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Comment by spudlyo | Hacker News Reader

So in case you're worried about watching a 35 minute video and wishing you hadn't, here is what I think is an interesting observation that the speaker starts coming around to at around the 7 minute mark.

Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities, and isn't interested in doing the hard work required to increase the reliability and reduce the technical debt in software. Engineers who care about such things, often engage in acts of "benevolent noncompliance". Common workarounds are "asking for forgiveness instead of permission", secrecy, and misdirection. Alternately you can confront management and fight for doing what you think is right. These sorts of things can be risky. You can be fired, you can be reprimanded if caught, you can be retaliated against or lose political advantage. In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us.

I haven't yet finished the whole thing, but there are sections around dark patterns and other forms of user-hostile software. I'll probably finish it.

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I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent. It's far more often that I hear "we interviewed someone we thought looked good and they couldn't even write a for loop, where are all the good engineers".

I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.

I don't think I have ever encountered anyone who could not write a for loop that got a job as a programmer.

I encounter plenty that used a for loop when something else would have been advisable.

I think he was being a little hyperbolic, but the core concern (that programmers look competent right up until you have them write a FizzBuzz) is very real.

(Source: I've helped hire lots of programmers.)

Sadly I have run into people like that. To this day I am convinced they paid someone to stand in for the interviews.

I'm probably the person ya'll are hating on. Writing code and writing code under pressure while you have a full blown anxiety attack are not the same thing. I'm lucky if I can accurately tell you what I had for breakfast once that triggers..

If you program daily, but were nervous during an interview, I would have been able to tell and always tried to get candidates comfortable before getting into any programming - talking about something they liked or were passionate about, reframing my questions in terms of something we talked about or was on their resume.

I found most of the people who couldn’t program were not the nervous ones, but were smooth talkers who probably didn’t write much code. Maybe they did at one point, maybe they never did, it was hard to know, but I couldn’t get even logical steps to solve straight forward problems out of them. Those were the worst interviews, not because the candidate wasn’t a fit for the role, but because then I had to panic to try to keep the experience positive, constructive, and collaborative. When I expected to fill 20-40 minutes talking through a problem with someone who can’t solve problems, let alone produce anything remotely looking like code, I always found that painful.

The questions I asked could be solved by non-programmers (my wife, who was an elementary teacher and even my kindergarten son could come up with reasonable solutions, but of course not code). That was probably the biggest issue I ran into with nervous people - they didn’t think about the problem first, they’d try writing code before really thinking through. That was usually easy to correct and I didn’t fault anyone who could handle correction and guidance.

Fizzbuzz is interesting because it relies on either the candidate remembering the modulo operator, or the interviewer allowing them to write a modulo function. I can understand why a candidate could forget how to find the remainder from an integer division.

The bigger issue is not having seen fizzbuzz before, really.

I’ve personally experienced devs who could not sum a collection of ints, “in any language of your choice”.

I’m not talking about devs who got hung up on integer overflow issues (or even off-by-one errors), but rather “just couldn’t get started at all”. I have no idea what they did before or what they expected to do if they got the job, but I doubt it would turn out well.

Yep, I've seen that too. I start with "sum an array of ints" due to the known problems using fizzbuzz, and there are software engineer candidates who can't or won't do it. Nobody believes you until they see a candidate like this themselves.

My pet theory: A lot of companies are very, VERY big, and a clever person who doesn't know how to do their job but can identify a weak manager, can simply get lost in them. Hiding away getting the paycheck, but doing nothing except convincing their manager they're doing things. I've definitely met a few people in my career that I believe were doing exactly that.

Yeah, I've seen that too, even in pre-LLM times.

I don't have a good explanation for how candidates with zero ability to write code can make it through a hiring funnel to sit in front of you. Maybe they don't know what they don't know.

No, fizzbuzz trips people who already have a job because they make two for loops, make too few IFs, or generally don’t have a logic mindset and get out of the interview saying “This is not something that’s asked for in the job!”

Fizzbuzz is not the least bit interesting on a technical level. It's interesting because even though it's trivial to "cheat" (you can just learn/memorize Fizzbuzz specifically), it still works because people so incompetent they can't even write something as trivial as Fizzbuzz are unlikely to have heard of it.

