Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now – anyone else noticing this?

One article inaccuracy: Amazon treats all of their employees (from the warehouse to Day One) like cattle. Bidets? Chefs?!? If you didn't have to make the free pot of coffee yourself as you ponder which café to fork over money to, consider yourself blessed. In Ruby/Dawson, you couldn't find a bathroom to save your life at times (more dignified to sob quietly on a toilet than a desk as you dealt with the brutal reality of stack ranks and agendas I suppose).

The pay scales differently, no doubt, but only because Amazon has to in order to be competitive (I still remember the recruiter saying "even Jeff himself doesnt have a base pay beyond $160k"). If they could get away with making pee break opportunities miniscule, rest assured they would.

bigyabai · 9h ago

> The point of AI isn't to make workers more productive, it's to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses.

Well, that's what the bosses think. Same way "hybrid" work plans just became a backdoor policy for RTO. But "the point" of AI is just to generate text, regardless of how the subtext around it changes.

johnnyanmac · 4h ago

Context is everything, though. It's what ruined "unlimited paid time off". Now that's seen as a dogwhistle instead of a generous work life balance benefit.

brandensilva · 8h ago

When all this happens you cannot help but see that populism will need to rise again from the ashes as a class warfare is under way as the article points out.

The current administration will consider any action against billionaires as domestic terrorism as witnessed with Tesla's recent boycotts despite this happening all around the world against American's richest companies. Much of America is in the denial phase right now but the writing is on the wall already.

I'm willing to bet most people don't want to work in factories again with Chinese conditions even as Secretary of Commerce Lutnick professes it so but the mega corporations demand the corporate security along with the obvious national security reasons for detaching from China.

As billionaires lust to take more of the pie without one ounce of support or laws or worker rights, against AI that enshittifies jobs and turns white collar work into a race towards the bottom, the populist class has no choice but to fight this head on.

As the government and businesses use AI to target the resistance as they take away rights, benefits, and standards of living you have to ask ourselves what side of history you want to be on because history shows these things tend to come to a massive clash. Power vs the people. Rights vs profits. Morality vs corruption.

We live in revolutionary times, thanks for the article share.

bigyabai · 6h ago

> populism will need to rise again from the ashes as a class warfare is under way as the article points out.

Good luck rallying the troops when half your cohorts are fascists, conservatives or Christians with a chip on their shoulder. Tech laborers don't have the leverage they think they do.

johnnyanmac · 3h ago

Debatable but irrelevant. You don't need too many people striking against essential services to grind entire cities to a halt. And that's how solidarity starts: locally.

Now will we do that? Seems doubtful. People long lost thst solidarity to begin with in lieu of this hyper individualistic digital scape.

bigyabai · 3h ago

So, name your "essential" digital services. Uber drivers start protesting and scabs are automatically hired at reciprocal rates. Self-conscious software engineers take a stand and get replaced by yes-men happy to subsume a six-figure salary to spy on users. Defense contractors start... oh who am I kidding, those places self-select for the least upstanding individuals.

You get the picture. You can't blame half these people either, most of them just want food on the table same as you or me. Relying on class consciousness to revolt against tyranny is like relying on a drogue chute to stop you 10ft from hitting the ground. It's fatalism predicated on the lie that things now are the worse than they've ever been.

johnnyanmac · 3h ago

I wasn't limiting myself to digital services in such statements. But sure. Software engineers get replaced and services stall for months in the meantime, if not years. That's the power workers hold if they can all stand up and push against corporate.

>You get the picture. You can't blame half these people either, most of them just want food on the table same as you or me.

I'm blaming everyone and no one at the same time. It's a prisoners dilemma, and if everyone struck for even a few days it'd be over in surprisingly quick cadence. The dock workers strike barely lasted 2 days, for instance.

But the alternatives make everyone lose out, and people are very risk avoidant, even if they boil in the pot as a result.