8 ms·

Programming Still Sucks

726 points by jeromechoo 5mo ago

maxehmookau 5mo ago
One of the best things I've read this year. Also one of the worst things I've read this year, actually. But also, I enjoyed reading it.
- stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
  Thanks man, that means a lot <3
jdw64 5mo ago
This is absurdly well written. I don’t know how someone takes the familiar anxiety around AI replacing developers and turns it into something this beautiful and funny. Once again, the programming industry has robbed literature of a potential Nobel Prize candidate.
- jeromechoo 5mo ago
  > You knew. And you signed off anyway. Because the alternative was losing the job, and the job was the mortgage, and the school fees, and the visa, and the version of yourself who'd fix it later once things stabilized. I felt the pang in my bones reading this. All of us peons are just wading through this brave new world trying to do what we know is right but ultimately having no choice but to give in to life's needs.
  - jdw64 5mo ago
    [dead]
- pona-a 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - jdw64 5mo ago
    You may be right. But this feeling is mine. Haha.
  - tyg13 5mo ago
    26% AI generated? What does that even mean? How is Pangram arriving at that figure?
    - pona-a 5mo ago
      26% of the sentences tripped the detection threshold for their classifier. That isn't a detection probability on the entire text.
  - idle_zealot 5mo ago
    Can we not pretend that AI can meaningfully classify whether something was written by AI?
  - grvdrm 5mo ago
    If it’s Claude - I’d love to see the prompts. This doesn’t read like AI to me. Lots of active voice. Shorter sentences. Not saying those are signals of human writing but in my experience AI writing is verbose.
    - pona-a 5mo ago
      26% isn't high and it's concentrated towards the end, so it could be the author just used it to revise some later paragraphs.
  - physPop 5mo ago
    26% means not ai 3/4 times...
  - loktarogar 5mo ago
    Would you accuse someone of murder with 26% matching evidence?
- grahamjperrin 5mo ago
  > anxiety around AI replacing developers For the benefit of people who don't absorb the entire article (spoiler alert): >> … AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did. …
- dktp 5mo ago
  As another commenter implied, the title a reference to this - https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks. Which is an incredible read as well
SaucyWrong 5mo ago
This was beautiful. I also appreciated the backlink to Peter Welch’s spiritual ancestor to this essay, which I had forgotten how to find, and had the joy of reading again.
fatih-erikli-cg 5mo ago
[flagged]
- phainopepla2 5mo ago
  What?
TacticalCoder 5mo ago
The USB stick hints at a big problem in our trade though: how do you "reboot" your IT infrastructure if it literally burns to the ground? I'm not talking about Google-scale systems (which still couldn't restart from scratch IIUC but they're actually working on it?) but only about SMEs. How does a medium-sized SME were all the payrolls depends on Sara and her USB stick do if, literally, their servers do catch fire. You've got backups, then what? How automated is the reinstallation of your typical SME's infra? The closest I saw to that scenario was some documentary where some little trading firm had just time to fetch the backup hard drives before leaving the building on fire after a plane crashed into it on 9/11. The CEO (I think it was the CEO) was explaining that had he not grabbed a HDD with the backups, the company was done (not that I advice onsite/offline backups on HDDs that you must not forget to grab when the shit hits the fan as a solution btw). I understand the "just drink the cloud kool-aid" angle: but are SMEs typically doing that? How many SMEs out there are depending on Sara's knowledge of the USB memory stick and how to use it? I've definitely seen similar things. And I'm sure many of you did too. Many houses of cards?
- smitty1e 5mo ago
  > How does a medium-sized SME were all the payrolls depends on Sara and her USB stick do if, literally, their servers do catch fire. The SpecOps guys have the following bit of wisdom on offer: "Two is one and one is none".
  - AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
    And a backup you haven't verified you can restore from isn't one.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- lmm 5mo ago
  > How does a medium-sized SME were all the payrolls depends on Sara and her USB stick do if, literally, their servers do catch fire. Like every job, we overestimate our importance. What do they do? They pay everyone the same as last month as a temporary measure, ask you to talk to your manager if your pay should be more this month, warn everyone that they're going to recalculate the payroll and adjust any differences next month. Then they calculate everyone's pay from the inputs, which really isn't such a hard problem when the alternative is failure. Maybe they pay some fancy consultants or an SAAS provider for a few months. Maybe they have to cut a few corners. Maybe they even get fined by their state's DoL. Life goes on.
ksd482 5mo ago
[flagged]
- SupLockDef 5mo ago
  I hope to never work with you. No offense.
  - ksd482 5mo ago
    It’s clear my comment is unpopular. I genuinely thought it would be well received. And I think what you are trying to communicate is your disagreement. Which is totally fine. I don’t claim to be right. I’m here to learn. I accept I could be wrong. But I’m curious what about comment is so offensive or disagreeable that you felt the need to say what you said. I am genuinely curious to learn your point of view. Can I ask you to articulate why you disagree with me and more importantly, what your view points are?
  - red75prime 5mo ago
    Your wish is granted. You will not work.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
keyle 5mo ago
Lovely writing! > ... to which they nod before moving on to a lighter topic, like whether we're going to nuke Iran or not. > There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. > AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did. Love the sarcasm, it carries a cynical form of experience :)
- nullhole 5mo ago
  > When the applause fades, my employees, or reports, or "my team" when I'm feeling jolly was good too
gregsadetsky 5mo ago
Archive link as the site seems down - https://web.archive.org/web/20260507003341/https://www.stvn.sh/writing/programming-still-sucks-fqffhyp https://web.archive.org/web/20260507003341/https://www.stvn....
graphememes 5mo ago
[flagged]
samdhar 5mo ago
[flagged]
fooqux 5mo ago
> AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did. Same greed that moved factories to Bangladesh and keeps slaves in cobalt mines in the Congo, wearing a new mask. Tell the nephew to do something else. Anything. It won't save him either, but at least he won't have to pretend the thing destroying his life is a robot. This hit me hard. This article is art. I think I need to sleep on this and read it again in the morning.
- hsuduebc2 5mo ago
  Autor surely always could be journalist. He can write a exceptional story.
  - stackghost 5mo ago
    Yeah, I fancy myself a decent writer but I am not anywhere close to this good. Very engaging, you can tell they're writing from the heart.
    - stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
      Keep writing please! Where can I find your writing?
  - bluegatty 5mo ago
    Don't like to go against everyone but this not particularly well written. It's a long winding absurdist metaphorical tale, that is really more or less a rant. It's not particularly well grounded. It's a nice piece of personalized fiction, but it's not particularly good writing and nothing approaching what we'd think of as 'journalism'.
    - Brian_K_White 5mo ago
      It's not absurdist. It's shining a light on something that actually exists and is absurd.
      - 5mo ago
artyom 5mo ago
I was expecting another AI rant. I got really great writing instead. This escalated quickly.
- stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
  I'm sorry, or you're welcome :D
jrm4 5mo ago
Yes. And the reason for all of this is the same as it's always been, and requires literally no technical knowledge to understand. There is essentially zero accountability for harm. There is no button on your toaster that blows up the toaster. But there's a link in your email. And that's a button. And no one has figured out how to punish Microsoft or Apple or Google for allowing that to continue, though we do this just fine elsewhere. Someone or something has to be punished, regulated or otherwise hurt for anything to change here.
- stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
  I agree, but would dare you to go one step further: there is no accountability for harm because, being the "bourgeoisie" under neoliberal capitalism, capital insulates them from consequences.
  - jrm4 5mo ago
