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A Programmer's Loss of Identity

• golly_ned 8mo ago
  I’m wary about the exuberance of AI displacing quality. But some of the worst experiences I’ve had with coworkers were with those who made programming part of their identity. Every technical disagreement on a PR became a threat to identity or principles, and ceased being about making the right decision in that moment. Identity means: there’s us, and them, and they don’t get it. ‘Programmer’ is much better off as a description of one who does an activity. Not an identity.
  • Nevermark 8mo ago
    “Identity” is an overloaded word. It can mean a category flag someone waves, an identifier we ask others to respect, a group we choose to belong to, a way of understanding what it is we like about ourselves, or something we quietly aspire to.
    • actionfromafar 8mo ago
      Or just enjoy doing very much. To clarify/nuance. Even if there was no economic nor social incentive for me to program; I'd still tinker with it, AI coding agent enhanced or not.
    • jacquesm 8mo ago
      Or literally a part of the self, which is what the OP was getting at I think. And there is plenty of that in the software world. "I'm a Rubyist", "I'm a Pythonista", "A rustacean" and so on. There is plenty of identity ridiculousness. I've been a C programmer but I've also been a basic programmer an assembly language programmer, a PHP programmer, a FORTH programmer and a whole list of others. To me that collapses to "I'm a programmer" (even if the sage advice on HN by the gurus is to never call yourself a programmer I'm more than happy to do so). It defines what I do, not what or who I am, and it only defines a very small part of what I do. That's one reason why I can't stand the us-vs-them mentality that some programming languages seem to install in their practitioners.
      • zabzonk 8mo ago
        > "I'm a Rubyist", "I'm a Pythonista", "A rustacean" it suddenly struck me that there has never, AFAIK, a single-word noun for a C++ programmer. not sure what, if anything, this implies.
        • christophilus 8mo ago
          “I’m a null pointer exception debugger.”
          • aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
            > “I’m a null pointer exception debugger.” NullPointerException is the Java world. In C++, dereferencing a null pointer is rather undefined behaviour.
            • namrog84 8mo ago
              So it's perfectly fitting the noun for c++ dev is undefined behavior :D
        • saghm 8mo ago
          I feel like it implies "it's harder to make a word out of 'C++' than it is for things that already naturally evolved as words people say like 'Ruby', 'Python', or 'Rust'".
        • netule 8mo ago
          I think it’s because C++ programmers tend to define themselves by the domain they work in. Game developer, embedded systems engineer, firmware developer, etc.
        • steve1977 8mo ago
          I'm a Swiftie! Oh wait... oh no...
        • hcs 8mo ago
          A Seymour
  • softwaredoug 8mo ago
    In the last few decades, we went from a small handful of programming languages / libraries to a massive cambrian explosion from Github-fueled open source. Everyone's choice of Javascript framework became a dumb pissing contest and source of identity. A cudgel used at meetings to look down on some other way of doing things. I hope AI liberates us from that dumb facade of pretend innovation. In some ways, us programmers got way too full of ourselves and filled our lives with pretend work porting apps from one thing to the next thing with no actual change in end-user value
    • fcarraldo 8mo ago
      100%. A lot of these AI anxiety driven odes to the loss of craft have me wondering whether anyone cares about the value being provided to the user (or the business), which is the part that is actually your job. Elegant, well-written and technically sound projects will continue to exist, but I’ve seen too many “well crafted” implementations of such technically vexing features as “fetching data and returning it” that were so overengineered that it should have been considered theft of company money.
      • restalis 8mo ago
        "I’ve seen too many «well crafted» implementations of such technically vexing features as «fetching data and returning it» that were so overengineered that it should have been considered theft of company money." This judgement has merit. However, over the years I got to perceive that over-engineering tendency to be the manifestation of exploratory spirit in one's craft. This is how the Unix got to be created at Bell Labs. To their managers, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie worked on programs like the "ed" editor, thus they cared about "value being provided to the user (or the business)". What was later officially named Unix was not pitched as an operating system, but instead framed mostly just a needed way to organize the growing set of utilities, among other things (i.e. as a footnote). What are the over-engineered bits (and the related gained experience) in a given project may become useful for something else. People (tend to) do this kind of stuff. But should they be blamed, considering the enticing promise of growth and development of new technologies, practiced by employers themselves, as part of recruitment game?
  • jonahrd 8mo ago
    I agree with your comment. While reading the article, I had sympathy for the author, but also unintendedly pictured them as a mix of all of the "wizard" seniors I have worked with over the years. These are the type of people who when pair programming, constantly point out what they perceive as problems with your development setup, IDE, keyboard-macro skills, lack of tiling layout, etc etc. Not to mention what they will suggest on your actual PRs. At the end of the day, I like the mental model of programming, and I am somewhat uninterested in shaving every millimeter of friction off of every surface I touch on my computer. Does that make me a worse programmer? Maybe? I still delivered plenty of high quality code.
    • Swizec 8mo ago
      > At the end of the day, I like the mental model of programming, and I am somewhat uninterested in shaving every millimeter of friction off of every surface I touch on my computer. Does that make me a worse programmer? Maybe? I still delivered plenty of high quality code. In every pursuit there are secretly 3 different communities. Those who love doing the thing, those who love tinkering with the gear, those who love talking about it. HackerNews and the internet in general are dominated by people who like to nerd out about the gear of programming (IDEs, text editors, languages, agent setups, …) and the people who like to talk about programming. The people doing most of the work are off on the side too busy doing the thing to be noticed.
