Short disclosure, I work as a Software Developer in the US, and often have to keep my negative opinions about the tech industry to myself. I often post podcasts and articles critical of the tech industry here in order to vent and, in a way, commiserate over the current state of tech and its negative effects on our environment and the Global/American sociopolitical landscape.
I’m generally reluctant to express these opinions IRL as I’m afraid of burning certain bridges in the tech industry that could one day lead to further employment opportunities. I also don’t want to get into these kinds of discussions except with my closest friends and family, as I could foresee them getting quite heated and lengthy with certain people in my social circles.
Some of these negative opinions include:
- I think that the industries based around cryptocurrencies and other blockchain technologies have always been, and have repeatedly proven themselves to be, nothing more or less than scams run and perpetuated by scam artists.
- I think that the AI industry is particularly harmful to writers, journalists, actors, artists, and others. This is not because AI produces better pieces of work, but rather due to misanthropic viewpoints of particularly toxic and powerful individuals at the top of the tech industry hierarchy pushing AI as the next big thing due to their general misunderstanding or outright dislike of the general public.
- I think that capitalism will ultimately doom the tech industry as it reinforces poor system design that deemphasizes maintenance and maintainability in preference of a move fast and break things mentality that still pervades many parts of tech.
- I think we’ve squeezed as much capital out of advertising as is possible without completely alienating the modern user, and we risk creating strong anti tech sentiments among the general population if we don’t figure out a less intrusive way of monetizing software.
You can agree or disagree with me, but in this thread I’d prefer not to get into arguments over the particular details of why any one of our opinions are wrong or right. Rather, I’d hope you could list what opinions on the tech industry you hold that you feel comfortable expressing here, but are, for whatever reason, reluctant to express in public or at work. I’d also welcome an elaboration of said reason, should you feel comfortable to give it.
I doubt we can completely avoid disagreements, but I’ll humbly ask that we all attempt to keep this as civil as possible. Thanks in advance for all thoughtful responses.
Much of what we do and have built is overpriced and useless bullshit that doesn’t make anybody better off.
We are inventing solutions and products to manage other solutions and products to manage other solutions and products to…etc etc.
Websites used to be static HTML pages with some simple graphics, images, and some imbedded stuff. Now, you need to know AWS for your IaaS, Kubernetes to manage your scaling and container orchestration for the thousands of Docker containers that you use to compose your app written in some horrific pile of JavaScript related web stacks like NodeJS, Typescript, React, blah blah blah…
Then you need a ton of other 3rd party components that handle authentication, databasing, backups, monitoring, signaling, account creation/management, logging, billing, etc etc.
It’s circles within circles within circles, and all that to make a buggy, overpriced, clunky web app.
Similar is true for IT, massive software suites that most people in the company use 10% of their functionality for stupid shit.
I’m all for advancing technology, I love technology, it’s my job and my hobby.
But the longer I work in this industry, the more I get this sick feeling that we lost the train long time ago. Buying brand new $1,500 laptops every 3 years so that most of our users can send emails, browse the web, and type up occasional memos.
CEOs and all management suite are mostly useless except for making the business worse for the employees and customers for the sake of investors.
Most employees are perfectly fine with slow and steady growth instead of maximizing it.
It’s interesting the preconceived notions over managements usefulness and the actual role a CEO plays in a company. I’ve had a lot of conversations with people over the years and everyone just expects that it “has to be this way or it won’t work”. Like every admin position is critical or the company will fail, completely disregarding that most of those positions didn’t exist before and the company ran just fine.
There’s a lot of misinformation over what their actual job entails. Management is mostly just one big “telephone” game (been on all sides of it, got out just in time before it warped my perception of life). The original role of being support is completely absent in their duties as our society and culture has changed. People also think a co-op would never work because you need a big shot CEO who runs the company and makes all the decisions (they don’t, plenty of examples in reality).
It’s kinda funny to hear a lot of the tech people on here mention imposter syndrome. Every person in administration has this feeling deep down inside that they aren’t important and they have no clue what they’re doing. The only difference is everyone in the C-suite pat’s eachother on the back and help build each other’s ego up so they can just pretend they don’t feel it. It’s why people in these positions get so defensive and irate if you start dissecting their actual duties and importance. They’ve been reassured everyday that what they do is integral when it’s suppose to be the managers job to make his employees feel that way.
Luckily, as I work for the local govt, I can talk all the shit I want about the tech sector and technologies as a whole. My colleagues obviously don’t agree with every opinion I share (some 3 even think Amazon is “actually good” and one networking guy is a cryptobro), but none of us are at any risk from talking shit about companies and their leaders, or tech shenanigans in general. Now, talking about our higher ups is trouble.
Right now, Ai is a party trick.
Tomorrow, Ai will inform the FBI that #29933 is planning on murdering his sister, and deploy a team of armed drones to escort him to prison, if he makes it.
Tomorrow, the department stores and supermarkets will be empty and you’ll pick up your groceries from an automated warehouse that inserts them into your car.
