Tell HN: I'm going on strike this November

curiousaboutml

I am a tech worker. This November 2026, I am going on strike. I want you to join me. This is a 100% human written wall of text. No AI tokens were spent writing/researching this. I will be on strike for the entire third week of November. I invite you to choose your own days that you wish to strike and coordinate with your colleagues. What am I going on strike for? I've just had enough of a lot of different factors which have, over the last decade or so, completely eroded all humanity and "good" from tech. This is not just about AI. AI is a symptom, not a cause. The cause goes way back. It started with being hostile to the users of software, then to non-users by alienating them from society, and now to those who build software (regardless of whether you write code or not). What was the point of software? What was the point of building industry, companies, and jobs around software? It was to empower people. And it HAS empowered people. Software is likely one of the most accessible and cheapest form of relatively advanced technology made available to such a large number of people. What you can do with software today, specially connected to the internet, is pure magic made cheaply accessible to a majority of the world's population. Search, navigation, live communication, live streaming, e-commerce, fintech, health advice are all magic. The resources you need to build this magic and to use this magic is not very dissimilar. The machine used to develop software is basically the same machine used to utilize that software. This is an engineer's dream. We envisioned a utopia which would lead to everyone having equal access to information, communication, market access, and general prosperity. I want to emphasize that this is not specific to those who write code. Anyone who could understand the concept of what software can do and had good intentions at heart was part of this. And then came the greedy grifters. They invested money not just to get returns (they could've gotten returns on any other established field of business), but to gamble for a chance of crazy high returns. They thought software has near-zero marginal cost. They started building walled gardens, to extract rent from users. Build insane profits on that near-zero initial cost. Then they realized you need to maintain software, specially if you didn't do it well the first time to rush to market (out of greed, to crush any competition). The costs started to rise up. There was still plenty of profit, just not enough to satisfy their greed. So the advertisement business grew, and with it came the largest assault on the privacy of the general public ever. Advertising essentially took over software. Nearly all software now was being built in the service of getting attention to advertisements in one way or another. Then they realized they could use this game politics itself. And they did, successfully. And made even more insane amounts of money in the process. And then they realized they don't want to pay the workers anymore who support the software. So they turned against the workers. During all this, the general public has lost control of their lives. They need a locked down always online machine tracking their location, health etc. to access their own money, messages, pictures, etc. The workers building this are forced to rent expensive small apartments near their office, and/or commute regularly, to then video call with other workers, diminishing the utility of the very software they have built, to then further diminish the utility of other software. In a game of pure madness designed to steal everything from the poor and give it to the powerful. I've had enough. Fuck their greed. Fuck their pathological necessity to control us. I'm going on strike. My specific demands from strike may be different from yours depending on your location, your habits, your company, your specific role, etc. But our goals are the same. We want humanity back in software. We want goodness back in software. We want software to finds its way back to empowering the general public, not serve as a resource extraction machine for the rich and powerful. 1. Stop forcing us to write user hostile software. We do not want to lock down software to extract more rent from our users. 2. Stop forcing us to force addictive algorithms. We do not want to force anti-social hate mongering adware junk on people. 3. Stop forcing workers to commute unnecessarily. Not twice a week or once a week or 11.33% of the week. Just no. Let individuals/teams decide how they want to work. If their performance is bad, you already have performance management tools for fixing that. 4. Stop all forms of unnecessary micro-management. The specifics for this depend on your company/role. 5. Stop forcing us to peddle slop. We do not want to shove AI generated bullshit in the face of our users. 6. Stop firing our human customer service staff colleagues to replace them with AI agents. It's one thing to let AI front some of the repetitive work. But AI can't replace a dedicated human who cares about helping the customer. 7. Stop forcing us to deal with slop ourselves. If the software is shit, we need time to fix it. Your deadlines can't go beyond the limits of complexities of real life. 8. Stop forcing "growth". Some of us our happy with our current role/jobs. Not all of us want to write ridiculous long essays praising ourselves for mediocre accomplishments. For many people a job is a job. I think the specifics of these demands is not important, they shouldn't be universal. Different people have different needs. The main reason for this strike is to send a message that they can't keep controlling us forever. And that if we don't cooperate with them, their house of cards will fall tomorrow. And that software must remain a way to empower people, not to satisfy greedy billionaires. So please, join me in my strike for one week of your choice in November 2026. Your fellow working class techie.

airhangerf15

I understand the frustration. I've been in this industry for over a quarter century myself. The proliferation of advanced computing in the palm of your hand with a fancy touchscreen slapped onto it in 2007 seemed like Star Trek magic at the time, but it quickly turned into dystopian tracking before anyone knew it. Now that compute was out of the realm of the enthusiast with the general public okay with locked down devices; with have access to your own hardware now called "jailbreaking," things quickly spiraled to a technocratic state we're moving towards. LLMs should actually be the level to oppose such things allowing for rapid reverse engineering of closed systems and custom bespoke software, but it's all dependent on "cloud" architecture, and OpenAI/Anthropic could ban you at any time for any reason. Independent models like Kimi 3 and GLM-5 should hedge that situation, but compute hardware required to run such models (e.g. 4x DGX units) use to sell for <$20k, but have now been pushed to nearly $40k. Enthusiasts can no long affordably buy the hardware that was so prevalent that made the modern compute era possible. I feel your frustration with your "strike" which is an unplanned vacation. It's won't amount to much and hopefully you won't lose your job. Organizing anything at scale will be impossible, because every large at-scale protest you see is organized by the state or massive private interests. They're all psychological operations, yes even the famous 9 minute clip. When you really dig into all of it, the vast majority of people in this world are in the global control net of the new technocratic religion, and they believe everything they see from a major news site on social media, Google or the TV screen.

