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The Programmer Identity Crisis

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Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#231

Post by balamatom »

whynotminot wrote: post #139
jimbokun wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s simpler than that. It’s more of a funeral, collective expression of grievance of a great, painful loss. An obituary for a glorious, short time in history where it was possible to combine a specific kind of intelligence, creativity, discipline, passion and values and be well compensated for it. A time when the ability to solve problems and solve them well had value. Not just being better at taking credit than oth…

I get it, but fundamentally this is a forum discussing technology, and AI is part of that. Especially as it relates to software engineering. I come here to learn, discuss, and frankly, to hang onto a good life as long as I can have it. The collective whinging in every AI topic is both annoying and self-defeating.

>is both annoying and self-defeating

No brother. You are the one being annoyed by it, because you are the one doing nothing about it.

>What would you like me to do about that? Is me refusing to use the tools going to change that possibility?

What I know I refused 'em out of principle, turns out I'm doing fine. I also know for certain that had I not refused them, I would not be doing fine.

>to hang onto a good life as long as I can have it.

Trick question: do you think you deserve a good life?

What if there isn't enough good life for everyone, do you deserve it more than others?

Than which ones then?

>collective whinging

And this is why I think you don't.

The moment you began to perceive mass dissent as "collective whinging" was the moment the totalitarian singularity won you over.

And then it's an entirely different conversation, conducted by entirely different means of expression.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#232

Post by balamatom »

NeutralCrane wrote: post #202
jimbokun wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s simpler than that. It’s more of a funeral, collective expression of grievance of a great, painful loss. An obituary for a glorious, short time in history where it was possible to combine a specific kind of intelligence, creativity, discipline, passion and values and be well compensated for it. A time when the ability to solve problems and solve them well had value. Not just being better at taking credit than oth…

It’s not about not caring. It’s about accepting reality.

Ok, enabler.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#233

Post by pjmlp »

inglor_cz wrote: post #105
whynotminot wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would someone who likes solving problems choose a very lucrative career path solving problems… hmmm You can also solve problems as a local handyman but that doesn’t pad the 401K quite as well as a career in software. I feel like there’s a lot of tech-fetishist right now on the “if you don’t deeply love to write code then just leave!” train without somehow realizing that most of us have our jobs because we need to…

At 47, I am an older guy already. But in my generation, people who went on to be programmers usually started tinkering with code at ~ 11 y.o. (back then on ZX Spectrum and similar cheap beasts available in freshly post-Communist Europe) out of interest and passion, not because of "I want to build a lucrative career". (Given how massively widespread piracy was back then, programming looked rather like a good way to do…

At the edge of 50, similar experience.

Additionally in many countries, being a developer is an office worker like everyone else, there isn't SV lottery level salaries.

In fact, those of us that rather stay programmers beyond 30 years old are usually seen as failure, from society point of view, where is our hunger for career and climbing up the ladder?

Now the whole set of SaaS products, with low code integrations, that were already a bit depressing from programmer point of view, are getting AI agents as well.

It feels like coding as in the old days is increasingly being left for hobby coding, or a few selected ones working on industry infrastructure products/frameworks.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#234

Post by pjmlp »

commandlinefan wrote: post #62
oldestofsports wrote: post #29

Getting rid of the programmer has always been the wet dream of managers, and LLMs are being sold as the solution. Maybe it is

This comes up whenever _anything_ is automated: "this is the end of programming as a career!" I heard this about Rational Rose in the 90's, and Visual Basic in the 80's. I don't think I'm sticking my head in the sand - an advanced enough intelligence could absolutely take over programming tasks - but I also think that such an intelligence would be able to take over _every_ thought-related task. And that may not be a…

I can tell that nowadays in what concerns distributed systems built on top of SaaS enterprise products, using MACH architecture approach, my programming at work is quite minimal.

Most of my programming skills are kept up to date on side projects, thanfully I can managed the time to do them, between family and friends.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#235

Post by CuriouslyC »

y0eswddl wrote: post #221
jackblemming wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know the net value add isn’t greater with the AI, even if it requires more code review comments (and angrier coworkers)?

all the recent studies (that are constantly posted here) that say so.

The Stanford study showed mixed results, and you can stratify the data to show that AI failures are driven by process differences as much as circumstantial differences.

The MIT study just has a whole host of problems, but ultimately it boils down to: giving your engineers cursor and telling them to be 10x doesn't work. Beyond each individual engineer being skilled at using AI, you have to adjust your process for it. Code review is a perfect example; until you optimize the review process to reduce human friction, AI tools are going to be massively bottlenecked.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#236

Post by CuriouslyC »

travisgriggs wrote: post #190
Etheryte wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion this is another case where people look at it as a technical problem when it's actually a people problem. If someone does it once, they get a stern message about it. If it happens twice, it gets rejected and sent to their manager. Regardless of how you authored a pull request, you are signing off on it with your name. If it's garbage, then you're responsible.

I largely agree with sibling responses. BUT... How do have code review be an educational experience for onboarding/teaching if any bad submission is cut down with due prejudice? I am happy to work with a junior engineer and is trying, and we have to loop on some silly mistakes, and pick and choose which battles to balance building confidence with developing good skills. But I am not happy to have a junior engineer th…

Code review as an educational device is done. We're going to stop caring about the code before people who are bad programmers right now have time to get good.

We need to focus on architectural/system patterns and let go of code ownership in the traditional sense.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#237

Post by CuriouslyC »

greymalik wrote: post #27

> One could only wonder why they became a programmer in the first place, given their seeming disinterest in coding. To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself. > careful configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments That may be fun for you, but it doesn’t add value. It’s accidental complexity that I am happy to delegate.

> To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself.

100% this. I think a lot of the people who are angry at AI coding for them are "code calligraphers" who care more about the form of the thing they're making than the problem that it solves. I can't see how someone's who's primarily solution focused would shed a tear at AI coding for them.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#238

Post by CuriouslyC »

rpcope1 wrote: post #151
mupuff1234 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that the problem is with Git and not the users?

How dumbed down does everything need to be? Git has warts for sure, but this whole ideas guy no actual understanding of anything is how you get trainwrecks. There is no free lunch, and you're going to pay one way or another for not understanding the tools of the craft, and that not everything can be ridiculously simple.

Git doesn't just have warts, its DX is actively bad. If it was good you wouldn't have so many tools designed to make it not suck to work with 20 years after release. The graph first and diff first design decisions are both bad choices that are probably burning millions of man hours per year fixing things that should just work (to be fair, they were the right decisions at the time, times have changed).

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#239

Post by dkersten »

amflare wrote: post #6
protontypes wrote: post #3

Whenever I see an em dash (—), I suspect the entire text was written by an AI.

Ironically, I love using em dashes in my writing, but if I ever have to AI generate an email or summary or something, I will remove it for this exact reason.

I used to use them, but stopped because I feel it makes people think that I used an AI to write.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#240

Post by dkersten »

psunavy03 wrote: post #87
gdulli wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a silly take, just because they existed and were proper grammar before AI slop popularized them doesn't mean they're not statistically likely to indicate slop today, depending on the context.

What's sillier is people associating em-dashes with AI slop specifically because they are unsophisticated enough never to have learned how to use them as part of their writing, and assuming everyone else must be as poor of a writer as they are. It's the literary equivalent of thinking someone must be a "hacker" because they have a Bash terminal open.

It doesn't really matter. Before LLM's, they were relatively rarely seen, after LLM's, they are commonly seen in AI-written text. Its not unreasonable for people to associate them with being AI-written.
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