- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
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Really?
Because nearly each time I point out that software has been getting so bad that I legitimately can’t go more than 1 day without wild bugs in everyday software that was fine 6 years ago, I’m surrounded by 17 AI bros screeching about how “umm actually I’m way more productive and AI has found 6,500 issues in this code and that’s great!”
Yea what’s not great is when they use AI to “patch” the vulnerabilities.
You ever try to go back in basically any industry and figure out what the fuck the last person at a job site did?
Now imagine that, except instead of intuitively being able to figure some things out because human thought is at least a base to start from, you have no fucking clue what the AI was thinking.
AI is also a massive shortcut that tugs your dick anytime you use it.
Humans can’t be trusted to not optimize every little thing, and AI is taking advantage of that.
I genuinely pine for a time when it was hand coded and I’m tired of pretending this is better
Thing is, the ones who use ai to code large segments of code, don’t usually know how it works in sufficient detail. Even the block diagram is done by ai with little oversight. The fix is simply to ask the ai to do over.
I ask the bizfolks: would YOU allow a guy in a suit with no prior engineering knowledge, but with an ai design the structural elements for a bridge for thousands of vehicles a day? What about one you use daily? So why would you allow that when developing software that is critical for handling your enterprise data and finances?
I ask the bizfolks: would YOU allow a guy in a suit with no prior engineering knowledge, but with an ai design the structural elements for a bridge for thousands of vehicles a day?
For less money in less time with no liability? Yes, without hesitation.
would YOU allow a guy in a suit with no prior engineering knowledge, but with an ai design the structural elements for a bridge for thousands of vehicles a day?
I know people who would get an instant boner from that idea and be the first in line to drive over it
I feel like this is the difference between the people who became developers for the craft and developers who became one just for the job
If you’re just doing it as a job, you tend to just want to get stuff done, as long as it works
If you became one for the art of the craft, you now feel the things described in the post. You don’t create anymore, you just delegate and code review. The LLM code might even be perfectly fine. But you don’t create, and it’s just tiring
Im a data janitor at my job. Theres no real love for stuff I make for the job. Sure I do a good job, but I dont pretend im making anything other than take data here -> clean it up -> put data new place half the time.
One thing LLMs have done is balloon the amount of projects that exist. Once a proof of concept is made, iterating on an AI project becomes a bit harder than normal, since your not the one who made the initial product. Also management often wants it out NOW rather than waiting on unsloppifying anything.
And management has now had a couple of years moving peoples jobs to an AI project. Which means ironically im doing MORE work since there is just more code all over the place. And AI is starting to get expensive per token… So they are hiring again haha.
Meanwhile at my house, ive been playing around with my open source ebook reader without any AI involvement. Its fun to make a small change and look at it from all angles. Small changes to make something for me.
Exactly.
And it’s not just programming, it’s in every career, artistry, journalism, etc.
When barriers are extremely low, one side effect is you no longer have the passionate people as easily rise to the top.
You have a shit load of people with surface level or worse understandings of things in charge.
See the following:
Parts of Hollywood from studios to directors, nepotism and mbas nearly ruined cinema.
Gaming companies often sell out to go public or allow themselves to be bought by soulless corps, this often but not always goes very very wrong.
The music industry is RIFE with plants, nepotism, and absolute garbage music.
Now programming is opened to the masses.
And you even have people like Linus Torvalds taking what I think is a stance that likely makes sense for him, but is such a damning thing to openly say because people take Torvalds use of AI as a blanket “look he uses it so it must be ok” where there is SO much nuance.
I miss times before AI lol
"journalism, has been doomed for like 2 decades, articles are just rehashs of other online articles prior to AI, and is clickbaity. AI just does it faster, not to mention the censorship from right wing groups screeching. i assume you meant AI affect all these jobs you mentioned?
bio/biotech remains high barrier of entry, due to have physical labs, and research, but bio has its own problems for a while already.
hollywood was always nepotism, dare i say it cronyism, unless one was wealthy or have significant connections you arnt becoming an actor, or at least one that wont get you roles, aside from your acting ability. olivia wilde, pratt, is 2 known nepo people. the current trend with movies and shows, seems to insert “these people” in the show/movie where its not source material, or distracts from the poor writing. hollywoods rife with Sexual predators that hold actors livelyhoods in thier hands. AMazon DINT green lit the new SG series because the exects want the same thing as what “nutrek” was pushing out, a large audience.
swift and shareen are prime examples of nepotisms to get into the industry.