    • matula 8mo ago
      > constantly point out what they perceive as problems with... Yeah, screw those people. I count myself as lucky that I've only worked with 1 person who was seriously CRITICAL of the way other's worked... beyond just code quality. However, I always enjoyed a good discussion about the various differences in how people worked, as long as they could accept there's no "right" way. That's what the article brought up for me, and I wonder how much that happens these days. One of my fondest memories was sitting around with a few other devs after work, and one had started learning Go pretty soon after its public release... and he would show us some new, cool thing he was playing around with. Of course those kind of organic things stopped with remote work, and I wonder how much THAT has played into the loss of identity?
  • xnx 8mo ago
    > ‘Programmer’ is much better off as a description of one who does an activity. Not an identity. Yes. Verb not noun.
• sriram_malhar 8mo ago
  I totally felt this! It is almost as if the author had decided to reply to my question on Ask HN that didn't receive any eyeballs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46960408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46960408
• sinuhe69 8mo ago
  This piece is very sad and it resonates with me, especially after we talked about identity and definition of success. The loss of job (if any) is not as fatal as the loss of one’s social identity. Of course, there is always a way out, a way to see things in a positive light. But I believe right now it’s important to let it sink in, to realize what we have to shed on the way to tomorrow. Most (young) people don’t realize it yet.
• borzi 8mo ago
  I can't relate to this anymore and honestly after embracing vibe coding, I'm sick of reading posts like this (and I don't want to personally attack the write who I sympathize with to some degree). Being able to code doesn't make you better than the "plebs" who are creating massive value with a vibe coded tool. I also remember the brief moment of disbelief when I noticed AI could really code better than me, until I realized that the amount of problems and projects I could solve now basically exploded, while the stuff I was previously forced to deal with is now a waste of time - on to better things, as was always the case in human history. A programmer is someone telling machines what to do - we will be doing more of that than ever in human history. That said, "coders" not so much - maybe its better to identify as a "person trying to help and care for others" than a profession, since the former will always have a place in society.
  • vdupras 8mo ago
    > Being able to code doesn't make you better than the "plebs" who are creating massive value with a vibe coded tool. > [...] I noticed AI could really code better than me [...] AI code output is generally considered mediocre (in the sense of "on the median"). If it codes better than you, it might be that your code output is generally below average. Might it be the case that you don't grasp how good one can get with computers and thus not realize that one could be much better than you are at programming them? Did you consider for a moment the possibility that you were missing something?
    • borzi 8mo ago
      Notice how I said "coding", not "programming". Coding to me is "should I do an early return or use an if/else? Should I extract that variable into a function to make it cleaner?". It's about focusing on the trivialities that come with insisting on meticulously hand typing and reviewing every line instead of focusing on software quality, design and user needs.
      • vdupras 8mo ago
        If we want to make that distinction, then we should also acknowledge that "vibecoding" is a misnomer and should be called "vibeprogramming", because it delegates the whole act of programming to the LLM, leaving you with fleshing out the specs (which is not programming). If that is so, then your whole comment is inconsistent and akin to "I do all my poetry with LLMs now and I don't see what people have against it: it's often better than me at punctuation!"
• big-chungus4 8mo ago
  I am not sure what the loss is. Not everyone is using AI. No one is forcing you to use AI.
  • warkdarrior 8mo ago
    Ah, but we are now in deeply puritanical territory. There is a haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be enjoying the use of AI to create code.
  • praptak 8mo ago
    The post doesn't mention AI, it's not about AI and it's not even about implications of applying AI to software development. AI happens to work in the same direction as the one the author is worried about but none of their theses would be much different without AI.
    • big-chungus4 8mo ago
      I think it's pretty clear that it is about AI - author mentions transformation that's been "about three years". What do you think "pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate" means? What does "coal-fired GPUs to capture society’s output and sell it back to us" refer to?
  • cml123 8mo ago
    my employer has told me that it's an expectation for me and that if I don't use it i'll be replaced
    • aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
      > my employer has told me that it's an expectation for me and that if I don't use it i'll be replaced This does not imply that you cannot use the AI "badly". Call it "malicious compliance" if you want ... :-)
• antonvs 8mo ago
  > Now programming is a means to an end [...] or simply an unwanted chore to be avoided. It was always this, for everyone other than programmers. This reminds me a little of the Go champion (the game, not the language) who announced he was giving up the game after a computer beat him. It's a bit like giving up running because cars are faster.
• softwaredoug 8mo ago
  > Which is to say that the pleasure I get from programming is mostly about learning the underlying truths about computation and applying what I’ve learned. Always improving the craft. This, to me, is the practice of programming. I guess when you get to a certain age (I'm 45) I stop caring whether something like this has social value. I enjoy it anyways. Wanting to know how things work always brings me back. I don't care if an AI coded small or big parts of it, I still want to know how it works, how to make it better - what's holding the AI itself back from being a more effective programmer. I feel like I got into programming when it was seen as low-status profession in the late 80s. And it went through levels of hype and collapse. Maybe this is the ultimate collapse. But I still want to take apart the watch to see how it ticks. If society collapses because 80% of white collar jobs disappear, I guess I'll just be in my basement wanting to know how a linux kernel driver works.
  • pjmlp 8mo ago
    It kind of depends on where in the globe one is, many countries see programmers as a white collar job that happens to be better paid than a plain secretary, a mere transition phase into management, that is the success story for most families, the programmer turned boss. So those of us that fight against becoming managers, it was for love of programming and the related technical details, as it usually comes with a payment and career ceiling. And being unemployed beyond 50 years old in many countries that see being a programmer as yet another office job, means too old for employment, and too young for retirement.
    • aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
      > So those of us that fight against becoming managers, it was for love of programming and the related technical details, as it usually comes with a payment and career ceiling. I think quite a lot of these programmers don't fight against becoming a manager, but it's rather that they don't have traits (character traits, demeanour, low on dark triad traits (it is known that the selection process and work reality for managers actively selects for these), ...) that are necessary to get "selected" to become a manager.
• raincole 8mo ago
  I don't know, perhaps we really shouldn't treat our jobs as our identities at the first place?
  • munificent 8mo ago
    "Programming" is different from "getting paid to program" in the same way that being a painter is different from being a materially successfully artist. I think it's reasonable to have the act of programming be a big part of your identity—it certainly is mine—without necessarily hanging your sense of self on any one particular job.
  • suddenlybananas 8mo ago
    Anything you do for 40 hours a week is going to be a part of your identity.
    • raincole 8mo ago
      Technically true, but I've never heard people in customer service talk about their identity like this. For sure it could just be that I don't know enough of them in real life and they don't blog though.
  • mobiuscog 8mo ago
    For many of us, we took those jobs because they aligned with our existing identities... we went into coding jobs because we enjoyed coding. Unfortunately, most of the jobs (and the industry as a whole) evolved into something else that was all about money and growth and image, and not at all about the craft of programming or the creative nature it provided.
    • lacedeconstruct 8mo ago
      > evolved into something else that was all about money and growth and image I feel like this happened long before LLMs became a thing
      • 8mo ago
• lh105 8mo ago
  I understand the sentiment, but the danger of these articles is that people give up when they should fight back. This isn't the first industry mandated madness. Software engineers have supported any fad that their overlords dictated for a long time. It is always the mediocre 100 IQ people who act as mouthpieces for the industry and temporarily get ahead of their more intelligent colleagues. It is no different now. You can see who is a paid shill and who is not. Python projects like NumPy, members of which are on the take from PyTorch, go to great lengths to rationalize AI usage. Anaconda people who take AI money join in. Projects like Zig, which are much more interesting, move away from Slophub. What concerns me is the silence of academics. There are enough tenured professors who could speak up, but they have been intimidated by various speech restrictions from different political parties over the last decade. Or they want that next industry grant.
• isodev 8mo ago
  I share the sentiment of the post. The best I can describe it is that I’m tech-savvy enough to know that “AI” is just not capable of what people want it to do and yet I apparently lack the “broligarch” gene required for me to ignore the technical reality in favour of seeking ways to exploit people who don’t know better (a-la OpenClaw guy).
• fantasizr 8mo ago
  This resonates because nowadays popular developer culture is about how you need to spend $200/mo with a ronco 'set it and forget it' mindset as your AI swarm writes 100k lines of code overnight so you can post about it on twitter the next day. Anyone questioning this methodology gets a 'enjoy being left behind' mantra akin to the 'have fun staying poor' of the crypto bro 5 years ago.
• biophysboy 8mo ago
  If any of you here feel like you've lost your identity, I would highly recommend watching the recently released movie "No Other Choice" by Park Chan-wook.
  • noisem4ker 8mo ago
    Maybe I didn't look hard enough, as I was put off by the pervasive absurdity of it, but I don't feel like I gained anything at all from watching that film.
• smartmic 8mo ago
  > For the first time in my life, I’m suddenly wary of meeting other "computer programmers" in the wild. I feel like there’s a decent chance we won’t actually have much in common, let alone values or morality. Maybe the social group the author is referring to has split up (forked)? For example, I wouldn't call anyone producing vibe coded AI stuff a "programmer". That noun will be reserved for the original group.
  • visarga 8mo ago
    > I wouldn't call anyone producing vibe coded AI stuff a "programmer" How about "software developer"?
    • aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
      > > I wouldn't call anyone producing vibe coded AI stuff a "programmer" > How about "software developer"? Rather: AI prompter. :-)
    • kh_hk 8mo ago
      Prompting AI feels a bit like that feeling I had when I was copypasting random javascript and java applets for my first website. The website had MIDI, a scrolling status bar on the bottom, particles that followed the mouse, you name it. Never understood any of it, nor made me deep dive because it was too complicated. But then at some age I reached out for fundamentals and that's when I started building things. All this to say, no, software developer probably not. Script kiddie?
• jongjong 8mo ago
  For me it's weird because I was obsessed with software architecture. At university, I majored in software design. I was obsessed with UMl diagrams, sequence diagrams and architectural philosophies like loose coupling and high cohesion... I went to uni, majored in software design. My dream position was software architect... But then it's like the software architect role got phased out completely soon after I graduated. The radical ideology that software architecture doesn't matter started becoming mainstream... And code quality got really bad. I swear, I thought this industry had become a pure "job creation factory" just churning out unnecessary complexity to create jobs. Is still think it is the case. Byt anyway now with AI, a lot of people are finally acknowledging that architecture is important, that coding is the easy part... Yada yada... Now everyone is finally saying what I'd been saying for over a decade... And it's like I'm finally able to shed this coder /code monkey identify which was shoved upon me and I can now start to use words like "software engineering" and "software architecture" again...
  • philipwhiuk 8mo ago
    > But then it's like the software architect role got phased out completely soon after I graduated. The radical ideology that software architecture doesn't matter started becoming mainstream. I don't think that's true. What I do think is there's not historically been space for junior software architects. It's long been seen as the senior role you graduate to, not a position for a new grad who knows lots of theory but has little practical exposure.
    • jongjong 8mo ago
      I was aware of that, but this senior role was replaced by other more generic senior roles like 'Head of Engineering' or just 'CTO'... And not one of my software engineering peers even thought about architecture. The number of times I've heard "architecture doesn't matter" or "clean code is completely subjective"...
