Programming Still Sucks
stvn.sh334 points by jeromechoo 13 hours ago
334 points by jeromechoo 13 hours 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.
He really put in to words what I’ve been feeling lately. I love programming and I’m quite good at it, but this industry is a cesspit. I’ve already decided to go back to school to get one of those ‘real’ jobs. I’m tired of working in an industry hell bent on the destruction of society.
>> I’m tired of working in an industry hell bent on the destruction of society.
People will argue this point. However, when I look at all the things that tech has done thinking it was going to improve society; when in fact, it did the exact opposite is hard to argue. AI is just another item on a very long list of dystopian markers that writers/musicians have warned us about for years.
The scary part now is people denying its happening right in front of them.
>However, when I look at all the things that tech has done thinking it was going to improve society; when in fact, it did the exact opposite is hard to argue.
Imagine, you invented iron production to improve people lives - better tools (ploughs, axes, knives), etc - and now you see how people immediately use it for better weapons crushing the ones who have still been using bronze.
The tech is great, be it iron or AI. The people are still the same.
> The scary part now is people denying its happening right in front of them.
I wonder if age is a factor. Those of us who have been around for a while have seen all the promises and hope and excitement about the future, that maybe 20% of that comes true and the rest ends up being the usual exploitation and greed.
The younger people haven't been through that cycle of disillusionment yet so they still believe that only the positive, hopeful dreams will come true. It's natural, but naive, to believe that humans will always collectively choose the best path forward [1].
My grandma always refused to touch computers despite my excitement about them in my youth and I couldn't understand why. Now I think I get it.
'The industry' is not hellbent on destroying society - this is just so unhinged it's hard to know how to make of it.
True, I should have said an industry that will trample on anything that stands in the way of its pursuit of money.
The industry optimize toward whatever metric is legible. A company that optimize toward an illegible metric will endure.
Unfortunately there are plenty of highly legible metrics that make the world a worse place ("engagement" might be among the worst)
There is a quote that goes something like "The purpose of any system is whatever it does."
Whatever any system does, it's someone's intention that it does so. It's like an unavoidable truism. You can't say anything that gets around it.
Great. The system does what it does.
It's not 'destroying society'.
Not remotely in, any sense.
Many people seem to like Facebook. It's not really not causing harm, they are a minor nuisance at worst ... that you can avoid by ... not using it.
Open AI makes AI that you can use to do whatever.
That's mostly it.
yes and yes. a system can fulfill it’s function while simultaneously having massive impacts on society. we are only now experiencing the consequences of social media running rampant.
Progress have massive impacts on society, printing press was running rampant and caused massive issues, protests, civil wars and in the end democracy. Historically giving people more access to information and communication has always been a good thing even if it caused problems short term.
social media is not running rampant, and, social media is only a tiny fragment of 'the industry'.
Facebook literally heavily contributed or at minimum enabled and amplified at least one genocide (2017 Myanmar). That is the total opposite of "really not causing harm".
We need to bring back consumer first design and destroy the incentives to prioritize shareholders over the much larger cohort of ordinary consumers whose lives were affecting.
Society doesn't owe me over $500k/year for writing some instructions in a cryptic specification language. It's cool that I've been getting that, but I consider that luck and circumstance. When robots take my job I'll go find something else to do. I'm not going to blame evil rich people or some other boogieman.
It also doesn't owe your CEO billions for hovering over a company where other people (like you) do the actual value creation.
Im a medior and I earn 42k/yr. It would be a privilege for me to earn this much, as I cannot afford a home.
> Society doesn't owe me over $500k/year
No it doesn't. But as a human being, you and everybody still deserves a decent living. And our current system clearly does not provide that for a lot of people.
Society doesn't owe anybody anything. So who's to say when you find something else to do, it will pay enough to live?
The history is quite unequivocal about what happens when there's too many people who don't earn enough to live. Governments are aware too, I think.
They've earned 500k/y for a couple years, they don't need another job that pays enough, that's why they can be so indifferent about the outcome.
I'm no where near that TC and think this way too. This field of work is generally new in history. The whole woe is me what will we ever do attitude is so weak and frankly annoying.
Most of modern society is new in history; what is that supposed to say? If you are making the point that it's unproven and fragile, that would be a good point and actually one that supports "woe is me" because all of it could disappear overnight considering the fragility.
