Posted by armcat 5 hours ago
Nearly two decades of experience learning how to build safe, performant software, to be replaced by this shit.
We don't care about people, our customers anymore. We actively harm them for profit. This is such a garbage industry now.
We don't have an option. Which is why a lack of care for users is abhorrent.
And this whole thread is just proving my point by blaming people and customers for the mistakes of technology companies.
I strongly believe that when used properly, AI can remove a lot of overhead that comes with writing the code (from both a critical thinking standpoint and physically it actually takes a lot more time than people realize to manually type code). You can focus on the design and have your team much more integrated in the designs and specifications of things without it being a slog to document the damn thing.
If I can go off and write up a draft and get feedback from my team in a day instead of in a week, I think that's fine. We can collectively walk through and use everyone's domain knowledge to correct details. Once everyone is onboard with the spec, I can feed that into a model to progressively do small changes rapidly but in such a way that's still manageable and reviewable for myself and the rest of my team.
If I go off and merge 45000 lines of code into main: fucking fire me and my whole team that approved that.
As with all new things that have extreme views on either side (AI is complete shit versus AI is the second coming of Christ in this case), there's generally a middle ground in between that we can collectively correct toward.
Now you'll be at least 50% slower and likely fired if you care, because caring means understanding the code.
The underlying problem is that quality isn't profitable. It goes beyond tech. The companies that cared about quality had their lunch eaten by the companies that chased razor-thin margins and produced disposable junk. I'm not sure what it is about AI that makes everyone forget what the world was like five years ago.
The rest, including me, are supposed to take up the slack with ridiculous deadlines and pressure. I don't have time anymore. I have to trust that my prompt and testing descriptions and harness will take care of it. And I have no clue whether that's truly happening, because I have another ticket before I get time to review, or send some swarm of test/probe agents at it. And right now I don't trust it. (Literally look at the parent article?)
I did have that time and capacity in the past. Maybe you didn't. But the landscape is, to me, objectively different now.
We're on the same page about most of this, but my perspective differs in a couple of ways: - I have worked at companies that didn't prioritize quality and had unreasonable deadlines for most of my career. It's the default state of corporations with leverage over their workers. - This was getting worse before AI. Big tech was the anomaly in terms of pay, perks, benefits, etc, and they were already jointly deciding not to do that anymore around the time of Musk's Twitter layoffs. The main reason they had offered such a compelling environment was to prevent talented people from being hired by their competition, in which case they were perfectly happy to let them "play around" and focus on quality.
I find it frustrating when people imply that employment was an idyllic wonderland before AI ruined everything. AI is another step, potentially the final step, in boiling the middle class. It didn't invent poor working conditions, it brought tech workers down closer to everyone else's level.
The best move right now is to move to a small startup or start something on your own. I fully understand that this is easier said than done, when you have bills to pay and deadlines keep you too exhausted to escape. To some extent, that's probably part of why the deadlines exist.
And we were allowed to? I raised so many tickets over time that had no real business impact beyond "this is a security risk" and nearly all of them I was allowed to adress.
Maybe that makes me some kind of tech-boomer, like people responding to me are implying, but I don't really give a shit.
Have you ever considered that the people who are pro-AI are not a monolith, and that it can be simultaneously true that you should absolutely be learning how to effectively and safely use LLMs in engineering workflows, while it is also true that there are people who are using them very unsafely?
Beig opposed to learning how to use AI correctly because some people use it recklessly is like being opposed to learning AWS in 2015 because some people left sensitive data in open S3 buckets.
Do not confuse negligent misuse of the tool for the value proposition of the tool itself.
I'm furious about slop-shovelling profit-driven development that actively causes harm to people. And the lack of care for, or outright disdain of customers, specifically fuelled by a misuse of AI, and the people telling me to get used to this, the people telling me to stop reading my own PRs, the people telling me this is just how it is now. When we all know that doesn't have to be true.
I just don't see any grassroots movement advocating for responsible software development winning out with a demographic that can't even unionize for their own self benefit.
There is no part of me that believes people will fundamentally do the right thing without an incentive to do so (money) or punishment (fines, jail). There won't be action until there is so much suffering that governments can no longer ignore it.
Only counterpoint is we have very well functioning unions in Norway for engineers.
But yeah, I don't see grassroots movements winning anywhere. Not even here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Society_of_Engineers...
The old joke was "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization", but in the AI era it feels like a butterfly would be enough.
I don't think you're making the counterpoint you mean to be.
Freedom from everything you enumerated already exists for anyone who cares enough to pursue it - robust ad and script blockers, operating systems with no coercion or user hostility, simple and stable scripting languages. They're not as polished as the products of manipulative and extractive abusers like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Discord, et al., and accordingly, users shun them, for the reason I explained above.
Ah, there's the victim blaming.
> Freedom from everything you enumerated already exists for anyone who cares enough to pursue it
Do you have any idea how daily life is for non-technical people? It isn't reasonable in our society to expect everyone to switch to FOSS, and blaming 60 year olds for getting their identity stolen because they weren't using a Linux phone or rolling their own self hosted matrix chat server is such a cruel and unbelievably out of touch take.
That would never happen though, the victims would plea and fight too vigorously in defense of their own abusers.
Who should be blamed for the actions of corporations ultimately subject to the society-scale approval of their consumers? No amount of misbehavior, malice, negligence, or abuse from the company can alienate the modal user of their products, they've thoroughly demonstrated this too many times to count.
It's not the doddering elderly folks I blame the most, it's everyone younger than them, the folks who grew up with the technology, aware of every abuse by these companies, who refuse to change their behavior. The ones who know better. The ones who can explain to you in great detail all about the surveillance, the dark patterns, the emotional manipulation, the extractive commercial angle, and who all refuse to adjust their behavior anyway. It's a choice, and it's one they make on a continual basis.
And to answer your question, no, I don't have much of an idea how daily life is for non-technical people besides them voluntarily suffering abuse like theft of their time (advertisements), or voluntarily paying a bribe to avoid the abuse, for no real reason other than that they don't care enough about the abuse or the bribe to spend 5 minutes learning how avoid both for free for the rest of their life.
This is very clear. You're incredibly disconnected from how most people in society operate, their motives, and capacity.
And your malice and contempt is entirely misplaced.
malice /măl′ĭs/ noun
1. A desire to harm others or to see others suffer; extreme ill will or spite.
2. The intent to commit an unlawful act without justification or excuse.
3. An improper motive for an action, such as desire to cause injury to another.
None of the above apply to me. I don't want to harm or injure anyone, and I don't want anyone to suffer. Consumers choose suffering and choose to voluntarily accept harm and injury, and I wish they wouldn't.
But you can't force people to not harm themselves, it's something they have to choose for themselves. Anyone who's ever lived with or loved an alcoholic or drug addict understands this. The contempt isn't for the person, it's for the theft of the person's faculties. The response to the person being unwilling to change is frustration with their choices, not contempt for the human being.
Interesting times.
Regarding losing jobs - what I hope will keep me employed: opiniated creativity and common sense. Not sure if I'm right.
Probably the people who are victims of identity theft, or have personal DMs leaked, or any other severe consequence of data breaches?
Thanks for proving my point though. No one cares about them anymore, as long as we ship fast and stock go up.