Short disclosure, I work as a Software Developer in the US, and often have to keep my negative opinions about the tech industry to myself. I often post podcasts and articles critical of the tech industry here in order to vent and, in a way, commiserate over the current state of tech and its negative effects on our environment and the Global/American sociopolitical landscape.
I’m generally reluctant to express these opinions IRL as I’m afraid of burning certain bridges in the tech industry that could one day lead to further employment opportunities. I also don’t want to get into these kinds of discussions except with my closest friends and family, as I could foresee them getting quite heated and lengthy with certain people in my social circles.
Some of these negative opinions include:
- I think that the industries based around cryptocurrencies and other blockchain technologies have always been, and have repeatedly proven themselves to be, nothing more or less than scams run and perpetuated by scam artists.
- I think that the AI industry is particularly harmful to writers, journalists, actors, artists, and others. This is not because AI produces better pieces of work, but rather due to misanthropic viewpoints of particularly toxic and powerful individuals at the top of the tech industry hierarchy pushing AI as the next big thing due to their general misunderstanding or outright dislike of the general public.
- I think that capitalism will ultimately doom the tech industry as it reinforces poor system design that deemphasizes maintenance and maintainability in preference of a move fast and break things mentality that still pervades many parts of tech.
- I think we’ve squeezed as much capital out of advertising as is possible without completely alienating the modern user, and we risk creating strong anti tech sentiments among the general population if we don’t figure out a less intrusive way of monetizing software.
You can agree or disagree with me, but in this thread I’d prefer not to get into arguments over the particular details of why any one of our opinions are wrong or right. Rather, I’d hope you could list what opinions on the tech industry you hold that you feel comfortable expressing here, but are, for whatever reason, reluctant to express in public or at work. I’d also welcome an elaboration of said reason, should you feel comfortable to give it.
I doubt we can completely avoid disagreements, but I’ll humbly ask that we all attempt to keep this as civil as possible. Thanks in advance for all thoughtful responses.
A very large portion (maybe not quite a majority) of software developers are not very good at their jobs. Just good enough to get by.
And that is entirely okay! Applies to most jobs, honestly. But there is really NO appropriate way to express that to a coworker.
I’ve seen way too much “just keep trying random things without really knowing what you’re doing, and hope you eventually stumble into something that works” attitude from coworkers.
I actually would go further and say that collectively, we are terrible at what we do. Not every individual, but the combination of individuals, teams, management, and business requirements mean that collectively we produce terrible results. If bridges failed at anywhere near the rate that software does, processes would be changed to fix the problem. But bugs, glitches, vulnerabilities etc. are rife in the software industry. And it just gets accepted as normal.
It is possible to do better. We know this, from things like the stuff that sent us to the moon. But we’ve collectively decided not to do better.
Main difference is, a bridge that fails physically breaks, takes months to repair, and risks killing people. Your average CRUD app… maybe a dev loses a couple or hours figuring out how to fix live data for the affected client, bug gets fixed, and everybody goes on with their day.
Remember that we almost all code to make products that will make a company money. There’s just no financial upside to doing better in most cases, so we don’t. The financial consequences of most bugs just aren’t great enough to make the industry care. It’s always about maximizing revenue.
maybe a dev loses a couple or hours figuring out how to fix live data for the affected client, bug gets fixed, and everybody goes on with their day.
Or thousands of people get stranded at airports as the ticketing system goes down or there is a data breach that exposes millions of people’s private data.
Some companies have been able to implement robust systems that can take major attacks, but that is generally because they are more sensitive to revenue loss when these systems go down.
I’m not sure if you’re agreeing or trying to disprove my previous comment - IMHO, we are saying the exact same thing. As long as those stranded travelers or data breaches cost less than the missed business from not getting the product out in the first place, from a purely financial point of view, it makes no sense to withhold the product’s release.
