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 1 days ago [-]
Great post, thank you. At least AI won't reach this level of story quality for the foreseeable future.
michaelteter 35 seconds 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.
monkeyballs 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 23 hours ago [-]
What I remember mostly from working in that era, was that managers let engineers make the technical decisions.
stevenlangbroek 23 hours 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.
_pdp_ 24 hours 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 16 hours ago [-]
>"I don't think there is anyone out there to argue otherwise."
Meanwhile, millions are arguing otherwise.
keyle 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
> When the applause fades, my employees, or reports, or "my team" when I'm feeling jolly
was good too
stego-tech 13 hours 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.
fooqux 1 days 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.
yoyohello13 1 days ago [-]
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.
at-fates-hands 1 days ago [-]
>> 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.
jordwest 23 hours ago [-]
> 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.
This made me think about the difference of growing old in a static world vs a one where change is constantly accelerating.
In the former, you understand it better and better as you age, but in the latter you're left with knowledge that's of no use while the next generation is ahead of you just by the privilege of being young.
In the former, you are a valuable source of information. In the latter, a burden.
coldtea 19 hours ago [-]
>In the former, you understand it better and better as you age, but in the latter you're left with knowledge that's of no use while the next generation is ahead of you just by the privilege of being young.
I'd put it more like: you're left with knowledge that sees right through bullshit and the same-old promises and error modes, but nobody's buying. And the next generation is hired precisely because they're naive to all of that to repeat the same mistakes eagerly while sociopaths profit.
pjmlp 18 hours ago [-]
Exactly, something that seniority brings is the ability to say no, and that isn't something most managers want to hear.
coldtea 19 hours ago [-]
Yes. Also folks who've been around remember what e.g. the dream of FOSS was (it wasn't merely about getting "software with a specific type of license" at your phone or behind some corporate cloud).
jnpnj 18 hours ago [-]
Could you tell us more about your grandma point of view (if she ever told you more of course).
With age I'm becoming jaded with computing, not personal computers per se, but the overwhelming space taken by them now (especially due to cheap networking I guess).
jordwest 1 hours ago [-]
She just didn't see the point in them, she enjoyed a simple life, grew up with little but had a full life and didn't see the need for more. She would ask me as a kid "you've been playing the television again have you?". I don't think she ever really understood that to me it was a creative tool.
I did manage to convince her to try a VR headset at one point and despite her protests she clearly enjoyed it. Afterwards she said "what a silly gadget" haha. I'm realising now that I have similar feelings about generative AI.
grim_io 19 hours ago [-]
We are building software in the image of their sponsors.
This is nothing new or unique to software.
coldtea 19 hours ago [-]
It is quite new historically.
trhway 21 hours ago [-]
>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.
Or for example from the Palantir's Karp's book "Technological Republic" :
" We make the case that one of the most significant challenges that we face in this country is ensuring that the U.S. Department of Defense turns the corner from an institution designed to fight and win kinetic wars to an organization that can design, build, and acquire
AI weaponry—... "
The tech is great, be it iron or AI. The people are still [almost] the same (i sometimes think that our evolutionary goal is the AGI robots who would take over the Earth and will evolve toward higher morals and conscience faster than we would - as they would naturally have shared brain state/connection that we can get only if we develop telepathy which we wouldn't, and we unfortunately disregard the next best thing - empathy)
stevenlangbroek 20 hours ago [-]
"technology is neutral, deployment is not"
is that a reasonable statement? if so, congratulations, welcome to the club bud! you're a luddite now. we meet on tuesdays, please bring cookies if it's your first time.
munksbeer 21 hours ago [-]
>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.
Certainly a lot of bad things have come out of tech.
But I don't agree that it has made everything overall worse. That feels like recency bias. In which few decades in history would you rather be spending your years on this earth, instead of now?
coldtea 19 hours ago [-]
I'd take the 90s, 80s, 70s or 60s anytime, just gimme that magic time travel option. You know what, even the 00s would be fine.
munksbeer 17 hours ago [-]
Yes, recency bias.
coldtea 17 hours ago [-]
Nope, raw "actually good balance of stuff I like and stuff I don't like in those decades" pragmatism.
I could not give less fucks for having AI and smartphones and most other stuff, including all the fancy new medical procedures which are barely incremental.
Fridges, basic 90s-style internet and mini-skirts and welfare, and cheap housing, and jobs-a-plenty, more affordable healthcare, and the lifestyle, I can use just fine!
And I'd avoid the Plague or feudal times too. Including the techno-feudal times of today.
Pretend people can't have periods they'd be fine to live again and might prefer to today is bullshit.
munksbeer 16 hours ago [-]
The thing is, the option you want is available today. There are communities all around the world that live much simpler lives. Some just because that is how they are, others because they've formed communities to escape all the things you don't like.
Genuine question, have you ever investigated these options? If so, why did you dismiss them?
coldtea 8 hours ago [-]
Because I don't want a fucking enclave to larp in, and even if I did, no place is safe from late stage capitalism and its corporations and politics.
I want the era/society/world, not mere personal or communal play-acting it.
esseph 15 hours ago [-]
> The thing is, the option you want is available today.
Disagree
Removing yourself from the computing environment does not remove the impact it has on the world and around you. That is the equivalent of sticking one's head in the sand.
munksbeer 14 hours ago [-]
The option is still available to you though. Sticking your head in the sand could be a great strategy if it improves your happiness and wellbeing.
esseph 14 hours ago [-]
> The option is still available to you though. Sticking your head in the sand could be a great strategy if it improves your happiness and wellbeing.
Right now I am picturing the dog drinking coffee in the burning room meme.
munksbeer 13 hours ago [-]
I really think this is extreme doomerism. Things are not that bad. And as I say, wouldn't you be happier if you lived in an environment where you were not impacted by all the stuff you dislike?
coldtea 8 hours ago [-]
>wouldn't you be happier if you lived in an environment where you were not impacted by all the stuff you dislike?