In my lifetime I have watched SPARC SUN Servers being thrown in the trash, spaghetti coded javascript and php run fortune 500s, the linux kernel adding containers, and everyone now being required to know how to code for CI so they can rerun tests, linters, and rebuild their app on every commit and publish it to an S3 bucket with specific IAM permissions tied to some SSO IAM provider.
At no point in any of that was anyone coddled or told that they will get to keep their job forever. Learn new skills. That's the game.
It's not even unique to tech. Doctors have to do this too.
There's so much work in the industry right now around LLM implementation that folks not looking into that are sleeping on good jobs.
Greed does not take your jobs, progress does. People don’t hand wash clothing for money because we have machines to do that now. We don’t need people delivering news papers because the news is delivered digitally. AI is no different. “IF” your job can be automated away or made more efficient it will. That might not be a benefit for your but it’s a benefit to society at large
Note: the above is not claiming AI or LLM can do these jobs. it’s claiming “IF” they can then they will. No greed required
This is ignoring the people who capture the rent.
If technological innovation is to liberate us from poverty then it should be a celebration that everytime that a job is automated. Since that is not happening, it implies something deeply wrong about how we structure our society.
> If technological innovation is to liberate us from poverty then it should be a celebration that everytime that a job is automated.
It depends. Sometimes automating a job just means wiping out the institutional knowledge that came with the job - which I take to be the OP's broader point. It's not clear that AI agents will be able to replace that role to any useful extent, even though it's nice that we can read their accumulated knowledge as a set of .md files written in plain English.
> This is ignoring the people who capture the rent.
So my grandma shouldn't have been be deliriously happy with the new washing machine that saved her hands from bleeding weekly because the evil capitalist laundromat owners charged a few quarters per load?!
> People don’t hand wash clothing for money because we have machines to do that now. We don’t need people delivering news papers because the news is delivered digitally.
Those jobs aren't creative knowledge work.
The advent of digital audio workstations didn't reduce the number of musicians - it increased the amount of music.
Now that we can write code with AI, we (as a civilization) will simply write more code than we used to.
What you're describing is akin to Jevon's paradox. Let's see. The Industrial Revolution, I think a good analogy, caused years of death & suffering before raising standards of living, and even then only so because of mass organizing & uprising.
> We don’t need people delivering news papers because the news is delivered digitally.
That’s where your idea breaks. There’s a big swathe of people who prefer the feel and simplicity of newspapers over digital hellscape. There’s also a reason why people prefer quality books like Folio Society over books printer on a toilet paper.
> “IF” your job can be automated away or made more efficient it will. That might not be a benefit for your but it’s a benefit to society at large
You can automate away 80% of CEOs by Markov chains, and it would be a benefit to society at large. Yet it doesn’t happen, why?
> You can automate away 80% of CEOs by Markov chains, and it would be a benefit to society at large. Yet it doesn’t happen, why?
Because, at some level, people understand that a CEO’s job is largely about the human interaction part, so the real value of a human CEO is that last 20%.
The real value of a software engineer is also their own “last 20%”, but non-technical people (and many frustrated technical people) don’t really appreciate how much non-technical work is involved in being a good SWE.
> it’s a benefit to society at large
That remains to be determined. Most of the examples you'll likely come up with are made at the expense of the environment. We've never consumed as much oil and other limited natural resources as now, in spite of massive gains in productivity.
So far it also looks like digital media is fast tracking us back into fascism, helped by the large concentration of capital that occurred during the transition.
Change and automation are not always societal progress, sadly.
It is greed; LLMs are progress but their cost, and the lies told about them wildly exceed their utility for most of the tasks that they’re otherwise expected to perform. The claims are fraudulent, fraud is a crime, and crime does not benefit society.
Does it? Why do those slaves work in the Congo? It's to produce materials that go into premium EVs in order to satiate demand in rich Western countries. If said demand never existed, or people would say 'yeah, but not at this cost', like you seem to imply the moral responsibility lies solely with industrialists, these mines would never exist.
Autor surely always could be journalist. He can write a exceptional story.
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'.
Thank you for writing this and your below longer comment.
I printed them with OP to remind me any time i’m afraid somebody can criticize my work and that it’s not worth to produce/write/publish.
no matter how good, there will always be people like you here, so no need to worry.