Let’s be real here, most developers are not working on airport ticketing systems or handling millions of users’ private data, and the cost of those systems failing isn’t nearly as dramatic. Those rigid procedures civil engineers have to follow come from somewhere, and it’s usually not from any individual engineer’s good will, but from regulations and procedures written from the blood of previous failures. If companies really had to feel the cost of data breaches, I’d be willing to wager we’d suddenly see a lot more traction over good development practices.
… If companies really had to feel the cost of data breaches, I’d be willing to wager we’d suddenly see a lot more traction over good development practices.
that’s probably why downtime clauses are a thing in contracts between corporations; it sets a cap at the amount of losses a corporation can suffer and it’s always significantly less than getting slapped by the gov’t if it ever went to court.
I’m just trying to highlight that there is a fuzzier middle ground than a lot of programmers want to admit. Also, a lot of regulations for that middle ground haven’t been written; the only attention to that middle ground have been when done companies have seen failures hit their bottom line.
I’m not saying the middle ground doesn’t exist, but that said middle ground visibly doesn’t cause enough damage to businesses’ bottom line, leading to companies having zero incentive to “fix” it. It just becomes part of the cost of doing business. I sure as hell won’t blame programmers for business decisions.
It just becomes part of the cost of doing business.
I agree with everything you said except for this. Often times, it isn’t the companies that have to bear the costs, but their customers or third parties.
That’s why I don’t work on mission critical stuff.
If my apps fail, some Business Person doesn’t get to move some bits around.
A friend of mine worked in software at NASA. If her apps failed, some astronaut was careening through space 😬
Yup, this is exactly it. There are very few software systems whose failure does not impact people. Sure, it’s rare for it to kill them, but they cause people to lose large amounts of money, valuable time, or sensitive information. That money loss is always, ultimately, paid by end consumers. Even in B2B software, there are human customers of the company that bought/uses the software.
Managers decided that by forcing people to deliver before it’s ready. It’s better for the company to have something that works but with bugs, rather than delaying projects until they are actually ready.
In most fields where people write code, writing code is just about gluing stuff together, and code quality doesn’t matter (simplicity does though).
Game programmers and other serious large app programmers are probably the only ones where it matters a lot how you write the code.
Kind of the opposite actually.
The Business™️ used to make all decisions about what to build and how to build it, shove those requirements down and hope for the best.
Then the industry moved towards Agile development where you put part of the product out and get feedback on it before you build the next part.
There’s a fine art to deciding which bugs to fix win. Most companies I’ve worked with aren’t very good at it to begin with. It’s a special skill to learn and practice
Agile is horrible though. It sounds good in theory but oh my god its so bad.
It’s usually the implementation of Agile that’s bad.
The Manifesto’s organizing principles are quite succinct and don’t include a lot of the things that teams dislike.
We follow these principles: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. Working software is the primary measure of progress. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility. Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
I read somewhere that everyone is bad at their job. When you’re good at your job you get promoted until you stop being good at your job. When you get good again, you get promoted.
I know it’s not exactly true but I like the idea.
I don’t want to get promoted… Once my job isn’t mainly about programming anymore (in a pretty wide sense though), I took a wrong turn in life 😅
maybe not quite a majority
VAST majority. This is 80-90% of devs.
No class consciousness. Too many tech workers think they’re rugged individuals that can negotiate their own contracts into wealth.
Working for free on nights and weekends to “hit that deadline” is not good. You’re just making the owners rich, and devaluing labor. Even if you own a lot of equity, it’s not as much as the owners.
And then there’s bullshit like return to office mandates and people are like “oh no none of us want to do this but there’s no organized mechanism to resist”
Join Tech Workers Coalition
Tech workers need to unionize
This is more than self interest, self respecting tech workers would have refused to create our current panopticon-skinnerbox if they weren’t at the mercy of the tech lords. Seniority based hiring and firing, that has to be demand number one, number 2 is layoff recall lists 5 years long.