Fizzbuzz is used to confirm an already present suspicion of complete incompetence, not to assess skill (ability to pass is not a meaningful signal).

I said "interesting" but I really meant "bad". You might as well test someone on whether they remember bitwise operators.

I feel that you did not address the specifics of what I wrote. It's a silly test because it's meant to cover the bare basics but it still relies on knowing/remembering the modulo operator, which junior hires might reasonably not have seen. If everyone didn't already know about fizzbuzz it would be even more stupid.

I've always wondered how people who write code could possibly be unaware of the modulo operator. In the 8-bit and 16-bit CPU era, or even just when working with data types of that width, one has to be aware of wraparound / overflow if the value gets too large and that's what modulo is. Is it just developers who came of age in the 64-bit CPU era that have this gap?

>I've always wondered how people who write code could possibly be unaware of the modulo operator.

Worked for 25+ years in regular business software - banking , insurance etc. I never recollect using the modulo operator.

When one's primary handling of numbers comes down to either linear (single-dimensional) lists or money, then you won't use modulo very much.

But any time you're walking over a discrete multidimensional list packed into a linear list, or walking over any discrete periodic signal (one very common example would be walking a linear array of screen pixels, walking over pcm samples in an audio waveform, literally 100% of GPU programming and 90+% of SIMD programming) you will want to be able to translate between "how far from the start am I" and "how far into the current cycle am I", and modulo handles that.

Similarly for almost anything involving time calculations (and for the same reason: because they are periodic). Modulo is literally described as "clock arithmetic" after all.

Here you can find Tempestt Bledsoe singing about it, lol https://youtu.be/fqtzqcJ6agE?t=570s

So you are absolutely correct that there do exist avenues in programming which can dodge this particular raindrop, I hope you aren't opposed to the idea that they are at least few and far between? ;)

>I hope you aren't opposed to the idea that they are at least few and far between? ;)

Absolutely not. Part of the reason why I mentioned the areas that I work in, are for that reason. I suspect that the vast majority of software jobs are of the kind I mentioned.

As the HN user 'strken' correctly pointed out, fizzbuzz can stump an experienced job candidate if he has never used the modulo operator.

I hired a data engineer who was unable write a for loop in their primary language (python).

The task was to write a simple sum of a list, but they had to convert the list to a pandas dataframe and then call some series of arcane functions. I originally thought this was just a preference but when I asked them for the simpler version while standing over their shoulder they were unable to do it.

They had ~8 years of claimed experience at the time and were from a country notorious for faked credentials. Turned out to be an ok hire overall (friendly, hardworking) but definitely lacking 80%+ of their supposed competencies.

Data engineering started off as just another discipline in software engineering, but then the BI people got jealous and anyone who used sql started calling themselves DE. The term is fatally cheapened.

You hired someone for a programming role who could not write a FOR loop? Oh dear.

> I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.

In some sense this is true, but in my view it's not whether a person theoretically has leverage or opportunity, but whether it's feasible to practice or to explore it. If enough people believe that programmers shouldn't have leverage, and in-practice if there's only negative repercussions from trying, then it's not meaningful. Broadly, in any profession, it seems like it comes down to a whole lot of luck whether you have real, practicable leverage. Barring some exceptions for somehow intentionally positioning oneself to be solely responsible for an uncommonly important system in an uncommonly lucrative business, but that seems to me to also be dependent on a lot of luck.

Overall, it seems that if you really have leverage, you effectively can't economically be replaced, and everyone knows it, but otherwise you'll be on the chopping block for not doing exactly what your narcissistic boss wants on a moment to moment basis.

> * Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent.*

I think this is largely a pay gap problem. There’s a bit of prestige involved (why work for random corp’s dev dept when you could work at FAANG) but a huge part is that most those random corps are paying way less. The best talent generally goes where the money is.

Maybe it’s not this way anymore, but VC backed companies played as good or better than FAANGs 10 years ago but it was a mixed bag of talent. I ended up at a place where the engineers hard largely come from a non-FAANG, but storied engineering culture that was different but had many analogous solutions to common problems.

