nyarlathotep_

My experience is somewhat limited professionally in software (just under a decade), but with very few exceptions I've seen little in terms of genuine professionalism as it pertains to anything that could be called "engineering."

Most design/implementation decisions were basically (or literally) equivalent to "we use Kubernetes cause we've already got a lot of existing Terrraform for it", or "we have React developers." I know real professionalism and maybe even "engineering" practice exists somewhere (I mean it has to, for something rigorously proven, right?), but I've not personally experienced it; I've seen this everywhere, as a consultant and employee, both in the public and private sector.

The number of times I've been on meetings or similar where there's tradeoffs backed by quantifiable data was a handful, at best, so the AI trend makes perfect sense to me.

I really don't imagine with something like Boeing where there's a far higher burden of proof there's discussions around, like, some equivalent subjective thingy like "code smells" or "anti-patterns."

{ "statusCode": 200, "error" : "internal server error" }

Nice.

There was an excellent thread(s? I think) about Nokia around these parts a few months back that covered this in detail by various commentators (perhaps you were one of them).

Wish I'd bookmarked them; some great reading in those

How did you find work? Something like contract-to-hire gigs from Dice or something? Did you create your own LLC or similar?

> read a whole paragraph of text without a computer generated voice + RSVP [0] + Subway Surfers gameplay in the background

Quite literally laughed out loud at this. I still cannot believe this is a thing people actually do; I thought it was a joke "genre" at first.

> It blows my mind that overemployed people have become folk heroes. They're obviously not putting full effort into two jobs.

What about people that put full effort and then some into jobs with long hours and loads of stress just to get hit with a PIP or get caught in the latest round of layoffs?

If that's how companies treat people, what's so wrong with 'overemployed' people having a fallback, especially in today's market?

> he's a really talented engineer, crushed our interviews.

Think it says a lot about this industry if "really talented 'engineer'" means passing loads of gamified interviews and not delivering things on time.

Yeah, it's really something to read this.

Considering the scale and frequency of layoffs across the board and the difficulty of finding a new job for many, you could just...run out the clock and wait for the inevitable?

> The problem is that only a fraction of software developer have the ability/skills to work on the hard problems. A much larger percentage will only be able to work on things like CRUD apps and grunt work.

It's also availability of those jobs, even for those who would otherwise be capable.

Some of the highest-skill software jobs, things like writing a cross-platform renderer for a AAA game engine, or JIT compiler optimizations or something else esoteric are very scant jobs and only ever needed in very small quantities at very specific places.

The overwhelming majority of work is some variety of CRUD with a website, and all of the "supporting cast" (CI/CD things, cloud stuff, etc).

Ironically this is why LLMs are so successful at automating it, how many React repos are there on GitHub?

For sure, I think your projection is a worse case scenario, one that's totally in the realm of possibility.

In "non-growth" times (i.e the era we're in now (post ZIRP) and probably for the foreseeable future, LLMs being the exception), very little outside the major revenue generators is probably "core" roles.

You've described my experience exactly.

The amount of money that "enterprises" will spend in order to avoid hiring actual competent people is staggering. They quite literally spend orders of magnitude more than just hiring people, always end up with mixed results and have no ownership over the things they depend on.

I've also seen several cases where these companies maintain a "predatory" relationship: they build some big convoluted Thing of dubious quality and utility, and then, as a result of the hiring company refusing to invest in employees of any expertise, they either pay the same company to "maintain" or "add features" to The Thing, or worse, they hire another outsourcing firm to do that.

My favorite experience was working with a large F500 that outsourced (effectively) 100% of their IT--the internal staff were basically "yappers", people that just attending meetings and said things like "we'll have to ensure this meets security standards" but did no actual implementation work and had no intimacy with anything developed.

The irony, of course, is that attempting to get answers about any of the complex stuff that their employer ostensibly owned was an exercise in futility: "oh you have to ask the 'platform'/'data'/whatever team (another subcontractor or several)". I was under the impression no actual employee at the company knew, in any material way, how any of the stuff the business depended on worked, beyond whatever prepared slide deck they were given.

They'd have zero useful technical input on any solution, only occasionally quipping with some sort of canned platitudes: "we use dotnet internally", right, sure.

Utterly bizarre, and not, I fear, unique.

This is also how the contracting firms maintain business.