Most IT infra exists solely to justify work that is pointless work.
One if the worst IT sectors is ad tech. The entire industry rationally should not exist.
Good article on this:
Much of what we do and have built is overpriced and useless bullshit that doesn’t make anybody better off.
We are inventing solutions and products to manage other solutions and products to manage other solutions and products to…etc etc.
Websites used to be static HTML pages with some simple graphics, images, and some imbedded stuff. Now, you need to know AWS for your IaaS, Kubernetes to manage your scaling and container orchestration for the thousands of Docker containers that you use to compose your app written in some horrific pile of JavaScript related web stacks like NodeJS, Typescript, React, blah blah blah…
Then you need a ton of other 3rd party components that handle authentication, databasing, backups, monitoring, signaling, account creation/management, logging, billing, etc etc.
It’s circles within circles within circles, and all that to make a buggy, overpriced, clunky web app.
Similar is true for IT, massive software suites that most people in the company use 10% of their functionality for stupid shit.
I’m all for advancing technology, I love technology, it’s my job and my hobby.
But the longer I work in this industry, the more I get this sick feeling that we lost the train long time ago. Buying brand new $1,500 laptops every 3 years so that most of our users can send emails, browse the web, and type up occasional memos.
An inability to understand that ‘e-mail’ doesn’t get an S is not how I guessed you work in a lot of Azure.
Few things would make me happier than to never log into an Azure instance ever again lol.
For many real world, day to day tasks, computers and the software that ran on them were faster and easier to use 20 years ago.
I was using my school’s website the other day and had a similar thought. I remember waiting a similar amount of time for many pages to load back in the dialup days. Why is it so slow to load a page that just shows some text and buttons??
The Microsh*t Office Suit is atrocious — both from a Software Dev and ordinary user perspective. Literally any alternative is better, Libre Office, Google Office, etc.
Word is bloated, slow, impractical, bad for collaboration, and politically dubious. Teams is buggy, impractical, also politically dubious, and lacks many basic features. At this point, I literally despise Microsoft. Also Windows really seems to be unusable, from the enlightened perspective of a Mac or Linux user (in my case the latter).
SystemD is bloated and stopping Linux from getting faster.
Most mainstream programming languages suck, Rust being the exception.
Alright, I’m done ;)
Edit: any website that breaks because of uBlock Origin medium mode is poorly made and not trustworthy. /endrant
There is two types of languages, ones people bitch about, and ones nobody uses.
Thoughts on rust? Is it a good programming language to learn as a beginner?
What sucks the most about rust is that 90% of rust jobs are some crypto bullshit. I love the language, but finding normal jobs is near impossible.
At the same time, i could find 20 Go positions but Go just isn’t exciting. It’s the new java imo, working with it probably good for job security, but i just don’t see myself working in Go in the future as a main language.
I truly believe that innovating the internet is really running in place. Might be just me but I can’t think of anything we can really do, to ‘evolve’ it. We’re doing everything that we’ve been doing in the past three decades, but it’s only just been more accessible and the speeds faster (depending where you are). But we’re not actually moving the needle when it comes to progressing the internet as a whole.
And I see it this way as to why. We’ve experienced two big booms in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, with Web 1.0 being what some consider the Wild West of the internet. Web 2.0 is basically the great social media bubble that has blossomed for years. We’re not doing anything new or different now than we did back in 2007. Every new social media platform that comes out is recycling the exact same things as many before it presented. I truly think we stopped evolving the internet the day we managed to get messengers onto phones when phones were developing and it’s only been perfected by the age of the first wave of smartphones.
So I just think with all of this AI stuff, this “Web 3.0” I’ve been hearing about for a few years now, the Metaverse .etc are all just gimmicks. Gimmicks of shitty ideas coming from the wrong people that should be practicing said ideas, all saying that they’re innovating the internet when all that they’re doing is just taking advantage of the internet for themselves. All within political theater of course.
