Tech Workers are just like the rest of us: miserable at work (opens in new tab)

People have the notion that tech workers are overpaid man-children that have to be babysat by their companies

The reality is, we're constantly dealing with increasingly tighter deadlines and unreasonable demands to deliver products that, even if they make it to market, are likely to be shut down within five years. We're basically glorified sandcastle builders

With AI, things have gotten even worse, people now believe everything is easy just because they can build a to-do app with a prompt

My observation at my employment was the separation w the IT people and the scientists. Also grouped apart from IT was the procurement, operations, etc. But the key observation I had was for social functions, such as a hike at the ocean, a BBQ, riding bikes at lunch, etc, the attendance ratios always demonstrated a very low turnout of IT people but high attendance from the others. The IT people always had too much work to do, too many deadlines, and broken things to address. The scientists and others could flex a lot more and it was much harder to pin them down to the potential improvements not made due to not aggressively working their issues.

At first I thought, was this caused by everyone learning to code? Well of course not everyone codes, but I’m just saying that this was a meme and it did become more possible for non-technical people to be more efficient.

I have never worked in tech, but in my mind, all of these perks mentioned in the article were the tech company’s tactic to get the tech worker to stay in the office. Some of the comments in the WSJ section are kind of mocking and derisive, but I get the tech workers’ morale hit because this is what made (most? some?) of them work really hard.

Then there’s the older photo shown of Zuckerberg yucking it up with employees. I think what that’s trying to convey is now there’s less chance for the workers to freely give input.

Lastly, I see they mentioned AI specialists still being rewarded more. I was reading an older article about the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” recently where it had something about how the job market could bifurcate more and more into jobs that require more skills/talent and those that do not. Would this mean that most tech workers would do well to try to get into AI somehow, or try to get a PhD?