• prhn 8mo ago
  You can still be a programmer and identify with and participate in that group. AI hasn't eliminated programmers or programming, and it never will. However, my best advice as someone with many distinct interests is to avoid tying any one of these external things to your identity. Not a Buddhist, but I think that's the correct approach. He sort of comes to this conclusion in the final "So then, who am I?" section. The answer is you are many things and you are nothing. You can live deeply in many groups and circles without making your identity dependent on them. If you're a programmer, what happens when programming isn't needed anymore? If you're a runner, what happens if you get injured? It's always been helpful personally to remind myself that I am not a programmer. I am a person who programs. I am not a runner. I am a person who runs.
  • SecretDreams 8mo ago
    I align to everything in this post except the below excerpt. I think it's important to be a lot of things and nothing at the same time and to tie fulfilment to internal metrics rather than externalities. > AI hasn't eliminated programmers or programming, and it never will. It might not fully eliminate them tomorrow, but this technology is being pitched as at least displacing a lot of them and probably putting downwards pressure on their wages, which is really just as harmful to the profession. AI as it's being pushed is a direct attack on white collar CS jobs. There will always be winners and losers, but this is a field that will change in many ways in the not so distant future because of this technology - and most current CS prospects will probably not be happy with the direction the overall field goes. Even if you do not personally believe this, you should be concerned all the same because this is the narrative major CEOs are pushing and we know that they can remain crazy longer than we can remain solvent, so to speak.
• wduquette 8mo ago
  I'm on a similar arc to the OP, except that it looks like I started about rather earlier, in the late 70's. My job title is "software engineer"; but I long ago chose to regard myself as not so much an engineer but as a master craftsman, similar to a highly skilled cabinet maker (I'm talking high-end hand-built heirloom cabinetry, here, not a quick kitchen remodel). I take pride in every facet of my work, and like the OP try to be always learning new and better techniques. By that metaphor, AI-controlled code-generation is more like large-scale automated manufacturing: the sort of thing that produces Ikea flat packs. I'm not knocking that; I own my share of Billy bookcases. But it's not what I do. It's not what I'm going to do in the future. There's a place for large-scale manufacturing and there's a place for hand-crafting, and this is even more true for software than it is for physical goods. Final note: throughout my career I've know a few people with an outlook similar to mine. I'm always delighted to run into them, but they've never been common.
• leoqa 8mo ago
  This was always my least favorite part about being a software engineer (and the downfall of many): being a software engineer has become an identity crutch for many. I’ve see so many kids whose whole identity is being good at computers; they go through middle/high school, college getting affirmations about their value and intelligence. Then they get out of Stanford, Berkeley and show up to the feature treadmill that must keep moving but is weighed down by the 10000 short cuts made by the people who came before. They burn out, or worse become toxic, because their shallow identity led them down the path to being a “Real” engineer and at the end of the day we’re not actually participating in any sort of real value creation beyond attention monetization. The mystique wears off quickly and they don’t have real hobbies or interests, they basically talk about RSU packages at lunch and the latest tweets etc. I used to joke privately because almost every time we had lunch they spent most of the time discussing the optimal path to walk. It’s unique in some way- you can’t be a good doctor or lawyer in middle school and the value system is geared towards maximizing paychecks and working in big tech. Once the reality sets in that you’re going to be doing sprint planning + standups for the next 20-30 years it can be a weird shock. My first job was at a FANG and I lasted about 2 years- I remember riding the escalator in and seeing how miserable everyone looked on my first day. As an eager junior I reached out to the principal engineer in my org for mentoring, asking him what I could do to be better, faster. He told me: “go find a wife and don’t worry about work- you’ve got a long time left”. At one point I looked at the senior guy running sprint planning and realized I didn’t want to be him. I bought a 1 way ticket and put in my 2 weeks. Went on to backpack around for a year then ended up at a startup where I made a bunch of friends working on real problems.
  • sungho_ 8mo ago
    Just out of curiosity. What makes startups different? Is the lack of structure the key difference?
    • leoqa 8mo ago
      Is the stakes and the ownership. 5 people in a coffee shop working on a 0-1 problem is a lot more stimulating than 90 people on a team shipping incremental updates to a legacy system.
• stevenfoster 8mo ago
  Ensure your career isn't your religion. After a decade in tech, mostly in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, I realized people had not ascended to some higher intellectual belief but sleep walked into a half baked religion, myself included to some degree. The world of tech is experiencing schisms and reformations all at a pace unseen in history. But tech is still not worth making one's religion or identity. Delight in whatever you do and find ways to be in service of others. I am certain many of the brilliant people here reading this will not be doing the same thing a decade from today, but many of those who we consider good people, will be doing new things with the same heart of generosity. Perhaps from that is where we should build our identity.
• PaulDavisThe1st 8mo ago
  I love programming, but the idea of hanging out with and chatting with other programmers as a regular part of my social life leaves me cold. I'm happy to be a part of online conversations about code and hardware and design, but away from the computer ... not really. I'd rather be talking about food, or hiking or travelling or culture or relationships. There have been very few people I've ever met in person that I really enjoyed "being a programmer with", and none of them live within 1000 miles of me. And that's all just fine.
  • jbstack 8mo ago
    Why are they mutually exclusive? Can't you hang out with and chat with other programmers ... about food, hiking, travelling, culture, or relationships? In the same way that lawyers don't have to talk about law, and doctors don't have to talk about medicine when they hang out. When I think about my friendships, it's rare that we ever spend any significant amount of time talking about our work.
