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Comment by xlii | Hacker News Reader

Long long time ago people in tech were in tech because of the tech.

Then, at some point, being in tech became a gilded profession and everyone: salesmen, artists, clerks etc. joined in. Not because they wanted to be in tech.

They wanted gold.

For years it was working, but right now things shifted. You can no longer just do the thing you learned for a job and continue doing so, because landscape shifted. So they're miserable and they want to get back to knitting, pottery or whatever thing they want to do but not tech.

For people I know who are in tech for the tech nothing changed. There's new tech in town, one has to adjust, and it's still possible to discover new things and pave new paths. Tech was always shifting and I suppose people who worked in it for it always knew it, and it doesn't derail them.

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I have been in tech for the tech for over 20 years now, heck over 30 years as a hobbyist. I have lost almost all interest in it these days. It feels increasingly meaningless, and actively harmful.

I know it is my own fault for neglecting my health and relationships, but I can't help but feel this career makes the most important things more difficult.

The burnout is a separate topic, and it was always difficult to balance in this specific industry.

All these "Working in IT isn't stressful at all - John 25yo" memes didn't come come from nothing.

But I wouldn't really put it on LLMs/AI. It was always like this. Jokes about how hopeless development cycle is, and how everybody have impostor syndrome etc.

> The burnout is a separate topic

I think it's pretty strongly related, honestly

Were you chasing the feeling of successfully solving a problem? Have you replaced problem solving with LLM chats?

Maybe instead of engineering, you’ve been subtly shifted into project management and hate that career.

But it’s tough to engineer much these days. Instead I find I’m PM’ing the bots more than solving problems.

The culture of the tech industry started going to shit in 2022/2023 after rates were hiked and before LLMs were capable of anything much.

There's more toxicity, more waterfall, more authoritarianism, less autonomy, more pressure. Consequently lower productivity, too.

Sometimes AI is just the label that gets slapped on "all the ways the tech industry has changed over the last 3 years".

2022/2023 is when the AI wrecking crews came in in full force

Yea there were layoffs blamed on AI even when GPT 3.5 couldnt write a line of code to save its life. That's public relations for you.

No exec wants to chalk up a layoff to a faltering company that can't grow sales even if it's not their fault.

At my job in 2023, after the staff engineers quit, new-hire engineers backed by new-hire managers pushed through a series of 5,000-10,000 line GPT 3.5 PRs affecting ludicrously convoluted, critical Makefiles designed and maintained by engineers who had left the company because of AI initiatives.

Even when AI couldn't write a line of code to save its life, I watched this company push out its strongest engineering talent to replace a series of well-constructed codebases with subhuman AI slop. They hired a wrecking crew of managers and engineers who were incentivized to ram the AI slop through as quickly as possible.

What happened to the project and to the company?

> But it’s tough to engineer much these days. Instead I find I’m PM’ing the bots more than solving problems.

I’m genuinely curious about your perspective as I have almost the diametrically opposite view. I love chatting with the bots as they can build the thing I want, how I want it, much faster than I could. The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally. The speed makes me feel, sometimes, almost superhuman.

Do you take emotional ownership in the shape output artifact itself, or merely that it works?

LLMs have literally sparked my joy to build software which I couldn’t before because of literal time constraints and mental overload

>I love chatting with the bots as they can build the thing I want, how I want it, much faster than I could. The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally.

The output, in my case, feels just as mine as the toppings I tell my local pizza store to add to whatever they're about to cook for me. It's tasty, and fills my stomach, but I didn't make it. I ordered it.

Ok. I had pizza last night. It was delicious. Most meals are packaged protein workout food. But I have a griddle and I love to make brunch, burgers, sliders whatever.

A lot of my job is really pizzas. Massive scale pizzas but still pizzas. God I hate making pizzas. Now I don’t really have to. That means I can focus more on a perfect burger. Or cooking a massive brunch for a crowd of friends. (Think: refactoring some giant hole that 5 years of pizza dug us, or rearchitecting an application rather than just porting it).

I’m definitely in the vocation not job position. I would do this even if we got post-scarcity utopia tomorrow.

I just remembered I used to make pizzas in college if they were short and I drew the short straw. Fuck me that was soul destroying. Much better to be working the bar.

I’m finding I’m able to learn more and pick up hobbyist projects easier w the help of Claude.

For the production stuff I still learn and watch it more closely.

Were you chasing the feeling of successfully solving a problem?

Yes, and it lead to ruin before llms were viable.

> I have lost almost all interest in it these days. It feels increasingly meaningless, and actively harmful.

Everything has this arc.

A civil engineer who signed on at a firm that did sewers, culverts and irrigation in 1970s was doing real work his customers wanted to pay for because they had water that needed to be elsewhere.