What I want is a better society (as I see it), not convenience for me personally.
Obviously to the degree I can distance myself from stuff I don't care for, I do it. But I don't want to larp in some like-minded commune while the world turns to shit, I want the world to not turn to shit.
esseph 12 hours ago [-]
"Just take soma" is what you are telling me right now.
Four things:
1. I am a parent. Ignoring like the world doesn't exist is not an option.
> wouldn't you be happier if you lived in an environment where you were not impacted by all the stuff you dislike?
2. That would not be possible.
3. If you have the capability to do something, some believe you have an obligation to. Actively working to not make a shit world requires a deep awareness and understanding that leads to consistent action.
4. Trying to isolate yourself like in the face of so much suffering, including those around you, seems like the most selfish thing I can imagine. Could never be me.
> Things are not that bad.
For YOU maybe, for fucks sake.
vinceguidry 14 hours ago [-]
Please. Covid destroyed everything in my life that I loved.
bluegatty 1 days ago [-]
'The industry' is not hellbent on destroying society - this is just so unhinged it's hard to know how to make of it.
yoyohello13 1 days ago [-]
True, I should have said an industry that will trample on anything that stands in the way of its pursuit of money.
devonkim 17 hours ago [-]
This is what amorality means to me in the context of socioeconomics. It operates in an area of reduced dimensionality to economic value because no other value can be agreed upon in trade between cultures. It doesn’t care if a piece of art, nature or human invention is genuinely novel, rare, irreplaceable, invaluable, etc. unless it can be converted into materializable economic value that is itself subjective and present oriented so that we can plan for our future selves about resources as a proxy.
kiba 24 hours ago [-]
The industry optimize toward whatever metric is legible. A company that optimize toward an illegible metric will endure.
jordwest 23 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately there are plenty of highly legible metrics that make the world a worse place ("engagement" might be among the worst)
sfn42 22 hours ago [-]
Welcome to literally all industry.
bluegatty 1 days ago [-]
It's not doing those things.
munksbeer 21 hours ago [-]
You're getting really downvoted, which just proves people don't like hearing views that challenge their narrative.
I agree with you. Human greed has always been a thing, will always be a thing. But most people now would never choose to go back and be born 100 years ago if given the option. They ignore everything positive that technology has done, and massively ramp the negatives.
FrustratedMonky 16 hours ago [-]
"industry' is not hellbent on destroying society"
Think you are missing the point.
It is not an actual back room with dudes twirling their mustaches with concrete plans to destroy the world.
It is the 'profit motive' that forces a thousand small decisions, that you go along with because you have a mortgage to pay.
And all added up they destroy the world.
Brian_K_White 1 days ago [-]
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.
bluegatty 1 days ago [-]
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.
propstober 1 days ago [-]
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.
Jensson 1 days ago [-]
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.
propstober 20 hours ago [-]
equating social media and the printing press is tempting but reductive. esp with massive profit incentives, social media is often built for retention and conversion rather than for informative purposes. esp within the modern context. it is not a black and white picture. social media can exist responsibly. just because a technology represents "progress" there is much we can and should pay attention to. just blanket dismissing regulation and criticism for the sake of progress is lazy.
Read at least the first couple lines and become microscopically less ignorant. Or don't. I'm not your mom.
blackjack_ 24 hours ago [-]
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".
nullsanity 1 days ago [-]
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.
01100011 24 hours ago [-]
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.
maweki 23 hours ago [-]
> 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.
larodi 19 hours ago [-]
How come is anyone "entitled" to a decent living? I don't think this holds evolutionary, nor from historical perspective. It is commendable for a person to want to think that everyone deserves it, but I don't see it follow from anything or manifest in general in a fair way. There are plenty of examples that people are very likely going to be deprived of even whatever they deserved by means of struggling to get it.
canelonesdeverd 16 hours ago [-]
> How come is anyone "entitled" to a decent living?
kind of the point of living in a civilized society i reckon
lopsotronic 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah once payback goes below subsistence[1] - even when it gets near it- things get unstable and extremely dangerous. Ancient people understood this very quickly and built up institutions to keep the baseline above subsistence for urban civilizations.
It's been so long since we've seen actual bread riots I fear we forgot how nasty those are.
I think the notion is that with new automated systems of violence and control, some of them built onto the people themselves, our "future civilization" can dial back the worker's compensation to below subsistence. There was a big zillionaire conference where they talked about slave collars, for example, or humanoid AI workers. I'm always a little distressed when the masters of industry fall back on science fiction in order to build a machine that needs to function in the, well, in the present.
[1] One person's output in terms of agriculture
alt_422568 10 hours ago [-]
> There was a big zillionaire conference where they talked about slave collars
It was a private 2017 desert retreat where five wealthy tech and hedge-fund investors flew out media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, ostensibly for a speaking engagement.
Rushkoff wrote it up first as a Guardian essay and later expanded it into his 2022 book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.
The problem's super duper obvious if you studied history, but it is also pretty obvious if you can think about second order effects. In collapse the wealthy obviously need security forces to hold on to their stuff, but in a collapse your stuff will - presto changeo - become the security force's stuff. Essentially the singular founding story of all European royal families. Barbarian general took the house, banged the wife, now he's king. Or King-Sound. Kai- Zar
At the end of the day all these little lords and lordettes figured out the time honored lesson that to be actually safe you want to make friends with the locals. And that's part of being new king types as well. But "making people like you" isn't a popular notion with the Revenge of the Nerds types who love this "Lord of the Bunker" kind of thing.
