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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Yup - and guess what, the only people hurt by this are the lowest level people. No manager or exec will feel any pain from this incompetence. Someone who isn't responsible but couldn't do their job effectively as a result is having a worse life now.

This is one of the primary reasons why I am totally done with Tech

The distance between users and builders is so excessively far apart now and the levels of abstraction for actually building things that are robust is just not even a consideration in software-centric design. Literally everything you have built after IDK 2000(?) will have exactly this issue. Just hope you're not at a scale that crushes people.

Software is the language of alienation and increasingly becoming unethical, as these systems are becoming increasingly impactful on the most vulnerable with no buttresses or supports preventing this kind of malfeasance.

It's not trivial. These are people's livelihoods at stake.

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As I sit here spending hours and hours importing packages, installing modules, downloading tools, finding libraries, patching scripts, following deployment guidelines and building gigabytes and gigabytes of artifacts ...for what amounts to a mobile app wrapper around HTML pages.

The disease has a name: over engineering.

https://www.smart-jokes.org/programmer-evolution.html

Most working programmers are in the middle near “seasoned professional.” They spend all their time thinking about how to manage complexity when they should be thinking about how to avoid it.

Only yesterday I encountered a fantastic example. I have to implement an API, there is a swagger/openAPI doc for it, but still, the real interaction and meaning of the calls can be a bit hard to grasp. But the developers provide an example application (in C#).

I expected something basic that implements the login flow and some of the more important calls. Instead I found something that could be described as an C# architecture example application. If I wanted to learn C#, I think I could learn a lot about application patterns from it. MVVM, how to separate the concerns into separate "packages" for reusability and the likes. What I can't really learn from it (without already being a C# pro, I work in other environments) is how to use the API.

To be fair, the tech stacks they have to work with often have staggering amounts of accidental complexity.

It’s seasoned professionals all the way down.

The app epidemic is mostly thanks to one single dead dude. Of course it made (and continues to make) billions to Apple. Then naturally half the industry wanted in on the app store game.

Eventually it might stop being such a cash cow - maybe thanks to endless numbers of teenagers hyping Fortnite.

Oh my I hadn't seen this before and it is divine!

That's one of the reasons I like my low level system programming job (maybe you could call it "embedded"). Of course it has problems of its own, but this particular area is at least a little bit better.

Except the pay sucks. You can make a lot of money concatenating HTML strings.

This is my experience.

I worked for over 10 years doing Linux Kernel driver implementation. At Intel.

When I quit last year my base was $120k (150 TC). I couldn’t afford a house in the HCOLA I’m in. Remote wasn’t an option. For me a house is a prerequisite to starting a family.

So I left to get housing. Either making more or going remote and moving to a less expensive area.

Embedded is really fun for me, but it just can’t keep up in times of such inflation- especially WRT housing.

After working on bloated systems at all my day jobs (pick any company) I go home at night and try to figure out how to use delta compression and trees to reduce storage costs on large datasets so I can fit them on $5 VPS or raspberry pi attached storage.

It's so satisfying to use 10,000x less resources to do something like full text search or handle 1,000 tps.

This is extremely untrue; a barely competent embedded developer can make gobs of money. It's a much rarer skill, somewhere at the intersection of software developer and electrical engineer.

Show me the offers. I have worked as embedded dev some time ago, and my job offer feed keeps sending me embedded opportunities. I'm making significantly more doing JS + React

I'd love to see this as well. Outside the FAANGs embedded devs are treated as a line-item cost on the BOM. 5 years of experience gets you a "senior" title and salaries here in the midwest cap at $150K with very few exceptions. I'm pretty sure you can make $150K as a freshout writing ReactJS.

Then again I refuse to make FPGAs for HF trading firms, and apparently you can make bank there if you can put up with their crap.

That is not universally true.

Can you share some pointers to embedded jobs that pay well? It's been a source of fascination over the years the way embedded jobs that sound as if they are important, challenging and interesting pay a fraction of other programming jobs.

I'm not the parent comment here but I'll note that the uptick in IoT/PaaS projects has created a nice niche if you have low level experience + embedded Linux + some cloud API experience. And not just taking an RPi and having it send JSON up to Azure, but defining a platform and creating a whole project full-stack.

