what’s wrong with the title?
I don’t understand your downvotes. If they are from scabs, or they are from people who only read the title and thought this is some managerial shit.
because I joined a long time ago?


We are throughout USA and Europe. I can give you personal advice as someone who emigrated, and you might want to ask the question in the community chats of different chapters, but TWC is for collective action, not for individual career support


we don’t take dues and we are not an union in a legal sense. Requirements: time, energy, and motivation to learn and contribute. You’re going to get trained on things once you join.
Join our community space before the 101 if you like: https://techworkerscoalition.org/subscribe/
I actually teach how to plan, execute, and assess political and social impact, beyond practicing it in my orgs. Are you aware there are plenty of disciplines working exactly on this? Your rethoric is just a way to justify your inaction. If nothing can change, it means you’re exempted from your responsibilities. Too easy.
Everything made by humans can be destroyed by humans. No social system is forever. The rest is just skill issue.


yeah, it’s quite big, because in a way it’s the biggest win so far for the BDS in American tech.


I unionize people in the tech sector. Childish nerds are much harder to work with than anybody else.
I would pick a coked out analyst over an emacs user every day


nerds are often egotistical, selfish and individualistic. Let’s kick them out and unionize instead


So the author’s argument is that youth have just gone to gig work instead of traditional jobs. OK, maybe true, but first of all, this is not a good thing on its own either. And secondly, we have to consider why gig work even exists, aside from being a fresh new way to exploit workers and deny them the traditional protections of the labor market. Because there is a specific reason gig work exists right at this very transitional moment in the workforce, and I’ll give you a spoiler: It exists because of AI.
Considering the author is possibly the most relevant scholar on (against?) platform work, I’m quite sure he would agree with you. The article implies that AI is deskilling and displacing workers and that’s intrinsically a bad thing.
“alignment problem” is what CEOs use as a distraction to take responsibility away from their grift and frame the issue as a technical problem. That’s another word that make you lose any credibility
I’ve met the author IRL. He’s quite famous in his niche


there’s an argument that this is just the targeted ads bubble that keeps inflating using different technologies. That’s where the money is coming from. It’s a game of smoke and mirrors, but this time it seems like they are betting big on a single technology for a longer time, which is different from what we have seen in the past 10 years.


It’s Germany, they have labor rights that they want to uphold. This is a so-called “warning strike”, to signal that there will be collective legal action if they get fired without abundant severance pay.
Basically TikTok doesn’t want to negotiate with the union and the union is showing that there’s support for collective legal action instead of a 1-on-1 dismissals that would cost the company way less. The company has an interest in negotiating because it’s quite sure to lose the legal battle.


Here “replace” doesn’t mean “being able to do the same job”. It means you get fired. Automation in most fields never even tried to get close to a level of quality comparable to what a human can do, but it was enough to displace a majority of workers.
The author is a machine learning engineer, so he’s perfectly aware of the limits of whatever is called AI. The point is to make those limits irrelevant by lowering the expected level of quality, as it happened with textile, food, and so on.
Most people don’t know they are allowed to dream, let alone in which direction. While this might not connect with you, there are millions of tech workers who have zero perspective on what’s out there.
I would argue the title implies “leaving the tech industry”, and in the beginning it says the article is for who wants to still work with the same skillset, but outside of the tech industry as in the companies who produce technology for profit. Probably only the tech co-op part can be said to be still within the tech industry
yeah, I conveyed a similar feedback to the author of the article. Thanks for the analysis