Appearing productive in the workplace

My line manager using a lazy single line description of a product is generating whole product listings and HTML for our web shop, never checking it. SEO is poor, views and conversion are collapsing. Upper management is responding to my serious issues with ChatGPT bullet point lists that don't address the problem. Video conferences I can see people typing into and reading back GPT instructions, suppliers are sending AI generated product images. 3rd party site devs are running buggy site deployments with Claude Code written as co author. I can't take it anymore, its an office of zombies.

I watched a video of some (unemployed) programmer lamenting over the current job situation market. He had been coding for a good while, but had recently been laid off. The vid was mainly concerning the searching and interview process, but it also did highlight something I find somewhat true and important:

Right now we're in a gold rush. Companies, that be established ones or startups, are in a frenzy to transform or launch AI-first products.

You are not rewarded for building extremely robust and fast systems - the goal right now is to essentially build ETL and data piping systems as fast as humanly (or inhumanly) possible, and being able to add as many features as possible. The quality of the software is of less importance.

And, yes, senior engineers with other priorities are being overshadowed - even left in the dust - if they don't use tools to enhance their speed. As the article states, there are novice coders, even non-coders that are pushing out features like you wouldn't believe it. As long as these yield the right output, and don't crash the systems, that's a gold star.

Of course there are still many companies whose products do not fall under that, and very much rely on robust engineering - but at least in the startup space there's overwhelmingly many whose product is to gather data (external, internal), add agents, and do some action for the client.

You need extremely competent, and critically thinking technical leaders on the top to tackle this problem. But we're also in the age where people with somewhat limited technical experience are becoming CTOs or highly-ranked technical workers in an org, for no other reason than that they know how to use modern AI systems, and likely have a recent history of being extremely productive.

"AI speedtracks bullshit shops into bullshit factories" is the other side of "AI enables efficiency gains beyond immagination". As a freelancer I get to see both in action.

No surprise! Do you rememeber agile? Sometimes it was pragmatically applied towards efficiency, sometimes it became a bullshit religion full of priest and ceremonies. And on i could go, with more examples, the gist stays the same : new tools, speed increase, faster crash or faster travel depends on the trajectory the company/team/project/thing was already on.

A special note on "People who cannot write code are building software." "Fuck yeah" to that! Devs has shipped bad software to people in other departements/domains, for ages. They would never build something better if what they had was good in the first place.

When we (coders/startups) were doing it it was "innovation", now is "elephants in the china shop"? And this is not a rethorical snappy question: that IS innovation, instead of critizing the "wrong schema" ... understand the idea, help build it and do the job: ship code that works and is safe.

Also, grey-beard here, pls, don't think you can ever have a stable job especially when code is around. It keeps changing, it always has, it always will. AI bringing unprecedented changes is hype. The world always changed fast.

If "you" picked software development because of salary, you are in danger. If you did it because you love it, then tell me with a straight face this is not one of the best moments to be alive.

That's a very good revert on horse-riding analogy. But you might still be making an assumption that the horse package doesn't come with a weapon. It might boil down to saying "AI can not achieve the skills of a senior engineer" - which might not have a strong basis.

If anything, the current era looks like how 1995-2015 was for me.

Back then I was not in the “nitpicker’s radar” yet. I was working in small teams and shipping like crazy, sometimes fixing small bugs literally in seconds.

Things worked, were stable, made money, teams were fun and code and product had quality.

The post-Thoughtworks, post-Uncle-Bob world of 2015-2025 was absolute hell for a maker. It was 100% about performative quality. Everything was verbose and had to be by the book, even when it didn't make sense from an engineering or product point of view.

Different opinions were simply not accepted.

It was the age of bloat, of thousands of dependencies, of nitpicks, of infinite meetings, of quality in paper but not in practice, of doing overtime, of being on a fucking pager, of having CI/CD that took 10 hours to merge, and all the stress it comes with.

I would be totally ok if all those “professional” engineers from that generation were to be replaced with hackers, both old and new.