Funny and insightful! AI can't write articles like this :)
Programming Still Sucks
111–120 of 354 posts
Re: Programming Still Sucks
#112> 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 havi…
What I remember mostly from working in that era, was that managers let engineers make the technical decisions.
Re: Programming Still Sucks
#113> 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.
Greed does not take your jobs, progress does. People don’t hand wash clothing for money because we have machines to do that now. We don’t need people delivering news papers because the news is delivered digitally. AI is no different. “IF” your job can be automated away or made more efficient it will. That might not be a benefit for your but it’s a benefit to society at large Note: the above is not claiming AI or LLM…
> People don’t hand wash clothing for money because we have machines to do that now. We don’t need people delivering news papers because the news is delivered digitally.
Those jobs aren't creative knowledge work.
The advent of digital audio workstations didn't reduce the number of musicians - it increased the amount of music.
Now that we can write code with AI, we (as a civilization) will simply write more code than we used to.
Re: Programming Still Sucks
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Greed does not take your jobs, progress does. People don’t hand wash clothing for money because we have machines to do that now. We don’t need people delivering news papers because the news is delivered digitally. AI is no different. “IF” your job can be automated away or made more efficient it will. That might not be a benefit for your but it’s a benefit to society at large Note: the above is not claiming AI or LLM…
This is ignoring the people who capture the rent. If technological innovation is to liberate us from poverty then it should be a celebration that everytime that a job is automated. Since that is not happening, it implies something deeply wrong about how we structure our society.
> If technological innovation is to liberate us from poverty then it should be a celebration that everytime that a job is automated.
It depends. Sometimes automating a job just means wiping out the institutional knowledge that came with the job - which I take to be the OP's broader point. It's not clear that AI agents will be able to replace that role to any useful extent, even though it's nice that we can read their accumulated knowledge as a set of .md files written in plain English.
Re: Programming Still Sucks
#115> 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 havi…
What I remember mostly from working in that era, was that managers let engineers make the technical decisions.
I can't speak for all managers obviously, but that's what we want. Now though, suddenly we're expected to contribute code again and C-level is completely ignorant about the tradeoffs they're making. Compounding this is the fact that the feedback loop for the tradeoffs is likely still a year+ away, far longer than their incentives take to materialize.
Re: Programming Still Sucks
#116> 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.
Society doesn't owe me over $500k/year for writing some instructions in a cryptic specification language. It's cool that I've been getting that, but I consider that luck and circumstance. When robots take my job I'll go find something else to do. I'm not going to blame evil rich people or some other boogieman.
Society doesn't owe anybody anything. So who's to say when you find something else to do, it will pay enough to live?
Re: Programming Still Sucks
#117Oh 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."
I kill any process that misbehaves.
Re: Programming Still Sucks
#118> 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.
Society doesn't owe me over $500k/year for writing some instructions in a cryptic specification language. It's cool that I've been getting that, but I consider that luck and circumstance. When robots take my job I'll go find something else to do. I'm not going to blame evil rich people or some other boogieman.
> Society doesn't owe me over $500k/year
No it doesn't. But as a human being, you and everybody still deserves a decent living. And our current system clearly does not provide that for a lot of people.
Re: Programming Still Sucks
#119> The previous captain started a fire because another captain explained internal combustion to him at Captainpalooza 2025, and he wanted to start iterating towards that.
Hey, that's agile!
Such a great write-up!
Re: Programming Still Sucks
#120Isn’t it a bit ironic that a (presumably statically generated) blog post about “programming sucks” is being chocked to death by HN?
Yeah this was just a failure on my part, I was too lazy to go the ISR route and was on the Cloudflare free plan. I was not expecting any traffic haha.
Get a VPS and host it there. Costs less than a cup of coffee a month, with tens of TB of traffic.
Nice article by the way!