Job postings are a kinda weird phenomenon. For one thing, they’re very modern. It used to be that most people either inherited a job (I’m a baker because my pa was a baker and our tiny hamlet needs…
Colophon
Ownership Aside from clearly-marked quotes from other sites, I write every word of my posts. They are wholly mine and do not represent anyone else, including my current employer. All mistakes are therefore also mine. Researching I read using NewsBlur, which aggregates my sites and newsletters. You can see
Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Tech workers are a weird choice for "princes of labor," but for decades they've enjoyed unparalleled labor power, expressed in high wages, lavish stock grants, and whimsical campuses with free laundry and dry-cleaning, gourmet cafeterias, and kombucha on tap:
The Rise of the Decentralized Startup
I think we’re seeing a very big shift right now in how startups are created and operate. But before we dig into that, I want to spend some time talking about work. For centuries, work has bee…
How People Use ChatGPT
Despite the rapid adoption of LLM chatbots, little is known about how they are used. We document the growth of ChatGPT’s consumer product from its launch in November 2022 through July 2025, when it had been adopted by around 10% of the world’s adult population. Early adopters were disproportionately male but the gender gap has narrowed dramatically, and we find higher growth rates in lower-income countries. Using a privacy-preserving automated pipeline, we classify usage patterns within a representative sample of ChatGPT conversations. We find steady growth in work-related messages but even faster growth in non-work-related messages, which have grown from 53% to more than 70% of all usage. Work usage is more common for educated users in highly-paid professional occupations. We classify messages by conversation topic and find that “Practical Guidance,” “Seeking Information,” and “Writing” are the three most common topics and collectively account for nearly 80% of all conversations. Writing dominates work-related tasks, highlighting chatbots’ unique ability to generate digital outputs compared to traditional search engines. Computer programming and self-expression both represent relatively small shares of use. Overall, we find that ChatGPT provides economic value through decision support, which is especially important in knowledge-intensive jobs.
It's the 21st century – why are we working so much? | Owen Hatherley
Owen Hatherley: The right calls for hard work, the left for more jobs. The dream of mechanisation leading to shorter working hours seems forgotten
Job Titles: Be Like The Wolf - DaedTech
I lied… kinda. A couple of weeks ago, I talked about job titles and said that I’d probably conclude the post the following week. But then I got sidetracked by shiny new topics and failed in that quest. Then there were the holidays and all that, so things got complicated. It’s time now to get...
A new middle-class fraction with a distinct subjectivity: Tech workers and the transformation of the entrepreneurial self
With the rise of digital capitalism, a novel occupational segment has emerged: so-called ‘tech workers’. Members of this grouping render and encode the digital technologies that permeate contemporary social life. While there are many studies about highly precarious digital labourers, research on these digital professionals remains scarce. Based on 40 original interviews, the article explores the subjectivity of tech workers. Specifically, it asks whether understandings of middle-class employees as entrepreneurial selves with a holistic market orientation hold true for this grouping, or whether new cultures of subjectivation are emerging. The key finding from these interviews is that tech workers show contours of a post-neoliberal subjectivity. While the figure of the entrepreneurial self remains an alluring force, this study detected four transformative cultures of subjectivation: (1) a return of the critique of economic inequality; (2) a concern for diversity; (3) an ethic of mindfulness; and (4) a lifestyle that signals ordinariness. These distinct forms of subjectivity point to the formation of a new middle-class fraction. However, drawing on the sociology of critique, this article also considers how this transformation of subjectivity can be appropriated as yet another new spirit of capitalism.
Making your first startup ops hire – what founders should look for - PostHog
Most founders I talk to approach their first ops hire in a totally sensible but wrong way. Their typical approach is to look at the long list of admin…
Stack Overflow puts a new spin on resumes for developers | TechCrunch
Stack Overflow, the community site best known for providing answers for all of your random coding questions, also has a thriving jobs board and provides
It’s high time to rewrite the hiring script
The disconnect between how many companies claim that they only hire the best and how they try to actually do that is perverse. A depressing number of job postings are barely more than a list of tec…
Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working | Brookings
The job market is a whole lot better than it was during the worst of the Great Recession, but around 7 million American men between the ages of 25 and 54 – mostly too old to be in school and too young to retire – are neither working nor looking for work. That amounts to […]
i called this phenomenon "the pachinkofication of intellectual labour" and this is very close to how i imagined it graphed: buttondown.com/dorian/archive/slop-machine-f…
Slop-Machine Future
buttondown.com
#BruceSterling
*Hmmm. This dynamic is quite similar to writing fiction with a pencil as opposed to a word processor
