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This is legitimately the reason I'm looking to leave programming. I got into programming because the problems of programming were interesting to me. But if th

• Bratmon 3mo ago
  (And I admit I'm salty that the "I don't give a shit about why the calculator doesn't work in France, I'm just here because they pay me to fix it" people were the ones vindicated by technological progress)
  • teaearlgraycold 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    • slopinthebag 3mo ago
      In every industry, and we wonder why everything is being enshittified. I'm not looking forward to using computers or technology over the next decade. There is a non-zero chance myself or a loved one is killed because of vibe coding.
      • fragmede 3mo ago
        There's also a non zero chance that someone in your life is going to have fun and whimsy and their life improved by vibe coding. Why focus on the negative?
        • QwenGlazer9000 3mo ago
          Are you fr?
        • slopinthebag 3mo ago
          Yes who cares if they die as long as they had some fun and whimsy first! :P Edit: fr though I have plenty of fun and whimsy without needing vibe coded apps and I'd prefer a 911 call didn't get routed to Burger King because someone vibe coded the comm stack...
          • esseph 3mo ago
            We're all going to die. Have your fun and whimsy.
          • fragmede 3mo ago
            To each their own. Would you rather live a long boring safe life, or a fast short exciting one? You decide!
            • bluefirebrand 3mo ago
              I want to live forever Not to be rich or famous or powerful. I just want to see where it all goes. I want to see the heights humanity reaches. I want to set foot on other planets, I wish I could see the universe That's way more exciting to me than doing the kind of shit that leads to a "fast short life"
            • NateEag 3mo ago
              If people live lives wherein they build important societal systems to be biased towards "short fast exciting" lives, the opportunity to live a long, boring, safe one may just evaporate.
        • nearlyepic 3mo ago
          "drunk driving helps people get home from the bar. why focus on the negative?"
          • fragmede 3mo ago
            Don't drive drunk. I'm pro self-driving cars.
            • slopinthebag 3mo ago
              But people have fun and whimsy and their life is improved by drunk driving. Why focus on the negative?
              • fragmede 3mo ago
                [flagged]
        • yuye 3mo ago
          Loads of people do cocaine and have "fun and whimsy" and I'm willing to bet there are even a few out there that have had their life improved by cocaine. Why focus on the negative?
        • aakresearch 3mo ago
          If the life of everyone (all 8 billion people) is improved by tech by some margin (pick the margin - 10%, 1%, 0.1%) at the cost of x people (pick the x - a thousand, a million, a billion) being killed by the same tech - is it still positive or negative? How do you even reason about it?
          • fragmede 3mo ago
            Fortunately, I'm not actually in charge of anything. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. There are some real life trolly problems out there that I'm glad I don't have to answer. https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/ https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/ But yeah if you want to put it in a spreadsheet, what numbers do you want for it to work out? Because I'm using a smartphone to access the Internet and post here, which means I have no idea how much human misery went into my being able to do that. Someone has died to make my totally average smartphone came to be in my hands. LLMs are nothing new under capitalism.
            • aakresearch 3mo ago
              I think we are in full agreement. Likewise, I am not in charge of any practical matter, and glad I don't have to answer to any moral or physical dilemma. The link is fun :). My kill count was 75. I was hinting at full impossibility to quantify those problems. Starting with un-define-ability (sorry, English is not my native tongue) of the very term "need" upon which the predicate "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few". Maybe that is why I am leaning towards "deontological" resolution of trolley problems, rather than "utilitarian". As for LLMs, I use them and benefit from them. For fun, and hopefully for profit too. But if I had a lever I could pull to make this tech disappear - I would not hesitate one second, deontology be damned. Even better if smartphones suddenly follow too.
      • dinkleberg 3mo ago
        But there is a much higher chance of getting killed by any number of other concerns like by a drunk driver. Putting that one on the list of things to stress about seems unwarranted.
        • yuye 3mo ago
          The difference is that drunk driving stocks aren't at an all-time high.