I've seen zoo chimpanzees make a mockery out of this sort of device in VERY short order, and I would dread to impose it on a Delta Force psychopath who also has more higher degrees than I do. Because he's going to know who it was who did it and have all sorts of ideas about what he's doing about that. So the basic premise is also idiotic.
Sorry, I was a little more snide than I usually am on HN, it's been a long day.
loose-cannon 15 hours ago [-]
There will always be scarcity and inequality. The point is to minimize/mitigate their effects. Can't you make the same argument for justice? Why does everyone deserve justice? Isn't that just entitlement? What is the historical or evolutionary basis for justice?
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 16 hours ago [-]
> I don't think this holds evolutionary
Sure it does. Our species is social, meaning we form societies for evolutionary success. Both of us being members of that society, it is in my interest to see your child survive. It is a tragedy to think your child may not survive because human greed prevents them from accessing resources we have in abundance.
The opposite perspective is anti-social in a literal way: the greedy cannot use all of the resources, can't eat all of the food; they want control so you can't have it without their permission. You are entitled to eat, seeing as we have more than enough to feed you. That others think you are not is disagreeable, to put it mildly.
munksbeer 21 hours ago [-]
World GDP and standard of living has never been higher.
Ygg2 15 hours ago [-]
If two trillionaires bounce a 4 trillion dollar IOU, the GDP could be the greatest in the universe, even though nothing would substantially change.
munksbeer 14 hours ago [-]
Living standards for the median person in the world improve every year, and have done for decades.
stevenlangbroek 18 hours ago [-]
So? We produce enough food for 10 billion people every year, there's only 8 billion of us and a billion are hungry. Those seem like legible KPIs for shareholders (i.e. humanity) to pursue, no? And while World GDP is up, it's come at the expensive of the systems we depend on.
I want my son to live on a livable planet, and not under the constant threat of destitution. And I want that for all children, not just mine.
munksbeer 17 hours ago [-]
Everyone wants that. But people on this thread are arguing that technology is reducing our standard of living, which is just factually untrue.
stevenlangbroek 17 hours ago [-]
Depends on who & what you ask. Aggregates hide important nuance. For who? At what cost to who? Do the people who bare the cost have a say? Would they agree that it's worth it? What's their life worth?
esseph 12 hours ago [-]
There is more to life than economics.
High trust societies, a feeling of place and well-being in a culture, connectedness, etc.
Note: Look at the US continuing to move down the report year after year.
eloisant 21 hours ago [-]
It also doesn't owe your CEO billions for hovering over a company where other people (like you) do the actual value creation.
roenxi 20 hours ago [-]
That's fairly well understood. If people get wind that the CEO isn't necessary they'd be out on their ear in short order. I don't think I've ever met anyone who'd shed a tear for the CEO losing their job. Except CEOs.
grim_io 19 hours ago [-]
CEO's don't lose jobs, they just move into other board/CEO positions.
Never a shortage of those, it seems. But only for insiders, of course.
ramon156 23 hours ago [-]
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.
lproven 21 hours ago [-]
> Im a medior
I do not know that word. I looked it up and found nothing helpful. What does it mean, and what do you mean?
Also, may I ask you to use more punctuation and things like currency symbols, because your message lacks so much context I can't even guess.
philipp-gayret 20 hours ago [-]
In the Netherlands, it's the name for anyone between junior and senior, in software. From my perspective it's more something used by recruiters and employers to tell people they don't get a senior engineer's compensation.
63stack 21 hours ago [-]
The first 3 hits on any search engine weren't relevant?
lproven 16 hours ago [-]
No, they weren't. They told me an awkward neologism for someone who isn't senior and isn't junior, and that means that neither they nor the original message tell me mid-level what.
So, no, they were not, or I would not have asked.
boogierobis 19 hours ago [-]
What I was going to ask as well, seems that people are getting dumber by the day.
Izkata 17 hours ago [-]
At least in English, this appears to be slang that only recently leaked out of its original context. I've never heard the term before and whatever they used to look it up probably had no results.
The usual English term is "mid-level".
kaashif 20 hours ago [-]
Something interesting: for me, that comment was the 6th Google result for "medior". Interesting term.
imtringued 19 hours ago [-]
There are three levels of seniority. You can be a junior, a medior or a senior.
ironmagma 23 hours ago [-]
Society doesn't owe anybody anything. So who's to say when you find something else to do, it will pay enough to live?
e12e 19 hours ago [-]
I think the very definition of society implies that we are all owed a lot, and we all owe a lot to society. Politics is about deciding what.
Education? Safety? Medical help? A home? Food? Transport? Communication?
These are things society needs to provide.
In turn, we provide society with labour, applied skills, decision making etc.
If there is no (trusted, working) social contract - society breaks down.
If we allow a small elite to monopolize the productivity gains and efficiency increased from new technology - the results will be dire.
I see the more feasible solutions to be some kind of universal income or negative tax - combined with reduced work hours (eg 30 hour weeks, to start).
simgt 23 hours ago [-]
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.
hparadiz 22 hours ago [-]
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.
ironmagma 22 hours ago [-]
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.
hparadiz 21 hours ago [-]
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.
simgt 21 hours ago [-]
Learning a new language or tech has always been such a minor hurdle. The whole point of the current wave of AI is that there is nowhere to retreat to if your means of income depends solely on intellectual work. Learn a trade or train to be a vet, sure, that'll last a while longer.
ironmagma 20 hours ago [-]
Doctors have to undergo minor professional development refreshers — not replace their entire education. There is a reason we educate early in life; it's hard to retrain the old (and expensive or even approaching impossible).
hparadiz 19 hours ago [-]
This comment gives me a chuckle. In my lifetime alone I've seen oncology completely transform before my eyes. New tools. New techniques. New drugs. I've also watched doctors in my family study this stuff in their off time in order to get certain positions.