The biggest problem with VC startups is their geographic concentration, but sometimes remote is available.

Sounds like we could fix this if we did a better job of holding FAANG accountable for the sorry state of technology. So many needless social problems have been introduced by technology and it happened on their watch. That prestige... we could poison it.

Maybe working at FAANG should be something to be embarrassed of.

The prestige is the total comp not the company. Nobody gives a fuck you worked for Facebook or Google but they do care you made 700K doing it.

Oh I can guarantee you there are many places where people give many fucks. Maybe you don’t because you have never reached a place where coming out of those companies is considered a fast track to whatever.

I think a much better metric is the results of the compensation, not the peak dollars earned for some narrow window of time. The differences in the cost of living and local economic inflation can become that significant in the long run.

I'm not sure I would call an appetite for risk a "talent", or even a natural consequence of talent.

If we look at the average case, there are plenty of millennials now turning 40 who have higher net worth and a better work-life balance precisely because they never worked for a FAANG. Can't argue with the results of sticking around somewhere and climbing the ladder the traditional way versus enduring all the job hopping, glass ceilings, and layoffs.

I'm skeptical that this is true with respect to net worth, given that I have worked at both FAANG and non-FAANG companies and I know what I got paid at one vs the other.

What factor(s) would cause you to go to a non-FAANG, having experienced both?

Pay means a lot; pay doesn’t mean everything.

Yeah, maybe - but you know what one of the perks of not working for FAANG is?

Not working for FAANG.

Some people prefer having a spine over selling their integrity. There’s heaps of opportunity for doing interesting work in a less toxic environment in places other than Silicon Valley, if you accept a little less pay.

It's not just pay gap. A lot of FAANGs treat employees as very disposable and fire people with an email, but at least provide learning opportunities, growth, have budget for projects... other companies can be much worse.

We really need to let go of the notion, that FAANG necessarily has especially skilled engineers. Their products indicate, that this is not the case. Look at what kind of shitshows Google search and YouTube are for example. Or how FB is only bots now. Do these things still rake in money? Yes. But that's rather due to history and entrenchment, than sheer quality of these platforms/tools. Something all of FAANG have failed at is content moderation. Their quality actually sucks.

Also I would like to add, that companies in general are quite clueless about how to hire good engineers and set up hiring processes, which reward talkers and liars, rather than good engineers. Someone not able to write a loop will be found out, but that doesn't mean they won't hire other types of mediocre engineers, instead of good ones, that they gave a pass. Don't forget, that often not even any engineer is involved in taking a look at someone's application or its contents. Often it is HR going off of checklists, which leads to them ending up with the people, who have fake CVs ticking all the boxes.

I wish companies were able to distinguish better, because then your point would stand, that talented engineers had far more leverage. Lately though, I have lost my faith in that.

> which reward talkers and liars, rather than good engineers

Part of that is also about who management and HR are socially comfortable with and candidates that may have connections with people in the company. It's often not a level playing field because of cronyism, nepotism, and many other -isms.

That's also why a good engineer, confident in their skills and value, needs to read the room or figure out what's going on. If the situation is not to their liking, then jump to another company or start their own business, whenever the chance presents itself.

Unfortunately their hiring practices are bonkers.

Of course knowing how many golf balls fit into a plane will help when it comes to fix that nasty bug on a Vulkan driver.

Or having to solve a data structures and algorithms question as if just left university, completely disregarding the 30 years in between.

Naturally we all do cool algorithm problem solving before getting into bed, and can't wait for the next Advent of Code.

Then they complain they can't hire anyone, go figure.

> I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent

I don't think the management at most companies could identify good talent if it poked them in the eye. Good talent wants to have agency and freedom to act, the average manager wants to breathe down your neck at all moments

I'm inclined to agree with this. If management can't personally code, and they don't know how the big companies acquire talent, the company ends up in a deadspin of not paying enough, not adequately examining coding skills during interview and probationary periods, and having mediocre seniors who have been around long enough to understand the eccentricities of the stack but still aren't actually any good controlling the hiring and training pipeline and selecting the new architecture.

