v3xro

Yes pretty much spot on. And if he thinks that

> they’re smarter than me. And when they get over this affectation, they’re going to make coding agents profoundly more effective than they are today.

Then I really hope he's in for a surprise.

Another one, here we go :) I think I'm going to keep it short because I am not here to convince people they're wrong, just to voice my dissent from uh almost every viewpoint this article comes from.

> Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans.

Well that's just wrong - we have failed to capture tremendous value through knowledge of our craft and to reduce it down to min-maxing effort/profit is not a pursuit that I can get behind. Nobody is talking about building Ivory towers, but we can do a lot better than most of the common denominator technologies in use today. We're failing our users most of the time (and of course people like the author say it doesn't matter because it doesn't show up in the quarterly results).

> Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed.

Speak for yourself.

Many of us would prefer to see the technological leaps to be evenly distributed (so e.g. even clean drinking water that does not need to be boiled before consumption is not a baseline in 2025). So if you want to adapt to your new and improved position where you are just pushing buttons fine - but some of us are actually interested in how computers work (and are actually really uninterested in most companies' bottom lines). It's just how it is ;)

Can echo that - it's pure lip service - the deadlines are arbitrary and change often, and nobody cares about quality beyond "can it appear to work plausibly at a demo". There are notable exceptions - nobody wants to be the next Knight Capital but a lot of work is not seen to be that critical so off to the next ticket it is.

There is still a rather large area of things that you can do that are not passive sitting-on-couch/sipping-cocktails "leisure" but are nevertheless not classed as "work" because there is no monetary compensation (hobbies being a nice example). Especially if you are self-motivated, you don't need monetary compensation and a boss to tell you what to do, and still enjoy all the benefits of "work".

It doesn't have to be that way no? As soon as we start realigning economic systems to value labor more than capital again I think we will find meaningful pursuits in all business areas.

Edit: and yes, I am all too aware of the "market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" adage as applied to this situation.

Yes, and they have the resources to go after every (former) user of ADP. </s>

Just another bad UK law not worth knowing about ;)

Because while a business goal is to make money, it is not necessarily, unlike what you have 80% of the people here believe, to make the most money possible. Ethics can exist in businesses too.

Yes, countries lacking in proportional representation and having obscure procedures like proroguing parliament are the best at listening to important but fairly obscure issues from their voters. </s>

Would like to echo this. I've seen this used to justify extracting more value from the user rather than spending time doing things that you can't ship next week with a marketing announcement.

I mean they could have tried not complying, and fighting a lawsuit at the ECHR (right of every person to a private life). Takes money and time but more attractive than the other options.

Very disappointed with this, but I think will be finding alternatives.

Family sharing especially of Reminders is a hard one - we use lists for grocery shopping and it is extremely convenient.

Has anyone tried out Ente https://ente.io/ for photos?

Just to note here - with Mullvad you can pay via gift card that you can find at various retailers (to get a one-time code that you can use to create an account). Of course they can see your IP address but there is no payment/contact information on the system.

Thank you for writing this down - it's a very astute description in my experience, and also the reason why software development is fun.

Even if that turns out to be true - I don't want human life to be about accomplishment only. We're not here as economic machines to squeeze value out of the next business idea.

As a former "staff engineer" these executives can go and have their careers and leave people who want to have code they can understand, reason about and focus on quality software well alone.

To weight in with what most likely is an unpopular opinion here on HN - but you also have to consider your job satisfaction and stress factors before and after the potential move - sometimes it is best to shift orgs entirely and continue doing what you like doing rather than be forced to take on new challenges (that might or might not be intractable).

Thanks for the summary, really looks like something that is worth digging into!

Indeed. Although I find it increasingly hard to find work that aligns with my expectations about technical excellency (too many companies chasing big returns on half-finished products for example) or even methods of creating software. This is hard to manage from a personal perspective but I guess life goes on... I wholeheartedly agree with the author - life's too short to be wasted on work that may get you some good words in one quarter and not matter the next.

There are rust libc implementations e.g. one by Redox: https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/relibc

For some people perhaps - it doesn't have to be for everyone. And there's plenty of really interesting content on HN that is about science and discovery rather than commercial uses.

To op - yes, feel the same, but what can you do...

I think the mention of Luddism is a nice tell. From Wikipedia:

> The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of automated machinery due to concerns relating to worker pay and output quality.

I think the push for AI is the modern-day equivalent for software development - to move making programs from being labour intensive to being capital intensive. There are some of us who don't see it as a good thing.

As for my personal perspective - I view AI as the over-confident senior "salesman" programmer - it has no model for what sort of things it cannot do yet when it attempts anything it requires a lot of prompting to get somewhere which looks passable. My values for developing software is reliability and quality - which I had hoped we were going to achieve by further exploring advanced type systems (including effect systems), static analysis, model checkers, etc. Instead the "market" prioritises short-term garbage creation to push sales until the next quarterly cycle. I don't have much excitement for that.