although I'm not sure how many people would call what they have over there "communism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Juche_Idea

Those are far closer to medieval feudal peasantry than 20th century industrial labor, regardless of the lack of an official hereditary aristocracy in the US.

I've never found it too difficult to get hired even when the requirements don't list something I've done already.

Yes surely I'm the one concocting things (rolls eyes)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Party

As Sartre said - it's pointless debating people like you because you're just amusing yourself and it's only my responsibility to use words responsibly.