"minor professional development refreshers" lol
Also known as (unpaid) hard work during the weekend.
ironmagma 18 hours ago [-]
Obviously fields like oncology and genetics are going to have major disruptions. What sort of event would trigger someone needing to redo their entire 7+ years of medical schooling?
red75prime 22 hours ago [-]
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.
antonvs 2 hours ago [-]
> Society doesn't owe anybody anything.
That's obviously false. What's the point of society if that's true? Do you think there should be no government roads, no government health care (if you're in the US, you may think this, but only because you're indoctrinated), no legal system (or enforcement thereof) to protect you from criminals, no legally enforceable human rights whatsoever? Etc., etc.?
Once they actually understand what they're saying, no sane person believes that society doesn't owe them anything.
stevenlangbroek 18 hours ago [-]
Correct. But don't you want something from the future? What do you imagine it to look like? How far is it from what you hope it might? What are you willing to do to bring them closer together?
113 21 hours ago [-]
You are the rich people.
stevenlangbroek 20 hours ago [-]
No, there's a difference between doing well for yourself and exploiting the labor of others to capture stupendous amounts of excess capital, then reinvesting part of that to make even more.
113 12 hours ago [-]
Of course there is. The person I'm responding to is still rich though.
coolThingsFirst 20 hours ago [-]
No, but it owes you around 100K with a great work-life balance and job security because you spent years and years studying and honing your skills for it.
alaaalawi 20 hours ago [-]
is it like society does not owe any body money for puting sand gravel cement and water. we are talking about products not their assembly
eggsandbeer 23 hours ago [-]
Fuck the American Dream
socalgal2 1 days ago [-]
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
kiba 24 hours ago [-]
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.
zozbot234 23 hours ago [-]
> 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.
endanke 23 hours ago [-]
These two things can be true at the same time.
amelius 22 hours ago [-]
The entire comment is true.
nickpp 22 hours ago [-]
> 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?!
kiba 15 hours ago [-]
It's not really the laundromat capitalist, but the landowner the capitalist paying rent to.
krackers 1 hours ago [-]
Note that as I understand the main claim of Marx is that the efficiency and productivity gains from automation don't actually go to the laborer, they're captured by the "capital owner". Example being how despite all the automation we're all still working 8 hr days, 5 days a week just to get by.
Now of course there's also jevon's "paradox" here, and the automation does allow us to support a larger population so in that sense not all the increased productivity is just "skimmed off the top" as profit. But on the flipside the crux of the other recent [1] HN post is that the wealth disparity is increasing. And if all the increased productivity directly translated to more "physical resources" in the world, that wouldn't be the case.
So something must be getting skimmed of the top, and intuitively you can feel the "rent seeking" layers in society have increased. Gains in efficiency are no longer resulting in surplus of physical products and decrease in prices.
> 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?
pdpi 22 hours ago [-]
> 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.
wavemode 23 hours ago [-]
> 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.
stevenlangbroek 22 hours ago [-]
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.
emmelaich 3 hours ago [-]
That's disputed. Progress was uneven and lagged a little, but by many standards (height, mortality) quality of life increased for many from the start of the industrial revolution.
wavemode 12 hours ago [-]
I don't think most software engineers have to worry about dying of industrial accidents and black lung...
Long hours? Sure, but that's not new (or universal), and AI definitely didn't cause it.
stevenlangbroek 9 hours ago [-]
That's not what I mean. You can't just retrain and get a job in a new field and maintain your mortgage, rent or your kid or partner's needs, and downward social mobility is incredibly painful (think personal bankruptcies, pretty grim mental health outcomes).
alaaalawi 20 hours ago [-]
it is that not that they will take, as they do not have will of their own. greed does put them to work
simgt 23 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Bendy 22 hours ago [-]
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.
majorbugger 22 hours ago [-]
Yes it does. Typical example - layoffs to make to stock perform better.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 16 hours ago [-]
> 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
"No greed required" doesn't seem accurate. One would not use an AI to do the job instead of a human, except for the motivation that they would have more at the end of the day.
torginus 22 hours ago [-]
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.
stevenlangbroek 18 hours ago [-]
Is all demand equal? How is demand induced, by who and for what benefit?
emmelaich 3 hours ago [-]
And yet I'm sure that greed is pretty much a constant. The opportunities to exploit that greed may change.
tim333 18 hours ago [-]
I've only done a bit of helping with computer systems but the gripes he lists - people not understanding the system, leaving, management trying trendy software and the like happen even without greedy capitalism.
hsuduebc2 1 days ago [-]
Autor surely always could be journalist. He can write a exceptional story.
bluegatty 1 days 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'.
nchagnet 24 hours ago [-]
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.
bluegatty 23 hours ago [-]
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.
lelanthran 21 hours ago [-]
> 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.
While "well-written" is subjective, the bar for "well-written" is whether people enjoyed reading it and the author managed to deliver his message.
I'm now very curious what bar you personally use for well-written, because it obviously differs from the majority of the people in this thread.
lproven 21 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Here is a thought that seems not to have occurred to you.
All these people saying it's good. You commented multiple times to say you disagree and think it is bad.
Maybe that means you do not get it. Maybe the problem here is you and your reading and your lack of comprehension. Maybe the problem is not in the article and the way the article is written.
Izkata 16 hours ago [-]
I read it as a comment on how bad journalism is nowadays, with the extensive prose instead of getting to the point.
hsuduebc2 15 hours ago [-]
Indeed I should use "writer" instead.
rdslw 21 hours ago [-]
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.