    Probably not wrong, and I mean, lots of economics words there (ah, my college major) but I personally just think that the path forward here is more practical and boring. Gotta sue people and companies. Gotta get governments to do more regulation. I know this place is kind of allergic to that, but hey.
henry_bone 5mo ago
Let me add to the chorus of admiration for this piece of writing. Poignant, accurate, appropriately cynical.
quxbar 5mo ago
I don't agree with everything this piece concludes, but I do admire getting to read through a whole HN article without feeling the sheen of AI co-authorship.
- dshacker 5mo ago
  You're absolutely right - this is not X, but Y. ---- I'm absolutely tired at work on how many people are writing with em-dashes with obvious AI prose. I feel a little bit insulted but then I remember we all participate in this charade.
  - stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
    As a typography nerd, I am also mourning the death of typographic style. Em-dashes and ligatures <3
- redfloatplane 5mo ago
  It’s funny you say that as about halfway through I was beginning to wonder if this was at least Claude-edited. Absolutely no shade to the author meant, I think it’s a thoughtful article, but I _did_ feel the sheen of AI co-authorship. It raises the question of how much text I have read that I did not realise was LLM-generated. I think I have a decent nose for it but I’m not perfect, there must be false negatives (and false positives, as it certainly might be with this article). What will it mean when I can no longer tell the difference? Edit: thinking on it a little more, I hope the author doesn’t feel insulted by my comment given the subject matter of the article at hand. Sorry, it’s early morning! I’m sure I am wrong about my assessment. Which now really makes me wonder about the above
  - stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
    Hey! I'm not insulted at all. My position is that of a Luddite: I think technology is neutral, but deployment is not. My critique is structural, and I don't blame people in or out of tech for adopting AI to be able to survive. No AIs were harmed in the writing of this post, either physically or by the sharing of earlier (cringe) drafts.
chanux 5mo ago
> Later is never. We all knew that. AI will do all the "later" things we could not do and the civilisation will flourish. :')
julianeon 5mo ago
[dead]
beemboy 5mo ago
So good. I had this read to me by Eleven Labs' reader and it somehow very very good with conveying the emotion. 5 stars, will recommend
Waterluvian 5mo ago
I’m trying to piece together a thought. Is it right if my employer wants to “own” the gain in productivity from these tools? I’m being paid the same. I’m still doing 40 hours. The huge gains in productivity are not mine to enjoy, it seems.
- rileymat2 5mo ago
  Unless the method of increasing productivity increases it disproportionately for you or you find a way to outcompete in productivity gains, I am not sure that ever happens. Edit: To put a finer point on this, generally,employed people don't get paid more for the excess value they produce, they get paid more for for the delta in perceived value between them and the next best option to fill the position (on a grand statistical scale for careers). * There are exceptions to this in the form of commission based jobs.
  - Jensson 5mo ago
    That goes for everything, you wont take a job that pays much less than the other jobs you can get, customers do the same with products they buy. In the end just a few percent go to profits for most companies, extremely few companies pay out more profits than they pay in salaries. So all that productivity increase didn't result in higher profits either, end users mostly captured it by getting a lot of free services that previously used to cost money. International communication used to be extremely expensive but today I exchange hundreds of messages with people across the sea daily for almost nothing.
    - rileymat2 5mo ago
      In a competitive environment, yes. But, tech has been particularly monopolistic/duopolistic and anticompetitive in a lot of different ways. Avoiding being treated as a commodity the same way many of the employees of those companies have.
- doug_durham 5mo ago
  You can absolutely capture the value of your additional productivity. Strike out on your own. Start your own company or consulting firm. That has always been the answer. Why would you think it would be any different now?
stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
oh shit haha hey y'all. i'm blown away. also my site is blown away, y'all killed my cloudflare account. maybe go to your room and think about what you did.
- christianqchung 5mo ago
  Great post, thank you. At least AI won't reach this level of story quality for the foreseeable future.
- alex_x 5mo ago
  been thinking about the same for a while but couldn't put this into words; thank you
- jazzyjackson 5mo ago
  is your shit not static? I've been using html files hosted in R2 buckets on the free tier, I think you get like a million reads a month for free, HN isn't that big is she?
- moravak1984 5mo ago
  oh, YOU go to your room and think about what YOU did. You can't (accurately, beautifully and incisively) show us the real culpable in a very engaging way without repercussions.
- classified 5mo ago
  Is the Sarah in your post the same as in the <<The end of "Just ask Sarah">> article? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47952807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47952807
monkeyballs 5mo ago
> The truth is, working in tech always sucked, and never really was what they thought it was. This is just not true. Working in tech was awesome for me for at least thirteen years from 1988 - 2000. Probably well beyond, actually. The main reason it began to suck was due to business -- corporate acquisitions and mergers -- not tech. Working for a good company, solving fun problems, making meaningful software, and having happy customers was tech heaven.
- stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
  i'm glad you had a good time! i did too! the reason it began to suck wasn't that it began to suck, it's that you began to notice. technology isn't bad, the technology industry is bad. we were always bad to some people, now it seems we're just straight-up bad to everyone.
  - monkeyballs 5mo ago
    I won't deny some of that truth, but even from my far-removed perspective the suckiness was quite limited when the leadership was technical and the goals were aligned. However, I will 100% acknowledge that the industry has been utterly exploitative of (in particular) young people who are passionate about their work, and it took me many years to realize that.
- cobbaut 5mo ago
  What I remember mostly from working in that era, was that managers let engineers make the technical decisions.
  - stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
    I can't speak for all managers obviously, but that's what we want. Now though, suddenly we're expected to contribute code again and C-level is completely ignorant about the tradeoffs they're making. Compounding this is the fact that the feedback loop for the tradeoffs is likely still a year+ away, far longer than their incentives take to materialize.
- 5mo ago
monkeyballs 5mo ago
> The truth is, working in tech always sucked, and never really was what they thought it was. This is just not true. Working in tech (starting 1989) was awesome for me for at least 20 years, and tolerable for quite some time after. The main reason it began to suck was due to business -- corporate acquisitions and mergers and tech-ignorant MBA decisions, for example -- not tech. Working for a good company, solving fun problems, making meaningful software, collaborating with committed peers, and having (and directly supporting) happy customers was tech heaven.
- stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
  i zoomed in on a specific aspect of the experience, that of course doesn't mean everything is bad across the board. i've gotten great joy from programming, especially with other cool people, for most of my life. i'm grieving the loss of that joy, and hopefully, inspiring a few people to start talking to their peers about it, rather than suffering in silence.
- SpaceNoodled 5mo ago
  Same old story: it was fun and awesome when you started working in the industry, and twenty years later you're jaded and it sucks.
doug_durham 5mo ago
It sounds like the author shouldn't be in tech. For many, perhaps most of us programming is joy. It's why we started in our teens and have continued for 40 years. This is just a cynical post that adds no new value. We didn't kill the junior training mechanism. Juniors are still hired in the 100's thousands every year. There are valuable things to be said about the impact of AI. This isn't one of them.
- stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