Capitalism. The people calling the shots and keeping the profits are not the people doing the work.
It’s bad and will continue to be bad for everyone except the top layer of rich people.
If you get the opportunity, join a union.
I’ve just seen a draft PR with 60k lines added.
No, I’m not OK.
And I’ll definitely go: TL;DR , I refuse to take any responsibilities about this.
You should choose random parts, and add “I don’t think this makes sense, can you explain this part?” or “Why didn’t you use <something semi-related> instead?”, “I think you should have done <random similar pattern>” here." to random parts of the PR. No need for it to be true or read it, not like it matters. You can keep doing that for quite a long time :D Sure, they’ll just copy-paste it to their agent, but the longer you keep that going, the more unsure will they be, probably.
Or even better, just message him that you have questions about the PR, if they can come over because it’s more things, and ask these comments directly.
I was a developer and then manager for 16 years before I saw what the industry was becoming and left, almost a year ago now.
I used to be excited about the work I was doing, solving tough problems and working/managing great people.
Unfortunately, like every company, we had mass layoffs and AI tooling mandated.
My very last year there was me just depressed while trying to keep morale up for the team I was left with (which is almost impossible if you can’t support the company).
The good news is, after I left I’ve made a horizontal shift to starting my own Indie game company. Obviously that has tons of risks and it’s own problems, but it’s been a breath of fresh air to work how I want to work, with a hope I can build a company and run it how I want to (which is not forcing AI tooling down everyone’s throats).
I suspect I’m not the only engineer who’s left to set up their own business over the past year, on the premise they want to start something small, with a healthy culture that they can hire engineers into.
I appreciate it’s not much of a lifeline, but over time I reckon you’ll see a correction with smaller companies starting up, who do engineering right and can set disruptive cultures that draw all the exceptional and clever engineers to come work with them.
I gotta say, I’m pretty fucking far from OK.
I THINK im burned out but I might just be dying slowly of some mysterious illness.
I don’t think I’ll ever stop working on my own projects. Even if I leave the software industry otherwise.
Sadly, I’m way more burned out than Pre-AI and I was a bit before then. (So I guess it just sped up the pace).
I have no desire to come home and work on personal software or devops projects. My Homelab sits in the same state it was since the last real vacation I had. Corporate/industry work has removed all desire for personal development work.
I guess I’m really lucky that I never had to use AI, and when I tried it on my own, I quickly realized how awful it is.
Yeah one of my hobbies used to be computational math, I used it to learn about complex analysis, shaders, group theory…
Now I’m like “fuck all of that”, I do tai chi, I cook carnitas, I read manga.
I’m spoiled on the whole thing, I take no pride that I used to be someone who knew a lot about computers and having worked at Google/MSFT is now a source of shame.
I would argue it’s normalizing.
For fucks sake, the last 30 years have been insane, especially with the dotcom boom and bust.
Suddenly every dipshit adult was telling their kids, “computers are the future, the internet is the future, and you can’t survive with just a highschool degree. You better go to college and learn programming!!”
Those parents are a bit to blame with how things got. And it seemed like they were pretty accurate too as high speed internet became huge, and lithium batteries thus mobile phones…
I always was interested in programming, since before my mom pushed me into it, because she was one of those types too. Then I went to college, and I met a bunch of teenagers who said, “uhhh I don’t know what I want to do but I want it make money so I’m doing computer science”.
The first year of college usually filtered those people out. Usually.
And i’ve always said, don’t join this career for the money. It’s not worth it, if you don’t love engineering. This is the most stressful fucking job I’ve ever had, and there are tons of meetings and social activity to go with it. You can’t just solve puzzles in a vacuum, even if you like programming, and that’s EVEN if you enjoy it. You have to start leading others at some point, act like a mentor.