I don't know, at least in Europe it's impossible to get a job right now unless you're well connected

companies seem really eager to just decline applicants before they even get interviewed

Oof, so it's not just me.

>It's far more often that I hear "we interviewed someone we thought looked good and they couldn't even write a for loop, where are all the good engineers".

Absolutely insane claim to make coming from the other side of the process. You get FAANG-style Leetcode Hard assessments, day-long takehomes with no pay and complete nonsense rejections even for very run-of-the-mill companies. The kind of feedback you're usually getting is so unfounded it can't even be considered in the category of wrong or right. But that's not a problem, since most of the time you're just getting ghosted. And all of that is assuming you're landing interviews, which in an optimistic scenario is going to take you weeks, sometimes over a month.

Anybody who claims they "can't find engineers" either has a broken hiring pipeline or enormously big self-esteem - based on my conversations with founders and people responsible for hiring, it's usually both.

A few years ago I was tasked with doing the technical interview for an operations team in the Chicago area. The job was mostly restarting services on windows and Linux. Running variously automated processes. Rebooting stuff. Be a resource on outage calls. Everything was documented, it was pretty entry level.

I interviewed over 100 people. The number of people who didn’t even know how to search with Google was mind boggling. Some wouldn’t even make an attempt. The people who knew their stuff laughed at the end of the interview and said, “is that it?” But even the most basic questions, that some found laughable, knocked out 80% of applicants. Many people who claimed to know Linux, interviewing for a server support role, had never touched the CLI.

It was rough. By the end of the hiring window, they were just making offers to anyone, so they didn’t lose the positions. I wasn’t happy about that.

> In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us.

This sounds like a job for unions. It would have been advantageous to have formed and joined them before so much power was lost, but it's easy to be shortsighted when you're happy and comfortable with where you are and ignore that the situation could easily change, if not for you then for the next generation. Companies are happy to leverage every advantage they have against workers. Unions can be a powerful tool for workers, one that could help solve a lot of problems current and future, and it's sitting there just waiting to be used.

I am 100% sure that I make more than the average person in my role and level (tbh more money than I even thought I'd make in my life).

Why should I support a union? If the company couldn't fire me they wouldn't pay me so much. If a union advocates for everyone else, it's gonna be harder for me to get paid so much.

I don't really mind the constant layoffs; I think that those are horrific for morale and lead to disengaged engineers and the bare minimum of work being done, but that's true with or without the union. I certainly look at the lack of opportunities for career growth and the constant threat of layoffs as a good reason to take it easy.

What I think the union would be AMAZING at is the same thing unions are always amazing at in this country: stopping anyone from being fired and ending merit based promotions.

> I am 100% sure that I make more than the average person in my role and level..Why should I support a union?

Even if that is true today, it may not be tomorrow. The corporation you work for is not your friend. They aren't looking out for your best interests. They are worried only about themselves. You should do the same and unions give you more power in negotiations with your employer and more protections against them as well.

> If the company couldn't fire me they wouldn't pay me so much.

That's a lie. First, because unions don't make it impossible to fire employees, but also because the ability to fire you for arbitrary (or even illegal) reasons does not force companies to pay you more. Removing that ability won't force them to pay you less.

> the same thing unions are always amazing at in this country: stopping anyone from being fired and ending merit based promotions.

Employers spend billions every singe year trying to con workers into thinking that unions are evil and wow, you really fell for their bullshit. Those are some commonly repeated lies, but they don't stand up to scrutiny. They're just supposed to trick people who don't bother questioning what they're told.

At most, all a union does is force a company to actually document the disciplinary problems and give an employee an opportunity to correct their behavior before they fire them. This makes it more difficult for companies to fire employees for reasons that have nothing to do with their performance and for any reasons that the company isn't comfortable documenting (often because those reasons would be embarrassing or illegal).

There's nothing preventing merit based promotions either. How promotions are handled will be determined in part by the contract between the company and the union and it's the workers who decide what the union asks for in their contract. If you want a contract with the employer that allows for merit based promotions you can have one. There are zero rules against that, but you should expect the union will require the terms to be well defined. Employers like to say they want "merit based promotions" when what they actually want is total control over promotions for whatever arbitrary reasons they decide to call "merit based".

