Comment by idiotsecant
Comment by idiotsecant 4 days ago
Yep, the tragedy is that the average tech worker has 'temporarily embaressed rockstar billionare' syndrome, and they've got it bad. They don't need collective action because their beautiful, perfect mind can do much better bargaining by themselves.
Carpenters know that they are labor and labor has value only when it takes it through collective action. Somehow tech workers haven't figured that out yet. When will tech workers catch up to carpenters? Hard to say.
I’ve thought we should mirror skilled labours in many ways for a long time but I don’t think we’ve made an inch of progress.
The way newcomers get “mentored” haphazardly by random coworkers and google/youtube/stack overflow/AI is absolutely bizarre and exceedingly unprofessional given our work has real world implications. Some sort of apprenticeship model and at least a degree of oversight would make so much sense, but… Well, we’ve got this mess instead. It’s strange.
Maybe I only feel that way because I came from skilled labour before I started programming full time. My experience of learning from someone who’d earned their tickets was sooo much better than the self-teaching and cargo-cult leadership I endured in tech.
Despite that, I’m extremely grateful to the people who served as good mentors in my career. It made an immense difference. And while I enjoy self-teaching a lot, it’s awful to need to rely on it because your industry is practically structureless in that regard. So many days of trial by fire that could be avoided.