Maybe 'journalism' wasn't the best suggestion by the OP but I have to disagree with the rest of your message. It may be a rant, or less pejoratively it may be a cry for help of someone seeing their industry's future, but I can't accept that it's not well written.
When is the last time you opened an HN comment section and the main comment was that people enjoyed the writing quality? Maybe it says more about what we usually read as a crowd, but to me this was a breath of fresh air, it was engaging but also quite deep at times.
I think the mark of great writing is that it makes an impression on you, on others, in a way casual writing doesn't. At least that's my take on this.
I commented only because I didn't think it was particularly well written, and I found the threaD to be full of people commenting on how well written it was.
It's highly personalized and interesting, but I wouldn't call it well written.
As a personal bit of art - 'thumbs up', but anything else is overstated.
But more appropriately, the nihilism on this thread is unhinged.
"seeing their industry's future" ???
I'm seeing people empowered to do the most spectacular things that they have ever done in their lives.
Software hiring on the aggregate is up, job postings are up, people are doing more, non-developers get to tinker.
Speculative money is coming into the industry for people to try wild new things.
The implied reality in the story is totally detached from reality.
Surely - there is a movement of people who lament a sense of loss of control, but that's normal with change.
There are also people in crappy jobs with crappy bosses in crappy companies doing crappy things - but that's not a feature of AI or the industry, in fact, software is a pretty good place, relatively speaking.
As I said, this is a reflection of someone's state of mind, mood, being interpreted as some kind of metaphor, but it just doesn't line up with reality in general. A personal reality sure, but that's not a reflection of the community.
It's not absurdist. It's shining a light on something that actually exists and is absurd.
It only 'shines light' on the mental disposition of the author.
hi, author here. what mental disposition would that be?
Whatever your mental disposition is.
The writing is an expression of a state of mind through an absurdist voice, not any kind of reasonable articulation of reality. It's at least a much about the lens as it is the subject. Which is fine, if we ingest it roughly from that purview.
the writing is a tribute to a 2014 similar article, based on my experiences since. it is absolutely a reasonable articulation of reality, although through a sarcastic or satirical lens. you might have different experiences, that doesn't invalidate mine.
your experiences (and probably mine as well) are not a reflection of the general reality of the industry - that's the root of the problem; the writing is a projection, not a reality. The writing is fine (even good) as a personal story, not in the manner in which people here seem to be interpreting it.
i dunno. i'm happy to read in the comments here (and elsewhere) that my experience is not unique, many others have similar experiences and are going through the same feelings: grief. i think we're allowed to grieve, don't you?
I mean he could be, though nowadays that's not really a recongition of skill some seem to think it is nowadays.
Besides this is an opinion piece, which contains passages comparing programmers who despite AI, make hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting at home or air conditioned offices, to bangladeshi indentured workers.
Even if we do away with hyperbole and take the 'Sara' example, programming are still one of the least physically demanding and best paid jobs out there, especially in the US, even compared to jobs needing hard qualifications. Compared to your hypothetical 'Sarah' keeping the payroll system alive, almost everyone in every profession does more work for less pay.
He also sells (I imagine not cheap) consulting on the side.
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.
Imagine you start on a trek to find the sage with the answer to why idiot sociopaths rule everything, why wars that don’t even benefit the aggressor are started, why there is enough food for everyone twice over but people are still starving... and much more. You’ve been pondering this question for years. You’ve read comments. Wikipedia. You already have a good idea. But you seek the wisdom of the sage.
You cross mountains. Marshes. You evade pirates, bandits. Help some fellow travelers. Finally, after scouring the land and asking hundreds for clues and direction, you find his location; a small plateau beyond the swamp and rainforest which hugs the southern shore of the great lake.
You notice immediately that the wind dies down. It is now completely calm. Weirdly serene, as if the sudden silence made you notice all the ambient noise, now absent. The sage sits between (edit: beneath) a cherry blossom tree, said to always bloom; the sage is an old man but his wisdom is the most permanent thing on the plateau.
You approach the old man. His eyes are closed. You make sure to exaggerate your approach, make some noise, so as to not startle this frail old man that surely must have seen more than ninety winters. You prostrate yourself, calmly introduce yourself, and sit down beside him.
You calmly breathe in and out. This is it. Don’t rush it. Any erratic movement, any slight irritation could prove fatal to his old shell.