A union contract probably should require that an employer is able to justify the reasons for their merit based promotions using objective measures of productivity/performance that apply equally to all employees. That means the people who work the hardest and do the best work will be promoted even when the boss would rather promote their favored nepo baby, or when the boss would rather not promote someone who actually earned it. Even then, that'd all be according to the contract. If your union doesn't care about fair merit based promotion and wants the boss to be able to deny or award them to anyone at any time without justification that's fine too.

Unions are organizations made up of people. There are good ones and bad ones. Workers get from them what they put into them. There are plenty of horror stories that get heavily promoted to scare you. Some of them are even true stories. Ultimately though, employees have the power to change or replace their union to make sure their needs are being met. You may still think that unions aren't for you, and that's okay. It's still probably worth looking into them a little though because you've been being lied to by people who want to keep you ignorant and misinformed on the subject. Those people are afraid of what unions are capable of and that isn't because they're worried about your career and want to protect you. Once you understand what unions actually are, and aren't, you can make up your own mind.

> That's a lie. First, because unions don't make it impossible to fire employees, but also because the ability to fire you for arbitrary (or even illegal) reasons does not force companies to pay you more. Removing that ability won't force them to pay you less.

Why do Europeans get paid so much less than Americans for the same jobs? Like it or not, at-will employment makes it much easier to justify hiring a new employee because they can just be let go if things don't work out. I'm not even talking about the employee not working out, forcing companies into continuing employment can be disastrous if the market shifts (e.g. what's happening at VW right now).

A requirement to provide x months of notice with y% chance of success is a quantifiable risk with a dollar price tag. It is definitely brought up when companies decide to expand in places where labor law is different, and it scales directly with how much the employee is being paid.

> There's nothing preventing merit based promotions either.

So why do most of our unions have time-in-grade promotions? Merit-based promo is quite rare in unionized jobs in the US. There are obvious incentives that push unions away from merit-based promo, and you're being intentionally obtuse if you refuse to see them.

> Even if that is true today, it may not be tomorrow. The corporation you work for is not your friend. They aren't looking out for your best interests. They are worried only about themselves. You should do the same and unions give you more power in negotiations with your employer and more protections against them as well.

You're right, that might not always be true. Every time that's happened I've just changed jobs for a raise and sometimes also a promotion.

That's my defense against shitty companies: I can just leave. If people were MORE WILLING TO LEAVE when things got bad, companies would get away with much less and make more efforts to retain employees.

I get the argument when we're talking about working-class people who might have a lot of difficulty finding a new job, but IN SOFTWARE? Demand for qualified engineers is insane! I haven't bothered to apply to a job since college, I've just set LinkedIn to "open to work" and replied to a few recruiters. FFS, even when I've been voluntarily unemployed, just holding onto my stock was enough to see my net worth INCREASE.

> It's still probably worth looking into them a little though because you've been being lied to by people who want to keep you ignorant and misinformed on the subject. Those people are afraid of what unions are capable of and that isn't because they're worried about your career and want to protect you.

I don't understand why pro-union folks always assume that skeptics think their boss is their dad. Rest assured, I am very cynical about my job and corporate politics.

Look man, I'm fully aware of what unions are and what they do. They're a great deal for some union members! They're also why American ports are the least efficient in the developed world, they're a big part of why RICO exists, and I'm already doing an in-demand well-compensated job. My peers and I are all going to be able to retire at 40, barring a major war or other disaster. If I get laid off, I get 90 days of COBRA and then Medi-Cal, and odds are I won't even need the Medi-Cal.

What exactly is a union going to get me that I can't get myself?

> Why do Europeans get paid so much less than Americans

There are lots of reasons though I doubt one of them is that it costs companies a fortune to document disciplinary actions before they fire someone (Is that even a law everywhere in Europe?) and it's probably more related to normal reasons like the cost of living is much much lower since employees already have a lot of their expenses covered entirely or substantially lowered like healthcare, child care, higher education, and transportation. They also work much less than Americans. They get tons of time off for vacations and for their families. All that extra income isn't putting the United States at the top of quality of life/happiness indexes. Even with lower numbers on their paychecks many Europeans are getting everything they need, and enough of whatever it is they want, to live healthy, happy, satisfied lives.

