Comment by nebula8804

1 day ago

They are closer but they are not part of the class so does it really matter how close they are? Engineer still has to trade their time for wealth in the form of work. Capital class has assets that work for them.

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nebula8804

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bob001  1 day ago

To me the only question is if there's a hypothetical revolution who will end up swinging in the wind by their neck and I have no doubt many engineers working for big tech would have been in that group. There's always nice rhetoric and focused rhetoric to not make too many enemies but the people on the ground differentiate a lot less and have in every revolution.

  • nebula8804  1 day ago

    By the time there is a revolution, i'd imagine that most engineers will have fallen to the working classes where they are technically a part of.

    Again, they are not part of the capital class. They were lucky to come across a special moment in time where there was a paradigm shift bringing with it enormous wealth and the capital class did not part with some of their wealth out of charity but out of greed because they realized that in order to capture this new found fountain of wealth they needed engineers...at least for the time being.

    This allowed one generation (maybe two) to live a dignified solid upper middle class life but since the beginning there has always been a push to eliminate them.

    Things such as low/no code, "learn to code", bootcamps, and now AI are attempts to destroy this avenue for people to rise above anything more than just worker class.

    • Izkata  15 hours ago

      > By the time there is a revolution, i'd imagine that most engineers will have fallen to the working classes where they are technically a part of.

      "Working class" isn't an adjective+noun that refers to anyone who works, it's a compound noun that specifically refers to physical labor. Knowledge workers of any sort are not part of it, despite both using the word "work".

    • ahf8Aithaex7Nai  1 day ago

      > Again, they are not part of the capital class.

      I vaguely remember reading something recently, probably by Branko Milanović, about how there is a class of workers in the tech sector who earn so much money that they are gradually starting to become capitalists. When you have so much money left over that you can start putting your capital to work for you, you cross that very line. I don't mean a home savings plan or ETFs or anything like that, but if you have seven figures and can skim off returns that you could live well on, then you're definitely no longer working class.