By 2000 the bulk of his trade was providing compliance solutions for customers who didn't want it, it didn't provide value for and were just doing it to check a box and get permission from the government to do the thing they actually wanted.

We still live in the eternal september.

I didn't use the internet until 93, and didn't own a modem until Christmas of 94. I'm part of eternal September, but I always identified with the elders of the internet.

Well, being harmful is the whole thing about tech. Economic and technological development happens through harming people, this is how society grows. Finding new and new ways of harming ever larger groups of people, forcing them to adapt.

disagree

Why? Every significant invention extracts value by putting someone out of work. Putting people out of work is the whole point of progress. Cinema, Radio -> money made by putting musicians, theatre actors, etc. out of work. Internet -> putting newspaper journalists, printers, real estate brokers, tour agents, etc. out of work. Cars -> putting everyone in the massive horse ecosystem from breeders to vets and horsheshoe makers out of work.

And i don't even mean predatory ones, like Uber -> highstreet robbery, grabbing capital from taxicab medallion owners. This too, is progress, and makes lives of humanity overall, better.

Positive civilisational impact of an invention can be directly measured by number of people it put out of work. Harmful inventions usually don't do that. I can't think of anyone who lost a job because a nuclear bomb was invented.

I find technology's evolution to be a continual recursive loop of "intelligence building on intelligence" to create systems that extract increasing amounts of energy from the environment with increasingly smaller input. And to me coding has now been better integrated into the tech stack. But still a long way to go.

With coding, so far it has really pushed the use-case for English too and people have reverted back to using language for its more conventional patterns. Coders have stopped coding, so shouldn't that be a relief? If only we could stop using cars too! But code is gradually taking over the driver's seat.

Hunter-gatherer societies were very advanced in many ways just by being in tune with natural processes in order to support life. They didn't even need to drive cars! Long-live the camp fire!

>For people I know who are in tech for the tech nothing changed.

Yeah it did. The environments became a lot more toxic and the decisions became a lot more stupid.

I also miss working with people who actually cared about the craft. They exist on the IC level but they're burned out and on the executive level it's mostly just insecure morons these days.

It’s great to care about the craft as long as someone else is paying for it. I think most software developers are waking up to the reality that they were always just holding business at ransom with their craft. Software is a grudge purchase for businesses. No one has ever cared about the craft except the craftsmen.

The parent comment’s take resonates with me and your response is exactly, what I assume, frustrates us both.

I’ve been at companies that were founded on sales of physical goods that literally had vendors pick them for vended goods because they found the software made purchasing more convenient - as in they literally had customers tell them they bought their physical goods because of their software. They didn’t need the software. The software wasn’t critical to acquiring goods. They could have purchased goods elsewhere of similar quality and often potentially lower cost. The customers cared about the software, the software (that was not part of their core business) drove the core business.

Edit: I originally had a lot more typed about how craft matters and not being strictly about perfection. It wasn’t necessary to drive the point, so I removed it. People do buy craft and many pay a hefty premium for better craft (in all aspects, both producer COGS and customer needs/desires).

Look I get it. I completely emphasise with the feeling. My undergrad is Computer Science, I often dreamed about writing my own compiler and spent years learning low level performance optimization, loved design patterns, re-factoring code to be more elegant, all that stuff.

I just feel like after years in industry and how I’m steering something like Fable now that all of this is irrelevant and the writing is crystal clear on the wall: Writing software by hand is in its death throes. There is no future for it besides some very niche areas. When last have you actually looked at what your high level language is actually being compiled and optimised to? We’re moving up the abstraction ladder with software.

To your point: People care about the actual output, the interface, whether it does what they want it to do, but in no way do they care about the internals and how it’s built. That’s an implementation detail. And that’s where all the fun of the craft actually sits.

This is not unique to software engineering though, go take a look at the maths and mathematics subreddits. There are guys doing PhDs in maths who are too afraid to run their dissertation topics through the latest models because it might just solve the problem they’ve spent the last few years working on in a few hours. They absolutely hate that problems are being blown away where people have spent years trying to figure out. It feels like the same psychological pain software engineers are going through.

I don't think you do get it. Caring about craft and wanting to write things like compilers are two very distinct things.

One is liking a mental challenge - like a crossword puzzle. The other is having pride in the quality of your work.

An LLM is not a compiler. It is the leakiest abstraction of all time. I never experienced a compiler making a mistake, I think, ever. Every LLM I use makes a critical mistake somewhere between 50% and 95% of the time.

If vibe coding truly is the future of coding then it really doesn't matter what you do. Keep up or don't keep up it doesn't matter. Your career is dead either way because your boss will replace you with a prompt. Might as well give up now.

