So it always amuses me when genAI advocates say things like "your job isn't going away, you're just going to be doing management" as if that is a good thing. To my ears, that reads as "you'll still be getting a paycheck, but your job is going to shitty."
So, what is this magical not-a-manager but also at risk of AI taking it away career? Are you sure it actually exists?
How so?
> Still, the bulk of the work is in the details.
The bulk of the work is in describing the details of what you want to see happen to another entity, which is what managers do. Someone else, or something else (like a compiler), will carry out the actual work to see your idea become a reality. Are you under the impression that managers don't do anything or something?
> We can play semantics on what it means to be a manager but the jobs as they were are going away
Are they? It is becoming easier to pass a lot more information off to the worker bees, so conceivably you should be able to do more management now, but the general act of describing what you want to the worker bees to do and seeing them carry out the task is no different. The telephone also increased the capacity of a manager being able to relay information, so while there is still evolution happening, what we're seeing in increasing the information density isn't unprecedented.
And, sure, maybe that will go away eventually. It is conceivable that AI can become the manager too, going off and coming up with its own ideas, plans, and delegating it all without any human intervention. But at that point you won't be a manager. Manager would be the very job on the chopping block.
If you want to say that managing a computer isn't managing I'd accept that stance in general, but the whole basis behind the idea of "everyone will become managers" is entirely premised on the idea of everyone managing computers, so that angle doesn't work within the context of this discussion. You cannot make that claim here.
I doubt anyone would, and that is why we even talked about the time when programmers weren't managers. Again, there really was a time in early computing where humans mechanically transcribed human-level descriptions into machine code. This is the origin of the term "coder". That was the job — encoding one representation into another. Unless you are trying to draw a distinction between programmers and coders? Most seem to consider them to be one and the same. But it wasn't long before we figured out how to make the computer the coder, so humans only had to worry about management of the coders.
> That, to me, is over-generalising what management is
The key difference in traditional use is that management is expected to manage people. As I mentioned before, I'd totally buy into you holding that same position. Except the idea of "everyone will be managers" hinges on the idea that they will manage computers, same as programmers have already been doing for decades. So that position doesn't work here. You cannot maintain that management is only management if it is people being managed, but then accept that in the future we will all be managers...
Straight up, there is no future where everyone will be managers of people. If everyone is the manager, what people would there be left to manage? It is impossible. Everyone becoming the manager is only possible if you include other things like computers. Which is fine, but we already manage computers. There is nothing new on that front. Computers were built to be managed. They are useless otherwise. Programming, for instance, is already always management (where you include computers as something able to be managed), even if there was a brief moment in time where it was more than that.
I get that it's cute and philosophical to think everything is management and I'm one to generalize stuff as well ad-nausea. But when people don't find satisfaction in their work anymore and the excuse is "well, think of it as a promotion", that to me is taking the analogy too far because it suits the current trends.
But we're discussing now what it means to do management. We'll just have to agree to disagree and call it a day
What other branch is there? You are either delegating or doing all the work yourself. Those who delegate become seen as managers, as that delegation requires managing the people (or, possibly things, depending on how you see that) that the work was delegated to. Those who receive the delegation and carry out their task individually are those considered to not be managers, but rather individual contributors.
> However, never would I say that when coding, I'm "managing the computer".
Why would you say anything while coding? I guess if you had some kind of voice-to-text system you might say something, but it wouldn't be "whee, I'm a manager now!!!!" — it'd be specific instructions directed at the computer so that it knows what task you are delegating to it.
> A compiler is a tool, not an unpredictable process I need to manage.
A compiler can be predictable if you perfectly describe the task you want it to carry out. However, that rarely happens in practice. Communicating your intent is always the hard part.
Which isn't much different than people. There are exceptions, but generally if you clearly define what you want them to do, they will execute it perfectly. Management of humans is all about coming back to make sure that what you described was correct and made sense to the receiving party. Which is the same thing you have to do with compilers.
I'd prefer to stay nearer this end of the scale, not that end.
Exactly this. We were (still are) complicit in our own destruction and worst yet when other courageous people spoke up we shout them down, hid away, laughed at their folly, or shunned them outright.