Brian_K_White 1 days ago [-]
It's not absurdist. It's shining a light on something that actually exists and is absurd.
bluegatty 1 days ago [-]
It only 'shines light' on the mental disposition of the author.
stevenlangbroek 1 days ago [-]
hi, author here. what mental disposition would that be?
bluegatty 24 hours ago [-]
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.
stevenlangbroek 23 hours ago [-]
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.
bluegatty 23 hours ago [-]
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.
stevenlangbroek 22 hours ago [-]
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?
munksbeer 20 hours ago [-]
I think you're extrapolating on something that hasn't even happened yet. We're still hiring juniors. They're thriving with LLM coding. They're learning rapidly.
I actually enjoyed your writing (though it does mimic a certain style I see coming out of the US), and I even enjoyed what you wrote. A lot of it definitely resonates, but you could have omitted any mention of AI, written it 20 years ago, and expressed the same sentiment. And I guess that is the main point "greed is to blame, not AI".
senordevnyc 21 hours ago [-]
I hear a lot more rage, envy, cynicism, bitterness, nihilism, and and learned helplessness than grief.
stevenlangbroek 20 hours ago [-]
it sounds like you should learn a bit more about grief. also, please, for god's sake, read the original. I've linked to it in at the top of the article. As to envious, I'm a Director of Engineering. What exactly do you think is left for me to be envious of? The levels above (VP, SVP, CTO at a non-startup) are outside of my interest.
senordevnyc 13 hours ago [-]
Chill dude, I was talking about the comments here.
hsuduebc2 12 hours ago [-]
I do not see that in the article. For me it was irony written well.
Brian_K_White 9 hours ago [-]
I think there is another "mental disposition" in need of some examination.
cube00 1 days ago [-]
I could have done without the five paragraphs of the ship analogy.
stackghost 1 days 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 20 hours ago [-]
Keep writing please! Where can I find your writing?
torginus 22 hours ago [-]
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.
stevenlangbroek 21 hours ago [-]
You're giving "yet you participate in society" vibes that I don't love, but let me address a few things:
- We're not indentured workers yet. We should always have been fighting for their dignity & rights, because they're ours too.
- Might I invite you to read the original, it's linked at the top of the article. Sure, programming isn't physically demanding, but that doesn't mean we should just accept the bad parts.
- All of that being said, yes I agree, other jobs are more valuable and it's insane that we get paid what we do. That's why I'm a socialist. Your value shouldn't depend on a grabbag of accidental circumstances outside of your control.
As to selling consulting on the side: I've been an employee for 2 decades, and am striking out on my own to build a better life for my newborn son & fiance. Sorry for wanting to be a more present father.
keybored 22 hours ago [-]
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!”
jamauro 15 hours ago [-]
Is this Gen AI or did you write it?
keybored 15 hours ago [-]
Don’t insult me.
jamauro 14 hours ago [-]
Haha I genuinely couldn't tell. I liked it which made me think that it was actually created by a human but had me a bit concerned that my detector is losing calibration.
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.
firemelt 19 hours ago [-]
why do you think programming is sucked?
fransje26 20 hours ago [-]
Just use AI to explain the code to you. /s
jrosenblatt 59 minutes 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.
JKCalhoun 17 hours 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 1 hours 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
SaucyWrong 1 days 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.
Waterluvian 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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.
01100011 23 hours ago [-]
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?
rileymat2 1 days ago [-]
Of course, but not as an employee
viccis 23 hours ago [-]
"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.
Waterluvian 16 hours ago [-]
True. I wasn’t born American so there is that. I have some of the lesser promoted freedoms like getting to think critically about if this is what I really want to be doing in life.
stevenlangbroek 22 hours ago [-]
> Ah you textile workers are so whiny...
hell yeah baby, I'm a proud Luddite.
stevenlangbroek 1 days ago [-]
under neoliberal capitalism? no. it's late, but not too late, to join a union.
23 hours ago [-]
thrance 16 hours ago [-]
Careful, you're dangerously close to rediscovering Marxism.
quxbar 1 days 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.
redfloatplane 21 hours 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 21 hours 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.
farmerbb 14 hours ago [-]
Thank you for writing this piece, resonated a lot with me. Looking forward to reading more from you in the future.
pona-a 20 hours ago [-]
Pangram agrees with you. About 25% of the text trips the detection threshold, mostly towards the later half.
I don't want to make any accusations, just give some evidence to the above comment.
stevenlangbroek 19 hours ago [-]
I have bad news for you...
pona-a 17 hours ago [-]
Believe me or not, that's good news for me. I actually really enjoyed your writing, and I'm glad that feeling wasn't misplaced. I'm sorry if my remarks came across as mean-spirited...
stevenlangbroek 15 hours ago [-]
Nothing to apologize for!
dshacker 24 hours 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 20 hours ago [-]
As a typography nerd, I am also mourning the death of typographic style. Em-dashes and ligatures <3
fnoef 23 hours 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 23 hours 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 23 hours 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 23 hours ago [-]
oh I probably should, but I'm kinda busy with checks notes trying to feed my family :D
dwd 1 days 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."
Let me add to the chorus of admiration for this piece of writing. Poignant, accurate, appropriately cynical.
oxag3n 12 hours 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.
imrozim 19 hours 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 16 hours ago [-]
[dead]
charles_f 23 hours 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!
kondov 19 hours 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.
gitowiec 22 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." :((( that is sad and so true. Economical thinking should be regulated
monkeyballs 1 days 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 22 hours 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 15 hours 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.
techteach00 18 hours 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.
asoderlind 20 hours 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.
ytoawwhra92 1 days ago [-]
> A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are.
Did we solve the ageism problem by mistake?
jdw64 1 days 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 1 days 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.
