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Do I belong in tech anymore?

ky.fyi

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Re: Do I belong in tech anymore?

#71

Post by Griffinsauce »

dgb23 wrote: post #42

> The point of a code review is not simply for good code to make it into a codebase, but to build institutional knowledge as people debate and iterate and compromise, slow as it may be. I feel like this is a very profound insight. Of course processes like this can become about the immediate utility. Reviewing is then checking work so, it can be merged and used. But the process is more about us than the code. And we l…

There's a Dutch idiom: no shine without friction.

AI is all about losing every possible bit of friction, severely underestimating the value that friction brings.

Re: Do I belong in tech anymore?

#72

Post by Paul-Craft »

zby wrote: post #57

This report lists failures of some AI systems. They look consequential - but the company does not seem to care. This is very strange - how can it be? I really like AI products they help me all the time - but I know I need to take into account their failure modes and be careful. But lots of organisations don't seem to do that calculation. Will competition root them out? I don't know - I am so enthusiastic about AI - b…

Which "LangChain situation" are you talking about? Anything specific, or just everything that's happened in the past year or so?

Re: Do I belong in tech anymore?

#73

Post by rkagerer »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #55
rkagerer wrote: post #54

I feel like all this hype around generated code overlooks a distinct opportunity for enterprising focus on excellent, clean, maintainable, curated code - baked by humans, for other humans.

What would that look like? In my experience, real production codebases tend to have lots of bugs. Most of them never get prioritized, because features matter more than fixing obscure bugs.

Indeed - one of my biggest pet peeves is when organizations chronically avoid budgeting the time and resources to deal with their technical debt. Or when they lack leadership that is confident and bold enough to make the hard decisions to do so (which requires experience and reputation), or suffer a culture that doesn't tolerate some degree of risk-taking, with contingencies (particularly in schedule and blast radius containment) to safely deal with occasional failure on the road to improvement.

I'd love to reinvent computing from the ground up, stripping away the many patchwork layers of complexity we've accreted over time and applying an obsession for making each individual component uncommonly robust and engineered for clarity. I feel that kind of project would be a great candidate for human-written code. I think AI tools would make a great sounding board / linter / reviewer in such a scenario, but since they were trained on existing examples and legacy patterns I'm not convinced they'd be as good as a human at the actual constructing, in terms of what I'm optimizing for.

I personally tend to favor longer lead times and slower public ship pace (but not slower betas or delay in customer feedback) in order to maintain a higher bar of quality. Even if saying so out loud risks branding me heretical by some corners of Silicon Valley!

Re: Do I belong in tech anymore?

#74

Post by Brian_K_White »

baxtr wrote: post #15
lazyasciiart wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When someone says “no one will interview me” this is a pretty unhelpful response.

My response is probably controversial. But I genuinely think it’s generally helpful advice. Ofc I don’t have any other information than the comment about this person.

You literally said they should do something.

Re: Do I belong in tech anymore?

#76

Post by _cenw »

barrkel wrote: post #75

Bluntly, no, you probably don't belong in tech. This is what tech has always been. A never (yet) ending race to automate. Our job will be done when there's nothing left to automate.

Automation seems like a very surface-level reading of this article.

Outsourcing your thinking, especially uncritically, is. There is a very obvious cognitive bias in the most vehement AI advocates where the one time a tool worked really well for them makes it worth the dozen of times it blows up in your face and makes that someone else's problem. The gain is romanticized and the losses set aside, without checking the balance or how badly the losses wear on morale.

Re: Do I belong in tech anymore?

#78

Post by ffsm8 »

dgb23 wrote: post #42

> The point of a code review is not simply for good code to make it into a codebase, but to build institutional knowledge as people debate and iterate and compromise, slow as it may be. I feel like this is a very profound insight. Of course processes like this can become about the immediate utility. Reviewing is then checking work so, it can be merged and used. But the process is more about us than the code. And we l…

It shows that previously he likely worked only at companies which catered to him, honestly.

That was pretty widespread during 2005-2015, but it's been dropping extremely quickly now.

Developers are generally seen as replaceable cogs. Middle management loves to talk about "scaling" - by which they don't mean scaling how devs understand it, but instead multiplying headcount - because surely throwing x-n devs at the same software will multiply the velocity by the same factor amiright?

The biggest value you can get is by having a very small team of extremely capable people (with extremely high bus factor) being fully in control of everything they do.

Realistically speaking, that'd be impossible to "scale" in the perspective of an MBA however, hence the industry at wide doesn't to that.

You may notice that some employers do, however.

You're just unlikely to get a job there, because their team is already established.

Re: Do I belong in tech anymore?

#79

Post by anal_reactor »

nso wrote: post #41
Paul-Craft wrote: post #5

I'm asking myself the same question for a different reason: nobody will even interview me. I've been out of work for a while. Savings are running out. I apparently don't even know how to look for a job anymore.

Yeah. Got word I was being laid off in November. Officially because of restructuring, but after having had some conversations it's clear I've been replaced by a junior with a Claude subscription. 20 years coding experience. Gone through the sweaty junior years, senior, founding engineer, CTO (and back to software Engineering again because it's my preference) -- and now I can't even get an interview with a human. Due…

Use AI to mass-apply to all available job postings. It's a numbers game.

Re: Do I belong in tech anymore?

#80

Post by queenkjuul »

dgb23 wrote: post #42

> The point of a code review is not simply for good code to make it into a codebase, but to build institutional knowledge as people debate and iterate and compromise, slow as it may be. I feel like this is a very profound insight. Of course processes like this can become about the immediate utility. Reviewing is then checking work so, it can be merged and used. But the process is more about us than the code. And we l…

I'm on round 3 of arguing with my boss's LLM about a terrible PR he refuses to review manually. I can tell from the PR that it was 100% generated by Claude code because I've seen identical suggestions in PRs from juniors. But this man is my boss. He won't listen.

Honest to god, were the programming job market like 5% better than it is (so, y'know, years away) i would already have quit. I've been applying places but it's a slaughterhouse out there. I got ghosted after a fourth round interview at a non-tech company over the winter.

Shit sucks.

I'm immensely jealous of the author; i have savings as a safety net, but not enough to take a year off work. But this next year of my role is guaranteed to be hell and the last year of applying for jobs has not been better.

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