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.

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.

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.

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.

AI is just repeating the pattern.

You have a software group, and there's a young engineer that goes and tries some new technology. He spends weeks reading about it, and does a lot of stuff in his head, and then he does something for the group using it and shows it off.

And management wonders about it. If the technology costs money, they will quietly push it off because they have no budget for a $50 tool. If it saves money, they will quietly push it off because reasons. But if it saves headcount and they get to get rid of "annoying fred with the red stapler", they might show interest. And interest means they have quietly accepted it in their mind.

Thing is jr guy spent every waking hour on this thing, chose the problem carefully, and didn't talk about the impractical, the gotchas, or the things it affects that he doesn't know about.

Who knows, maybe I'm just imagining this and AI is different.

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.)

> ... 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 :)

This hit me hard. This article is art. I think I need to sleep on this and read it again in the morning.

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."

I’m being paid the same. I’m still doing 40 hours. The huge gains in productivity are not mine to enjoy, it seems.

Hey, that's agile!

Such a great write-up!

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.

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.

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 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.

We all wanted gigabyte per second downloads not gigabyte per second life changes.

The doll catches the fire.

The greed of gullible CEOs. I assure you there's a talent pipeline collapse that's in progress and you'll be hard press to find senior engineers in few years because AI output is not something a junior can ride easily and you killed that pipline of junior engineers today.

Slaying the goose that lays the Golden eggs in your corporate greed.

You'll pay pack with interest and then some.

Good luck.

Build it greenfield 7 years ago, everyting is well documented, everything special screams at you if it breaks and tells you how to fix it (if it even needs fixing).

We spend time on upgrading stuff because of external dependencies and otherwise add new features.

Programming doesn't suck.

Did we solve the ageism problem by mistake?

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.

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.

AI will do all the "later" things we could not do and the civilisation will flourish. :')

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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-...

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/