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Programming Still Sucks

Programming Still Sucks

jeromechoo

Comments (65)

  • fooqux
    > AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did. Same greed that moved factories to Bangladesh and keeps slaves in cobalt mines in the Congo, wearing a new mask. Tell the nephew to do something else. Anything. It won't save him either, but at least he won't have to pretend the thing destroying his life is a robot.This hit me hard. This article is art. I think I need to sleep on this and read it again in the morning.
  • quxbar
    I don't agree with everything this piece concludes, but I do admire getting to read through a whole HN article without feeling the sheen of AI co-authorship.
  • dwd
    Oh man...Really enjoyed it, and went back and read "Programming Sucks" which is also full of delightful nuggets like this:"The only reason coders’ computers work better than non-coders’ computers is coders know computers are schizophrenic little children with auto-immune diseases and we don’t beat them when they’re bad."
  • monkeyballs
    > The truth is, working in tech always sucked, and never really was what they thought it was.This is just not true. Working in tech was awesome for me for at least thirteen years from 1988 - 2000. Probably well beyond, actually. The main reason it began to suck was due to business -- corporate acquisitions and mergers -- not tech. Working for a good company, solving fun problems, making meaningful software, and having happy customers was tech heaven.
  • doug_durham
    It sounds like the author shouldn't be in tech. For many, perhaps most of us programming is joy. It's why we started in our teens and have continued for 40 years. This is just a cynical post that adds no new value. We didn't kill the junior training mechanism. Juniors are still hired in the 100's thousands every year. There are valuable things to be said about the impact of AI. This isn't one of them.
  • Waterluvian
    I’m trying to piece together a thought. Is it right if my employer wants to “own” the gain in productivity from these tools?I’m being paid the same. I’m still doing 40 hours. The huge gains in productivity are not mine to enjoy, it seems.
  • keyle
    Lovely writing!> ... to which they nod before moving on to a lighter topic, like whether we're going to nuke Iran or not.> There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came.> AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did.Love the sarcasm, it carries a cynical form of experience :)
  • jimbobbam
    Ya hit real hard. Are there people in tech that can really write like this? Wow nail on the head
  • SaucyWrong
    This was beautiful. I also appreciated the backlink to Peter Welch’s spiritual ancestor to this essay, which I had forgotten how to find, and had the joy of reading again.
  • henry_bone
    Let me add to the chorus of admiration for this piece of writing. Poignant, accurate, appropriately cynical.
  • gregsadetsky
  • beemboy
    So good. I had this read to me by Eleven Labs' reader and it somehow very very good with conveying the emotion. 5 stars, will recommend
  • chanux
    > Later is never. We all knew that.AI will do all the "later" things we could not do and the civilisation will flourish. :')
  • monkeyballs
    > The truth is, working in tech always sucked, and never really was what they thought it was.This is just not true. Working in tech (starting 1989) was awesome for me for at least 20 years, and tolerable for quite some time after. The main reason it began to suck was due to business -- corporate acquisitions and mergers and tech-ignorant MBA decisions, for example -- not tech. Working for a good company, solving fun problems, making meaningful software, collaborating with committed peers, and having (and directly supporting) happy customers was tech heaven.
  • jrm4
    Yes. And the reason for all of this is the same as it's always been, and requires literally no technical knowledge to understand.There is essentially zero accountability for harm.There is no button on your toaster that blows up the toaster.But there's a link in your email. And that's a button.And no one has figured out how to punish Microsoft or Apple or Google for allowing that to continue, though we do this just fine elsewhere.Someone or something has to be punished, regulated or otherwise hurt for anything to change here.
  • stevenlangbroek
    oh shit haha hey y'all. i'm blown away. also my site is blown away, y'all killed my cloudflare account. maybe go to your room and think about what you did.
  • jdw64
    This is absurdly well written.I don’t know how someone takes the familiar anxiety around AI replacing developers and turns it into something this beautiful and funny.Once again, the programming industry has robbed literature of a potential Nobel Prize candidate.
  • artyom
    I was expecting another AI rant. I got really great writing instead. This escalated quickly.
  • TacticalCoder
    The USB stick hints at a big problem in our trade though: how do you "reboot" your IT infrastructure if it literally burns to the ground? I'm not talking about Google-scale systems (which still couldn't restart from scratch IIUC but they're actually working on it?) but only about SMEs.How does a medium-sized SME were all the payrolls depends on Sara and her USB stick do if, literally, their servers do catch fire.You've got backups, then what? How automated is the reinstallation of your typical SME's infra?The closest I saw to that scenario was some documentary where some little trading firm had just time to fetch the backup hard drives before leaving the building on fire after a plane crashed into it on 9/11. The CEO (I think it was the CEO) was explaining that had he not grabbed a HDD with the backups, the company was done (not that I advice onsite/offline backups on HDDs that you must not forget to grab when the shit hits the fan as a solution btw).I understand the "just drink the cloud kool-aid" angle: but are SMEs typically doing that?How many SMEs out there are depending on Sara's knowledge of the USB memory stick and how to use it?I've definitely seen similar things. And I'm sure many of you did too.Many houses of cards?
  • julianeon
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  • samdhar
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  • ksd482
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