Tomorrow, the mail bot will barf your mail into a labeled box, wherin you’ll find your prescription medication, bottled labeled and packaged by nobody, which you take right after you go out to eat at an empty restaurant, where your food is brought to you by an automated track that says tHaNk Yo in an inhuman tone before cutting off too soon.
No conversations, no traveling, no hassle, no humanity, or sincerity whatsoever.
hooray?
Why the fuck is everyone so stoked about this? Vending-machine land sounds insufferable.
IT is slowly starting to get regulated like a real engineering field and that’s a good developement.
I’m sad that I missed my opportunity to take a PE exam in software engineering.
All software should be open source
All software should be released as a common good that cannot be captured by corporations. Otherwise it’s just free labor for Amazon, Google and Facebook
For the sake of humanity
You’re becoming an old man yelling at clouds. People sad all the same shit about websites back in the 90s. They said the same shit about personal computers in offices in general over the mainframe systems. Unless your software is going to be responsible for actual lives it’s better to get something buggy out on time then drag things out like star citizen soaking up money for no returns.
No class consciousness. Too many tech workers think they’re rugged individuals that can negotiate their own contracts into wealth.
Working for free on nights and weekends to “hit that deadline” is not good. You’re just making the owners rich, and devaluing labor. Even if you own a lot of equity, it’s not as much as the owners.
And then there’s bullshit like return to office mandates and people are like “oh no none of us want to do this but there’s no organized mechanism to resist”
Join Tech Workers Coalition
like pretty much all industries there are holding companies buying up anything profitable that is not to big to aquire consolidating a hold on the industry. this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vista_Equity_Partners bought out my company. I was let go and I don’t think that came from vista but the separation agreement they put in front of me Im pretty sure was. Needless to say I did not sign it as it was crazy.
Please stop with the AI pushing. It’s a solution looking for a problem, it’s a waste in 90% of the cases.
On a bright note I’m optimistic that ai bloated garbage and advertising will eventually push a critical mass of people to using decentralized and open source tools, or possibly that non-profits and co-ops will start to spring up to manage more ethical services that could potentially replace the mainstream ones.
When you’re not trying to make some dude disgustingly richer, you don’t need a ton of advertising (imo).
I also think tech workers should unionize. On a darker note, I think outsourcing/offshoring post-covid is going to kill any unions viability. You need bargaining power (withhold your labor) and I’m not sure that will exist for this trade because of how easy it will be to find workers.
I also think tech workers should unionize. On a darker note, I think outsourcing/offshoring post-covid is going to kill any unions viability.
Quite possibly, but that’s just another part of the onshore/offshore cycle. And having worked for a company that utilized offshore for coverage reasons, I’m not that worried about my position. Offshore techs are decent, but I have to clean up after them more than my onshore coworkers.
You need bargaining power (withhold your labor) and I’m not sure that will exist for this trade because of how easy it will be to find workers.
Offshore may work as scabs, but much like scabs, the work quality is noticeably worse. Ultimately, I think tech workers are a bigger hindrance to a tech union than the threat of offshoring is. Mainly because of the house cat like “rugged individualism” they’re sure they have and a lack of overall understanding of the system we work in.
What do you think would help overcome that obstacle to unionization?
This post exemplifies an interesting combination of optimism and pessimism.
I think companies that use unethically trained AI (read: basically all gen AI) should be subject to massive litigation, or at least severely damaging boycotts.
Have mentioned it to a lawyer at work, and he was like “I get it, but uh… fat chance, lol”. Would not dare mention it to the AI-hungry folks in leadership.
You can’t litigate against owner class as working class. Federal government is sold out their asses so they won’t do it.
Litigation is a dispute resolution tool for the owners, between owners.
There is NOT a viable way forward within the courts or political processes.
Things will get worse before anything changes.
Source: Dead CEO and how they treat luigi
Most of the high visibility “tech bros” aren’t technical. They are finance bros who invest in tech.
Not a software dev, but for me it’s the constant leap from today’s “next best thing” to tomorrow’s. Behind the Bastards did an episode on AI, and his take resonated with me. Particularly his Q&A session with some AI leaders at, I think, CES not long ago. When the new hotness gets popular, an obscene amount of money is paired with the “move fast and break things” attitude in a rush to profit. This often creates massive opportunities for grifters as legislators are mind numbing slow to react to these new technologies. And when regulations are finally passed (or more recently, allowed by the oligarchs), they’re often written to protect the billionaires (read: “job creators”) more than the common customer. Everyone’s bought into the idea that slow and methodical stifles innovation. At least the people funding and regulating these things have.
A very large portion (maybe not quite a majority) of software developers are not very good at their jobs. Just good enough to get by.
And that is entirely okay! Applies to most jobs, honestly. But there is really NO appropriate way to express that to a coworker.
I’ve seen way too much “just keep trying random things without really knowing what you’re doing, and hope you eventually stumble into something that works” attitude from coworkers.
maybe not quite a majority
VAST majority. This is 80-90% of devs.