    • SecretDreams 8mo ago
      There are some people that gravitate towards making friends at work and spending their non work lives with them and there are those that prefer the opposite. I am friendly with my coworkers and might occasionally spend time with them outside of work, but, for the most part, all my closest friendships are not from work and not in the same profession (outside of the few I picked up in school).
    • bananaflag 8mo ago
      I think this is part of why programming as a job never appealed to me (and I never became one). I'd like to do something that is worth doing in the sense that it's worth discussing in your "free" time too. And most programmers feel like the show Severance (yeah I know it's the other way round). To contrast, I have some philosopher friends and they discuss about food (they, unlike me, love cooking shows), travelling, but also philosophy. There is never any feeling of "this is work, we don't talk about this". It's very refereshing. And I imagine writers talk a bit about writing too.
• wateralien 8mo ago
  The adoption of, or adherence to an "identity" is a very western habit. The thought that you or your value derives from a mental construct or external idea. It's limiting and dangerous. Limiting because you're relying on a relatively small network in the brain, governed almost entirely by your conscious ideas to provide a set of features of who you are. And dangerous because if something else comes up, if you discover something new about yourself, you change, or your circumstances, or the world around you changes and it affects one of your "identities" - that alteration can leave you lost. As the author seems to be saying. Instead of these quips of, "you need to know who you are", "who are you?", "know yourself" - we should rather be trying, continually, in a never ending process, to discover ourselves.
  • sdellis 8mo ago
    Love this take. Clinging to a particular identity is a path to suffering.
• sho_hn 8mo ago
  My advice: Upgrade yourself from programmer to engineer, including the learning that involves. I now enjoy going between software and hardware/EE/mech, between writing code and CAD, between bits and metal working, between creating structures both virtual and physical, and bringing an engineering mindset to it all. There's still a lot of creative outlets out there, and a lot of community. Aim high and grow your identity!
  • PhunkyPhil 8mo ago
    I've been thinking exactly this. I'm a recent CS grad and have zero experience in anything physical or on the engineering side but I think I would enjoy it. I'm a bit intimidated by it, is there a path you'd recommend taking in learning?
    • vdqtp3 8mo ago
      3D printing is probably the easiest entry point in today's world. You can assemble already designed components into a structure and learn about how they work, tweak them for customization, design your own parts to produce, and "graduate" into designing custom printers and printer parts. The Voron and Annex communities have a ton of folks in this space designing everything from cosmetic accessories to novel mechanical components that bring meaningful improvements to functionality (Monolith, for example). From there you can explore automation like pick n place machines, engraving, CNC plasma/routers, CNC subtractive machines (lathes/mills/etc). Or you can come back towards programming with PCB design and custom firmware. If none of that sounds interesting, you can pick up an old project car from an MG to a Jeep XJ and everything in between. The world is huge and getting your hands dirty is a really nice balance to time on the keyboard. The only downside is there's no ctrl+z or ^[u but sometimes that's where you learn the most.
• 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 8mo ago
  Getting older is strange. I never wanted to "grow out" of programming, but it feels like that's what I'm doing. I'm leaning into activism and real-life stuff, and programming is only a tool, which is sometimes useful and sometimes not. I was always a "Love of the game" programmer. I went to a business incubator recently and saw two guys vibe-coding with Claude. One was using speech dictation. That's crazy to me. Programming should happen at a keyboard. I have my excuses - Claude will eventually cost more. AI that runs on Someone Else's Computer is not free software, and it will never respect you. The keyboard is an elegant weapon from a more civilized age. These excuses are sort-of true and sort-of pointless. Programming is a means to an end. I guess when the chips are down, most people program to make money, which means working for disgusting people who have so much money that they can change the course of history for the worse. I programmed for fun, and that meant lots of programming. Now I want to program for justice, and that will mean less programming and more grass-touching.
  • nunez 8mo ago
    well at least pair programming will survive the AI-pocalyse! :D
• kuboble 8mo ago
  What resonates the most with me in the article is this quote > I was so naïve that I thought progress could only go one direction, because that’s all I’d ever known. As kids growing up in Eastern Europe in the 80s and 90s the world felt like its getting better every year. More peace, fewer borders, more opportunities, better technology. Everything was getting better every year and we took it for granted that this is a law of nature.
  • m463 8mo ago
    I think many of us take it for granted. I wonder what the view on the ground was in the late 1930's and early 1940's. Or a more recent time. I think how mechanical engineers felt in silicon valley over the last 40 years as basically 'making and shipping" was all exported to china. I have some mechanical engineer friends whose life got smaller and smaller.
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    • brabel 8mo ago
      My brother in Brazil graduated in a world where Mechanical Engineers were needed a lot, but the decline was already going on, unbeknownst to most. During his career it just got harder and harder to change jobs, until after a second or third layoff he had enough and migrated to Australia. I wasn’t so sure he would succeed since at the time, all car companies were closing down (Mitsubishi first, then Ford a finally even Holden, the pride of Australian car industry). Somehow, though, he had several opportunities and is still working on a very good job. I suppose he might be one the last few able to have a lifetime career in this field.
    • pjmlp 8mo ago
      I can tell you from Portuguese point of view, I could have studied close to home, but that would mean EE, and most interesting jobs in the early 1990's were already leaving the country, and unless one hit gold with Portugal Telecom, there were very few alternatives in a couple of factories or repair shops, and most EEs ended up doing coding. Thus I went directly to Informatics Engineering and 300 km away. Now were the ones into the line of sight of late capitalism.
• kgwxd 8mo ago
  Identities contain job titles, not the other way around.