You take on a fucking lot of responsibility, start giving demos, working with product managers, marketers, help teach people what is possible in the product and what isn’t. This isn’t a chill gig. It rarely is. It usually involves a fuck ton of effort and planning.
You get paid a lot… But honestly, if you’re actually doing the job well, you’re underpaid even then. Often you will be underpaid compared to the effort you put in. Especially now.
Not as many people should be in software engineering as there are. I talk to people sometimes and you can tell they hate this job. It’s okay, and I don’t blame them, but way too many people got sucked into this career for the wrong reasons, then kinda now have to keep doing it to survive.
I’m glad I still enjoy it but I see a lot of fucking burnout right now. But I have to say, the people leaving the job now, some of them, not all but some, might be some of the types that shouldn’t have jumped into it in the first place. Lots of people were told they’re smart and good with computers so should make money doing it.
Some of those smart people should’ve done other smart jobs. Biotech is huge too, but I don’t see the drive to it like there was for making fucking websites.
I’m a computer scientist and got into it before it became popular.
I suck at programming and have never labeled myself as a programmer. I write software to solve problems and know my way around the SDLC, but there’s a LOT of CS work out there that isn’t being a code monkey.
The shame was the number of people who went to college specifically to learn how to write software that can now be generated by AI, at the quality level generated by AI. Those jobs are now gone. Being a software analyst, integrator, architect, security engineer, information systems analyst, data scientist, etc? Thise are still in high demand, as are programmers who are subject matter experts or can lead a team.
The first year of college usually filtered those people out. Usually.
Unfortunately in my country this doesn’t happen. There’s a bell curve and as long as you submit your homework and do the bare minimum for the exams, you get your degree. You’re gonna have a pretty mid GPA, but you’ll have a degree which effectively makes the degree useless as an indicator of competency. The amount of people I’ve interviewed who couldn’t answer a simple programming question is astounding.
Most of these people end up picking up jobs as project managers because that’s all they can do. And the country’s leaders wonder why we don’t have much software R&D here.
India?
Singapore
Hilarious to throw biotech out there at the end as its a similar case with a lot of smart people doing not what they want and hard to pivot out of. The filter also works similarly.
Could be STEM as a whole. Everyone glamorizes it, but it’s definitely not for everyone. Shit, my family literally got upset when I suggested I might want to be a writer.
I really enjoy programming, and i don’t mind all of the planning, mentorship, and working with stakeholders to formulate solutions. But for the past few weeks 90% of the work I’ve been doing had been around deployment, migrating services to new servers, and fucking with azure resources. I haven’t written a line of code for 3+ weeks. That has been draining.
Couple that with picking up work items that are poorly written with way to little information on what needs doing and it’s also frustrating as hell.
At my company, we have dozens, probably over one hundred different repos that we maintain, and no less than 30 actively worked on projects. It’s bitter sweet in that I get a good mix of work to break up the monotony of working on the same project, but at the cost of not being able to master any of them. I’ve only been in my role for 6-8 months coming from a non programming background, and it’s been tough to learn and keep up with the pace required. Being full stack is nice but shitty at the same time.
Does your current stretch have a foreseeable end? Or do you think the very little programming will continue?
It’s just the way work has played out for us right now. A couple servers are being decommed at the end of the month, so it’s priority. I work on team of about 14 people and we use Azure dev ops for work items and sprint planning. The way we do it is once you finish a task, you grab the next available item in sprint rather than cherry picking. I’ve just been a bit unlucky in my timing. We do have some projects in the works that will be hitting us soon, and some new implementations, so I yea, it’s likely I’ll be writing actual code again in the near future.
If your company sucked before this, it sucks 80x as much now.
I switched companies this year, and there’s a big difference between working for a company that is shrinking and one that is growing right now.
I’d say tech workers in general are not doing okay. I quit my sysadmin job 3 years ago and have been desperately trying to switch careers.
I moved from sysadmin to technical pre-sales a few years ago and I’m happy with the move. Though honestly I enjoyed being a sysadmin as well - from my experiences it’s more the work environment and the collegues than the actual work you do that makes or breaks a job.