        • slopinthebag 3mo ago
          I'm gonna get a bag tonight, after all I have a much higher chance of getting killed by any number of other concerns anyways.
    • mc3301 3mo ago
      Hmm... I think the majority of people working jobs are mostly just there "for the paychecks." It'd be rather beautiful if all jobs were purely passion driven, but that is simply not the case. Nor could it be. And yeah, there are programmers with jobs that are mostly driven by passion, but most would pack it up and go home immediately if there was a sudden "we have stopped paying you" announcement.
      • cindyllm 3mo ago
        [dead]
      • sodapopcan 3mo ago
        > Hmm... I think the majority of people working jobs are mostly just there "for the paychecks." And the majority of software is terrible so ya. Life is generally unfortunate.
      • jp0d 3mo ago
        Why else would you "work", if it weren't for the pay cheques to support yourself and your family?
        • jdashg 3mo ago
          Because I believed in the product! (Firefox, in my case)
          • jp0d 3mo ago
            May I ask what do you do to financially support yourself, if the gig at Firefox is pro bono?
      • zamadatix 3mo ago
        There is a large canyon between "just their for the paycheck" and "primarily there for the paycheck". Most have _something_ about their job they enjoy, it's just not usually enough to be the top reason for having the job.
      • 3mo ago
    • bobthebob 3mo ago
      So - most of human society?
    • jp0d 3mo ago
      I think greedy execs are a much bigger problem than "The people just here for the paychecks".
• irjustin 3mo ago
  Giving my "otherside", because the pressure to output more at work is real, but at the same time, out side of work, I love this. I'm able to do way more projects than ever before because a barrier to entry was always the amount of research+time required to start up a pet project. My latest is, I'm really into fizzy/soda water and wanted my own continuous carbonator. My entire build from water source to tap with an ESP32 controlled pump, pressure, water level, cooling fans. There were so many areas I made mistakes in my shopping cart and it found it - like Home Brewer likes 8mm lines but water filter systems like 9.5mm. Really optimized the versions from a simple on/off pump w/ float switch to effectively a full on PLC system. So many iterations gained by chatting with "someone more experienced". Once I get the parts I can build and have the software side running in less than an hour. It doesn't make money, but man I really enjoy it.
  • thisoneisreal 3mo ago
    [dead]
• altairprime 3mo ago
  Accounting is desperate for accountants because they’re necessary for legal and compliance reasons. Join up today!
  • htatche 3mo ago
    Did you make the move yourself from software development? I'm considering a move into economics lately but I wouldn't want to leave IT completely i.e. saying bye to a 15y career in software and all the stuff I learnt along the way. Ideally I'd find something in between but I don't know how feasible that is.
    • altairprime 3mo ago
      Well, it’s maybe 120 credit-hours for an Economics bachelor’s degree if you don’t have any prior college credits or degrees, less if you’ve got prior art to build on (or a second major usually only requires the ECON classes). Fun fact, if you see in the course catalog that’s listed as Remote/Online, check the scheduled times; if there are some, they’re either mandatory meeting times or in-person testing days; if there’s none, then it’s a fully asynchronous class you can THEORETICALLY complete in parallel to your job, whenever you like. You could dip your toe in the water very slowly the first term and set calendar reminders for the drop & withdraw deadlines. At worst you don’t like it, at middling you realize you can’t multitask school and work, at best you pass the course. One step closer: wax on, wax off.
  • zahlman 3mo ago
    Doesn't this require accreditation that most programmers wouldn't have?
    • altairprime 3mo ago
      6 terms left :D
• MitziMoto 3mo ago
  I'm no longer in corporate America, so maybe I'm out of touch a bit, but could you just...not...use an LLM? You can still solve interesting problems on your own if you choose to do so?