Again, unions don't force companies to keep people employed, but agreements companies make with unions can set certain terms. VW agreed to no compulsory layoffs until 2030. They can still fire workers who don't do their job. They can still eliminate tens of thousands of positions. They've been doing exactly that and they plan to do much more (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/26/volkswagen-vw-job-cuts-autos...). If VW has mismanaged the company by accepting a labor agreement that they couldn't live up to that's not really the union's fault. Sure, companies could make a lot more money if they didn't have to treat their employees fairly. They could make even more money if they had slaves. That doesn't mean that workers should happily let them. Instead workers and companies have to find something they can both agree to. Unions just let workers do that on a more level playing field.

> So why do most of our unions have time-in-grade promotions? Merit-based promo is quite rare in unionized jobs in the US.

If that's true it's either because workers in those unions feel that is important to them or because they couldn't get an agreement with the company that offered them something better. Workers can ask for anything they want, but the company has to agree to those terms. Many workers feel that their time and experience at a company makes them more valuable and that should be reflected in pay and promotions. They may prefer to work under people who actually understand the work they do because they did it themselves. Workers may not like it when people who have no idea what they are doing get promoted into high paying positions while highly skilled workers with many years of experience can't advance. That said, unions don't have a problem with merit-based promotion when it's transparent and fairly applied to everyone. If companies look at that requirement and say "never mind, that defeats the whole point" then it's the companies who are the problem and not the unions.

> I get the argument when we're talking about working-class people who might have a lot of difficulty finding a new job, but IN SOFTWARE? Demand for qualified engineers is insane...What exactly is a union going to get me that I can't get myself?

there are plenty of qualified people right here on this website who have been looking for work and talking about how difficult it is to find a decent job. If you're one a very very very very small number of people in the world who will somehow never have any problem finding work, that's great for you. The vast majority of the people on Earth aren't in that position. Not even the ones who write software for a living.

Even if you are 100% certain that you can always find a higher paying job the moment you decide to quit your current job (in which case, why haven't you quit the one you have already?) there are all kinds of things a union could still do for you. While I myself am not convinced that AI is going to put all programmers out of a job, companies are forcing it on workers. A union could give you a seat at the table when it comes to decisions surrounding how the company uses AI.

This post was all about software companies using dark patterns and unethical practices. A strong union could help prevent companies from making employees do things that are unethical. A union could give programmers the ability to stop software from being released when it has bugs that would cause security/privacy issues. A union could help ensure that software is better written. Unions could also give you benefits you don't have now or improve the ones you have. A union could help to give you more time to spend working on what you care about instead of working for what your boss wants.

"You can be fired, you can be reprimanded if caught, you can be retaliated against or lose political advantage."

You could also silently burn out. Especially if fighting this as your own personal sisyphean uphill battle.

I think especially people driven by passion and curiosity are at risk of this. And I mean, that's pretty much what the "hacker mindset" of many people on here amounts to. There's also a reason why people with a lot of passion are often taken advantage of, e.g. game development industry.

> Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities

This is Hacker News syndrome. What you described is why everything sucks. It's because people at the top are more concerned with making money than doing good things well.

> Engineers who care about such things, often engage in acts of "benevolent noncompliance". Common workarounds are "asking for forgiveness instead of permission", secrecy, and misdirection.

Without the support of a unified vision, these good intentions could pave the path to hell by the way.

In defence of management, there is definitely a pattern of engineers (or employees in general, really) spending inordinate amounts on time doing something that they find personally gratifying but adds no real value to the product/business.

I've been guilty of this myself.

The pendulum has swung way too much to the other side. Now, people have to fight for just doing a reasonably basic job testing the code while the manager breathes down their neck with impatience fueled by unrealistic expectations of LLM magic (and this is even for those managers who are technically aware enough of LLM challenges so I can only attribute that to wilful ignorance).

