horse_called_proletariat

horse_called_proletariat , 5 months ago

breathing exercises, intense exercise, taking timeout to think about about all your stressors and what actions you can take to reduce them in meaningful ways. i also get really mad and stressed out and close to shutting down sometimes/often. im trying to get into a DBT skills course on top of what i already mentioned as things that have been helpful for me but yeah

horse_called_proletariat , 6 months ago

Yeah, you either work extra hours or you work during the meetings or both or you get de-skilled pretty quickly unless you work open source, second job or personal projects in the non-work hours. Otherwise, you can treat it like BS job but your skills will become BS and you will have to get better at lying and or potentially go into management with that level of experience. RN I’m unemployed and I’d gladly take any position, even if I’m qualified for senior, and I don’t care if I have to work extra hours to keep up and this is coming from someone who has been actively organizing on the job at my last two tech jobs.

horse_called_proletariat , 6 months ago

If you’re a senior engineer, then you should have a team of juniors doing most of the coding. Your job is to architect, peer review, meet with stakeholders, etc… At least that has been my experience. Unless you are on one of those small teams with all senior engineers and then you have to do all of the above, and the coding too. I’ve had that experience as well.

small team with inexperienced new people that needed a lot of training and we also had “architect” positions and those guys I would never even see or talk to, they were in their own realm somewhere isolated from the actual work. what you are describing was more like the “principal” engineer and we had one of those and he was mostly only doing meetings and occasionally doing some work when the itch struck him sufficiently

horse_called_proletariat , 6 months ago

Quiet quitting is sorta stopping working… so I guess we are like a dim lightbulb lol That said though, a burnout antidote is to start a union and love your craft, not your boss’s bottom line. That’s the real boss fight. Grind culture can lead to burnout but frankly it can also not. For me personally, grinding to level up my own coding skills for myself or for volunteer efforts is far more satisfying that working extra hours for some VC’s profits. Not that I haven’t had cool projects at work but you don’t always get to have those and also I am not gonna be putting in unpaid hours of work anymore for their profits. Open source, personal projects for a portfolio, volunteering for something you actually CARE about is a good burnout antidote. If you do it off the clock at a strict workplace you can still enjoy what you got into tech for in the first place while you spend your time at work doing what it takes to stay employed, while organizing, should you choose to do that. In a more bougie workplace you could even do that on the clock and not get much pushback at all. That said, if you really want to be pro-athlete level coder you are probably gonna have to put in more than 40 hours weekly combined at and off work, tech skills are fastly moving target, so it does require it but hell, at least its not physical work… And as far as the corporate porkies and their manager lackies, my observation (* anecdotal but I have also talked to many coworkers about this type of stuff and confirmed it repeatedly) is that the bigger the company, the more clueless they are about who is really doing what of value. Case in point, working hard and overdelivering doesn’t always save you from the random ‘fire’ button. I’ve seen it happen to myself and my coworkers based on really dubious reasoning behind upper management’s layoff decisions, which they are also super un-transparent about. If you are not levelling up skills you will probably eventually get proletarianized, having to do much more manual and outdated work for much less pay than before, which is also good, in a way, because you will find yourself with other proletarianized ex-coders that will want to start a coder’s union much more than a bunch of bougie techies who are feeling themselves as indivuals far more than as a workers collective. Don’t be a sellout, be skilled worker that’s also an organizer in solidarity with the rest of the working class, even if you are a bougie worker. Code for your own enjoyment and to keep up with the craft and for whatever org or volunteer effort you actually CARE about, not for licking the bosses’ boot.

horse_called_proletariat , 6 months ago

work requirement, amphetamine-driven endless curiosity of staring at commands and man pages, interest in programming, initial allure of the concept of copyleft

horse_called_proletariat , 9 months ago

don’t try making changes as individual. do it when you have leverage, after organizing your coworkers collectively into a formally recognized union or an informal grouping of workers that take action together and are willing to take some risks. and I’m not just talking about technical changes to projects or ops, im talking about workplace processes, such as how much unpaid time you work, getting guarantees about not getting laid off, keeping or improving current pay and benefits, getting on the job training, getting to work certain types of skills without getting deskilled, etc.

Otherwise, for technical challenges, a lot of it boils down to how popular you are and internal politics and whether management will or will not get in your way. as a worker, i’m less concerned with how well the business performs and much more concerned with how my coworkers and I are treated. I do also dislike toil but realize that too much automation can also remove the need for myself to be employed. If you are working in the west it can also mean getting yourself replaced with outsourced workers, who will either also be de-skilled and only taught to use the automation you wrote and paid less or very skilled and without access permissions and still payed way less than you. Its a fucked system in every type of way.

