gene_takavic

True, of course, but in those projects (a) you have the power and authority to address that tech debt whenever and however you want, and (b) you’re at no risk of catastrophic income loss due to tech-debt political issues outside of your control.

You’re not wrong that human psychology is the ultimate source of the problem, but inventive structures and cultural circumstances decide how the good and the bad in our psychological makeup get expressed. Eradicating corporate capitalism wouldn’t come close to see living all problems—it would only move us up Maslow’s hierarchy so we could grapple with more interesting problems than the depressing ones we’ve got now.

I don’t think you can fairly compare feminism and leftism (well-intended movements) with antisemitism, which has a historical record of resulting in mass murder. And toxic masculinity certainly exists, though not all forms of masculinity are toxic, and I don’t think men ourselves are in any way “toxic”. In fact, toxic masculinity and corporate capitalism are closely intertwined, each being an expression of the other.

#1 is not assumed. Clueless like their jobs because they believe their roles (usually in middle management) are more important and respected than they actually are.

And, sure, SWE is full of Clueless (you don’t have to be a manager to be clueless) who think they’re going to be millionaire CEOs inside five years because they were promised “meritocracy”.

I do agree that those models are specific (and therefore limited) to the private-sector corporation, and don’t really hold in mission-focused organizations where there is an actual reason for it to exist. Thing is, most of the highest-paid tech jobs are in pointless work done solely for rich people, with zero or negative net social value, so that’s where most HN posters are going to end up.

I disagree. Our technical woes are not caused by the teeming masses of 1x developers, locally solving small problems but creating bigger ones.

Nearly all the rot and poison comes from one source: the fact that we answer to capitalists, people who hold private wealth and will do absolutely anything to retain it, even if it means covering the world in lahars of shit.

If we don’t fix that problem and overthrow the corporate system, there is literally no point in anything we do.

“10x” is also terrible because it shows complete social incompetence. What developers think they are saying is that they deserve a 10x salary (and that their bosses, out of the goodness of their hearts, will just give it to them). What they are actually doing is legitimizing metrics (that they will not control for very long) and micromanagement. They’re basically saying their colleagues are all 0.1x compared to then and should be fired… and it’s because we all so quickly knife each other that MBAs, individually less intelligent than us but with far more collective intelligence, end up ruling us.

There’s also the language of Michael O. Church, our fallen hero:

Losers: subordinate and strategic, not dedicated.

Clueless: subordinate and dedicated, not strategic.

Sociopaths: dedicated and strategic, not subordinate.

The unicorn of all three doesn’t exist because it’s never strategic to be both dedicated and subordinate: you always get better results if you pick one or the other and stay in that lane.

1. Learn computer science to at least a graduate level. It’s ok if your college major is something else.

2. Program and learn more about programming constantly.

3. Working for and with idiots is not a useless experience, but it’s commonplace and repetitive. Move on when you stop learning.

4. Program and learn some more. Keep at it for 30+ years.

Maybe by something worse.

Currently SWE interviews are 25% IQ test, 25% a handling-of-short-term-pressure test, 25% a “shit test” (or, more neutrally, “behavioural screen”) to see if you’ll handle gracefully the indignities of being a subordinate in a dysfunctional hierarchical corporation, and 25% pure noise according to the technical prejudices of the interviewer.

Since most SWE jobs are Jira jobs that don’t actually require much IQ, that part could be taken out of the interview process. But whatever replaces it will be worse.

One of the really awful things that happens if you end up in the private sector is that the stupid speed limits come back—and this time they’re malevolent and political, so the smarter you are, the more eyes are on you watching for “bad attitude” when you realize you’re “not allowed” to learn at your natural rate of 10 times the prescribed one, and that this is not for your benefit but because some spreadsheet eichmann needs to get more grunt work out of you.