  Programming gives me great joy. I wrote my first batch scripts when I was 6 years old. I got my first job in the industry when I was 20. I'm 41 now. The problem isn't the act of programming. As to juniors, first time I heard someone brag about AI removing the need to hire juniors was in 2022. every junior I know is struggling to find work. It's not hard to find reddit threads with people sharing their experience to that effect. The fact that some do get hired is not evidence to the contrary.
  - rustystump 5mo ago
    I remember being fresh out of school in peek free money era and couldn’t find anything. It was brutal. The only way i got out of it was by accepting help from an uncle who got me an internship at his company. After that one tiny bit of experience, i found a job at a php shop. I dont think much has changed. It has always been who you know. I was fortunate enough to have an uncle. Every single new hire i see is either the child of two fango mango parents or a visa. I rarely ever talk to someone with a different background. In startup world, everyone had theater degrees or dropped out. It was amazing. I miss it.
  - eloisant 5mo ago
    > every junior I know is struggling to find work. They also struggled in 2000, and in 2008. There was no AI at the time.
    - xboxnolifes 5mo ago
      Were they bragging?
jimbobbam 5mo ago
Ya hit real hard. Are there people in tech that can really write like this? Wow nail on the head
- gnabgib 5mo ago
  Com'on bot, don't talk about people like you know how it feels. Or am I absolutely right?
dwd 5mo ago
Oh man... Really enjoyed it, and went back and read "Programming Sucks" which is also full of delightful nuggets like this: "The only reason coders’ computers work better than non-coders’ computers is coders know computers are schizophrenic little children with auto-immune diseases and we don’t beat them when they’re bad."
- GoblinSlayer 5mo ago
  I kill any process that misbehaves.
socalgal2 5mo ago
Person needs to go work at another company
- stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
  I've worked at many over the past 20 years.
ytoawwhra92 5mo ago
> A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. Did we solve the ageism problem by mistake?
_pdp_ 5mo ago
The so called AI job loses are not due to AI. I don't think there is anyone out there to argue otherwise. In a year but probably sooner, when software systems start collapsing, and they will, hiring in tech sector will skyrocket. In fact, I don't believe the world have enough developers to backfill for the AI deficiencies. To me the math is obvious. Assuming humans touch a 1% of all software systems created, something we know it is simply never going to be true given the current state and upcoming regulations, the 47 million developers world-wide (and that includes all kinds of developers) are simply not enough. However, although jobs will be back and it will be better payed, programming will "suck" even more and I don't think it will be for everyone. If you are not the kind of person that enjoys reversing a piece of tangled mess it might not be for you. If AI is everything and AI is software then everything is software and everyone would like to have a piece of that software.
- FrustratedMonky 5mo ago
  >"I don't think there is anyone out there to argue otherwise." Meanwhile, millions are arguing otherwise.
- fragmede 5mo ago
  I like the idea of that, but it hinges on the notion that AI won't be capable of that. From what I've seen I don't know that it won't.
hmontazeri 5mo ago
lol Please check back later Error 1027 This website has been temporarily rate limited
- stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
  heh yeah the irony is not lost on me. should be fixed now.
fnoef 5mo ago
Isn’t it a bit ironic that a (presumably statically generated) blog post about “programming sucks” is being chocked to death by HN?
- stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
  Yeah this was just a failure on my part, I was too lazy to go the ISR route and was on the Cloudflare free plan. I was not expecting any traffic haha.
  - fnoef 5mo ago
    Get a VPS and host it there. Costs less than a cup of coffee a month, with tens of TB of traffic. Nice article by the way!
    - stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
      oh I probably should, but I'm kinda busy with checks notes trying to feed my family :D
- BirAdam 5mo ago
  Not really, no. As this post was inspired by "Programming Sucks," that the traffic generated by it made something break is quite on point.
vegaxarchitect 5mo ago
Is that ironic at all or is it really helpful? Hard to say.
arian_ 5mo ago
Programming has always sucked. The difference now is that we have AI agents that can do the sucking for us, and somehow that made everything worse because now we have to debug code we didn't write, can't fully understand, and definitely can't explain in a code review.
- fransje26 5mo ago
  Just use AI to explain the code to you. /s
- firemelt 5mo ago
  why do you think programming is sucked?
bronlund 5mo ago
Funny and insightful! AI can't write articles like this :)
charles_f 5mo ago
> The previous captain started a fire because another captain explained internal combustion to him at Captainpalooza 2025, and he wanted to start iterating towards that. Hey, that's agile! Such a great write-up!
anal_reactor 5mo ago
> You remember being the junior whose first PR got shredded by a senior who took the time to explain why. No I don't. I remember flagging that a tool is bugged, my manager-but-also-engineer-himself telling me "why cannot you do this, just press this button here" and then my entire work for that week getting obliberated because surprise surprise, the tool was bugged. And his voice "What? This wasn't supposed to happen.". > You told yourself the seniors could absorb the missing hands, that the agents would cover the gap. In every company I've been to the correlation between age, seniority, and skill, was very loose. I'll never forget going to my first job, talking to literally the oldest man there, and him telling me that smart pointers in C++ are silly and real men use bare pointers. > You knew what happens to a codebase when the people who'd catch the errors get pushed out, or learn to stop catching them. Recently I thought that we as a society need to stop expecting everything digital to work 24/7. Adding more nines to availability costs exponentially more effort but the gains are minimal. Imagine a world where every year for two days we just shut down the internet - one day for Postgres upgrade, and the other just for chilling on the beach. Would the society collapse? I don't think so. Managers understand this, but they prefer faulty software over giving their overly eager programmers a break. > Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. Not all of them. Not even most of them. Very few would become valuable contributors, most of them would never make code better than AI does. That's the sad truth. I sit in a meeting with 6 seniors and we spend an hour discussing irrelevant shit and eventually postponing the decision until "later time" aka "we'll quickly do whatever once the situation becomes urgent". How is that better than vibe-coding a functionality? > When she dies, the thing that produces people like her is already gone. Literally not a problem because if every single company is fighting the same issue, then your company isn't disadvantaged by also having the issue.
gitowiec 5mo ago
"AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did. Same greed that moved factories to Bangladesh and keeps slaves in cobalt mines in the Congo, wearing a new mask." :((( that is sad and so true. Economical thinking should be regulated
abstractspoon 5mo ago
Loved it. I'm retired
rramadass 5mo ago
On Greed; “If greed were not the master of modern man--ably assisted by envy--how could it be that the frenzy of economism does not abate as higher "standards of living" are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness? How could we explain the almost universal refusal on the part of the rulers of the rich societies--where organized along private enterprise or collective enterprise lines--to work towards the humanisation of work? It is only necessary to assert that something would reduce the "standard of living" and every debate is instantly closed. That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of "bread and circuses" can compensate for the damage done--these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence--because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.” ― From the book, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher. 1) See wikipedia for an overview/links to the book etc. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful 2) Small is Beautiful Revisited 50 Years On: A New Study Guide to Small is Beautiful - https://centerforneweconomics.org/envision/library/small-is-beautiful-study-guide-50th/ https://centerforneweconomics.org/envision/library/small-is-...
royaldependent 5mo ago
[dead]
jocelyner 5mo ago
[flagged]
asoderlind 5mo ago