Companies are realizing that the IoT node structure is not just a one-shot project that ships and is never maintained. It's part of the revenue stream. So the need for embedded Linux developers is increasing and the experience base out there isn't great. Again, having an RPi in your desk drawer doesn't make you an embedded Linux dev.

How do the jobs pay, outside FAANG or whatever? The money for developing embedded software was out of line (far too low) with the difficulty of those jobs and the importance of those systems even before those systems had "IoT" sprinkled all over them.

> So the need for embedded Linux developers is increasing and the experience base out there isn't great. Again, having an RPi in your desk drawer doesn't make you an embedded Linux dev.

Maybe things have changed, but in the past there hasn't been much financial incentive for devs to build up those skills beyond the "RPi in the desk drawer" (zing!) level. "Work hard, make a lot less than a web dev, be less hirable in the future because of your niche skills." I'm speaking as someone who actually did look into what training myself on some of Wind River's products would cost, about eight years ago, and looked into what the jobs paid.

edit: I can see by looking at a grandparent comment that we're probably in agreement

That is universally true.

> Software is the language of alienation and increasingly becoming unethical, as these systems are becoming increasingly impactful on the most vulnerable with no buttresses or supports preventing this kind of malfeasance.

This doesn't really have that much to do with software. As with many other things, software can make it easier to have this kind of crap, but it is not the cause and not a prerequisite.

Case in point: Franz Kafka wrote The Trial 30 years before ENIAC.

> No manager or exec will feel any pain from this incompetence. Someone who isn't responsible but couldn't do their job effectively as a result is having a worse life now.

> This is one of the primary reasons why I am totally done with Tech

Is it that much better in other fields?

no, its not. Not in any white collar professions, not in any blue collar jobs, not in the military, not in academia.

You are only safe when you don't have bosses and all responsibility and power rests on yourself.

Almost...you find coworkers and share responsibility mutually. You don't need to put it all on your own back.

Yes. For example German workers have better than average protection from exploitation

This is from 2018 and shows where you can actually have some rights as a worker. It's not hopeless: https://www.ituc-csi.org/IMG/pdf/ituc-global-rights-index-20...

I would imagine that this is also the case for German tech workers as well.

My point was that tech probably isn't all that different from other professions where there are layers of management on top.

The parent comment made it seem like "tech" was worse than "other," which I'm not sure is true.

German workers have protection from their company owned laptops being disabled?

IMO most reasonable managers would not blame the individual contributors for not being able to do their job because of a security and procurement issue that is out of their hands. I suppose it can happen, but if you're working at a place that has management like that perhaps it's time to look around.

Claiming responsibility or shifting the blame, what is better for your career?

1. The people to blame here are not the builders.

2. The people impacted are employees who now have a few days chilling. I would love to have this problem as an employee.

Unfortunately not limited to tech industry. I watched a publications department sit on a blacklisted application stack for five years, as IT - with plenty of warning - kept screaming that it was going to get turned off.

A complete absence of tool selection, migration, or any preparation whatsoever, because the new tool couldn't be funded from leadership, so the horrible ship kept belching forward. Until it was shut down. End result was seventeen people sitting on their thumbs for years.. and a totally fragged publication environment that never recovered, the product of which will - at best - be waived on future contracts at some incredible cost. At worst, it will be yet another barrier to the already marginal business.

I think this is a common refrain but no line-level worker is losing their livelihood because they were part of the 25% of the company whose machine just stopped working.

If anything they are part of the 25% of the company who just got a few extra paid vacation days.

> Software is the language of alienation and increasingly becoming unethical,

This was a management problem. They had a plan to retire obsolete devices, but no plan to replace them.

> They had a plan to retire obsolete devices, but no plan to replace them.

Cool and now I bet they have a new line on their procedures to ensure continuity of service (so that the next management can fumble this in new and creative ways)

Management will suffer when this mess results in them underperforming.

> This is one of the primary reasons why I am totally done with Tech

I don't get the impression that this a tech-specific issue.

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