I often wish my coworkers would care way more about working conditions and the way they are being exploited and used and less on technical aspects of how the work gets done. Not that a well organized work process and sane technology choices wont make things easier for workers sometimes, but this is traditionally the job of senior engineers colluding with management to figure out and not much of my concern, even if I do have good ideas on how to improve things, which will get ignored by the needs of the business and executive’s silly decisions that they make that day

horse_called_proletariat , 9 months ago

not always (in tech sector). you could end up in a place that is worse or the same level of bad, also. its happened to me a couple of times already, though the opposite also has.

also, conditions in the sector as a whole will change, as more “belt-tightening” is imposed, as a result of an already stagnating industry that is relying more and more on extracting money through subscriptions and is less able to deliver on innovating tech promises that it was able to in the past.

i think the golden age of tech sector unionization is yet to come but will probably happen in the next 20 years, similar to how many telecom and electrical companies got unionized in the US in the last century, but only time will tell of course. that said, imo, we should strive to do what we can to push unionization in this sector along at all points in the process, even if that means doing so at another job and not the current one. hell, google workers are already doing so, as are grindr, kickstarter and some other places

horse_called_proletariat , 9 months ago

united we fight, divided we beg for sure

horse_called_proletariat , 10 months ago

war is just a way for businesses to shore up their falling profits. destroying another country gives victor companies chances to rebuild, which temporarily shores up profit rates because so much capital is destroyed and the creation of new capital during the windup phase actually increases the rate of profit for a little bit. there are other techniques as well. that said, the corruption was so rampant that they didn’t even execute that well. either way the human costs of continuing to run capitalism as usual are staggering and wars are one of the many facets of that. all the other explanations and media outrage etc and just cover stories to make it palatable for the public, which has already believed the big lies about democracy and freedom existing under capitalism

horse_called_proletariat , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

War is about the rate of profit decreasing and is one of the premier ways of conterveiling that decrease. Rate of profit is total surplus value (which is the amount of labor that the worker does not get paid for, which the capitalist pockets in order to reinvest in his business) divided over the cost of constant capital ( machines and commodites that go into production ) + the cost of labor (also called variable capital). ( r = s/ (c + v) ) When taken on national scale or on an industry scale or even on a global scale, you can see that the overwhelming tendency is for this value to decrease. Carchedi and Roberts have rather good empirical confirmation of this in their work, as do many other economists who study this tendency. Marx is the first one to come up with this, though the labor theory of value had been around previous to him in various unfinished forms.

The tendency of this ratio to decrease is due to the tendency of capitalism to, over time, invest more and more in labor-saving capital as a cost cutting measure to remain competitive and corner the market while overproducing commodities until it reaches limit of realizing profit while at the same time reducing its reliance on workers (labor) by laying people off and keeping fewer workers around to work the more advanced means of production. Initially capital is in an ascendant phase but overtime all of capital reaches this crisis.

This very tendency is what causes capitalist global crisis. Capitalist crisis is what causes global imperialist conflicts and wars. Iraq and Afghanistan are just examples.

What you are referring to in terms of military industrial complex and resource wars is simply the class of business owners employing some counterveiling tendencies to reverse the trend temporarily. Cheap resource extraction actually decreaces the value of C in the formula S/(C+V), so this increases the rate of profit. Making workers desperate for work, such as what’s happening in Ukraine, due to the war, decreases V without decreasing S, which also increases the rate of profit. Destroying an entire country destroys massive amounts of both C and V and allows entire industries to be started anew, which restarts the accumulation cycle in that region to its starting point, at which point it can enjoy a certain limited period of increasing rates of profit before the inevitable decrease.

Checks and balances and other half measures won’t do. The capitalist revolution overthrew kings and queens and got rid of feudalism but it benefited overwhelmingly the class of business owners and not anyone else. To get the rest of the classes to go along with them, they came up with fake shams like the Constitution and business-friendly philosophers came up with nonsense like the bill of rights. You should ask yourself whose rights? Clearly of those that control business, those who won the borgeois revolution. Those same people who, in the case of the US, fought to not pay taxes and own slaves, the same ones that did not allow regular working people to even vote without owning property. Its clearly a system for owners by owners with hogwash and bullshit for everyone else.

If we want a planet that will not be destroyed by this crashing system that only benefits a rather miniscule portion of the planet we (workers) will sieze control through revolution and reorganize society to benefit all from each according to their ability to each according to their needs. This will involve great deals of class consciousness as well as class based violence and terror in the period before establishing a dictatorship of the workers and solidifying the power of the workers councils. After that we will finally have the freedom necessary to reorganize production into a new mode of production that does not involve wage labor, commodities or classes, with the help of highly advanced means of production and advanced planning techniques as well as a culture born from class conscious struggle and the creativity of the working masses that will replace the current superstructure.

Naturally, ours is a fighting ideology but not one dedicated to shoring up the profits of a tiny minority of sick bastards.

horse_called_proletariat , 10 months ago

pay my personal expenses with it but keep working a job. donate to the communist party of my choice, so we can have a legal defense fund and do fancy projects that we can’t afford now and can help out comrades in need. donate to every strike fund in the world that will accept a payment. maintain a large list of such funds. donate money to battered women’s shelters and to give direct aid to poor and homeless around the world. repeat until the money runs out. as far as the technical aspects of how to manage money that large without losing it due to bank system failure, i guess i could open thousands of accounts in different banks and put 250,000 in each of them or do some other strategy. ill take off a few months from work to research how to do it and talk to people who know more about the subject until i have a solid plan for that.