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The Tech Workers Building A.I. Are Scared of It, Too

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philb2

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/opinion/ai-tech-worker-organizing.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

What explains the gap? The standard answer points to culture. Tech workers often see themselves as professionals aligned with management, not laborers facing exploitation; they identify with their companies’ purported missions of driving innovation and solving complex challenges; they are well compensated and enjoy conditions that other workers envy.

But recent research suggests that the tech industry’s unique professional culture can also enable collective action. Tech workers often choose their careers at least in part because they believe technology can benefit society. When their employers violate that belief by building drone targeting systems, supporting immigration enforcement agencies or harvesting workers’ expertise to train their replacements, many experience it as a profound betrayal.

Unlike in much of Western Europe, where workers are unionized at high levels and can bargain as an entire sector to address problems in their industries, in the United States the legal system makes organizing and bargaining exceedingly difficult.
 
philb2 said:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/opinion/ai-tech-worker-organizing.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

What explains the gap? The standard answer points to culture. Tech workers often see themselves as professionals aligned with management, not laborers facing exploitation; they identify with their companies’ purported missions of driving innovation and solving complex challenges; they are well compensated and enjoy conditions that other workers envy.

But recent research suggests that the tech industry’s unique professional culture can also enable collective action. Tech workers often choose their careers at least in part because they believe technology can benefit society. When their employers violate that belief by building drone targeting systems, supporting immigration enforcement agencies or harvesting workers’ expertise to train their replacements, many experience it as a profound betrayal.

Unlike in much of Western Europe, where workers are unionized at high levels and can bargain as an entire sector to address problems in their industries, in the United States the legal system makes organizing and bargaining exceedingly difficult.
Click to expand...

Not just that. People have been told for a long time now that tech jobs are the future and that we need lots of them. AI is coming for all their jobs now even faster than it is coming for the trades. For decades people were told to go get a university education and that tech jobs were pretty much guaranteed to get jobs. The script is getting flipped on its head now and people are not happy.
 
Ididar said:
we need lots of them
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It's more likely that there's a need for a small number of workers who need advanced training and cognitive skills. The number of true tech jobs is tiny. Apple only has 50K, and they manage to do hardware design, OS, and applications. If Apple can do all of that with 50K, how do you justify millions of office drones redoing the same CRM type of nonsense SaaS as every other company? Musk fired 80% of Twitter, and it continued running just fine. Was there even a service disruption?

Trades aren't much different. 30 years ago students were told that they were guaranteed a job as an electrician, and in many areas there was an oversupply of them. Similar stories for pharmacists. I don't think there's a single field where there was no oversupply at some point. "Tech" jobs are unique in that the oversupply of labor was bigger than anyone could imagine.
 
stuffmonger said:
It's more likely that there's a need for a small number of workers who need advanced training and cognitive skills. The number of true tech jobs is tiny. Apple only has 50K, and they manage to do hardware design, OS, and applications. If Apple can do all of that with 50K, how do you justify millions of office drones redoing the same CRM type of nonsense SaaS as every other company? Musk fired 80% of Twitter, and it continued running just fine. Was there even a service disruption?

Trades aren't much different. 30 years ago students were told that they were guaranteed a job as an electrician, and in many areas there was an oversupply of them. Similar stories for pharmacists. I don't think there's a single field where there was no oversupply at some point. "Tech" jobs are unique in that the oversupply of labor was bigger than anyone could imagine.
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Saying Twitter ran "fine" is a bit of a stretch. He turned it into a pretty big cesspool. But, if that was the goal then mission accomplished. I'm not saying cuts weren't necessary but he went way beyond what he needed to do into revenge. He also oversaw a 30% reduction in traffic and a big uptick in bots. So there's that.

Yes, there are oversupplies in many industries, no doubt. Some companies run a bit fatter but still make pretty damned good money doing it as well. On the flip side, some companies are running so lean that a small blip can bankrupt the company, or cause it some serious financial headaches.
 
Twitter is worse, since you have to pay $8/mo for people to see your posts. I bet the goal was easy advertising for xAI. If the IPO goes well, they'll get the $50B back.

I'm no fan of Musk, but the cuts could been more. Valve only has a few hundred people, but they do a wider ranger of services. Craigslist has only 20 employees, but they don't have video or payments. It's best to be as lean as possible in terms of headcount for an Internet company.
 
stuffmonger said:
Musk fired 80% of Twitter, and it continued running just fine. Was there even a service disruption?
Click to expand...
Since Musk took over, Twitter's functionality has been gimped, too, though, so it needs less resources. For example, you basically can't see replies to tweets unless you're logged in. Surely that causes at least a large reduction in hardware needs. I'm not really disagreeing with you, just pointing out this is less of a compelling argument than it could be.
 
stuffmonger said:
Musk fired 80% of Twitter, and it continued running just fine. Was there even a service disruption?
Click to expand...
To be fair when private equity buys a company the PE often stops innovation and just suck the value out of the company. Think about all the user data\content in Twitter. That being said as Ididar mentioned it could be a revenge FU purchase.
 
There was innovation and new features on Twitter like MechaFuhrerious Grok 3 which lasted one glorious day :)
 
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