Very well written article, joy to read, which is getting more rare these days. Also I think it's always worth repeating the risk of losing long-term institutional knowledge when opting for AI as an explicit replacement for junior devs. Another tragic case of short-term gains prioritized over long-term success.
sylware 5mo ago
Computer languages cannot be trusted, even from ISO. You may have a chance with a simple preprocessor and simple assembler. Don't forget, for most software out there, but not all, its development time is ridicoulus compared to its life cycle.
coldtea 5mo ago
>AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did. Sure. But when it comes to coding, even greed couldn't do it without AI. At best it could outsource, still giving it to humans.
kondov 5mo ago
I'm doing my best to mimic enthusiasm, but it's becoming harder and harder to do so. I was afraid I was turning into a dinosaur, so I tried to be excited about AI. We can do more with computers, we can build faster, we can prototype, etc. But when you have automation you get people with spreadsheets running the business and this is a little bit too close to an assembly line for my liking. I guess I'll be in the industry until it eventually spits me out, but if the rippling effects of software being devaluated can be so big that I don't know what I'll even do once this chapter of my life is over.
imrozim 5mo ago
Im 19 trying to break into teach and third exactly what scares me they killed the apprenticeship before i could get in how do you become Sara if there's no Ben left to learn from.
- fatata123 5mo ago
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deleted 5mo ago
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firemelt 5mo ago
I don't get the sentiment at all, to me all that make it sucks is just incompetent people not programming nor tech.
pjmlp 5mo ago
Oh boy, I can relate to the sentiment of the article, it feels like how it has always been in enterprise consulting.
techteach00 5mo ago
It's one thing to have to cope with the stress of job obsolescence over a generation but the speed has picked up so much that people just feel rushed and paranoid. Never enough time to settle down and feel secure for a bit. We all wanted gigabyte per second downloads not gigabyte per second life changes.
JKCalhoun 5mo ago
The sentiment of the article is spot on. I retired four years ago and it had already been going down hill for over a decade at that point. But… The but is simply to remind people that programming can still be fun. Programming as a career? Not really. If you don't believe me, that programming is still fun, go do some programming for your own personal project. (Still fun.) (But, yeah, so glad to have left. I recall toward the end of my career, a coworker and I having lunch in Apple Park and sitting there, lost in thought watching a gardener tending the plants and trees in the center of the "park". When my co-worker started to say something about the gardener I knew instantly where his thoughts had also been going and what he was going to say next.)
- biglost 5mo ago
  I love programming, i hate my work as a programmer or whatever shiny name people prefer like software engineer. It's the only thing i know, the only way to get money for my family, the only way my wife can work at something she loves to do, so her life it's not misserably as mine
- livinglist 5mo ago
  Programming is definitely fun but not so much so when you have bills to pay and a salary that barely keeps up with the inflation…
FrustratedMonky 5mo ago
Amazingly Real. Very good simple explanation for what is happening.
FrustratedMonky 5mo ago
Think this is very good article, and good to highlight with a link to an older one. The Moloch article from Scott Alexander. Covers the broader themes. Software just seemed immune from it for a couple decades, but Moloch caught up to it. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
stego-tech 5mo ago
Damn. Phenomenal read. Just a really excellent piece of prose in its own right, topic be damned. Yet the topic is also what makes it so good. It's written by someone who has also seen the vastness of impact technology has had, who has a firm grasp of the difference between technology and industry. Someone who knows the technology didn't get people addicted to social media and short-form videos and click-bait headlines and microtransactions, it was the industry that consciously chose greed and harm. I love technology, and I'll keep wielding and mastering it until I'm dead in the ground. It's the industry aspect that I'm increasingly dissatisfied and disillusioned with.
oxag3n 5mo ago
Great read. Got absorbed into few scenes. The scene with applauds played in my head as a silent movie with Charlie Chaplin presenting his perfect plans and crowd applauding unrealistically fast (due to under-cranking) with piano playing Super Mario theme in background.
realaaa 5mo ago
good article ! guy should be writing instead of IT delivery
jrosenblatt 5mo ago
"There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember." is brilliant writing. It's such good writing that it might convince you it's true. But it's cope. By that point, all senior engineer jobs will be automated too. And companies with old unknown chron jobs and USB sticks will get replaced by ones that innovate.
- JackSlateur 5mo ago
  This is dogma
michaelteter 5mo ago
The problem is not AI. The problem is still very human: the humans in charge don’t know what they don’t know, and they believe that whatever they imagine is true. They also often believe that anything they can think of must be easy - just a matter of a worker spending a little time. Or maybe an AI can do it. Management rarely learns from group failures, because they naturally assume that since the project was “easy”, it must be a problem with the workers. CEOs routines run companies into the ground and the switch to a new company, fist full of cash on the way out. Once in a while, one of those repeat failures ascends into politics.
- TheOtherHobbes 5mo ago
  The whole point of social media/Web 2.0/ad tech is to create and propagate these illusions, because it's more profitable to confuse, manipulate, and distract humans than to educate, inform, and communicate with honesty and integrity. So we've ended up with a low SNR culture where everything is noisy, nothing is real, and trends and fads created by grifters are more important than reality. Obviously, this won't end well in any of the many different ways it's playing out.
- cineticdaffodil 5mo ago
  Its the "Lets invade russia in winter" moment of the mbas.
khana 5mo ago
[dead]
invalidSyntax 5mo ago
Wow some story. I forgot time reading it. It's fiction, Right?...
wg0 5mo ago
> You knew. And you signed off anyway. Because the alternative was losing the job, and the job was the mortgage, and the school fees, and the visa, and the version of yourself who'd fix it later once things stabilized. The doll catches the fire. The greed of gullible CEOs. I assure you there's a talent pipeline collapse that's in progress and you'll be hard press to find senior engineers in few years because AI output is not something a junior can ride easily and you killed that pipline of junior engineers today. Slaying the goose that lays the Golden eggs in your corporate greed. You'll pay pack with interest and then some. Good luck.
seansh 5mo ago
I wonder if the embedded programming sector has been relatively safe and unharmed by AI. Is there anybody here who can weigh in?
AntiUSAbah 5mo ago
Not in my team and not in my code base. Build it greenfield 7 years ago, everyting is well documented, everything special screams at you if it breaks and tells you how to fix it (if it even needs fixing). We spend time on upgrading stuff because of external dependencies and otherwise add new features. Programming doesn't suck.
m463 5mo ago
So I've seen this pattern many times in software. I've been part of it too. AI is just repeating the pattern. You have a software group, and there's a young engineer that goes and tries some new technology. He spends weeks reading about it, and does a lot of stuff in his head, and then he does something for the group using it and shows it off. And management wonders about it. If the technology costs money, they will quietly push it off because they have no budget for a $50 tool. If it saves money, they will quietly push it off because reasons. But if it saves headcount and they get to get rid of "annoying fred with the red stapler", they might show interest. And interest means they have quietly accepted it in their mind. Thing is jr guy spent every waking hour on this thing, chose the problem carefully, and didn't talk about the impractical, the gotchas, or the things it affects that he doesn't know about. Who knows, maybe I'm just imagining this and AI is different.
Chipshuffle 5mo ago
I thought about Sara and the cron job and if this could be an interaction between a script and an AI agent. When the script doesn't run and throws an error, it could trigger an AI that has some skill to reconfigure and rerun the script so that it can run again. Seems like the perfect fit depending on the complexity.