Accenture, Deloitte, et al are some of the only businesses that are "trusted partners" for the big F500s* or the only firms that are sufficiently capitalized/insured etc etc such that they can "win" the big jobs. Quality and such doesn't matter much--if you and I could spin up and LLC tomorrow with the ability to deliver something at 10x the quality in half the time, it literally wouldn't matter, for exactly those reasons. It's an identical situation to buying services/software from MS.

*the amount of work outsourced at these places is staggering, speaking from experience.

I don't think it'll get that bad.

My mostly uninformed worse case estimate is a large portion of these companies become something like the "body shops" (I believe MS has some association with Accenture, so that'd fit) where they maintain a minimal US presence for (mostly) customer facing "sales"/"high touch" positions so they have someone to broker deals and contracts with the (often clueless, IME) F500s, and then outsource all implementation work offshore. Same goes for some large portion of "important" managers.

For the "deep"/important/critical technical work, there will likely be staff retained on-shore, while the "boring" CRUD-type work that comprises some portion of the FANNAGS (whatever) is done overseas.

It's unlikely, say, for Google Search or AWS EC2 or something critical at MS (M365 maybe?) to be totally off-shored, but lesser services/functions are a likely target. (I know this is already happening to some extent at these companies; I've heard from reputable sources there's some large services that were nearly entirely built by staffing firms)

Basically, I think it's two things: we've reached the end of stratospheric growth in "tech" (sorry I just don't see the LLM wave getting there; a million SAAS thingys to "vibe code" a React calorie tracker ain't it), there's a massive surplus from the ZIRP era paired with some sort of obvious recession happening (or that's been going on for a while).

It's also a reset of sorts--look I'm as "pro software" as the next commentator here, but it's pretty absurd to think that there's loads of people making 200K+ to write CRUD stuff. There's just not a "shortage" in any way for any of these skills, as anyone doing a job search can attest.

This type of pay is really only "rational" in the markets where the cost of living has skyrocketed in the manner it has (largely/entirely a function of the "growth" era in SF/Seattle/Austin). It never seemed sustainable, and I suspected there would be some abrupt end when the "learn to code" era really took off.

On a positive note, perhaps those cities would be more affordable, but the in-elasticity of housing prices on the "way down" are always a problem for buyers.

I do wonder if these trends continue (paired with the offshoring and H1B replacements they're all in on (otherwise mentioned in this thread), how this effects the local housing markets in places like, in this case, Seattle.

If every third 22 year old isn't making 200K, how are you going to sustain a market of crapshacks "worth" 1M?

I think Brave has this too, IIRC.

> while they might replace the copy-pasters at Big Tech companies,

Are there really 'copy-pasters' at 'BIg Tech' companies?

In Google's case, outside of LLMs I've always wondered how much code was generated by the protocol buffer compiler.

> Bonus: the customer was the Department of Energy, and the program managed nuclear material inventory. Sleep tight.

These are my favorite (in a sense) programmer stories--that there's these incomprehensible piles of rubbish that somehow, like, run The World and things, and yet somehow things manage to work (in an outwardly observable sense).

Although, I recall two somewhat recent stories where this wasn't the case. The unemployment benefits fiascos during early Covid-era, and some more recent air traffic control-related things (one which effected me personally).

What are you using for displays in this range? I've been using 4K displays at home exclusively for ~5 years and it's rare to even see 4K display over 60hz. I assume they're quite pricy still?

> What do you mean, you don't want "software"? Where do you draw the line? A basic digital wristwatch has "software".

I think this nomenclature is a result of the post-Jobs software as "app" paradigm + Web as the definitive "application" platform era.

The majority of software written, especially in these circles, is going to be some sort of user interface/CRUD stuff. The "invisible" (and frankly remarkable, when talking of things like ECUs and ABS software) is basically like The Earth (it's just always been there and taken for granted).

Appreciate the clarity here; I always wondered which "came first"

The most pressing issue to me currently regarding LLMs is the blatant, flagrant change in tone of the "leadership/ownership" class towards employees.

It comes off as little other than thinly veiled contempt for the people that actually make the business function.

We've seen, most recently, Jassy come out and say "we're gonna need a lot less people", Zuckerberg doing his "replacing engineers" shtick on several occasions, all the commentary from the Anthropic CEO/Altman etc.