“Venerable Opakaku”, you start. “I know some things about how the world works. Why the cruel rule us. Why the meek suffer. Why the brave die for nothing. Why those of brilliant mind mostly seem to serve the cruel. But my opinions are unimportant. Can you please tell me, Venerable Opakaku, why is the world in this state? And how do we solve it?”
The sage’s parched lips move. He has to wet his throat, it is difficult for him—such is the state of his shell—but he composes himself and opens his white eyes, staring just to the left of your head. His blind eyes widen as he is about to reveal the answer. “Greed!”
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.
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
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.
> 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.
What I remember mostly from working in that era, was that managers let engineers make the technical decisions.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
> When the applause fades, my employees, or reports, or "my team" when I'm feeling jolly
was good too
Isn’t it a bit ironic that a (presumably statically generated) blog post about “programming sucks” is being chocked to death by HN?
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.
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!
oh I probably should, but I'm kinda busy with checks notes trying to feed my family :D
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.
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.
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.
> every junior I know is struggling to find work.
They also struggled in 2000, and in 2008. There was no AI at the time.
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.
There are way too many people in tech who did it solely for the money. People worry about AI slop but these poseurs have been cranking out garbage for decades. A lot of my career has been cleaning up the mess they've made.
The difference with AI is that now generating AI slop is much faster than carefully crafted code. So companies began to prefer AI slop.
"Juniors are still hired in the 100's thousands every year."
CITATION NEEDED
From my perspective it seems like they're just not hired basically at all anymore
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't pay for the tokens I use, so why would I expect to be compensated for it?
Hell, I paid for my own programming environment (SlickEdit) years ago with my own money and still didn't expect to get paid more. I did it because it helped me deliver higher quality work more efficiently and I was proud of that.
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?
"Ah you textile workers are so whiny. If you're mad at your jobs being obsoleted by massive machine factories, why not just buy a few dozen such factories? Strike out on your own."
Yeah man I don't know if mommy and daddy are paying your rent and healthcare (as I often see from people with this attitude). Or maybe you're one of the 45 year old tech workers whose mid life crisis involves a music project no one will listen to and going to work on some startups with your FIRE nest egg until you come crawling back to a big tech company. But for now I, like most millennial Americans, am reliant on wage labor to afford a dignified life in a tolerable town.
> Ah you textile workers are so whiny...
hell yeah baby, I'm a proud Luddite.
under neoliberal capitalism? no. it's late, but not too late, to join a union.
Archive link as the site seems down - https://web.archive.org/web/20260507003341/https://www.stvn....
Let me add to the chorus of admiration for this piece of writing. Poignant, accurate, appropriately cynical.
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."
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.
> 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!
Ya hit real hard. Are there people in tech that can really write like this? Wow nail on the head
Com'on bot, don't talk about people like you know how it feels. Or am I absolutely right?
> 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.
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.
Loved it. I'm retired
Funny and insightful! AI can't write articles like this :)
> A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are.
Did we solve the ageism problem by mistake?
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
lol
Please check back later Error 1027 This website has been temporarily rate limited
> Later is never. We all knew that.
AI will do all the "later" things we could not do and the civilisation will flourish. :')
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.
As another commenter implied, the title a reference to this - https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks. Which is an incredible read as well
> 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.
> 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. …
[flagged]
Can we not pretend that AI can meaningfully classify whether something was written by AI?
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.
26% AI generated? What does that even mean? How is Pangram arriving at that figure?
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.
Is that ironic at all or is it really helpful? Hard to say.
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
2) Small is Beautiful Revisited 50 Years On: A New Study Guide to Small is Beautiful - https://centerforneweconomics.org/envision/library/small-is-...
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.
Great post, thank you. At least AI won't reach this level of story quality for the foreseeable future.
Person needs to go work at another company
I was expecting another AI rant. I got really great writing instead. This escalated quickly.
> 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.
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?
When I took charge of solving backups for the single important box with unique, irreplaceable data -- the accounting system -- at an SME a long time ago, I think I approached it with the right amount of correctness. Therein, losing a day or three of recent data would have been recoverable; losing all of it would have been catastrophic.
