A Programmer's Loss of Identity

There is a middle ground: programmers who want to program as a hobby and do something else for a job. They tend to want small, efficient code that is easy to understand and debug. Unfortunately, most find themselves writing code for a living.

While I also share the sentiment with the author, I can't help but notice that the article is picturing things as more dramatic than they really are.

What's been happening to software development from the 2010s onwards is closer to what happened to manual craftsmanship as the industrial revolution took off, than to the effects high-level programming languages and abstractions had on the field. Many attempts have been made to turn software development teams into assembly lines; between ultra high-level frameworks and AI, we've had all those "new-new" formal methodologies and extreme offshoring, for example. Another factor that contributed to the status quo is the fact that programming has become well-paid, which inevitably attracted people who are in it for the money and made it an attractive target for "cost optimization".

Not all hope is lost, however. There are two significant differences that set programming apart from traditional crafts: performance and security. There's no universal recipe for either—LLMs and large bloated orgs suck equally at both. Smaller players still can largely outperform behemoths if they have the right idea, similar to what WhatsApp did to Microsoft's Skype or to what Anthropic is now doing to OpenAI, Google and Microsoft. And as for security, just look at Apple's and Google's bug bounties.

At its core, software development is still a meritocracy. This hasn't changed despite the trillions of dollars that have been poured into making it a quantifiable problem. Organizations that refuse to accept this have their projects fail. As for the influx of money-oriented programmers, it might have skewed the proportions, but it definitely did not drive out all of the passionate ones. Keep your head up.

Also, I must say I like the irony of this post making it to the front page of a website that's usually full of headlines of the likes of "How I used Claude to code a revolutionary JavaScript framework running 100% on Amazon Lambda" :)

This seems like an analogy in bad faith. How would plumbing as a hobby even make sense?

Compare to jobs like writers, scientists, carpenters, mechanics, etc that are much closer to programmers in spirit and do have a lot of people doing them in their free time.

> We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate.

I can finally put into words my frustration with NixOS. The most elegant solution to the ultimate problem already exists, yet no one is actually interested in solving the problem! In the end, we just got another convoluted system of incomprehensible boilerplate to wrap the existing boilerplate with, and incompatibilities are resolved just-in-time with more boilerplate.

As much as I enjoy AI, this does resonate with me. I would be much happier if ChatGPT weren’t invented and I spent my weekends reading programming books instead of vibe coding.

Unfortunately, I’m convinced this is where the industry is heading. my job pays me to solve problems efficiently, not to have opinions on idiomatic Java