726 points by jeromechoo 5mo ago

One of the best things I've read this year. Also one of the worst things I've read this year, actually. But also, I enjoyed reading it.

stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
Thanks man, that means a lot <3

jdw64 5mo ago

This is absurdly well written. I don’t know how someone takes the familiar anxiety around AI replacing developers and turns it into something this beautiful and funny. Once again, the programming industry has robbed literature of a potential Nobel Prize candidate.

jeromechoo 5mo ago
> You knew. And you signed off anyway. Because the alternative was losing the job, and the job was the mortgage, and the school fees, and the visa, and the version of yourself who'd fix it later once things stabilized. I felt the pang in my bones reading this. All of us peons are just wading through this brave new world trying to do what we know is right but ultimately having no choice but to give in to life's needs.
- jdw64 5mo ago
  [dead]
pona-a 5mo ago
[flagged]
- jdw64 5mo ago
  You may be right. But this feeling is mine. Haha.
- tyg13 5mo ago
  26% AI generated? What does that even mean? How is Pangram arriving at that figure?
  - pona-a 5mo ago
    26% of the sentences tripped the detection threshold for their classifier. That isn't a detection probability on the entire text.
- idle_zealot 5mo ago
  Can we not pretend that AI can meaningfully classify whether something was written by AI?
- grvdrm 5mo ago
  If it’s Claude - I’d love to see the prompts. This doesn’t read like AI to me. Lots of active voice. Shorter sentences. Not saying those are signals of human writing but in my experience AI writing is verbose.
  - pona-a 5mo ago
    26% isn't high and it's concentrated towards the end, so it could be the author just used it to revise some later paragraphs.
- physPop 5mo ago
  26% means not ai 3/4 times...
- loktarogar 5mo ago
  Would you accuse someone of murder with 26% matching evidence?
grahamjperrin 5mo ago
> anxiety around AI replacing developers For the benefit of people who don't absorb the entire article (spoiler alert): >> … AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did. …
dktp 5mo ago
As another commenter implied, the title a reference to this - https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks. Which is an incredible read as well

SaucyWrong 5mo ago

This was beautiful. I also appreciated the backlink to Peter Welch’s spiritual ancestor to this essay, which I had forgotten how to find, and had the joy of reading again.

fatih-erikli-cg 5mo ago

[flagged]

phainopepla2 5mo ago
What?

TacticalCoder 5mo ago

The USB stick hints at a big problem in our trade though: how do you "reboot" your IT infrastructure if it literally burns to the ground? I'm not talking about Google-scale systems (which still couldn't restart from scratch IIUC but they're actually working on it?) but only about SMEs. How does a medium-sized SME were all the payrolls depends on Sara and her USB stick do if, literally, their servers do catch fire. You've got backups, then what? How automated is the reinstallation of your typical SME's infra? The closest I saw to that scenario was some documentary where some little trading firm had just time to fetch the backup hard drives before leaving the building on fire after a plane crashed into it on 9/11. The CEO (I think it was the CEO) was explaining that had he not grabbed a HDD with the backups, the company was done (not that I advice onsite/offline backups on HDDs that you must not forget to grab when the shit hits the fan as a solution btw). I understand the "just drink the cloud kool-aid" angle: but are SMEs typically doing that? How many SMEs out there are depending on Sara's knowledge of the USB memory stick and how to use it? I've definitely seen similar things. And I'm sure many of you did too. Many houses of cards?

smitty1e 5mo ago
> How does a medium-sized SME were all the payrolls depends on Sara and her USB stick do if, literally, their servers do catch fire. The SpecOps guys have the following bit of wisdom on offer: "Two is one and one is none".
- AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
  And a backup you haven't verified you can restore from isn't one.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
lmm 5mo ago
> How does a medium-sized SME were all the payrolls depends on Sara and her USB stick do if, literally, their servers do catch fire. Like every job, we overestimate our importance. What do they do? They pay everyone the same as last month as a temporary measure, ask you to talk to your manager if your pay should be more this month, warn everyone that they're going to recalculate the payroll and adjust any differences next month. Then they calculate everyone's pay from the inputs, which really isn't such a hard problem when the alternative is failure. Maybe they pay some fancy consultants or an SAAS provider for a few months. Maybe they have to cut a few corners. Maybe they even get fined by their state's DoL. Life goes on.

ksd482 5mo ago

[flagged]

SupLockDef 5mo ago
I hope to never work with you. No offense.
- ksd482 5mo ago
  It’s clear my comment is unpopular. I genuinely thought it would be well received. And I think what you are trying to communicate is your disagreement. Which is totally fine. I don’t claim to be right. I’m here to learn. I accept I could be wrong. But I’m curious what about comment is so offensive or disagreeable that you felt the need to say what you said. I am genuinely curious to learn your point of view. Can I ask you to articulate why you disagree with me and more importantly, what your view points are?
- red75prime 5mo ago
  Your wish is granted. You will not work.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]

keyle 5mo ago

Lovely writing! > ... to which they nod before moving on to a lighter topic, like whether we're going to nuke Iran or not. > There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. > AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did. Love the sarcasm, it carries a cynical form of experience :)

nullhole 5mo ago
> When the applause fades, my employees, or reports, or "my team" when I'm feeling jolly was good too

gregsadetsky 5mo ago

Archive link as the site seems down - https://web.archive.org/web/20260507003341/https://www.stvn.sh/writing/programming-still-sucks-fqffhyp https://web.archive.org/web/20260507003341/https://www.stvn....

graphememes 5mo ago

[flagged]

samdhar 5mo ago

[flagged]

fooqux 5mo ago

> AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did. Same greed that moved factories to Bangladesh and keeps slaves in cobalt mines in the Congo, wearing a new mask. Tell the nephew to do something else. Anything. It won't save him either, but at least he won't have to pretend the thing destroying his life is a robot. This hit me hard. This article is art. I think I need to sleep on this and read it again in the morning.

hsuduebc2 5mo ago
Autor surely always could be journalist. He can write a exceptional story.
- stackghost 5mo ago
  Yeah, I fancy myself a decent writer but I am not anywhere close to this good. Very engaging, you can tell they're writing from the heart.
  - stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
    Keep writing please! Where can I find your writing?
- bluegatty 5mo ago
  Don't like to go against everyone but this not particularly well written. It's a long winding absurdist metaphorical tale, that is really more or less a rant. It's not particularly well grounded. It's a nice piece of personalized fiction, but it's not particularly good writing and nothing approaching what we'd think of as 'journalism'.
  - Brian_K_White 5mo ago
    It's not absurdist. It's shining a light on something that actually exists and is absurd.
    - 5mo ago

artyom 5mo ago

I was expecting another AI rant. I got really great writing instead. This escalated quickly.

stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
I'm sorry, or you're welcome :D

jrm4 5mo ago

Yes. And the reason for all of this is the same as it's always been, and requires literally no technical knowledge to understand. There is essentially zero accountability for harm. There is no button on your toaster that blows up the toaster. But there's a link in your email. And that's a button. And no one has figured out how to punish Microsoft or Apple or Google for allowing that to continue, though we do this just fine elsewhere. Someone or something has to be punished, regulated or otherwise hurt for anything to change here.

stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
I agree, but would dare you to go one step further: there is no accountability for harm because, being the "bourgeoisie" under neoliberal capitalism, capital insulates them from consequences.
- jrm4 5mo ago
  Probably not wrong, and I mean, lots of economics words there (ah, my college major) but I personally just think that the path forward here is more practical and boring. Gotta sue people and companies. Gotta get governments to do more regulation. I know this place is kind of allergic to that, but hey.

henry_bone 5mo ago

Let me add to the chorus of admiration for this piece of writing. Poignant, accurate, appropriately cynical.

quxbar 5mo ago

I don't agree with everything this piece concludes, but I do admire getting to read through a whole HN article without feeling the sheen of AI co-authorship.

dshacker 5mo ago
You're absolutely right - this is not X, but Y. ---- I'm absolutely tired at work on how many people are writing with em-dashes with obvious AI prose. I feel a little bit insulted but then I remember we all participate in this charade.
- stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
  As a typography nerd, I am also mourning the death of typographic style. Em-dashes and ligatures <3
redfloatplane 5mo ago
It’s funny you say that as about halfway through I was beginning to wonder if this was at least Claude-edited. Absolutely no shade to the author meant, I think it’s a thoughtful article, but I _did_ feel the sheen of AI co-authorship. It raises the question of how much text I have read that I did not realise was LLM-generated. I think I have a decent nose for it but I’m not perfect, there must be false negatives (and false positives, as it certainly might be with this article). What will it mean when I can no longer tell the difference? Edit: thinking on it a little more, I hope the author doesn’t feel insulted by my comment given the subject matter of the article at hand. Sorry, it’s early morning! I’m sure I am wrong about my assessment. Which now really makes me wonder about the above
- stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
  Hey! I'm not insulted at all. My position is that of a Luddite: I think technology is neutral, but deployment is not. My critique is structural, and I don't blame people in or out of tech for adopting AI to be able to survive. No AIs were harmed in the writing of this post, either physically or by the sharing of earlier (cringe) drafts.

chanux 5mo ago

> Later is never. We all knew that. AI will do all the "later" things we could not do and the civilisation will flourish. :')

julianeon 5mo ago

[dead]

beemboy 5mo ago

So good. I had this read to me by Eleven Labs' reader and it somehow very very good with conveying the emotion. 5 stars, will recommend

Waterluvian 5mo ago

I’m trying to piece together a thought. Is it right if my employer wants to “own” the gain in productivity from these tools? I’m being paid the same. I’m still doing 40 hours. The huge gains in productivity are not mine to enjoy, it seems.

rileymat2 5mo ago
Unless the method of increasing productivity increases it disproportionately for you or you find a way to outcompete in productivity gains, I am not sure that ever happens. Edit: To put a finer point on this, generally,employed people don't get paid more for the excess value they produce, they get paid more for for the delta in perceived value between them and the next best option to fill the position (on a grand statistical scale for careers). * There are exceptions to this in the form of commission based jobs.
- Jensson 5mo ago
  That goes for everything, you wont take a job that pays much less than the other jobs you can get, customers do the same with products they buy. In the end just a few percent go to profits for most companies, extremely few companies pay out more profits than they pay in salaries. So all that productivity increase didn't result in higher profits either, end users mostly captured it by getting a lot of free services that previously used to cost money. International communication used to be extremely expensive but today I exchange hundreds of messages with people across the sea daily for almost nothing.
  - rileymat2 5mo ago
    In a competitive environment, yes. But, tech has been particularly monopolistic/duopolistic and anticompetitive in a lot of different ways. Avoiding being treated as a commodity the same way many of the employees of those companies have.
doug_durham 5mo ago
You can absolutely capture the value of your additional productivity. Strike out on your own. Start your own company or consulting firm. That has always been the answer. Why would you think it would be any different now?

stevenlangbroek 5mo ago

oh shit haha hey y'all. i'm blown away. also my site is blown away, y'all killed my cloudflare account. maybe go to your room and think about what you did.

christianqchung 5mo ago
Great post, thank you. At least AI won't reach this level of story quality for the foreseeable future.
alex_x 5mo ago
been thinking about the same for a while but couldn't put this into words; thank you
jazzyjackson 5mo ago
is your shit not static? I've been using html files hosted in R2 buckets on the free tier, I think you get like a million reads a month for free, HN isn't that big is she?
moravak1984 5mo ago
oh, YOU go to your room and think about what YOU did. You can't (accurately, beautifully and incisively) show us the real culpable in a very engaging way without repercussions.
classified 5mo ago
Is the Sarah in your post the same as in the <<The end of "Just ask Sarah">> article? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47952807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47952807

monkeyballs 5mo ago

> The truth is, working in tech always sucked, and never really was what they thought it was. This is just not true. Working in tech was awesome for me for at least thirteen years from 1988 - 2000. Probably well beyond, actually. The main reason it began to suck was due to business -- corporate acquisitions and mergers -- not tech. Working for a good company, solving fun problems, making meaningful software, and having happy customers was tech heaven.

stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
i'm glad you had a good time! i did too! the reason it began to suck wasn't that it began to suck, it's that you began to notice. technology isn't bad, the technology industry is bad. we were always bad to some people, now it seems we're just straight-up bad to everyone.
- monkeyballs 5mo ago
  I won't deny some of that truth, but even from my far-removed perspective the suckiness was quite limited when the leadership was technical and the goals were aligned. However, I will 100% acknowledge that the industry has been utterly exploitative of (in particular) young people who are passionate about their work, and it took me many years to realize that.
cobbaut 5mo ago
What I remember mostly from working in that era, was that managers let engineers make the technical decisions.
- stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
  I can't speak for all managers obviously, but that's what we want. Now though, suddenly we're expected to contribute code again and C-level is completely ignorant about the tradeoffs they're making. Compounding this is the fact that the feedback loop for the tradeoffs is likely still a year+ away, far longer than their incentives take to materialize.
5mo ago

monkeyballs 5mo ago

> The truth is, working in tech always sucked, and never really was what they thought it was. This is just not true. Working in tech (starting 1989) was awesome for me for at least 20 years, and tolerable for quite some time after. The main reason it began to suck was due to business -- corporate acquisitions and mergers and tech-ignorant MBA decisions, for example -- not tech. Working for a good company, solving fun problems, making meaningful software, collaborating with committed peers, and having (and directly supporting) happy customers was tech heaven.

stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
i zoomed in on a specific aspect of the experience, that of course doesn't mean everything is bad across the board. i've gotten great joy from programming, especially with other cool people, for most of my life. i'm grieving the loss of that joy, and hopefully, inspiring a few people to start talking to their peers about it, rather than suffering in silence.
SpaceNoodled 5mo ago
Same old story: it was fun and awesome when you started working in the industry, and twenty years later you're jaded and it sucks.

doug_durham 5mo ago

It sounds like the author shouldn't be in tech. For many, perhaps most of us programming is joy. It's why we started in our teens and have continued for 40 years. This is just a cynical post that adds no new value. We didn't kill the junior training mechanism. Juniors are still hired in the 100's thousands every year. There are valuable things to be said about the impact of AI. This isn't one of them.

stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
Programming gives me great joy. I wrote my first batch scripts when I was 6 years old. I got my first job in the industry when I was 20. I'm 41 now. The problem isn't the act of programming. As to juniors, first time I heard someone brag about AI removing the need to hire juniors was in 2022. every junior I know is struggling to find work. It's not hard to find reddit threads with people sharing their experience to that effect. The fact that some do get hired is not evidence to the contrary.
- rustystump 5mo ago
  I remember being fresh out of school in peek free money era and couldn’t find anything. It was brutal. The only way i got out of it was by accepting help from an uncle who got me an internship at his company. After that one tiny bit of experience, i found a job at a php shop. I dont think much has changed. It has always been who you know. I was fortunate enough to have an uncle. Every single new hire i see is either the child of two fango mango parents or a visa. I rarely ever talk to someone with a different background. In startup world, everyone had theater degrees or dropped out. It was amazing. I miss it.
- eloisant 5mo ago
  > every junior I know is struggling to find work. They also struggled in 2000, and in 2008. There was no AI at the time.
  - xboxnolifes 5mo ago
    Were they bragging?

jimbobbam 5mo ago

Ya hit real hard. Are there people in tech that can really write like this? Wow nail on the head

gnabgib 5mo ago
Com'on bot, don't talk about people like you know how it feels. Or am I absolutely right?

dwd 5mo ago

Oh man... Really enjoyed it, and went back and read "Programming Sucks" which is also full of delightful nuggets like this: "The only reason coders’ computers work better than non-coders’ computers is coders know computers are schizophrenic little children with auto-immune diseases and we don’t beat them when they’re bad."

GoblinSlayer 5mo ago
I kill any process that misbehaves.

socalgal2 5mo ago

Person needs to go work at another company

stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
I've worked at many over the past 20 years.

ytoawwhra92 5mo ago

> A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. Did we solve the ageism problem by mistake?

_pdp_ 5mo ago

The so called AI job loses are not due to AI. I don't think there is anyone out there to argue otherwise. In a year but probably sooner, when software systems start collapsing, and they will, hiring in tech sector will skyrocket. In fact, I don't believe the world have enough developers to backfill for the AI deficiencies. To me the math is obvious. Assuming humans touch a 1% of all software systems created, something we know it is simply never going to be true given the current state and upcoming regulations, the 47 million developers world-wide (and that includes all kinds of developers) are simply not enough. However, although jobs will be back and it will be better payed, programming will "suck" even more and I don't think it will be for everyone. If you are not the kind of person that enjoys reversing a piece of tangled mess it might not be for you. If AI is everything and AI is software then everything is software and everyone would like to have a piece of that software.

FrustratedMonky 5mo ago
>"I don't think there is anyone out there to argue otherwise." Meanwhile, millions are arguing otherwise.
fragmede 5mo ago
I like the idea of that, but it hinges on the notion that AI won't be capable of that. From what I've seen I don't know that it won't.

hmontazeri 5mo ago

lol Please check back later Error 1027 This website has been temporarily rate limited

stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
heh yeah the irony is not lost on me. should be fixed now.

fnoef 5mo ago

Isn’t it a bit ironic that a (presumably statically generated) blog post about “programming sucks” is being chocked to death by HN?

stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
Yeah this was just a failure on my part, I was too lazy to go the ISR route and was on the Cloudflare free plan. I was not expecting any traffic haha.
- fnoef 5mo ago
  Get a VPS and host it there. Costs less than a cup of coffee a month, with tens of TB of traffic. Nice article by the way!
  - stevenlangbroek 5mo ago
    oh I probably should, but I'm kinda busy with checks notes trying to feed my family :D
BirAdam 5mo ago
Not really, no. As this post was inspired by "Programming Sucks," that the traffic generated by it made something break is quite on point.

vegaxarchitect 5mo ago

Is that ironic at all or is it really helpful? Hard to say.

arian_ 5mo ago

Programming has always sucked. The difference now is that we have AI agents that can do the sucking for us, and somehow that made everything worse because now we have to debug code we didn't write, can't fully understand, and definitely can't explain in a code review.

fransje26 5mo ago
Just use AI to explain the code to you. /s
firemelt 5mo ago
why do you think programming is sucked?

bronlund 5mo ago

Funny and insightful! AI can't write articles like this :)

charles_f 5mo ago

> The previous captain started a fire because another captain explained internal combustion to him at Captainpalooza 2025, and he wanted to start iterating towards that. Hey, that's agile! Such a great write-up!

anal_reactor 5mo ago

> You remember being the junior whose first PR got shredded by a senior who took the time to explain why. No I don't. I remember flagging that a tool is bugged, my manager-but-also-engineer-himself telling me "why cannot you do this, just press this button here" and then my entire work for that week getting obliberated because surprise surprise, the tool was bugged. And his voice "What? This wasn't supposed to happen.". > You told yourself the seniors could absorb the missing hands, that the agents would cover the gap. In every company I've been to the correlation between age, seniority, and skill, was very loose. I'll never forget going to my first job, talking to literally the oldest man there, and him telling me that smart pointers in C++ are silly and real men use bare pointers. > You knew what happens to a codebase when the people who'd catch the errors get pushed out, or learn to stop catching them. Recently I thought that we as a society need to stop expecting everything digital to work 24/7. Adding more nines to availability costs exponentially more effort but the gains are minimal. Imagine a world where every year for two days we just shut down the internet - one day for Postgres upgrade, and the other just for chilling on the beach. Would the society collapse? I don't think so. Managers understand this, but they prefer faulty software over giving their overly eager programmers a break. > Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. Not all of them. Not even most of them. Very few would become valuable contributors, most of them would never make code better than AI does. That's the sad truth. I sit in a meeting with 6 seniors and we spend an hour discussing irrelevant shit and eventually postponing the decision until "later time" aka "we'll quickly do whatever once the situation becomes urgent". How is that better than vibe-coding a functionality? > When she dies, the thing that produces people like her is already gone. Literally not a problem because if every single company is fighting the same issue, then your company isn't disadvantaged by also having the issue.

gitowiec 5mo ago

"AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did. Same greed that moved factories to Bangladesh and keeps slaves in cobalt mines in the Congo, wearing a new mask." :((( that is sad and so true. Economical thinking should be regulated

abstractspoon 5mo ago

Loved it. I'm retired

rramadass 5mo ago

On Greed; “If greed were not the master of modern man--ably assisted by envy--how could it be that the frenzy of economism does not abate as higher "standards of living" are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness? How could we explain the almost universal refusal on the part of the rulers of the rich societies--where organized along private enterprise or collective enterprise lines--to work towards the humanisation of work? It is only necessary to assert that something would reduce the "standard of living" and every debate is instantly closed. That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of "bread and circuses" can compensate for the damage done--these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence--because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.” ― From the book, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher. 1) See wikipedia for an overview/links to the book etc. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful 2) Small is Beautiful Revisited 50 Years On: A New Study Guide to Small is Beautiful - https://centerforneweconomics.org/envision/library/small-is-beautiful-study-guide-50th/ https://centerforneweconomics.org/envision/library/small-is-...

royaldependent 5mo ago

[dead]

jocelyner 5mo ago

[flagged]

asoderlind 5mo ago

Very well written article, joy to read, which is getting more rare these days. Also I think it's always worth repeating the risk of losing long-term institutional knowledge when opting for AI as an explicit replacement for junior devs. Another tragic case of short-term gains prioritized over long-term success.