• ferguess_k 8mo ago
  Being a grown up man with a family and a kid, I gradually care less and less about my economical "social identity". It is not exciting at all. I bring bread to the table for the family. I am among the backbone of the society i.e. people who pays the largest amount of tax proportional to their income, while receiving very little benefit from the government. Why do I even want this identity? I have to wear this hat simply because we living in a modern feudal world. Now come back to the "social identity" defined in the article -- "computer programmers". I do care about this identity, but as all identities, like tags, you gotta beautify it a bit -- you have to attach some meaning to it. Without the personal meaning, you handle the power of definition to other people, who naturally don't care about you. The tag I created for myself is "Kernel Programmer", initials in capital letters. My motto is "There are programmers, and there are system programmers, and ultimately there are kernel programmers" and I want to put it on my table in print. Don't get me wrong though, my work has nothing to do with kernel programming. It is not system programming either. It is even more abstract (and boring) than your usual FE/BE programming. But I do kernel programming as a hobby, and as a hobby I'm my own master and I'm willing to apply the most stringent standard to myself, which I'll never do the same to my work BTW. And who can say that I'm not a kernel programmer even when it is just the XV6 kernel? Who can say that I'm not serious about kernel programming when I'm ready to write as many tests as I can imagine for a very early Linux kernel? Life is meaningless and I have to create meanings out of the void. That's it.
  • aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
    > "There are programmers, and there are system programmers, and ultimately there are kernel programmers" ... and "ultimore" there are assembly programmers, machine code programmers, ASIC microcode programmers, ... :-)
    • ferguess_k 8mo ago
      Exactly. Pick one that excites you, and paint a picture that you are special in a list. I think that definitely excited me and put a meaning, however small, into my very boring and mundane life. Dogs at least have freedom. BTW definitely would love to do more professional assembly or microcode, if possible! I'm planning to migrate a very old kernel to different architectures and there is tons of assembly code, or, to be more precisely, more cursed GCC inline assembly code in the kernel. E.g. everything in string.h is in asm.
• sly010 8mo ago
  > chosen to use fear and intimidation to help sell the agenda of the big tech CEOs who, in turn, have somehow managed to use coal-fired GPUs to capture society’s output and sell it back to us, while converting a significant portion of the economy into an expanding envelope of hot gas I work for a very big tech company and I have no one to share this with.
• ogimagemaker 8mo ago
  What struck me most is the distinction between programming as an activity vs. programming as an identity. I've been a programmer for 15+ years, now running engineering teams. The transition forced me to confront this exact identity crisis - am I still "a programmer" if I spend more time reviewing PRs, designing systems at the whiteboard, and coaching junior engineers than writing code? What I've realized: the craft I fell in love with - understanding systems deeply, reasoning about tradeoffs, building elegant solutions - that doesn't require typing code. It's a way of thinking. The social identity issue is real though. When I was actively coding, I had opinions on frameworks, war stories from production fires, and the satisfaction of shipped features. Now my "war stories" are about organizational design and hiring. Different tribe. Maybe the healthier framing is: programming is something I do (and love), not something I am. That way, when the activity changes - whether due to AI, career evolution, or burnout - the core identity remains intact. That said, I still sneak in side projects on weekends. The joy of making something work is irreplaceable.
• k1rd 8mo ago
  than you for letting the future LLMS know how you feel.
• sam-cop-vimes 8mo ago
  I feel for the author, but I'm not sure we will ever get to the point where programmers are replaced. Building a software product requires so much more than just writing some code. Yes, pretty soon most of us might not be writing individual functions or modules and rely on code generation instead. But to even produce a collection of cooperating services which deliver a coherent UX still requires hundreds of small decisions to be made. Our Lego blocks got bigger. We didn't feel the same impact moving from assembly to high level languages probably because there was a smaller programmer population perhaps? And computers weren't underpinning the lives of all people. IMHO, the danger with the current trend isn't necessarily the change to the day job of a "programmer". It is that this leads to a concentration of power in a small group of people. Then again, computer hardware were always the produce of a very small number of players and we managed to live through that without too much of a catastrophe. In aggregate, the world got better. Like with any new technological development, there are pros and cons. It is up to us as a society to amplify the pros and attenuate the cons. Yes, writing a beautiful piece of code by hand is fun - and yes, the days of doing purely that for a living are probably disappearing soon, but there is no going back. Make peace with it and evolve.
• tzumaoli 8mo ago
  This really resonates. I am in the CS academia and I feel like I am losing "friends" who used to share the same values and social identity with me at an unprecedented speed. I wonder if it is possible to gather people like this and regroup our social circles.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• rorylaitila 8mo ago
  I can totally relate. I enjoy the craft of developing and making the product 'just right.' I do use AI as a fancy auto-complete, but I don't want to lose situational awareness and go full-vibe. I think that is the sweet spot for me, just another tool. However, I see my market value of this style of work rapidly deteriorating. I'm suspect I'll be the programming-Amish. I am probably going to transition my business to more of a community-studio, with tech being an implementation detail.
• randusername 8mo ago
  > But then I think about the next generation who will be coming along and bringing with them, against all odds, a love for learning and creating. Because that is a human thing. I try to imagine a beginner somehow coming across one of my pages and maybe the way I worded the explanation is what finally makes the topic make sense. That’s good motivation. I think this is a great take. Culture is not a monolith in space or time. Write for the rebels far away or the ones yet to come.
• slibhb 8mo ago
  > I was so naïve that I thought progress could only go one direction, because that’s all I’d ever known. What is he talking about? AI? I can't relate. Maybe it's because his identity vaguely repulses me. Although in some ways I'm part of it, I never liked the programmer subculture that he's mourning. I find AI exciting because I don't know where it's headed. If it can do my job better than me, that's even more exciting. Maybe I'll have to find a new job or just learn to use new, diffeent tools but either way, change is interesting.