  • sarchertech 3mo ago
    Yeah at many places you still can. It’s just so easy to turn your brain off and let the robot do a maybe good enough job that even people who know better are merging slop. We’ve had 3 production incidents this week that slipped past CI because there’s a whole team that is just shoving out PRs without understanding what’s going out.
    • ehnto 3mo ago
      A lot is said about context you can feed into the LLM but I do think there is still superior power in human context awareness. That kind of ambient collation and organisation of the whole business and its purpose, all the different work going on and how it all relates to eachother. It happens when you isolate business units a bit too much also. It's not surprising that if you have a hundred separate, isolated contexts working on the same business, that don't cross-talk and have no ability to subconsciously receive and collate, prioritize the thousands of signals we get from our work environment, that you end up shipping lots of incomplete or incompatible work.
  • yunwal 3mo ago
    It’s not there yet but we’re clearly heading towards a world where the answer is “no, you have no choice”. AI is weaved into business processes. If Ai leaves a comment on your pr, you must resolve it before merging, you’re expected to “get things done” at a particular pace consistent with using ai, regardless of whether what you did is any good.
  • aaulia 3mo ago
    LLM skew the time estimate tho. Now everybody expect stuff based on LLM work instead of normal human work. I/we can choose to solve problem normally, but the expectations have changed.
• krackers 3mo ago
  Part of the annoying thing is that if you're working on a product which uses LLMs, at some level you run out of levers to pull in terms of being able to fix things. At best you're stacking hacks on top of hacks to prevent unwanted output, but at the end of the day if the LLM really decides it simply doesn't want to follow your instructions, you can't do much other than resign to adding *IMPORTANT* and hoping the next model fixes it. The experience is much closer to working with an external API that you don't have control over and which simply doesn't do what the documentation says. Those have always been the most frustrating parts of programming, but at least previously you could reverse engineer the actual implementation to work around bugs. You can't even do that now because the "boundary" randomly change every day.
• infinite_spin 3mo ago
  I got into programming to just build stuff, the coding is just a means to an end, try not to think too hard about the how and think more about the why and what
  • 16bitvoid 3mo ago
    We get it, you don't have a passion for the act or the craft, just the end result, but I'm absolutely sick of hearing it all over this site as if it's a universal truth that some of us just don't recognize yet. Sorry, some of us have a joy for programming where the how is just as important, if not more so, than the what and the why. No matter how much people proclaim that the how doesn't matter to them, it isn't going to suddenly make it true for others.
    • jdashg 3mo ago
      Claude: Solve this jigsaw puzzle for me...
      • infinite_spin 3mo ago
        If solving jigsaw puzzles with claude will enable the creation of tools that help the people I want to help (students with disabilities), then I would use it for that, without feeling any guilt at all for doing so. Why should I regret that? Why should I care about your purity tests?
        • aarjaneiro 3mo ago
          Nobody said you should? Some people merely enjoy programming more than engineering.
          • infinite_spin 3mo ago
            > Nobody said you should? This is dishonest. Your quip was to imply that I'm reducing what is otherwise a fun activity to an automation, on the basis of a purity test. > Some people merely enjoy programming more than engineering. And I haven't said otherwise, so I'm not sure what point youre trying to make. My initial goal was to provide my own viewpoint on how to enjoy the process while taking advantage of modern tools, not to tell people they shouldn't enjoy programming more than engineering.
• tayo42 3mo ago
  Leave programing for what though?
  • r0b05 3mo ago
    That is the conundrum, and I genuinely enjoy building software.
  • sph 3mo ago
    Anything else, dude. Let’s do without the propaganda that programming is a cushy job, and any other job is menial underpaid grunt work.
    • tayo42 3mo ago
      I don't think a career switch is really as simple as go do anything you want.you need a skill, and need to go through the entry level pipeline again. You also need too find it interesting like the other commenter mentioned. Otherwise you do just end up as a cashier or something unskilled.
• senectus1 3mo ago
  iwould advise that if you love it, stay and coast. this AI bubble will pop. when it does you'll be hot stuff all over again.