by
I started working for reals in IT in 1997 and however bad the 10x Rockstar Developer shit is now: It was worse back then. Systems and networks, programmers, didn't matter, the whole industry had the kind of overwhelming superiority complex you only see in crypto dipshits who are one week from having to sell their Tesla because they put their entire savings into Memecoin and ugly JPEGs of stoned monkeys. Passing out on a coil of cable in the server room after working ten sixteens in a row was a point of pride.
Part of the point of 10x, Rockstar, etc horseshit is the capitalist class trying in vain to recapture our self-inflicted legendry. We were Hackers and Wizards, as opposed to the Lusers. Simon the Bastard was our Robin Hood. We were going to rule the world.
The problem with trying to recapture this, to inflict it on the workers instead of having them come up with more or less on their own, is that the mid-to-late 90s were a gold rush period thanks to massive Internet expansion. There was at least a perception that if you played your cards right and were smart enough and Very Computer enough you could be the next Bill Gates or Seymour Cray, or at least the next Gary Kildall. There were paths into the industry if you were cocky and self-taught enough that really don't exist anymore.
It's no coincidence that in the 90s we pretty self-consciously seized on the culture and legendry from previous boom eras. The previous gold rush was the mid-80s, the combination of the AI boom and the proliferation of PCs, and then before that was the iron age of the late 60s and early 70s before the first AI winter. These were all spaced fairly close together with gaps on the order of a decade or less, so it was easy for lore like the Jargon File and semi-satirical grandiosities like Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal to stay more or less current and find a new generation of eager readers.
The gold rush is over and we haven't really seen a new one since the dot-com recovery. There have been attempts to Potemkin village the perception of a new (or continued) gold rush era into existence, between the ostensible "machine learning revolution" and crypto, but it has no substance. The industry has professionalized. The "code grinders" we used to mock are now more or less everyone. We don't wear suits but only because jeans and t-shirts are the uniform. And that means people are waking up to the fact that we are workers. We're not going to invent a newer and better HTML parser and become millionaires; the C suite and the big shareholders are the ones who will keep getting richer on our work.
And we are workers, and actually recognizing it is good! It's the first step toward being able to actually improve our conditions instead of trying to get that Big Bag at the expense of the people we work with day to day.
i think a lot about this stuff and i think that the prospect of another tech boom, perhaps just around the corner, informs much of peoples' thinking and action in the grand ol' political economy of tech.
and i think for a lot of these people, the idea that there are no more booms left in the tank is unthinkable, because for them human history has been made of technological advances reshaping society, and social changes that weren't driven by that are exception that prove the rule, and the political forces behind past technological shifts have been incidental rather than, uh, the actual driving forces.
so there is this bone-deep reticence to doubt tech companies' claims about what will happen in the future, what futures are within our grasp, what kinds of futures we want; which things are "inevitable", which things are a matter of choice, which things are unthinkable. many a public figure's greatest fear is of being the 2020s version of the guy who pooh-poo'd the iphone just before it came out.
and it's this sense of being part of the driving force in human history that much of the average tech worker's ego and worldview and basic sense of emotional investment comes from. and in that whole narrative, the executives are the heroes - even when they're flawed, even when they're abusive, even when they're simply incompetent - they're the vision-keepers, who are actually steering the ship that makes civilization what it will be. and to an engineer or IT worker etc, siding against them and with the people who quietly empty your trash cans and restock the free drink fridges every evening, seems like shunning progress itself, a sort of voluntary ego-death that gains you nothing.
fortunately, some peoples' consciousness around this is changing, the emperors' naked butts are more and more frequently visible and nasty/embarrassing, and tech workers gradually wake from a slumber carefully orchestrated over several decades, of being told they are a smarter and superior form of office worker, made in the exec-gods' own image.
and maybe there will be another boom, an actual boom that isn't a complete fraud, but if it has as big an impact as smartphones did - wouldn't you want it to be more of a net-positive for humanity than the last ~15 years have been? do you want the same clowns in charge forever? are tech's futures ones that serve human needs or ones that convert all matter on the planet into paperclips? what futures are worth fighting and bleeding for?