The expectation of the code not blowing up in production still stands though. There is no arguing with this unreasonableness.

It basically sucks.

It's really easy to miss the value in Pointless Rewrite 5 of Core Module 4, but the grad who rewrites it will at least understand it afterwards and can fix the bugs they introduced and add new features to it easier. But the hard pill to swallow is they spent $200K of the engineering budget making the code worse.

The way to understand the value is to see the engineer as an asset. Engineers aren't interchangeable and no codebase can truly be documented and CI'd to the point where expertise doesn't matter.

Aren't you glad the govt let them import a bunch of cheap labor they can treat like trash to undercut the US economy?

This hits so hard. I used to admire Senior developers who would do this. Now, I find myself in a place where there is no one to do this, and I've taken up to playing this role. It is the hardest job, but I cannot do any thing else as my team is committed to just non-stop slop thanks to management directives. I realize all the time I spent admiring, and now I have become.

If the engineers were right the bill will come due on that tech debt eventually. Likely when that happens the company will just spend more than they needed to fixing the issues and no one will be around to say I told you so.

The problem is that the counterfactual isn't obvious. The company spends more time - and money - than they needed to fixing those issues, but how do they know? And how do they know that it would've amounted to less if they'd done those fixes sooner? Figuring that out, and figuring it out accurately, is often extremely difficult. A serious attempt might cost more than the fixes.

...and often the amount more isn't catastrophically more, so they don't even think about it. The company might be bleeding from paper cuts, it might be terribly unhealthy because of it, but still not unhealthy enough to kill it.

The bill does come due. I've seen it happen over and over. But management fails to connect current problems to past mistakes, especially when they happen over the course of years. Thats setting aside when they insist that the correct decision was made, but have no real evidence that this is the case, other than the fact that "things worked out" even though maybe it would have been better had a different decision was made.

People do get a pass on this -- you can't rigorously examine every decision and counter-factual or you'd never make forward progress. And I don't really have any great ideas on how to bridge this gap. It'd be nice if there were better ways to measure this but there aren't, so it really comes down to who is more convincing, which is often orthogonal to facts and correctness.

> Likely when that happens the company will just spend more than they needed to fixing the issues and no one will be around to say I told you so.

In my experience, yeah, but how they do it is... not what you'd expect.

Leadership has no clue about the scope of tech debt in their products and if they do decide to fix it, it will be by coming up with a bunch of ridiculously optimistic estimates and then foisting them off onto engineers who are already overworked trying to keep up with tech debt to launch new stuff. This feels awful and generally doesn't lead to anything being properly fixed because it turns fixing tech debt into a "just get it barely good enough and mark it as done."

After the inevitable surge in attrition, more often than not the tech debt is "solved" by throwing out the old codebase and starting from scratch with a new team. This is expensive, but in a lot of cases produces a better product.

The title is bad. Anything "-pilled" is incel speak until proven innocent

Thank you for this.

(I think HN should consider creating TLDR type of comments for upvoting separately from commentary. @Dan incentivise with different karma credits?)

I think such comment are the exact reason why "the speaker" has quit HN. This is literally some AI transcription from the video + "I find this interesting". Why is this even in the top?

> why "the speaker" has quit HN

Quitting HN[1] might have more to do with feeling he and Zig had already harvested the maximum benefit and marketing propaganda usage for elevating itself, including using it to thoroughly smear its C alternative language competitors. Thus, it came time to figuratively give HN the middle finger while on top (selling high before the stock may fall).

Many might not have done a review of the history, as he quit Twitter and Reddit too[2], years ago (2023). Arguably excuses are given to cover for offloading any personal involvement on a particular social media platform, as either they are self sustaining without his presence or no greater benefit is thought to be possible.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47928645 (Tell HN: Site Is Trash Now)

[2]: https://andrewkelley.me/post/goodbye-twitter-reddit.html (So Long, Twitter and Reddit)

Do you find it so unbelievable that Andrew is genuinely unhappy with the direction that HN has been taken? You can't deny that there is a real problem with AI generated submissions and comments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com