This doesn't match up with what I've heard from people I know within Apple, but perhaps things have changed recently. Certainly the encrapification seems to have gotten worse - my suspicion is that the services businesses have too much power within the company and are damaging product design to boost their own numbers.
Agreed - once you have to do something for a living in order to survive (and probably under the orders of clueless management and company executives) it becomes "work" that is no longer fun.
Same way that being forced to read for school often kills the desire to read for fun.
> I'm somewhat genuinely worried about the human race becoming like the people from Wall-E. We already get food almost on-demand, entertainment to consume too. As of right now somebody alive has to produce that entertainment, but once we've figured out how to automate that (ComingSoonToATheatreNearYou) we'll just be amusing ourselves to death.
Congrats everyone, we seem to have arrived there sooner than expected!
> You are not your job. You're a person first. Your ability to connect, be present, and make people feel understood is what makes you irreplaceable to the people around you, which is the only market that counts.
True, but losing your job is still a big deal. It often means that you lose your income, your health insurance (in the US at least), many (if not most) of your daily interactions with other people, and your social status.
> My technical skills are being disrupted by machines - that's fine I'll go do other things.
As others have noted, it's great to not actually need the paycheck you are working for.
> Your ability to connect, be present, and make people feel understood is what makes you irreplaceable
They say this to a group of people that often struggles with all of these but still have managed to make a living off of solving technical problems in the past. Don't worry, you can just fall back on your famously great people skills!
Have you ever had an experience where you objectively were doing something technically complex yet someone dismissed it because it wasn't "relevant" in their eyes?
That's a people skills problem, believe it or not. At the very least, it's a philosophical problem.
Something in my comment triggered people to think I'm saying that communication skills aren't important or worth bothering with, so obviously there's room for improvement there.
But that's kind of beside the point isn't it? If you've spent years of your life learning specific skills to offer some benefit to society, and suddenly the society decides they need far fewer people with those skills (and thus don't want to employ you), that just fundamentally has to suck for a lot of people.
Saying "cheer up, you can just compensate with this other skill" is just ignoring that fundamental reality. And I think we've all met people who were diligent and technically competent but "a bit weird", but found a refuge in tech (note: I'm not necessarily talking about "assholes" here). Those people are going to have an even harder time, and that's not because of their "toxic" identification with their job (i.e. source of income and primary form of service to society).
And I hesitate to mention this, but I don't feel I'm in this situation. I just see it happening to people in my industry and worry about the future.
> > My technical skills are being disrupted by machines - that's fine I'll go do other things.
> As others have noted, it's great to not actually need the paycheck you are working for.
Um. Yes. There's a link on "other things". It's to a site for a bike tour. The author seems to be implying they don't really need a job.
I still remember hearing a group of homeless people near the cable car turntable at Powell and Market in SF talking about the days when they used to be printers. That was, for several hundred years, a stable, well-paying job.
> In the US, it means that you lose your income, your health insurance
Luckily, in the US, you can get another one much more quickly than anywhere else in the world, and be payed several multiples of what anyone else is payed.
> in the US, you can get another one much more quickly than anywhere else in the world
Depending on the economic conditions for the year, it can still take months:
> To illustrate the recent trajectory: one analysis found that in January 2023 it took job seekers 268 days on average to land a job offer, whereas by August 2024 this had improved to 182 days (about 6 months) (How Long Does it Take to Find a Job in 2024?). Another dataset focusing on tech jobseekers showed a similar trend – those in 2024 took about 247 days on average to secure a “good” job, down from 281 days in 2023.
The whole world is hurting pretty bad right now when it comes to tech jobs - America seems to be hurting the least.
I'm not saying the tech job situation in America isn't bad - but the world dances to America's fiddle, and its frustrating hearing Americans complain about how hard their situation is while their boot is firmly planted on my neck
To be specific, it’s tied to good employment. Part-time and low-salary jobs don’t often (usually?) provide it. So trading a good tech jobs for “things to keep busy” loses the insurance. Unless you can afford cobra and that only lasts 18 months. At what tends to be 5x the price.
I completely understand where you are coming from, but try not to hate on American laborers because of this situation, that is no more helpful than Americans blaming immigrants for their job woes.
It is the wealthy capitalist class that has the boot planted on all of our necks.
I do recognize that the outcome is worse for some people than others, but keeping us fighting each other is how they continue to maintain power.
(Technically it is optional if you don't need to ship signed apps or submit to the app store and you don't care about the rest of Apple's developer program.)
"Delinquency" is a bit of a joke/misnomer since modern lenders have abandoned grace periods. This of course means that they can immediately charge late fees...
Student loans are a particularly interesting scam. Young people with no income, assets or collateral are funneled into significant long-term debt that is difficult to discharge, even in bankruptcy. Credit card companies might have tried this for a time, but universities are the ones who really took the ball and ran with it.
It seems to be a corrupt bargain with universities, who can raise tuition and fees with impunity (indeed both have outpaced inflation at least half a century.)
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