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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

It’s just resumé driven development. Corporate droids gotta justify their salaries somehow. It doesn’t pay to call software “done”.

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Individual developers or even developer management doesn't get much of a say in product direction at large corporations. The product management folks are who decide what features go in and when.

PMs have resumes too :)

- Successfully led key efforts to modernize aging platform technologies

- Directed integration of cutting-edge system-wide artificial intelligence functionality

Even if you talk to users, you can do it the wrong way. Big companies are incentivized by the stock market to care more about new users than existing ones because their only focus is growth. Growth can't be rooted in your existing users is a common feeling in product management circles. If you try to do things for people other than your existing users, then you end up doing odd stuff that at best is a mild annoyance. More likely you hurt their ability to continue using the app.

Exemplified by every website with a massive SIGN UP button and then a little 8 pt font log in tucked away somewhere underneath.

Gee thanks for helping me find the button I'll use literally once and making me hunt for the one I'll need the other 99999 times I use this service.

Existing users can go fuck themselves as long as new people are registering. Line go up!

I can’t tell you how relieving it is to hear somebody else complain about this. This has been my pet peeve for ages.

Unjustified downvoting. You absolutely have a point. Not just software, also the gazillion UI/UX designers. They keep moving things around and changing colors and fucking things up just to justify their salaries. Case in point: Google maps. It was perfect 15 years ago. We don't need vomit inducing color changes every 2 years

Microsoft is driving AI adoption. Why blame tge workers for this?

Microsoft is comprised of its workers.

All workers are equal, but some workers are more equal than others

I have been thinking about this Animal Farm quote a lot recently.

Why can't Indian software developers stand up for themselves and say no?

Because there are plenty of developers who'll say yes, so anyone saying no is putting their ethics ahead of their livelihood. Few people will be willing to put their beliefs ahead of providing for their family.

It's easy to say you will, and very hard to actually do it.

That's what ethics are. If you don't make sacrifices for them they aren't ethics they're just conveniences.

This is easy to say until you're an immigrant worker in a foreign country - something one probably worked for their entire life up to that point - risking it all (and potentially wrecking the life of their entire family) just to stop some random utility from having a Copilot button. It's not "this software will be used to kill people", it's more like "there's this extra toolbar which nobody uses".

In life you have to choose your battles.

I hadn't made more solid connections between the current state of software and industry, the subjugation of immigrants, and the death of the American neoliberal order until this comment thread but it here it lies bare, naked, and essentially impossible to ignore. With regards to the whole picture, there's no good or moral place to "RETVRN" to in a nostalgic sense. The one question that keeps ringing through my head as I see the world in constant upheaval, and my one refuge in meaning, technical craftsmanship, tumbling, is: Why did I not see this coming?

"why won't other people make sacrifices for me?"

Because the society in US is arranged as a competition with no safety net and where your employer has a disproportionate amount of influence on your well being and the happiness of your kids.

I'm not going to give up $1M in total comp and excellent insurance for my family because you and I don't like where AI is going.

Just having the option of giving up $1 million in compensation put one far far far above meaningful worries about your well-being and the happiness of your kids.

Not really. We would have to downsize our life.

I'll have to explain it to the wife: "well, you see, we cant live in this house anymore because AI in Notepad was just too much".

I'll dial up my ethical and moral stance on software up to 11 when I see a proper social safety net in this country, with free healthcare and free education.

And if we cant all agree on having even those vital things for free, then relying on collective agreement on software issues will never work in practice so my sacrifice would be for nothing. I would just end up being the dumb idealist.

I posed my comment poorly and trollishly.

I don't think you should make any change you don't want to, I'm not arguing for collective agreement on anything, and I'm not convinced there's a big ethical case for or against AI, even in Notepad.exe. If you can make $1M, go nuts, I just think it's not a great example of dealing with ethics & tradeoffs.

I was more just reacting to your the contrast between ideas early in this thread, and your implication of a $1M comp. Early in the thread there was implication that poor/exploited/low-level workers with few other options were either being blamed for AI in notepad, or should not be blamed. Then you casually drop the $1M comp line. Maybe that's real, maybe it's not but regardless, it felt silly to compare the earlier population with people who can or have made $1M. Of course we all face challenges, and the hedonic treadmill calls for us equally at $1K/year and $1M/year, I just think people in the latter have objectively more options, even if the wife complains, than people in the former, and it's tough to take the latter seriously when they talk about lifestyle adjustments.

You can say exactly the same thing about the management and the shareholders. If they say no, someone else will say yes, so why blame them?

Your solution for us to all agree to do the same thing is not realistic for the same reason that recycling doesn't really work, why we have a myriad of programming languages and similar but incompatible hardware, etc.

There is always someone who will take advantage of the prisoners dilemma.

They make the decision about what to say yes to. They can choose to do something else without it impacting their individual circumstances.

It's a cultural thing. They'd much rather do what they think someone means than question authority

Hard to say no to paycheck

And yet, if they were raising a Series A, they'd be lauded as "disruptors"

By some

Some of us were impressionable when Jurassic Park came out.

The vast majority of hn commentors, I'd wager.

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