I've had maybe 2-3 years combined where I actually got to build something I could be proud of, and made all the red tape worth it. The rest has been navigating/paying down other peoples' technical debt and being forced to add some of my own when there's no budget for maintenance and the band-aid becomes permanent.
At the start of my career I wondered why anyone retired early when there was so much cool stuff to work on... now I get it. The cool stuff is the extreme minority of available work, and the odds of you getting to work on any of it are down to being in the right place at the right time. As for the rest of the job, I'd sooner step on a nail if it didn't come with the pay and benefits.
All options are good because they are all true.
I think you can extend them.
At no point in history was it ever thus.
There were really 2 sides to the original 'tech' industry: military and consumer. The military side was always about profit, because it was just an extension of the already extant WW2 military industrial complex (and frankly, IBM falls here despite their mainframes being largely used in civilian businesses).
But the consumer side that really grew out of universities into early gaming, internet, and consumer electronics tech, was very heavily driven by design and garage-start tinkerers. That's not to say no one wanted to make money, but it wasn't MBA-bro-driven back then.
Gaming got very corporate very quickly. Atari sold itself to Warner in 1976. Magnavox was a defense contractor. I don't have to tell you about Fairchild or Mattel or the Connecticut Leather Company. On the arcade side, Bally, Midway, and Williams had been making pinball machines for decades.
I'll grant you that there were a lot of "garage-start tinkerers" on the home-computer software side.
I got into IT because I loved working with technology, building communities and game servers and chatrooms and computers and the like. I got lucky that someone found me, my interest in these things, and showed me how it could be a career.
Nowadays though, so much of my time isn’t spent building so much as debunking the latest grift, scam, or lie. It’s spent unfucking arbitrary vendor changes that didn’t fix any actual problems but created a slew of new ones. It’s bristling at the notion that SAML, SSO, and SCIM remain Enterprise options so that a fraction of players can have total control over identity, instead of letting customers and users build solutions that fit their needs. So much time spent talking, not doing, and almost always in service of making some rich old billionaire fuck that much richer while I struggle to buy a home.
I got into this field because it brought disparate people together. People from all over the world, all walks of life, all backgrounds and belief systems and ideologies into a giant melting pot of community. Nowadays there’s so many corporate and nationally-erected fences that everyone is so carefully siloed into approved areas, and any attempts to cross imagined digital borders is viewed as suspect or criminal by default.
The technology of today does not enable, or empower, or bring us closer together. By design, it keeps us apart, distanced, agitated at difference or unbalanced from change. The stuff that fucking works - Home Assistant, the Pi-Hole, my Docker containers - are what is good, and leaves me time to deal with shitty OS updates breaking familial devices, or “smart” appliances that get unprompted updates that break connectivity.
We are miserable because those in charge of the direction of technology - the shareholders, the Boardrooms, the C-Suites, the VCs - all demand it be miserable and extractive, rather than empowering and liberating.
For a lot of folks, AI was the final canary in the toxic coalmine. The realization that this is not a noble cause or profession anymore. That we’re not helping people do better, at least not en masse, but instead making life actively worse for disproportionately more folks than those whose lives we make better.
And it’s a goddamn tragedy.
To say much the same things stuff a slightly different framing:
The promise of "personal computers", and then the internet, making your own applications, etc. was that they would democratize and spread certain capabilities so that everyone could have their tool which accomplished their goals to make their life better. One might even call it owning your own "means of [digital] production", although that comes with some political baggage.
The depressing parts come as that autonomy is violated, as your computer becomes not your computer, but something rented to you by a remote authoritarian who demands it executes a process that improves their lives rather than yours.
In other words, I see it less as connecting groups of people than giving individuals agency--although that agency might be to create (and leave) groups.
And this is different than other industries how?
Everything from electricity to the railroad to trucking to finance to environmentalism has had this arc from wild west to establishment.
Railroads were the tools of robber-barons even in the 1800s. Electricity was captured by the major electric companies before most millennials were born. Finance was a stodgy-suit-wearing-white-guy's game when my dad got into it in the 1970s.
I knew that's what "finance jobs" meant back when I was a kid building fan pages on GeoCities. But GeoCities and Limewire and Napster and Gaia Online never led me to think that's were I'd end up if I worked in tech.