What about Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s SoLiD (social linked data)? I mean, I guess it only (or mainly) pertains to data, and doesn’t necessarily change the web itself
I briefly worked with Solid at a nonprofit, passing around turtle files and whatnot. It’s a cool bit of tech that kind of harkens back to the days before JSON took over. Much more secure in theory too, it just would need the entire infrastructure of the web to change around the paradigm for it to really take off…but yeah its a cool idea akin in some ways to the fediverse.
I think companies that use unethically trained AI (read: basically all gen AI) should be subject to massive litigation, or at least severely damaging boycotts.
Have mentioned it to a lawyer at work, and he was like “I get it, but uh… fat chance, lol”. Would not dare mention it to the AI-hungry folks in leadership.
You can’t litigate against owner class as working class. Federal government is sold out their asses so they won’t do it.
Litigation is a dispute resolution tool for the owners, between owners.
There is NOT a viable way forward within the courts or political processes.
Things will get worse before anything changes.
Source: Dead CEO and how they treat luigi
‘Using cloud software will lead to lower costs and a better overall service quality’
IT is slowly starting to get regulated like a real engineering field and that’s a good developement.
MOBILE USERS CAN GO FUCK THEMSELVES.
Phew. That felt good.
Only one in this thread willing to talk about the real problems.
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IT reconversions are bullshit and dangerous to the industry. Everyone and their grandma are becoming “programmers”. We’re in the “fuck around” phase, the “find out” will be explosive. Companies are inundating themselves with these “reconverted” juniors and doing soft-layoffs to seniors…
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crypto, Blockchain and AI are just bs to make a quick buck out of investors. They are truly disastrous to the environment
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If you use chatgpt et al. I’ll look down on you from a technical competence level
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marketing and middle management are mostly useless. A good, and small, sales+marketing team is very effective but the moment they start growing they start to degenerate pretty fast into BS world and imposing company culture
- If you use chatgpt et al. I’ll look down on you from a technical competence level
Eh, I have to say I find it quite usefull sometimes for brainstorming solutions. It is esentially a rubber duck that answers and sometimes gives good ideas.
Of course the answers are often bullshit, but they can sometimes point you in the right direction/to the right words to google.
(All of this ignoring the enviromental problems ofc.)
If you use chatgpt el al. I’ll look down on you from a technical competence level
If someone asks “But using google is the same”, no they are not the same. Chatgtp is a toddler which has been force-fed information and is rewarded if the generated answer statistically makes sense. Google, or any search engine, points to a page where actual humans have discussed about the problem. They can also be wrong, but you can see the thought process of the individuals, and sometimes you can even ask the experts directly. It’s a very different experience.
Phhht…AI rocks. Nobody else tells me “you’re absolutely right, I’m very sorry for any inconvenience caused” in every sentence. They make me feel so smart.
/s, obviously.
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I think that the AI industry is particularly harmful to writers, journalists, actors, artists, and others. This is not because AI produces better pieces of work, but rather due to misanthropic viewpoints of particularly toxic and powerful individuals at the top of the tech industry hierarchy pushing AI as the next big thing due to their general misunderstanding or outright dislike of the general public.
I’m a writer and my work is increasingly making me use AI to do things. I’m 98% sure I’m just training this thing to replace me at this point, and am planning accordingly.
On a bright note I’m optimistic that ai bloated garbage and advertising will eventually push a critical mass of people to using decentralized and open source tools, or possibly that non-profits and co-ops will start to spring up to manage more ethical services that could potentially replace the mainstream ones.
When you’re not trying to make some dude disgustingly richer, you don’t need a ton of advertising (imo).
I also think tech workers should unionize. On a darker note, I think outsourcing/offshoring post-covid is going to kill any unions viability. You need bargaining power (withhold your labor) and I’m not sure that will exist for this trade because of how easy it will be to find workers.