I actually would go further and say that collectively, we are terrible at what we do. Not every individual, but the combination of individuals, teams, management, and business requirements mean that collectively we produce terrible results. If bridges failed at anywhere near the rate that software does, processes would be changed to fix the problem. But bugs, glitches, vulnerabilities etc. are rife in the software industry. And it just gets accepted as normal.
It is possible to do better. We know this, from things like the stuff that sent us to the moon. But we’ve collectively decided not to do better.
Main difference is, a bridge that fails physically breaks, takes months to repair, and risks killing people. Your average CRUD app… maybe a dev loses a couple or hours figuring out how to fix live data for the affected client, bug gets fixed, and everybody goes on with their day.
Remember that we almost all code to make products that will make a company money. There’s just no financial upside to doing better in most cases, so we don’t. The financial consequences of most bugs just aren’t great enough to make the industry care. It’s always about maximizing revenue.
maybe a dev loses a couple or hours figuring out how to fix live data for the affected client, bug gets fixed, and everybody goes on with their day.
Or thousands of people get stranded at airports as the ticketing system goes down or there is a data breach that exposes millions of people’s private data.
Some companies have been able to implement robust systems that can take major attacks, but that is generally because they are more sensitive to revenue loss when these systems go down.
I’m not sure if you’re agreeing or trying to disprove my previous comment - IMHO, we are saying the exact same thing. As long as those stranded travelers or data breaches cost less than the missed business from not getting the product out in the first place, from a purely financial point of view, it makes no sense to withhold the product’s release.
Let’s be real here, most developers are not working on airport ticketing systems or handling millions of users’ private data, and the cost of those systems failing isn’t nearly as dramatic. Those rigid procedures civil engineers have to follow come from somewhere, and it’s usually not from any individual engineer’s good will, but from regulations and procedures written from the blood of previous failures. If companies really had to feel the cost of data breaches, I’d be willing to wager we’d suddenly see a lot more traction over good development practices.
… If companies really had to feel the cost of data breaches, I’d be willing to wager we’d suddenly see a lot more traction over good development practices.
that’s probably why downtime clauses are a thing in contracts between corporations; it sets a cap at the amount of losses a corporation can suffer and it’s always significantly less than getting slapped by the gov’t if it ever went to court.
I’m just trying to highlight that there is a fuzzier middle ground than a lot of programmers want to admit. Also, a lot of regulations for that middle ground haven’t been written; the only attention to that middle ground have been when done companies have seen failures hit their bottom line.
I’m not saying the middle ground doesn’t exist, but that said middle ground visibly doesn’t cause enough damage to businesses’ bottom line, leading to companies having zero incentive to “fix” it. It just becomes part of the cost of doing business. I sure as hell won’t blame programmers for business decisions.
It just becomes part of the cost of doing business.
I agree with everything you said except for this. Often times, it isn’t the companies that have to bear the costs, but their customers or third parties.
Yup, this is exactly it. There are very few software systems whose failure does not impact people. Sure, it’s rare for it to kill them, but they cause people to lose large amounts of money, valuable time, or sensitive information. That money loss is always, ultimately, paid by end consumers. Even in B2B software, there are human customers of the company that bought/uses the software.
That’s why I don’t work on mission critical stuff.
If my apps fail, some Business Person doesn’t get to move some bits around.
A friend of mine worked in software at NASA. If her apps failed, some astronaut was careening through space 😬
Managers decided that by forcing people to deliver before it’s ready. It’s better for the company to have something that works but with bugs, rather than delaying projects until they are actually ready.
In most fields where people write code, writing code is just about gluing stuff together, and code quality doesn’t matter (simplicity does though).
Game programmers and other serious large app programmers are probably the only ones where it matters a lot how you write the code.
Kind of the opposite actually.
The Business™️ used to make all decisions about what to build and how to build it, shove those requirements down and hope for the best.
Then the industry moved towards Agile development where you put part of the product out and get feedback on it before you build the next part.
There’s a fine art to deciding which bugs to fix win. Most companies I’ve worked with aren’t very good at it to begin with. It’s a special skill to learn and practice
Agile is horrible though. It sounds good in theory but oh my god its so bad.
It’s usually the implementation of Agile that’s bad.
The Manifesto’s organizing principles are quite succinct and don’t include a lot of the things that teams dislike.
We follow these principles: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. Working software is the primary measure of progress. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility. Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
I read somewhere that everyone is bad at their job. When you’re good at your job you get promoted until you stop being good at your job. When you get good again, you get promoted.
I know it’s not exactly true but I like the idea.
I don’t want to get promoted… Once my job isn’t mainly about programming anymore (in a pretty wide sense though), I took a wrong turn in life 😅
They call that the Peter Principle, and there’s at least one Ig Nobel Prize winning study which found that it’s better to randomly promote people rather than promote based on job performance.
I think it’s definitely the majority. The problem is that a lot of tech developments, new language features and Frameworks then pander to this lack of skill and then those new things become buzzwords that are required at most new jobs.
So many things could be got rid of if people would just write decent code in the first place!
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