If our boomer parents had warned us about crapitalism as kids, we might have seen it coming before we had already sunk decades into it as an interest and career path.
All of American society tried to warn boomers about this their whole lives, and they consciously rejected it in favor of a movie star who promised the economy would magically be amazing if only we didn't allow the government to have any say in how business works.
"Hey, don't let industries conglomerate because they will do bad things to customers and in general it's pretty inefficient for the economy" was known when Railroads did it two hundred years ago. But that didn't stop Reagan insisting that letting businesses buy up all their competition would magically make prices fall, and it didn't stop the american public from consuming that bullshit with abandon.
Like, I don't know what more you want. My social studies textbooks were pretty clear about the times we had to break up monopolies, why we had to do it, and how it had clear benefits.
Oh didn't you realize that some people actually READ the books people reference here?
Remember murder is only bad when it's not done with an algorithm and a bureaucratic process.
For-profit claim denials should be abolished unless there's a public backstop.
The Joker's monologue to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight about how one group of killings is just normal and "part of the plan", while another is shocking and appalling (specifically when it's a societal 'elite'), was supposed to be at least somewhat outlandish and overly pessimistic as an interpretation of society, but damn these people are trying to prove him right.
Kill thousands for profit -> no need to care, move along, no one is at fault and nothing of importance really happened
Kill one that is responsible for the former -> you must preface your discussion with hundreds of references to murder being bad, and clearly and unambiguously condemn the monster that did this
Humans really do have a bias where doing something small-scale but visceral causes horror and outrage, but doing 1000x that harm by building slow and boring bureaucratic machines of death is not noticeable because, after all, the machine isn't literally putting a gun to the face of the victims, so it's all fine.
https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/51189-presidential-pardons...
If Mangione had killed the UHC CEO by being his insurer and denying his claim for cancer treatment that his doctor said he needed, nobody would be saying anything.
it's cuz the guy is hot. that's gotta be it.
not how the main source of bankruptcy in the US is related to medical bills.
it's cuz he's hot.
Yes, that person is MY DOCTOR. There is no world in which it is reasonable that my health care team says I should have particular treatment, and insurance executives get to say no I don't. Sadly I understand this is not the case, and we value money more than human life, but I do not find that reasonable, no matter how common it might be.
I also understand that medical fraud happens, but I'm not sure the tradeoff to reducing it is worth the lives it's taking when we refuse claims.
Yes. It's the cost of doing business. Why is it that when we talk about the justice system, we think it's better to let a hundred criminals go free to avoid punishing an innocent, but in healthcare suddenly it flips and now it's better to have a hundred people be denied life-saving treatment to avoid one person getting an unnecessary one?
Your hypothetical is frankly insane - nowhere in the world, despite the dozens of types of medical systems, is there a crisis of doctors ordering frivolous multimillion dollar treatments just for fun. There is no incentive for them to do so. Your entire argument hinges on something that doesn't actually happen, just to defend an evil that already exists in the world.
Outrageous idea, but we should trust the people who studied for over a decade to administer medication to decide what medication a person needs, and pry the hands of private business off that process entirely. If someone misuses the system or prescribes obviously wrong treatment, go after that individual. If in 30 years it turns out that doing this does actually cause doctors to order random treatments for fun, then we can talk about scaling it back. Until then, for-profit healthcare is not to be trusted.
The insurers are hardly running up against hard resource limits, where there just isn't enough to go around and they have to triage. They are profit driven entities, and if they were legally allowed to deny all claims they would be required to do so by their shareholders.
No system is perfect, but patients shouldn't die to boost a stock price. And no patient should be required to fight for coverage at their most vulnerable.
Most people do not get to choose their own insurance company, they just get whatever their job picks. Most big companies have directors and officers that personally benefit when a particular insurance company does well. The market is completely broken.
Insurance is an arbitrage leach at best, and extortion at worst. It provides no value to society.
Without insurance Market prices would drive down the cost of healthcare.
