Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

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Thank you for sharing your perspective. It honestly warms my heart to see that some people believe the trajectory is still upward.

> Maybe I just enjoy software right now because I've now got the technical competence and confidence to avoid some of the frustrations that I experienced earlier

Just as some but not all of my (mostly negative) perception is surely personal, might I suggest that some but not all of your (mostly positive) perception is not? Perhaps the industry really has improved in some areas that you care about during that interval. Yay! OTOH, that doesn't necessarily put your perception and mine in opposition. There are other areas and other intervals, and other priorities as well. It's great that your experience has been positive. I hope it remains so.

The issue isn't so much the trajectory, but the people in the industry. I've been repeating for a while now that there are too many people who are not team players, who are basically still cowboy coders, looking to scratch their own personal technical itches rather than working together to build good software. This has been my experience for the last 5 years at least. It definitely reminds me more of the 90s, when the industry was a mess because it was new and growing. My issue is mostly with the people though, not the actual work. Lots of self-righteousness. Lots of people wanting everything to be on 'hard mode.' And as someone else commented, there is definitely a Stockholm Syndrome with the money involved since I now can not do anything else and maintain my life. Nor has this industry made it easy to change jobs. Nobody wants to train, everyone seems very cheap, but they want to hire Kobe. I am counting the days before I get broken.

I think that's a good way to think about it. Everyone's individual perspectives are valid, and they're a mix of real things that have happened in the industry and their own experiences.

I'm very much aware of how bad some parts of the industry can be (particularly having recently dipped my toe into some machine learning work and discovered an entire sub-field in which nobody has ever heard of documentation, testing, coding standards, or things like releasing software that actually works).

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