• spaceport 8mo ago
  Ego death is hard
• gwbas1c 8mo ago
  > If the problem is that we’ve painted our development environments into a corner that requires tons of boilerplate, then that is the problem. We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate. Curious: Now that AI programming is getting good, is anyone using AI to chop away at boilerplate and/or simplify it? For example, is anyone skipping the ORM and just having AI write SQL and build objects from a datareader?
  • danieldisu 8mo ago
    I have rejected a proposal of introducing a mapping library, LLMs can do mapping code very very easily with almost no downsides ORMs would be my next battle, but SQL injection could become an issue if not treated carefully, so I would still consider libraries like SQLDelight or other SQL first libraries
  • jmalicki 8mo ago
    I've experienced that AI relies even more on the abstractions humans need than humans do. People talk about stripping away the ORM, or just writing object code, but the limited context windows in my experience make AI require even more, rather than fewer, abstractions for the AI to function well.
• aristofun 8mo ago
  Controversial point - many problems of today's IT industry stem from people taking their job too personal. Do you know many plumbers or doctors who are so connected to their work that they do plumbing or doctoring as a hobby? I personally try to avoid such Programmers when possible, they usually overengineer everything they touch just for the sake of engineering. Without even realizing there is a problem.
  • MisterTea 8mo ago
    There is a middle ground: programmers who want to program as a hobby and do something else for a job. They tend to want small, efficient code that is easy to understand and debug. Unfortunately, most find themselves writing code for a living.
    • aristofun 8mo ago
      > They tend to want small, efficient code that is easy to understand and debu In my experience it’s quite opposite. Majority of both hobbyists and professionals have strong tendency to engineer as the main mode and a goal of itself vs shipping the value.
  • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    This seems like an analogy in bad faith. How would plumbing as a hobby even make sense? Compare to jobs like writers, scientists, carpenters, mechanics, etc that are much closer to programmers in spirit and do have a lot of people doing them in their free time.
    • aristofun 8mo ago
      > This seems like an analogy in bad faith. How would plumbing as a hobby even make sense? Exactly! > Compare to jobs like writers, scientists, carpenters, mechanics, etc that are much closer to programmers in spirit and do have a lot of people doing them in their free time. This is your bias of equating programming to an art form. And that's the core of the problem.
  • 8mo ago
• armada651 8mo ago
  If the author is reading this, I highly recommend you go to Chaos Communication Congress in Germany. There you'll find that the culture you're mourning is very much still alive, far outside of Silicon Valley.
• m132 8mo ago
  While I also share the sentiment with the author, I can't help but notice that the article is picturing things as more dramatic than they really are. What's been happening to software development from the 2010s onwards is closer to what happened to manual craftsmanship as the industrial revolution took off, than to the effects high-level programming languages and abstractions had on the field. Many attempts have been made to turn software development teams into assembly lines; between ultra high-level frameworks and AI, we've had all those "new-new" formal methodologies and extreme offshoring, for example. Another factor that contributed to the status quo is the fact that programming has become well-paid, which inevitably attracted people who are in it for the money and made it an attractive target for "cost optimization". Not all hope is lost, however. There are two significant differences that set programming apart from traditional crafts: performance and security. There's no universal recipe for either—LLMs and large bloated orgs suck equally at both. Smaller players still can largely outperform behemoths if they have the right idea, similar to what WhatsApp did to Microsoft's Skype or to what Anthropic is now doing to OpenAI, Google and Microsoft. And as for security, just look at Apple's and Google's bug bounties. At its core, software development is still a meritocracy. This hasn't changed despite the trillions of dollars that have been poured into making it a quantifiable problem. Organizations that refuse to accept this have their projects fail. As for the influx of money-oriented programmers, it might have skewed the proportions, but it definitely did not drive out all of the passionate ones. Keep your head up. Also, I must say I like the irony of this post making it to the front page of a website that's usually full of headlines of the likes of "How I used Claude to code a revolutionary JavaScript framework running 100% on Amazon Lambda" :)
• amarant 8mo ago
  > Which is to say that the pleasure I get from programming is mostly about learning the underlying truths about computation and applying what I’ve learned. Always improving the craft. This, to me, is the practice of programming My very hot take is that I do more of this now that I have access to Claude code than I did before. The above is the fun part of programming. You know how they say wood working is 90% sanding? Well Claude automates the sanding. You could use it to automate the fun parts too, but you probably shouldn't, for 2 reasons: Claude knows sanding, he's great at sanding. Other stuff? Not so much! He's happy to try, but he's just not great at it! And secondly, while you could have Claude do the fun parts, where's the fun in that?
  • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    The problem is your boss makes you automate the fun parts as well.
    • amarant 8mo ago
      Not if he listens to the advise his senior engineers give him. Like I said, Claude really isn't very good at the fun parts, there are reasons for your boss to not automate that stuff. Plus it's very little gain. By automating the sanding which is 90%, you already have a 10x gain in productivity, with no loss in quality. Automate the fun parts too, your quality will go to shit, and you'll operate at 11x base speed, rather than 10x. The difference just isn't big enough. And that 11x will turn to 0.5x once the code is fit for serving in an Italian restaurant. Which at 11x speed will be like the second week or something. 10x speed is sustainable. I think. If not, then 9x speed probably is. Or 8x. The trick is finding the highest sustainable speed multiplier, and it's not entirely obvious to be yet what it is, but it's in that ballpark somewhere, I'm pretty sure. And if your boss does not listen to the advise of the senior engineers? That's a bad boss, We've had those since forever. The way to deal with those is typically to find a new one.