Or, you know, become the guy who knows how to write really good prompts

The trajectory is that the LLM providers have been making prompting increasingly dead-simple for the past 2 years. Any edge a group of individuals may have in knowing how to use LLMs gets absorbed into the LLM product.

an AI can be just as good a prompt monkey as you are

But can it be the prompt monkey’s prompt monkey?

The patient with heart disease doesnt give a shit about exercising and eating healthy they just want the doctor to make them better.

No business has ever appreciated my craft directly and why would they? Theyve just enjoyed the indirect benefits - speedy delivery of bug free features. Sometimes execs understood why they got that from one team and not another, mostly they didn't.

The difference these days is not that high quality code isnt appreciated it's just that there is a religion that has developed around AI being The One True Way To Develop.

When it is delivering worse quality work, more slowly that is usually tolerated because the hope is that it will long term lead to the ability to lay off engineers.

You are correct on all counts. This is the IKEA phase of software development. Disposable shit. Need something new and ask an LLM to summon it into existence. I guess you could compare it to this hand-crafted desk I’m sitting at that my great grandfather built himself. He was a carpenter. It’s still here, decades later. To be honest, my next desk would be some IKEA shit, because it’s cheap and I can replace it every few years as fashion changes. But I get the emotional attachment.

The economics of code and carpentry are different though. A really good piece of code to, say, calculate taxes can be written once and used by a million people.

Or, a million people might generate a one off piece of slop to calculate their taxes.

Which one was more efficient?

I do think that disposable easy to validate software will probably never be human written again but I also think that the demand for this type of software is wildly overestimated. Users mostly don't want a bespoke weather app that is customized to their prompt they want one which they can trust.

I feel like that applies to all labor. labor is just business at ransom with productivity that they themselves cannot (or do not want) to do. If they could automate out humanity tomorrow, they would.

In comes the snake oil salesmen telling them they can finally do this. Of course they will fall for the notion, even if they know it's not true. It's what they want oh so badly to be true.

This is what annoyed me to no end; being surrounded by incurious corporate political players who wanted to appear "smart" but couldn't care less about learning, excellence, or much of anything except leaving in time to pickup their kids.

Meanwhile, I had taught myself coding the hard way without the internet or proper reference materials or community, by trial-and-error in front of a debugger/profiler/disassembler in the mid 80's - late 90's. Apparently, that holds no economic value now because all that matters is # of PRs, tokenmaxxing, and "impact" like savings and features. But really, the deal breaker for me is the brazen and/or clueless evil aims of the ownership class such that working for them enables rather than reduces societal harm. Thus, tech isn't for me. Also, the number and distribution of cool, decent, clever people has been driven out of both the startup scene and the megacorp scene; maybe there's better hope in obscure SMBs or nonprofits.

Quite a lot of folks who got into tech for the tech are also miserable, because, as the byline rather aptly puts it, a lot of it is pointless. It does not serve a public good, or even a public desire, and 'work for its own sake' is only engaging up to a point.

>For people I know who are in tech for the tech nothing changed

I'd say I'm in tech for tech. Everything changed, the social contract was defiled. The gold rush was always temporary, but the act of "getting a job in tech" (which was already an excessive process) became a wild goose chase itself. I can't even just hope for a boring bank job making 90k anymore (which was always told as my reassurance "if all else fails). We're just in a broken system, now.

My goals aren't derailed, but my career sure was.

That seems backwards. I'm here for the money, and AI has turned the work into largely unskilled labor. I don't care if all I do is copy and paste between tickets, logs, and the prompt (and, that is really all I do). I'm expecting the gravy train to end, but right now things only suck if you care about doing good work.

Management is quite happy with the resulting output, and I'm fine with matching their energy. I can do things that I care about on my own time.

It doesn't derail them, except for them not finding a new job and many being unfortunate enough to lose their old one. Instead many jobs are taken by "AI engineers", glorified prompters, who are not in tech because of the tech, but because they will do anything for that paycheck.

Tech means a lot of things there.

I got into computer science because the problems in physics were either already solved or couldn't be solved without trillions of dollars invested in new accelerators.

From my point of view the tech side of things is a gig I did on the side to pay the bills. LLMs are amazing and useful. Even Knuth thinks so: https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf

Now instead of spending weeks on side quests I can just burn some money and get either a counter example or proof without sinking hours/days/weeks into it.

100%.

I noticed it most when the slurs they used against us became status symbols, as a hoard of grifters traded in their ties (remember ties?) and golf doodads for SF franchise bling and proclaimed themselves "geeks" and "nerds".

That was just a brief trend.

Geeks and nerds are back to being derogatory.

I suppose I should be grateful, if it means the mercenaries are leaving.

This is such a neat comment! If you concentrate, it's very near the metre and prose of a Dr Seuss story, like the Lorax or the Sneetches.

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