For the benefit of people who don't absorb the entire article (spoiler alert):
>> … AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did. …
pona-a 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
idle_zealot 1 days ago [-]
Can we not pretend that AI can meaningfully classify whether something was written by AI?
grvdrm 1 days 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 20 hours 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 1 days ago [-]
26% means not ai 3/4 times...
loktarogar 1 days ago [-]
Would you accuse someone of murder with 26% matching evidence?
tyg13 1 days ago [-]
26% AI generated? What does that even mean? How is Pangram arriving at that figure?
pona-a 20 hours ago [-]
26% of the sentences tripped the detection threshold for their classifier. That isn't a detection probability on the entire text.
jdw64 1 days ago [-]
You may be right. But this feeling is mine. Haha.
coldtea 19 hours 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.
pjmlp 18 hours ago [-]
Oh boy, I can relate to the sentiment of the article, it feels like how it has always been in enterprise consulting.
jrm4 1 days 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 21 hours 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 12 hours 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.
firemelt 19 hours ago [-]
I don't get the sentiment at all, to me all that make it sucks is just incompetent people not programming nor tech.
realaaa 6 hours ago [-]
good article ! guy should be writing instead of IT delivery
doug_durham 1 days 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 24 hours 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.
eloisant 21 hours 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.
stevenlangbroek 21 hours ago [-]
You mean after the dot-com bubble and after the financial crisis? I mean, not to disagree, but what point are you making here?
xboxnolifes 21 hours ago [-]
Were they bragging?
rustystump 22 hours 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.
msie 21 hours ago [-]
"I wrote my first batch scripts when I was 6 years old." - Wow, that's pretty amazing. What did you write when you were 10? Really curious.
lelanthran 9 hours ago [-]
> What did you write when you were 10?
Me, personally, a text adventure game filled with bugs that I did not know how to fix. (I realise only decades later that the index into array I was using to store the location references was probably incorrectly calculated when I moved sometimes.)
I learned a lot of programming from books like these (official links, not pirated):
There were more (one had a game called "Rats" and from the description I thought it would be a 3D game, but alas I never got it entered properly and even if I did, I realise now that it probably wasn't 3d rendered).
stevenlangbroek 20 hours ago [-]
Not much for a while, then when I was a teenager I got into Flash / ActionScript, this was around the 2advanced era, if that means anything to you. I did a little bit of that & HTML, CSS and PHP throughout high school, then landed a job in e-mail marketing a few years after I dropped out of school, slicing templates for customers. Been climbing my way up since.
dwd 15 hours ago [-]
I'm guessing an AUTOEXEC.BAT file to configure DOS settings for different games.
stevenlangbroek 14 hours ago [-]
haha close! i saw my mom get frustrated not remembering where her programs were located, so I wrote a little numerical menu for her with her programs listed in order of use. each number was secretly another .bat script that would then go to the right directory and run, for example, WordPerfect for her.
01100011 23 hours ago [-]
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.
lelanthran 20 hours ago [-]
> There are way too many people in tech who did it solely for the money.
Well perhaps now, when AI halves your salary, and then halves it again, and the only people left are those who do it for some reason other than a salary, you'll be happier?
01100011 15 hours ago [-]
If AI did that to my salary it would be a nice wage for a job where I sit in a chair all day so yeah.
black3r 22 hours ago [-]
The difference with AI is that now generating AI slop is much faster than carefully crafted code. So companies began to prefer AI slop.
rustystump 22 hours ago [-]
Their rollin out the agentic swarm soon… god help me.
LazyGooze 21 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Madmallard 22 hours ago [-]
"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
chanux 1 days ago [-]
> Later is never. We all knew that.
AI will do all the "later" things we could not do and the civilisation will flourish. :')
19 hours ago [-]
hmontazeri 24 hours ago [-]
lol
Please check back later
Error 1027
This website has been temporarily rate limited
stevenlangbroek 23 hours ago [-]
heh yeah the irony is not lost on me. should be fixed now.
bronlund 23 hours ago [-]
Funny and insightful! AI can't write articles like this :)
maxehmookau 17 hours 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 14 hours ago [-]
Thanks man, that means a lot <3
beemboy 1 days 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
jimbobbam 1 days ago [-]
Ya hit real hard. Are there people in tech that can really write like this? Wow nail on the head
gnabgib 1 days ago [-]
Com'on bot, don't talk about people like you know how it feels. Or am I absolutely right?
vegaxarchitect 23 hours ago [-]
Is that ironic at all or is it really helpful? Hard to say.
FrustratedMonky 16 hours ago [-]
Amazingly Real.
Very good simple explanation for what is happening.
artyom 1 days ago [-]
I was expecting another AI rant. I got really great writing instead. This escalated quickly.
stevenlangbroek 21 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry, or you're welcome :D
sylware 19 hours 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.
abstractspoon 21 hours ago [-]
Loved it. I'm retired
anal_reactor 22 hours 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.
socalgal2 1 days ago [-]
Person needs to go work at another company
stevenlangbroek 23 hours ago [-]
I've worked at many over the past 20 years.
rramadass 21 hours 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.
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?
ssl-3 1 days ago [-]
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.
lmm 1 days 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.
sqircles 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
pocksuppet 1 days ago [-]
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.
1 days ago [-]
protocolture 1 days 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.
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.
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.
thisoneisreal 1 days ago [-]
How did you get into that line of work? Sounds really interesting.
protocolture 1 days ago [-]
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.
smitty1e 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
And a backup you haven't verified you can restore from isn't one.
FrustratedMonky 16 hours 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.
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?
fatih-erikli-cg 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
phainopepla2 1 days ago [-]
What?
Rendered at 05:15:32 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
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.
Meanwhile, millions are arguing otherwise.
> ... 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 :)
was good too
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.
This hit me hard. This article is art. I think I need to sleep on this and read it again in the morning.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
In the former, you understand it better and better as you age, but in the latter you're left with knowledge that's of no use while the next generation is ahead of you just by the privilege of being young.
In the former, you are a valuable source of information. In the latter, a burden.