I devised a system to perform bare-metal backups onto an easily-swapped, external 2.5" hard drive, using Acronis. I provided a plurality of these hard drives, and they were to be rotated off-site. The system was tolerant of human error and would proceed with making valid, current backups even if the drives were rotated incorrectly, or if not rotated at all on any given day. The backup drives each had complete file history (yay shadow copies) from an ever-advancing date, so any given drive could be used as a time machine of varying resolution, and also as the single source from which to independently start fresh.
I'd watch the logs to see that it was done, and for the most part: Whoever was assigned to that role normally did it properly-enough.
I documented it and showed the other technical folks how it works.
Sometimes I'd wander back and make sure the backup drives weren't accumulating on-site (there should never be more than 2 on-site). I'd periodically test these backups by restoring them completely onto identical hardware, to make sure the system hadn't got crufted up somehow and that it still continued to perform its task of restoring a working system from zero.
It worked fine for years and years. We never had to use that backup, but I had every confidence that it would be useful if that ever became necessary.
Eventually, my role changed and those things rather officially became Not My Problem.
Later, they moved the accounting system from that lineage of stout Proliant boxes to a trash-tier small-form 1u Lenovo machine that someone found used, on eBay, for cheap.
Backups are handled by the clown, somehow. The last I heard anything about it, the person doing the talking was very pleased with the money they'd saved and that they'd no longer have to pay "extortion" to Acronis.
I have every expectation that nobody has ever restored these backups. They're probably relying on the sheer hope that they'll never have to restore them, much less from zero.
And I also hope they never have to restore them, lest they may find out exactly what that data is worth to them.
> 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.
> How many SMEs out there are depending on Sara's knowledge of the USB memory stick and how to use it?
I think at least in part, that is the point: orgs are missing the part of the equation where the institutional and organizational knowledge is critical. Sure, the code to accomplish parts B and C can be re-duct-taped together in a month or so by off-shore, or maybe an agent... but part A, its plumbing, and why it does what it does the way it does it due to historical failures and the knowledge behind that is probably what keeps it going.
Those things are learned starting at the ground level by bumping into them in the trenches.
The company just shuts down and its customers switch to competitors. This is economically efficient. The redundancy of a company is another company. It's a bit like how we don't insist on every server running two CPUs in lockstep in case one fails, because we have more than one server to handle requests.
>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.
Maersk ground to a halt because it got done nearly 100% by cryptolocker. IIRC they went to hard copy records, called everyone, got all of IT together with some company credit cards to get new laptops and flash drives and shit and literally rebuilt their infra from scratch.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/maersk-had-to-reinstall-all-i...
I read a better post mortem but thats the highlights.
>How many SMEs out there are depending on Sara's knowledge of the USB memory stick and how to use it?
Part of my day job is finding, documenting and remediating these sort of issues.
"The CEO Coded this application in VB5 15 years ago, the entire business relies on it, theres no source code, theres no binary backups and the one computer it runs on just had its PSU fail"
"Theres a cron somewhere that compresses, zips and transports the payroll database interstate, outside of our network, before our weekly pay run"
"Theres been no documentation of this environment for 20 years, most of the hardware is that old, and the team that developed it just sold all their shares and left"
This shit is my life lmao.
Theres obviously some bias, because the good companies aren't asking me to do it for them. But I make a decent living examining, documenting and remediating this shit.
How did you get into that line of work? Sounds really interesting.
Refusal to pick a silo, having a knack for troubleshooting, falling into consulting. It just sort of happened. Helps to be extremely jaded too. My kneekjerk disbelief that something is good, documented or even functional makes me well suited to taking over new clients and finding where all their bodies are buried.
One of my favorite jobs early in my career was working for a really shonky wireless isp. The majority of the network was built by sales people using terrible tools with no documentation. I actually cant overstate how bad they were originally, they had entire areas of network with no recorded network config or credentials. My daily workflow was getting a ticket from a customer I had never heard of > trying to figure out where they were and what services they had (2 of their 3 billing systems were offline, and I often had to grep out information from a sqldump to find this stuff) > performing a discovery, L2 upwards of their infrastructure > semi offensively trying to authenticate into their infrastructure > resolve and document so that other people can reliably service them. All while pretending this was absolutely normal to the customer. Turns out there were lots of ISPs in the same boat, and turns out there's lots of non isp businesses in the same boat.
> 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".
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I hope to never work with you.
No offense.
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?