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Comment by zwnow | Hacker News Reader

Doing it professionally destroyed all the magic for me. Everything is slop, customer appointments are exhausting af, nobody is able to precisely communicate their needs and im supposed to be the people pleaser saying "sure can do" to every lunatic idea some person with enough money has. If you want to take responsibility and actually build a valuable product your only option is open source software as companies, no matter the size, do not care about the nuances a feature might have as long as its shippable. Big tech has embarked into enshittification for over two decades now. Imagine being paid for making a product worse. Fuck this industry, money is the only driver for me. Once that's gone, which surely will happen with companies trying to replace devs with AI, I'll hopefully find a way to keep my income stable in a different profession that is actually enjoyable.

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It really depends on the culture of the organization, personal and team goals. Very few places have everything in place to support engineers by making work low friction, productive and with the right support from the rest of the team combined with interesting tasks and goals. Once in a while a job like that comes along, but usually it ends up changing over time as priorities for the organization and individuals shift.

But yeah, I'm pretty down on tech these days (and even telecom). Bullshit happens everywhere and drains virtually all the fun out of everything. There are loads of incumbents, pole owners and municipalities that don't even do the bare minimum required by responding to permits in a timely manner. It's depressing that it is refreshing to me when people do the bare minimum -- replying to emails on the next business day (making it possible to get to the real work of installing cables for a customer). Most days for me now are hounding people to do what they should have done weeks / months / years ago, or writing legal documents to try to address harm they're causing. <sigh>

I sense just a touch of catastrophising going on here…

Not really. No matter what enterprise dev I talked to their product is completely unsaveable. Too big for a rewrite and basically a Frankenstein monolith/microservice done wrong architecture. It's really painful to see how bad some stuff is millions of people depend on. If builders built houses like devs built software, we would have no houses.

Check out the homebuilding subreddit. The amount of "bad" stuff that ends up under the surface of nice drywal is, in fact, _just fine_, is quite high! Here's a recent example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Homebuilding/comments/1mjxqin/is_th...

Building with drywall is a concept ill never understand. Houses are made of brick walls where im from.

I'm sure you know, but to clarify, drywall is not structural. Load is borne by lumber in most cases, though some homes in America are built with structural masonry; South Florida builds a lot of homes with concrete masonry units, for example. The drywall is just there as a pleasant skin to hide the structural underpinnings. There's nothing stopping someone from using drywall in the interior even in structural masonry buildings, and this happens pretty often, in fact.

There's nothing wrong with wooden houses! They're a cost-effective method of building, and with proper care, such houses will last over a hundred years. Masonry buildings, of course, also need care to avoid falling apart, though probably less so than wooden buildings.

I don't know where it is that you're from, but I'd wager that large parts of the US sees harsher climate conditions. Between hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and wildfires, American houses have to deal with a lot. Properly-constructed wooden houses handle what they need to.

Sure, you could say that all else equal, a masonry structure is more durable than a wooden one. But as they say, anyone can build a bridge that stands, but only an engineer can build a bridge that barely stands. Cost is always an object in the real world.

I didn’t say software everywhere isn’t quite crap, I’ve seen it first hand. I just thought the catastrophising was a bit over the top.

If anything, we're not responding to this enough.

If we were civil engineers it would be shocking for the public to learn that we are sometimes ordered build the bridges terribly on purpose, for something like the purpose that it influences people toward using toll roads -- when in the world of software engineering not only has this kind of anti-user (anti-human) behaviour become commonplace but actually it's increasingly the only novel work we do between gluing other people's code together.

Agreed. You don't even need to just include engineers. Even professionals like electricians or nurses etc stand to be struck off or even sent to prison for incompetence like mislabelling a fusebox or something. Meanwhile software engineers are being told to just fucking put a bolt in the fusebox, we haven't got time to do it properly.

Because people’s lives aren’t typically at stake because a website is janky.

We’re not building bridges though are we. I’m more aware than anyone that the software is terrible about the place. I’ve also seen that fail to matter that much 99% of the time.

Nah, we're just handling national security, healthcare, banking and social welfare. We're of course allowed to make oopsies, and since we're not a real engineering profession we're never held accountable :)

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