Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

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hn_throwaway_99

This is me to a tee. I think I'm a fairly good software engineer, and I loved building software and mentoring more junior engineers who I thought had both ability and a good attitude. I also think I was a pretty pragmatic engineer (I was not an "architecture astronaut"), but I did enjoy the craft of getting into the nitty gritty details of software.

The past 5-10 years or so saw me pretty beaten down though with software engineering, and AI was the final nail in the coffin that caused me to leave the profession in later middle age. I thought software as a business had "lost its way" from building great products with attention to detail to "how do we addict as many people as possible as quickly as possible". Think about the degradation in Apple software from say the "it just works" era to now.

With respect to AI, I'm not really against it, and I find it extremely valuable in my personal projects. I just feel in a large group/enterprise context that it's replaced a lot of tasks I actually enjoy doing with becoming an editor for what feels like a slightly inebriated junior developer. Or maybe it's better to say a junior developer on a mild amount of meth, because as you say this developer can churn out semi-but-not-fully-working code at an astonishing rate, and then I feel like it's often my job to mop the slop off the floor. Pass, not interested.

I feel lucky to have had my career during what I consider the golden age of software engineering, but I'd note I don't think that golden age lasted even a full career of one person.

In retrospect, the golden age was the pre-internet era. Some rose-colored glasses maybe, but as I remember it:

Paying for software was the norm, so it was more clear what the "product" was, and software writers had a direct incentive to write better software.

Updates could not be pushed out so you had to be pretty sure your code worked before you shipped it. Having to ship physical media to all your customers for a bug fix was very expensive. Any new release was a big deal, so you had to put some real thought into what features it should contain.

Significant amounts of your development time were not spent trying to work around browser bugs, or differences in browsers, or supporting random old browsers that your customers still use for <reasons>.

Stack churn was much slower. The feeling of constantly trying to keep up with a treadmill was much less.

Users, while often not technology experts, were a much more competent slice of people than the general public who showed up when they got internet service and a computer at home.

The only ads were in print in trade magazines or publications like Computer Shopper. Yes, people actually used to buy a magazine that was nothing but ads.

Going to CompUSA and looking at the back of the box for not only video games, but spreadsheet and translation software, too; was awesome. As a kid I always wondered about the adults who needed such software as the back of the Deus Ex or Shogun Total War boxes captured my imagination.

Since it sounds like you built software during that era, thanks. Thanks for the memories.

You're right about those things, but you're forgetting that we had no source control, and almost all software was closed source. You took what you were given and you liked it, and you developed strong attachments to particular versions of software which you clung to well beyond its use-by date (like Python 2.7). MS-DOS 3.3 forever!

I started using SCCS in the late 80s, then RCS, then CSV, then subversion, and finally git.

We had version control in the 70s with SCSS and then RCS. They were primitive, but a lot of software were only a few files.

In the 80s, source control was like networking. Yes some orgs had it (mostly academia) but the rest of us just had a precious floppy that we copied the known-good source onto.

We had an own good-releases directory in our svn repository! That's when you realize old habits are hard to change.

In thinking about it more, I think you're totally correct.

For the vast part of my career I worked for good companies that I thought were comparatively very well managed, and I was especially fortunate that overall I think I had excellent bosses. But the reality of the Internet age and CICD in particular is that speed is much more important than quality. I don't even really disagree with the business imperative of "ship, ship, ship", but for people who really value their craft, it can be discouraging shipping stuff you know is always kinda half baked. I was definitely not a "gold plater" either, and time pressure was certainly a thing pre-Internet, but as you say mistakes were a lot more expensive then so there was more business rationale to ensure quality before a release.

I also consider myself a fairly good pragmatic software engineer. I have led small (3 engineers), medium (15), and large (100+) teams.

To me, the best time was late 90s, early 2000s. We had a lot of autonomy. People would just trusted that we knew what and how to build it. I could focus on building a great product. Overtime, we lost control, to the point that we now work based on jira tickets made by managers or product owners with one tenth of the experience that we have.

I definitely hear about segments of the industry being like that, but FAANG and adjacent generally isn't. Engineers are expected to display ownership of a problem space (scope depending on seniority), navigate ambiguity, and manage their own time.

> The past 5-10 years or so saw me pretty beaten down though with software engineering, and AI was the final nail in the coffin that caused me to leave the profession in later middle age.

What year did you leave? And what are you doing now?

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