0xy

I'll be straight up. I have been responsible for performance conversations and hiring decisions, and I use both of these as a tool to ensure that engineers on my team are using AI. The window for the gunslinging no-AI coder sitting in the basement with Mountain Dew and cranking out thousands of lines a day is essentially closed now. My previous superstar 10x engineers are now superstar 50x engineers thanks to AI-enhanced output. All metrics are up. There's also no negative effects either, in fact incidents and faults have declined. This position is the equivalent of the delivery driver in the early 1900s who refused to get an automobile and instead insisted his horse and cart is better. Know that if you oppose a productivity tool that transforms every other engineer, you will be managed out. I've seen it happen more than once already.

Havoc

> If enough of us do this, it will work. Tech scene can’t even muster enough collective consensus to slow a „this is potentially dangerous“ scenario let alone a vague eroding of humanity. Still I’m all for people’s right to strike for whatever reason they like

paxy

This site is really just Reddit now, isn't it.. Where is everyone going next?

gigatexal

Have fun with that. But … I’m not in a position to have such a luxury. I got a family to feed and bills to pay. Idealism died when I got a mortgage and got married.

_nobody

With no context on who you are, where you live, what this strike is - what the fuck am I suppose to do with this tell HN post? Do you ignorant bastards just assume everyone is from the same 4th world shithole place from where you are? If you can add some inkling of details, I might empathise with what you are doing, heck even support you. But if you want to be a twat about it, then I wish you all the suffering in the world. The other commenter is right, this place is infested with Reddit retards.

furk

I respect your frustrations and can relate to most. But strikes only mean something when they are organised. The best way to organise is through worker unions. If enough employees in a given company join forces, they can achieve a lot. But here, I’m not optimistic - I’ve never seen another industry where workers have so little class consciousness. Tech workers think they’re very special and they’re so self important, it’s painful. It would be a huge job to get them together to fight for their common interests.

shagie

> I will be on strike for the entire third week of November. Oh, deer hunting season... when half my team is already on v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike. I'm already taking the next week for v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike... and two weeks in December too! And what's more... I'm getting paid for this v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike. I haven't put the requests in properly - I should do that. I still have 252 hours of v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike time that I need to use in the next two months (or move to other places... some carry over to next year, some moved to the sabbatical time account). Some of the "you have how much vacation?" is because I am part of a union. Though I'll note that the union also has a "no strike" clause that would prevent me from actually participating in an unauthorized strike (such as this one). The software that I work on is the boring "line of business" type things for keeping the internals of the organization moving smoothly. No advertising, no dark patterns, no social media (unless you count the internal department message board). Random techies taking a week (or more) of PTO in November is expected and entire teams moving to a skeleton crew for periods of time in November is something that is already planned for. This is even less impactful if it's scattered across companies. While my workplace sounds like your ideal, I probably make 1/3 to 1/4 of what my peers do (if I had stayed in working at a company where tech is the revenue generating faucet). Many people have baulked when they see the pay range for the position and the corresponding impact that that would have on their lifestyle. If you want to protest these things at your employer, start a union at your employer . Here are the steps: https://www.nlrb.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/pages/n...

10111001

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50271809 I understand your frustrations, but you can't strike without a union. The power of a strike is all (or most) of the workers stop working at once in a coordinated manner, causing severe impact on the business. What you're planning and asking people to do (small number of random people here and there temporarily stopping work) is just ineffectual venting. You need to put your efforts into unionization. You're not going to accomplish anything by yourself without organization. The best time to start a union is 20 years ago, the second best time is now.

ProllyInfamous

Also: October 31st is officially "Take the License Plate off your Car for the Day+" (to protest LPR cameras). Share with your friends.

erelong

ITT we can maybe discuss effective alternatives to strikes > start alternative better businesses or work for them > encourage work reforms in society like remote work / 4 day work weeks > write in

AndrewKemendo

Reach out if you need moral support at some point. I’ve been saying we need a general strike for a long time and I’m hoping it will happen https://generalstrikeus.com/

iExploder

Technology, including LLMs is a tool, without agency of its own, as such it's netheir intrinsically good or bad. What defines that is the entity with agency, despite what labs would have you think this is still employees, corpos and governments. Imagine for a moment star trek like society where one needs not toil for corpos to have their basic needs met. In such a scenario is better LLM good or bad? Would you fight to go back to cubicle then? I posit we should not scrutinize technological progress itself or try to resist it's adoption, but rather look at people who shape the policies around it and how our society is structured, which is politicians and to larger extent us who live in democracies around election time. In fact, I believe we should accelerate AI adoption in order to emphasise the impacts of the disruption and shortcomings of current societal structures and norms thus shortening the Unstable Era ushering a new AI driven heaven on earth... ... or we all just get marched into the recycling vats, it's a coin toss at this point I guess...