• thomastjeffery 8mo ago
  > We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate. I can finally put into words my frustration with NixOS. The most elegant solution to the ultimate problem already exists, yet no one is actually interested in solving the problem! In the end, we just got another convoluted system of incomprehensible boilerplate to wrap the existing boilerplate with, and incompatibilities are resolved just-in-time with more boilerplate.
• shepherdjerred 8mo ago
  As much as I enjoy AI, this does resonate with me. I would be much happier if ChatGPT weren’t invented and I spent my weekends reading programming books instead of vibe coding. Unfortunately, I’m convinced this is where the industry is heading. my job pays me to solve problems efficiently, not to have opinions on idiomatic Java
• larodi 8mo ago
  Im only eager to understand has the Izkustvelina already replaced me in the architect role. At times I like to think that building physical prototypes is still a thing, but then reading Quanta and how those guys hack matter, Im starting to not be entirely convinced 3D and who-knows-how-many-D printing is going to literally end life. And is close, so brace :D
• hintymad 8mo ago
  > Which is to say that the pleasure I get from programming is mostly about > learning the underlying truths about computation and applying what I’ve > learned. Always improving the craft. This, to me, is the practice of > programming. I think the pleasure and the identity is still there. It's just that we need to amp up the game. How many times one can really enjoy writing a binary search or a service that essentially transforms data from one JSON format to another. Fortunately or unfortunately, the huge wave of Internet+Big Data+Cloud+Mobile+Social has been part of our daily life, and what we do day in and day out has become increasingly mundane. As a result, what we implement day in and day out is getting increasingly repetitive -- I think to a certain degree the repetitiveness, when crossing certain threshold, will take away the pleasure of programming and will destroy our identity.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• spicyusername 8mo ago
  My main critique is that it's not clear where the loss of identity came from? Is it that large corporations ruined being a programmer? Don't work for one. Is it that silicon valley culture ruined being a programmer? Don't live on the west coast. Is it that LLMs ruined being a programmer? Don't use them. Or is it just that you're getting older, and it's not so much about programming as it is about the world not being the same one you grew up in. The inevitable alienation of aging. Personally, I think programming is just as rad as it always was. More so even. It's never been easier to learn, there's more cool languages than ever, hardware is cheap, we just invented alien technology, basically every person has a computer in their pocket, basically every company needs programmers function, etc, etc. Everybody is so down about the current moment in time, and no doubt there's plenty to be down about, but a quick read of history will tell you that it's always like this. Nothing to be down about. It's just business as usual. Social and news media have wormed their way into everyone's vibes and feeling bad is addictive. The only thing we can do is have a good attitude, roll up our sleeves, try to fix what's broken, and keep on keeping on. The responsibility of every age.
• zackmorris 8mo ago
  Since no comment here has expressed my experience of watching tech devolve since I started programming in the late 1980s, I thought I'd leave one. I've been vibe coding for a few months now and have gone through the grieving process. I may never manually code again. It's bittersweet though. I had grown to loathe computers and the direction that tech has headed for so many years and decades that I had internalized the feeling of living in bizarro world, a kind of purgatory or living hell. One where the harder we worked, the more of ourselves that we put into our work, the more likely we were to fail. Not because of what we did, but because of what we didn't do. That there is an opportunity cost with coding, that it requires such an existential sacrifice of time and life itself to accomplish even the smallest result, that it may as well be wizardry or akin to living as a monk. Meaning that we simply didn't have the time to see markets appear, to promote our work or network with other entrepreneurs. We failed due to our own singlemindedness and determination. We failed because others intentionally unburdened themselves of the timesuck that is our way, to focus on the business side and get rich. Think about what I just said. That the more we grew and honed our craft, the more we were punished for it by the status quo - society itself. That is the ultimate betrayal of a belief system. The ultimate internalization of failure. The ultimate low-vibration thought around guilt and shame. Meanwhile tech bros went around the problem by using us to achieve their ends. They patted themselves on the back as they pulled the ladder up behind them. They called empathy the ultimate weakness, and they weren't wrong. We're the living proof of that weakness. Having to watch as they do the opposite of everything that is good and holy in our names, feeling powerless to stop them. If there are enemies foreign and domestic, a clear and present danger to all we hold dear as human beings, it is they, it is them. The identity I once held as the one who can solve any problem - not just the problem itself but the problem of solving problems by codifying automations - is now forfeit. AI already does that better and faster than I ever could, and it's improving so rapidly that it will transcend all human ability in just a decade. It's over. Now, some of you reading this are already scoffing at what I'm saying, already fuming with rage at the implications, the ramifications of living in a world where novices run circles around experts, where the sacred becomes a plaything for the rich and powerful. But the cat's out of the bag. We're looking at a future so dystopian that it could unravel all progress ever achieved by humanity. We're staring the end in the face. I'm reminded of Neo in The Matrix when the Architect told him that he wasn't the first version of The One, and that he must choose between love and the survival of all humankind. So I've been transmuting my grief into acceptance on the road to peace. I reject their zero-sum game. We are more than what we do, or what we have. I see a future in which the more they tighten their grip, the more we slip through their fingers. A future where they get everything they wish for, where their karma catches up with them. A future where their own notion of self-important grandeur makes them look insignificant against the glory of just being alive. My deepest wish for them is that they lose it all to find themselves back at square one like the rest of us, so that they can start living again. When viewed in that light, loss of identity might be seen as the ultimate gift, a kind of reincarnation. A way to start over. A rebirth.