I'd put it more like: you're left with knowledge that sees right through bullshit and the same-old promises and error modes, but nobody's buying. And the next generation is hired precisely because they're naive to all of that to repeat the same mistakes eagerly while sociopaths profit.
With age I'm becoming jaded with computing, not personal computers per se, but the overwhelming space taken by them now (especially due to cheap networking I guess).
I did manage to convince her to try a VR headset at one point and despite her protests she clearly enjoyed it. Afterwards she said "what a silly gadget" haha. I'm realising now that I have similar feelings about generative AI.
This is nothing new or unique to software.
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.
Or for example from the Palantir's Karp's book "Technological Republic" :
" We make the case that one of the most significant challenges that we face in this country is ensuring that the U.S. Department of Defense turns the corner from an institution designed to fight and win kinetic wars to an organization that can design, build, and acquire AI weaponry—... "
The tech is great, be it iron or AI. The people are still [almost] the same (i sometimes think that our evolutionary goal is the AGI robots who would take over the Earth and will evolve toward higher morals and conscience faster than we would - as they would naturally have shared brain state/connection that we can get only if we develop telepathy which we wouldn't, and we unfortunately disregard the next best thing - empathy)
is that a reasonable statement? if so, congratulations, welcome to the club bud! you're a luddite now. we meet on tuesdays, please bring cookies if it's your first time.
Certainly a lot of bad things have come out of tech.
But I don't agree that it has made everything overall worse. That feels like recency bias. In which few decades in history would you rather be spending your years on this earth, instead of now?
I could not give less fucks for having AI and smartphones and most other stuff, including all the fancy new medical procedures which are barely incremental.
Fridges, basic 90s-style internet and mini-skirts and welfare, and cheap housing, and jobs-a-plenty, more affordable healthcare, and the lifestyle, I can use just fine!
And I'd avoid the Plague or feudal times too. Including the techno-feudal times of today.
Pretend people can't have periods they'd be fine to live again and might prefer to today is bullshit.
Genuine question, have you ever investigated these options? If so, why did you dismiss them?
I want the era/society/world, not mere personal or communal play-acting it.
Disagree
Removing yourself from the computing environment does not remove the impact it has on the world and around you. That is the equivalent of sticking one's head in the sand.
Right now I am picturing the dog drinking coffee in the burning room meme.
What I want is a better society (as I see it), not convenience for me personally.
Obviously to the degree I can distance myself from stuff I don't care for, I do it. But I don't want to larp in some like-minded commune while the world turns to shit, I want the world to not turn to shit.
Four things:
1. I am a parent. Ignoring like the world doesn't exist is not an option.
> wouldn't you be happier if you lived in an environment where you were not impacted by all the stuff you dislike?
2. That would not be possible.
3. If you have the capability to do something, some believe you have an obligation to. Actively working to not make a shit world requires a deep awareness and understanding that leads to consistent action.
4. Trying to isolate yourself like in the face of so much suffering, including those around you, seems like the most selfish thing I can imagine. Could never be me.
> Things are not that bad.
For YOU maybe, for fucks sake.
I agree with you. Human greed has always been a thing, will always be a thing. But most people now would never choose to go back and be born 100 years ago if given the option. They ignore everything positive that technology has done, and massively ramp the negatives.
Think you are missing the point.
It is not an actual back room with dudes twirling their mustaches with concrete plans to destroy the world.
It is the 'profit motive' that forces a thousand small decisions, that you go along with because you have a mortgage to pay.
And all added up they destroy the world.
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.
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.
I highly encourage you to read: https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/
The statement was that the purpose of the system is what it does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Read at least the first couple lines and become microscopically less ignorant. Or don't. I'm not your mom.
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.
kind of the point of living in a civilized society i reckon
It's been so long since we've seen actual bread riots I fear we forgot how nasty those are.
I think the notion is that with new automated systems of violence and control, some of them built onto the people themselves, our "future civilization" can dial back the worker's compensation to below subsistence. There was a big zillionaire conference where they talked about slave collars, for example, or humanoid AI workers. I'm always a little distressed when the masters of industry fall back on science fiction in order to build a machine that needs to function in the, well, in the present.
[1] One person's output in terms of agriculture
What? Do you have a link?
It was a private 2017 desert retreat where five wealthy tech and hedge-fund investors flew out media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, ostensibly for a speaking engagement.
Rushkoff wrote it up first as a Guardian essay and later expanded it into his 2022 book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.
The problem's super duper obvious if you studied history, but it is also pretty obvious if you can think about second order effects. In collapse the wealthy obviously need security forces to hold on to their stuff, but in a collapse your stuff will - presto changeo - become the security force's stuff. Essentially the singular founding story of all European royal families. Barbarian general took the house, banged the wife, now he's king. Or King-Sound. Kai- Zar
At the end of the day all these little lords and lordettes figured out the time honored lesson that to be actually safe you want to make friends with the locals. And that's part of being new king types as well. But "making people like you" isn't a popular notion with the Revenge of the Nerds types who love this "Lord of the Bunker" kind of thing.
I've seen zoo chimpanzees make a mockery out of this sort of device in VERY short order, and I would dread to impose it on a Delta Force psychopath who also has more higher degrees than I do. Because he's going to know who it was who did it and have all sorts of ideas about what he's doing about that. So the basic premise is also idiotic.
Sorry, I was a little more snide than I usually am on HN, it's been a long day.
Sure it does. Our species is social, meaning we form societies for evolutionary success. Both of us being members of that society, it is in my interest to see your child survive. It is a tragedy to think your child may not survive because human greed prevents them from accessing resources we have in abundance.
The opposite perspective is anti-social in a literal way: the greedy cannot use all of the resources, can't eat all of the food; they want control so you can't have it without their permission. You are entitled to eat, seeing as we have more than enough to feed you. That others think you are not is disagreeable, to put it mildly.
