Summarizer

Pandora's box is open; we're moving towards a world where white collar workers will be working 24/7 and they'll be expected to do so. It won't matter if I'm washing the dishes, walking the dog, driving to the supermarket, picking up my kids from school. I'll always be switched on, on my phone, continuously talking to an LLM, delivering questionable features and building meaningless products, destroying in the process the environment my kids are going to have to grow in. I'm a heavy LLM user. On a daily basis, I find LLMs extremely useful both professionally and personally. But the cognitive dissonance I feel when I think about what this means over a longer time horizon is really painful.

You can do it on a personal level, but when everyone else is overworking you, your manager will compare your output based on your peers, and based on it, you might be negatively impacted

Yeah absolutely. It’s hardly things like Claude Code that are the problem, Slack (or other forms of communication) are much easier to slip into personal time and have been a trend since Blackberries were invented.

- maternity leave - paternity leave - overtime - not having to answer a call or email outside of work hours - workman’s comp / short/long-term disability for issues with my back or wrists or eyes or… - about 100 more things

The difference here is, you type a command into your phone at 3pm. Put it down to go play with your kid for 3hours. Type a new one in at 9pm before bed where you’ve been binging your wife’s favorite show. Then you wake up at 10am to a holistic transformation in your business that would’ve taken months previously in your career. But whatever, another command and it’s off to 11am frisbee.

That sounds more like the fault of shitty managers who would find a way to make you work 24/7, with or without Claude Code "On-the-Go".

One of these is immutable (shitty managers) one of these is new. I personally am all here for the brief human funtime before we all get paperclipped and whatever, been having a ton of fun with CC/Codex, been pushing my own startup forward... but ... You do see the issue here right? It's the power imbalance. Shitty managers still control your means to eat.

> It won't matter if I'm washing the dishes, walking the dog, driving to the supermarket, picking up my kids from school. I'll always be switched on, on my phone, continuously talking to an LLM, delivering questionable features and building meaningless products, destroying in the process the environment my kids are going to have to grow in. I remember hearing similar criticisms of continuous delivery. On one end of the spectrum people who had to wait months to get changes out now got them out relatively quickly. On the other end of the spectrum, some person was going to push changes at midnight. A decade on forward I've never actually worked at a shop that at scale did continuous delivery in its truest sense where changes go straight to production. Simply, nothing beats a human in the loop; it's always about balancing the costs of automation and a lower barrier to entry. I imagine this kind of thing, if it ever actually takes hold and can be adopted by a larger subset of engineers, will follow a similar path. Long way of saying, I don't think you're Chicken Little but also don't start breathing into a bag just yet.

Did they say the same when Email took over? Or Slack?

Are you suggesting that workers are NOT already more constantly "on the clock" with mobile phones/email/slack/text than before those things? (I'm not really sure LLMs will make it that much worse here, but all those things have been harmful to workers already.)

Well yes, they did... For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29201917

Remember "Crackberry"?

Had the same feeling many moons ago when they gave me an office smartphone where email from the company was available 24/7. At the beginning was answering emails at midnight, nowadays couldn't care less. Just wait until work hours. You'll likely get used to this new thing too.

That reminds me of my father calling the mobile phone and laptop issued to him as the "dunce kit", so he could work at home as well. He used to say that since the 90s, ahaha.

You can do that if you want. Ill refuse. Ill take a manual labor job doing basically anything else for 40 hours a week over what your describing.

You can just say no.

In many countries, these and other jobs show you cannot. If you don't, others will and so you won't have a job very soon. Especially if these types of jobs lose their shine/prestige and are basically call center quality/pay like jobs in 5-10 years.

Move somewhere with strong worker rights/laws even if you are not in a union. Here no with a normal job (not freelancers / contractors etc) is looking at their work phone/email outside 9-5/4-5 days a week; this frustrates US companies who merge/acquire companies here greatly but they cannot do much (firing for no cause is very expensive) except slowly move the operation to the US and wind down here, which is expected; everyone is already looking for new jobs as no one wants the 'performance reviews' with the broken records like 'you are not a teamplayer because your colleague was trying to reach you at 22:00 Friday night'.

This was the end game with or without AI. It was always going to result in a zero-sum game because the factories that are open around the clock can output more products - which is exactly why a lot of manufacturing has non stop shift work. If you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table and a competitor will gladly take it. When you saw 996 being talked about it should have set a few alarm bells off, because it started a countdown timer until such a work culture surpasses the rather leisurely attitude of the West in terms of output and velocity. West cannot compete against that no matter how many “work smarter, not harder” / “work to live don’t live to work” aphorisms it espouses. This should be obvious by now (in hindsight). You can blame LLM or capitalism or communism but the hard matter is, it’s a money world and people want to have as much of it as they possibly can, and you and your children can’t live without it, and every day someone is looking to have more of it than you are. This isn’t even getting into the details of the personality types that money and power attracts to these white collar leadership roles. Best of luck to you.

The Chinese are not doing 996 as much these days. It is illegal for starters.

Chinese are way past 996 and onto 007

This has been like this forever. Change is that software engineers, historically spoiled and expensive is going to have a brutal reality check - aka we will work just everyone else.

This is a bit too "plugged in" for my liking. If I am in line for coffee, it's usually respite away from work, not an opportunity to do more. However, I do love the tmux + worktree + claude setup. I use this now and I know a few peers who do too and it's very enabling. This is what work feels like these days: cycling through agents, each working on a task, checking their work, unblocking them.

I'm wondering about the same thing, I imagine it's good for posting it on the #hustleculture circles.