In the real world, not a hypothetical, your market driven approach ensures they approve the minimum necessary to prevent customers from leaving. They require patients to to fight them for coverage while they're undergoing cancer treatment, because a dead patient they didn't pay out for is more profitable. Paying for insurance in a for-profit marketplace isn't paying for health coverage, it's paying for a CHANCE at health coverage, and you better be willing and able to fight for that chance while you're undergoing cancer treatment/surgery, or be willing to go bankrupt, or not get the treatment and die. That's the choice the insurance marketplace presents to you.
Not hyperbole, many such stories. My own father in law died in part because his private medicare advantage plan refused to approve in-patient rehab after a brain surgery that every MD working on him said he needed, but would have cost 6 figures out of pocket that nobody could front. The grim irony is he later tried to get out of bed to use the bathroom, couldn't support his own weight and suffered a skull fracture that resulted in a second brain surgery inside of a week, and that was fully covered.
I'll take the bureaucrats. The real world shows they're simply better at this, and Ayn Rand is simply wrong.
For this reason many small businesses don't offer insurance directly, but provide a tax-free health insurance stipend to their employees who then source their own insurance, effectively subsidizing the more expensive premiums as a benefit.
Larger employers have more bargaining power due to the number of employees they bring with them and can get better rates/plans from the insurance companies, and these better rates/plans are typically passed along to employees as a benefit for working there. An employer might cheap out, but that's the same as offering a bad salary.
Very large employers (Fortune 500s and such) are often self-insured, where they contract all the bureaucracy out to a private insurer but the company is actually doing all the payouts. The quality of this coverage naturally varies from employer to employer. I once had a co-worker have a claim denied for an expensive psychiatric facility he sent his son to, but because he had the claim pre-approved he had grounds for a lawsuit. He had to sue both the insurance company and the company we worked for while working there.
The elderly have medicare, and the poor have medicaid, which are taxpayer funded but not always 100% coverage, and there's a bunch of private plans you can buy to fill in the gaps if you do desire with various pros/cons.
Our system is a complete fucking mess, although it's arguably still better than it was pre-Obamacare
I'm not going to wade into the murder tag, but is this the actual incentive? The health care execs don't have enough money to save everyone so they pick who they can help strategically, making sure to help as many as possible, or is the system incentivized to instead maximize finding who can be denied so that the company makes the most money?
All of it is doing it both. The system is cracking and the ONLY REASON why its brought up is because 1 guy did a murder to an important guy. Otherwise business as usual.
Shame on society
Abortion doctors and admins are gunned down
Gender change doctors and admins are gunned down
Judges who allowed for bail and the person killed after bonding out are gunned down
Regular killers and gang members are gunned down
Police are gunned down
Politicians on both sides are gunned down
Mayors that didn't prioritize for natural disasters are gunned down
Feel free to add to the list.
I never made any statement about which actions should be legal. And the facile assertion that endorsing one action is either tantamount to, or requiring of, endorsement of any action that shares an arbitrary attribute you identify is sloppy argumentation; somehow I don't think you would argue that someone supporting police having the authority to use force means they are supporting every instance including illegal uses of force.
"Its giving pearl clutching status quo defending cognative dissonance internal identity crisis having mook behavior" as the kids would say
He deserved death, but the manner in which that death is administered matters. Vigilante justice corrodes the very foundations of the justice system, if we allow it the end result will be far more dead innocent people than guilty ones. I don't want more innocents to die just to kill those who deserve it.
Since you know what excessive is, at what level do the premiums become a moral crime?
Sadly, they want to retain the ability to deny you coverage for any reason. Their maximum profit happens when they pay out as few claims as possible. The only reason they don't already operate that way is legal enforcement, so let's take that to it's logical conclusion
Would you expect every insured without sufficient medical knowledge to understand which denial was appropriate versus which was an error?
There are many crimes today that did not exist 100 years ago and vice versa. Yes, there are crimes that should be punished that are not yet present in the criminal code, and you don't need to be a legal scholar to propose new ones.
I think most people agree deriving financial profit by knowingly denying people necessary medical treatment is immoral.
Part of keeping health costs down is rejecting some treatments as too expensive. Without this, costs will balloon forever as there is no one to say "enough".
The "no politics" rule is about not posting constant "x politician said this about tech" articles, not about banning all discussion of real-world consequences of the tech industry.