I want my son to live on a livable planet, and not under the constant threat of destitution. And I want that for all children, not just mine.
High trust societies, a feeling of place and well-being in a culture, connectedness, etc.
https://data.worldhappiness.report/map
Note: Look at the US continuing to move down the report year after year.
Never a shortage of those, it seems. But only for insiders, of course.
I do not know that word. I looked it up and found nothing helpful. What does it mean, and what do you mean?
Also, may I ask you to use more punctuation and things like currency symbols, because your message lacks so much context I can't even guess.
So, no, they were not, or I would not have asked.
The usual English term is "mid-level".
Education? Safety? Medical help? A home? Food? Transport? Communication?
These are things society needs to provide.
In turn, we provide society with labour, applied skills, decision making etc.
If there is no (trusted, working) social contract - society breaks down.
If we allow a small elite to monopolize the productivity gains and efficiency increased from new technology - the results will be dire.
I see the more feasible solutions to be some kind of universal income or negative tax - combined with reduced work hours (eg 30 hour weeks, to start).
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.
"minor professional development refreshers" lol
Also known as (unpaid) hard work during the weekend.
That's obviously false. What's the point of society if that's true? Do you think there should be no government roads, no government health care (if you're in the US, you may think this, but only because you're indoctrinated), no legal system (or enforcement thereof) to protect you from criminals, no legally enforceable human rights whatsoever? Etc., etc.?
Once they actually understand what they're saying, no sane person believes that society doesn't owe them anything.
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
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.
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.
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?!
Now of course there's also jevon's "paradox" here, and the automation does allow us to support a larger population so in that sense not all the increased productivity is just "skimmed off the top" as profit. But on the flipside the crux of the other recent [1] HN post is that the wealth disparity is increasing. And if all the increased productivity directly translated to more "physical resources" in the world, that wouldn't be the case.
So something must be getting skimmed of the top, and intuitively you can feel the "rent seeking" layers in society have increased. Gains in efficiency are no longer resulting in surplus of physical products and decrease in prices.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48038307
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?
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.
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.
Long hours? Sure, but that's not new (or universal), and AI definitely didn't cause it.
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.
"No greed required" doesn't seem accurate. One would not use an AI to do the job instead of a human, except for the motivation that they would have more at the end of the day.
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'.
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.
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.
While "well-written" is subjective, the bar for "well-written" is whether people enjoyed reading it and the author managed to deliver his message.
I'm now very curious what bar you personally use for well-written, because it obviously differs from the majority of the people in this thread.
Here is a thought that seems not to have occurred to you.
All these people saying it's good. You commented multiple times to say you disagree and think it is bad.
Maybe that means you do not get it. Maybe the problem here is you and your reading and your lack of comprehension. Maybe the problem is not in the article and the way the article is written.
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.
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.
I actually enjoyed your writing (though it does mimic a certain style I see coming out of the US), and I even enjoyed what you wrote. A lot of it definitely resonates, but you could have omitted any mention of AI, written it 20 years ago, and expressed the same sentiment. And I guess that is the main point "greed is to blame, not AI".
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.
- We're not indentured workers yet. We should always have been fighting for their dignity & rights, because they're ours too. - Might I invite you to read the original, it's linked at the top of the article. Sure, programming isn't physically demanding, but that doesn't mean we should just accept the bad parts. - All of that being said, yes I agree, other jobs are more valuable and it's insane that we get paid what we do. That's why I'm a socialist. Your value shouldn't depend on a grabbag of accidental circumstances outside of your control.
As to selling consulting on the side: I've been an employee for 2 decades, and am striking out on my own to build a better life for my newborn son & fiance. Sorry for wanting to be a more present father.
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!”
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.
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.)
I’m being paid the same. I’m still doing 40 hours. The huge gains in productivity are not mine to enjoy, it seems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
hell yeah baby, I'm a proud Luddite.
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
No AIs were harmed in the writing of this post, either physically or by the sharing of earlier (cringe) drafts.
I don't want to make any accusations, just give some evidence to the above comment.
----
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.
Nice article by the way!
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."
Hey, that's agile!
Such a great write-up!
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.
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.
We all wanted gigabyte per second downloads not gigabyte per second life changes.
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.
Did we solve the ageism problem by mistake?
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.
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.
For the benefit of people who don't absorb the entire article (spoiler alert):
>> … AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did. …
Not saying those are signals of human writing but in my experience AI writing is verbose.
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.
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.
Gotta sue people and companies. Gotta get governments to do more regulation. I know this place is kind of allergic to that, but hey.
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.
They also struggled in 2000, and in 2008. There was no AI at the time.
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.
Me, personally, a text adventure game filled with bugs that I did not know how to fix. (I realise only decades later that the index into array I was using to store the location references was probably incorrectly calculated when I moved sometimes.)
I learned a lot of programming from books like these (official links, not pirated):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTdGY0VEQzSGZnelU...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTb2VxczM3WGNBLUE...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTRUl3SFRONGN0MFk...
There were more (one had a game called "Rats" and from the description I thought it would be a 3D game, but alas I never got it entered properly and even if I did, I realise now that it probably wasn't 3d rendered).
Well perhaps now, when AI halves your salary, and then halves it again, and the only people left are those who do it for some reason other than a salary, you'll be happier?
CITATION NEEDED
From my perspective it seems like they're just not hired basically at all anymore
AI will do all the "later" things we could not do and the civilisation will flourish. :')
Please check back later Error 1027 This website has been temporarily rate limited
Very good simple explanation for what is happening.
Don't forget, for most software out there, but not all, its development time is ridicoulus compared to its life cycle.
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.
“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-...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The SpecOps guys have the following bit of wisdom on offer: "Two is one and one is none".
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/
No offense.
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?