Even if none of this comes to pass, I've never witnessed such open "threats" in my lifetime.

I can't square this perspective with that of the LLM advocates that run to defend every legitimate criticism of LLM use--unless you're one of the aforementioned or in a similar position, why would you want to defend software that's primary purpose is to displace you?

They are literally telling you that's why they're investing in it. I don't get it.

Thanks for making me feel less alone in this perspective--it's always been kind of verboten to say such a thing in those kinds of workplaces, but all my software type friends agree completely.

The "entire generation of developers" paradigm is all over in different domains too--web programmers that seem to honestly think web development is only React/Angular and seem to have no idea that you can just write JS, python programmers that have no idea a large portion of the "performant codebases" are piles of native dependencies etc

It's 100% this; you're right on the money (pun intended).

Don't forget various pipelines, IaC, pipelines for deploying IaC, test/dev/staging/whatever environments, organization permissions strategies etc etc...

When I worked at a large, uh, cloud company as a consultant, solutions were often tailored towards "best practices"--this meant, in reality, large complex serverless/containerized things with all sorts of integrations for monitoring, logging, NoSQL, queues etc, often for dinky little things that an RPI running RoR or NodeJS could serve without breaking a sweat.

With rare exceptions, we'd never be able to say, deploy a simple go server on a VM with server-side rendered templates behind a load balancer with some auto-scaling and a managed database. Far too pedestrian.

Sure, it's "best practices" for "high-availability" but was almost always overkill and a nightmare to troubleshoot.

> It's all they've seen. They don't get why they're doing it, because they're junior devs masquerading as architects. There's so many 'senior' or 'architect' level devs in our industry who are utterly useless.

This is the real, actual conversation to be had about "AI taking jobs."

I've seen similar things a lot in the private sector.

There's just loads of people just flailing around doing stuff without really having any expertise other than some vague proxy of years of experience.

It's really not even exactly their fault (people have lives that don't revolve around messing about with software systems design, sure, and there's no good exposure to anything outside of these messes in their workplaces).

But, outside of major software firms (think banks, and other non-"tech" F500s; speaking from experience here) there's loads of people that are "Enterprise Architects" or something that basically spend 5 hours a day in meetings and write 11 lines of C# or something a quarter and then just adopt ideas they heard from someone else a few years back.

Software is really an utterly bizarre field where there's really nothing that even acts as valuable credentials or experience without complete understanding of what that "experience" is actually comprised of. I think about this a lot.

> and I’m usually the only one on my team using a debugger. Almost everyone in the real world (at least in web tech) seems to do print statement debugging.

One of the first things I do in a codebase is get some working IDE/editor up where I can quickly run the program under a debugger, even if I'm not immediately troubleshooting something. It's never long before I need to use it.

I was baffled when I too encountered this. Even working collaboratively with people they'd have no concept of how to use a debugger.

"No, set a breakpoint there"

"yeah now step into the function and inspect the state of those variables"

"step over that"

: blank stares at each instance :

> Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services?

Probably not many. OTOH, I pay for Fastmail and NextDNS (both for at least 5 years at this point).

People give strange looks when I mention paying for e-mail, even people "in the know."

SAAS offerings for individuals don't have a lot of market share (streaming services aside). The exception might be iCloud/GMail harassing people about running out of storage, and people just eventually going "sure, here's 3 bucks a month."

> Major corporations are almost by definition have massive amounts of bloat and inefficiency to one degree or another and are carried (especially tech companies) by certain products/teams/departments the rest are often there only for the ride (short to medium term at least and who has time for any "long-term" development these days?). To be clear, I don't think this has that much to do with people who are "lazy" or hard workers (you can put in extreme amounts of effort into something that leads nowhere).

This is a really good summary, IME.

Yes there's loads of people that do "actual work" (technical work) on projects that are "pet/promo projects" that are doomed from the start to go nowhere and have no path to profitability.

There's also loads of managers managing managers overseeing project managers etc etc

This is really cool, thanks for the info. I've always wondered about how this was done, especially for games.

> so the executable statically links with pretty much everything, including stuff that would count as part of the OS on a PC.

So this is something like whatever libc implementation was used? What era was this? "modern" ish consoles (ps4/XBox-whatever-from-the-last-decade)?