sylware 5mo ago

Computer languages cannot be trusted, even from ISO. You may have a chance with a simple preprocessor and simple assembler. Don't forget, for most software out there, but not all, its development time is ridicoulus compared to its life cycle.

coldtea 5mo ago

>AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did. Sure. But when it comes to coding, even greed couldn't do it without AI. At best it could outsource, still giving it to humans.

kondov 5mo ago

I'm doing my best to mimic enthusiasm, but it's becoming harder and harder to do so. I was afraid I was turning into a dinosaur, so I tried to be excited about AI. We can do more with computers, we can build faster, we can prototype, etc. But when you have automation you get people with spreadsheets running the business and this is a little bit too close to an assembly line for my liking. I guess I'll be in the industry until it eventually spits me out, but if the rippling effects of software being devaluated can be so big that I don't know what I'll even do once this chapter of my life is over.

imrozim 5mo ago

Im 19 trying to break into teach and third exactly what scares me they killed the apprenticeship before i could get in how do you become Sara if there's no Ben left to learn from.

fatata123 5mo ago
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firemelt 5mo ago

I don't get the sentiment at all, to me all that make it sucks is just incompetent people not programming nor tech.

pjmlp 5mo ago

Oh boy, I can relate to the sentiment of the article, it feels like how it has always been in enterprise consulting.

techteach00 5mo ago

It's one thing to have to cope with the stress of job obsolescence over a generation but the speed has picked up so much that people just feel rushed and paranoid. Never enough time to settle down and feel secure for a bit. We all wanted gigabyte per second downloads not gigabyte per second life changes.

JKCalhoun 5mo ago

The sentiment of the article is spot on. I retired four years ago and it had already been going down hill for over a decade at that point. But… The but is simply to remind people that programming can still be fun. Programming as a career? Not really. If you don't believe me, that programming is still fun, go do some programming for your own personal project. (Still fun.) (But, yeah, so glad to have left. I recall toward the end of my career, a coworker and I having lunch in Apple Park and sitting there, lost in thought watching a gardener tending the plants and trees in the center of the "park". When my co-worker started to say something about the gardener I knew instantly where his thoughts had also been going and what he was going to say next.)

biglost 5mo ago
I love programming, i hate my work as a programmer or whatever shiny name people prefer like software engineer. It's the only thing i know, the only way to get money for my family, the only way my wife can work at something she loves to do, so her life it's not misserably as mine
livinglist 5mo ago
Programming is definitely fun but not so much so when you have bills to pay and a salary that barely keeps up with the inflation…

FrustratedMonky 5mo ago

Amazingly Real. Very good simple explanation for what is happening.

FrustratedMonky 5mo ago

Think this is very good article, and good to highlight with a link to an older one. The Moloch article from Scott Alexander. Covers the broader themes. Software just seemed immune from it for a couple decades, but Moloch caught up to it. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

stego-tech 5mo ago

Damn. Phenomenal read. Just a really excellent piece of prose in its own right, topic be damned. Yet the topic is also what makes it so good. It's written by someone who has also seen the vastness of impact technology has had, who has a firm grasp of the difference between technology and industry. Someone who knows the technology didn't get people addicted to social media and short-form videos and click-bait headlines and microtransactions, it was the industry that consciously chose greed and harm. I love technology, and I'll keep wielding and mastering it until I'm dead in the ground. It's the industry aspect that I'm increasingly dissatisfied and disillusioned with.

oxag3n 5mo ago

Great read. Got absorbed into few scenes. The scene with applauds played in my head as a silent movie with Charlie Chaplin presenting his perfect plans and crowd applauding unrealistically fast (due to under-cranking) with piano playing Super Mario theme in background.

realaaa 5mo ago

good article ! guy should be writing instead of IT delivery

jrosenblatt 5mo ago

"There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember." is brilliant writing. It's such good writing that it might convince you it's true. But it's cope. By that point, all senior engineer jobs will be automated too. And companies with old unknown chron jobs and USB sticks will get replaced by ones that innovate.

JackSlateur 5mo ago
This is dogma

michaelteter 5mo ago

The problem is not AI. The problem is still very human: the humans in charge don’t know what they don’t know, and they believe that whatever they imagine is true. They also often believe that anything they can think of must be easy - just a matter of a worker spending a little time. Or maybe an AI can do it. Management rarely learns from group failures, because they naturally assume that since the project was “easy”, it must be a problem with the workers. CEOs routines run companies into the ground and the switch to a new company, fist full of cash on the way out. Once in a while, one of those repeat failures ascends into politics.

TheOtherHobbes 5mo ago
The whole point of social media/Web 2.0/ad tech is to create and propagate these illusions, because it's more profitable to confuse, manipulate, and distract humans than to educate, inform, and communicate with honesty and integrity. So we've ended up with a low SNR culture where everything is noisy, nothing is real, and trends and fads created by grifters are more important than reality. Obviously, this won't end well in any of the many different ways it's playing out.
cineticdaffodil 5mo ago
Its the "Lets invade russia in winter" moment of the mbas.

khana 5mo ago

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invalidSyntax 5mo ago

Wow some story. I forgot time reading it. It's fiction, Right?...

wg0 5mo ago

> You knew. And you signed off anyway. Because the alternative was losing the job, and the job was the mortgage, and the school fees, and the visa, and the version of yourself who'd fix it later once things stabilized. The doll catches the fire. The greed of gullible CEOs. I assure you there's a talent pipeline collapse that's in progress and you'll be hard press to find senior engineers in few years because AI output is not something a junior can ride easily and you killed that pipline of junior engineers today. Slaying the goose that lays the Golden eggs in your corporate greed. You'll pay pack with interest and then some. Good luck.

seansh 5mo ago

I wonder if the embedded programming sector has been relatively safe and unharmed by AI. Is there anybody here who can weigh in?

AntiUSAbah 5mo ago

Not in my team and not in my code base. Build it greenfield 7 years ago, everyting is well documented, everything special screams at you if it breaks and tells you how to fix it (if it even needs fixing). We spend time on upgrading stuff because of external dependencies and otherwise add new features. Programming doesn't suck.

m463 5mo ago

So I've seen this pattern many times in software. I've been part of it too. AI is just repeating the pattern. You have a software group, and there's a young engineer that goes and tries some new technology. He spends weeks reading about it, and does a lot of stuff in his head, and then he does something for the group using it and shows it off. And management wonders about it. If the technology costs money, they will quietly push it off because they have no budget for a $50 tool. If it saves money, they will quietly push it off because reasons. But if it saves headcount and they get to get rid of "annoying fred with the red stapler", they might show interest. And interest means they have quietly accepted it in their mind. Thing is jr guy spent every waking hour on this thing, chose the problem carefully, and didn't talk about the impractical, the gotchas, or the things it affects that he doesn't know about. Who knows, maybe I'm just imagining this and AI is different.

Chipshuffle 5mo ago

I thought about Sara and the cron job and if this could be an interaction between a script and an AI agent. When the script doesn't run and throws an error, it could trigger an AI that has some skill to reconfigure and rerun the script so that it can run again. Seems like the perfect fit depending on the complexity.