A tech worker is calling a one-week strike this November to take software back from greed
Tell HN: I'm going on strike this November
A self-described tech worker has posted an open call on Hacker News for a strike during the third week of November 2026, inviting colleagues to pick their own days. The argument: AI is a symptom, not the cause — the real rot is a decade of user-hostile software, surveillance advertising, forced return-to-office, micro-management, AI slop, and replacing human support staff. The demands are local and personal, but the goal is shared: put humanity and goodness back into software.
AI is a symptom, not a cause. The cause goes way back.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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...
- 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 baul […]