The bloody managers are the biggest problem. Most don’t understand code much less the process of making a software product.

So, I've had my eye on management and started doing some management training. The job of management really isn't to do the work itself (or even to understand the work). That's the job of specialists and technical leads. The job of management is to oversee the workforce (hiring, organizing teams, dictating process, allocating project time, planning mid and long term department goals, etc) not to actually get your hands into the work itself.

It's certainly helpful to understand coding broadly speaking. But I'm in an office where we're supporting dozens of apps written and interfaced with at least as many languages. Nevermind all the schemas within those languages. There's no way a manager could actually do my job without months (if not years) of experience in the project itself.

At the same time, the managers should understand the process of coding, particularly if they're at the lower tier and overseeing an actual release cycle. What causes me to pull my hair out is managers who think hand-deploying .dlls and fixing user errors with SQL scripts is normal developer behavior and not desperate shit you do when your normal workflows have failed.

Being in a perpetual state of damage control and thinking that this is normal because you inherited from the last manager is the nightmare.

But at least the bozos at the top get to make the decisions and the cheddar for being ignorant and not listening.

Identifying and integrating new technologies is normal and good managerial behavior.

Getting fleeced by another round of over-hyped fly-by-night con artists time after time after time is not as much.

But AI seems to thread the needle. Its sophisticated and helpful enough to seem useful on superficial analysis. You only really start realizing you've been hoodwinked after you try and integrate it.

Setting aside the absurd executive level pay (every fucking corporate enterprise is just an MLM that's managed to stay cash positive) it does feel like the problem with AI is that each business is forced to learn the lesson the hard way because no business journal or news channel wants to admit that its all shit.

This is the first rule of sales. It is not important or necessary to be the best. It is only necesaary to be slightly less shitty than your nearest competitor.

Man not all are even trying to beat the average!

I've kinda checked out of the private sector for this reason. I've been having a great time working for a government job. Great benefits, union, etc... pay is about 80 percent of what others make but it's more than enough to get by.

In the 2010s, the mindset at tech giants seemed to be that they had to hire the best developers and do everything they could to keep them.

Not really. The mindset was actually to hire skilled developers just to dry up the market, so that their competitors would not have skilled labour to develop their own competing products and services.

Then the economy started to take a turn for the worse, and these same companies noted that not only they could not afford blocking their competitors from hiring people but also neither did their competitors. Twice the reasons to shed headcount.

It was not a coincidence that we saw all FANGs shed people at around the same time.

It’s hilarious when the identified problems come back around to bite the organization, when the priorities have been to work on poorly specc’d features instead.

I don't care what your fancy RAMrod doohickeys say Johnson! We need that system up tomorrow so we can reach our quarterly earning projections for the shareholder's meeting!

I keep seeing a pattern of sre/devops/sysadmin tasks being given back to developers and canning the SREs. Hard to understand why. Then some of the SWE get stuck basically focussing on infra SRE stuff and become unwilling SRE more or less. Circle of life? Do the old devops folks get made into glue or something?

The secret is just to do it anyway. I have yet to work in a job where anyone actively stopped me fixing technical debt, even if they never asked me to do it.

Yeah, that's probably more the issue. We've seen too many times throwaway code become production code because "it works already, we need to move forward".

Can confirm. Was quite unhappy in my mechanical engineering job, had an opportunity to develop something nice in python, was told we'd do it in excel/vba instead, still unhappy.

Every job lately seems to have been infected by Meta/google "data driven" leadership. Its so painful and wasteful sometimes.

If your job can be replaced with GPT, you had a bullshit job to begin with.

This one's funny to me, because the people who WILL try to replace you with GPT don't care if they CAN replace you with GPT. They just will.

Look at how it's haphazardly shoved into everything for no reason whatsoever already.

Automation is always incremental.

I'm an accountant. Components of the job have been being automated or systemised for many decades. Most of the tasks that occupied a graduate when I was one 20 years ago don't exist anymore.

Not because AI is doing those tasks but just because everything became more integrated, we configure and manage the flow of data rather than making the data, you might say.

If you had to hire 100 professional programmers in the past, but then AI makes programmers 10% more efficient than previously, then you can do the same work with 91 programmers.

That doesn't mean that 9 people were doing something that an LLM can do, it just means that more work is being completed with fewer programmers.

Indeed, professional standards and 12h days are not compatible.

Do you have kids? Does your schedule accomodate parenting and chore duties? I feel that after my kid was born, I lost the possibility of having a good night of sleep. And my kid is already older, so I don't have the issue of waking up many times during the night anymore. Even so, just surviving has been difficult.

who is actually stopping them from dealing with it?

Management. Someone in management sets idiotic deadlines, then someone tells you “do X”, you estimate and come up with “it will take T amount of time” and production simply tells you “that’s too long, do it faster”

they don’t care about the details or maintenance

They don’t, they care about time. If there are 6 weeks to implement a feature that requires reworking half the product, they don’t care to know half the product needs to be reworked. They only care to hear you say that you’ll get it done in 6 weeks. And if you say that’s impossible, they tell you to do it anyway

you have to include the cost of managing technical debt

I do, and when I get asked why my time estimations are so long compared to those of other colleagues I say I include known costs that are required to develop the feature, as well as a buffer for known unknowns and unknown unknowns which, historically, has been necessary 100% of the time and never included causing us development difficulties and us running over cost and over time causing delays and quality issues that caused internal unhappiness, sometimes mandatory overtime, and usually a crappy product that the customers are unhappy with. That’s me doing a good job right? Except I got told to ignore all of that and only include the minimum time to get all of the dozens of tiny pieces working. We went over time, over cost, and each tiny piece “works” when taken in isolation but doesn’t really mix with everything else because there was no integration time and so each feature kinda just exists there on its own.

Then we do retrospectives in which we highlight all the process mistakes that we ran into only to do them all again next time. And I get blamed come performance review time because I was stressed and I wasn’t at the top of my game in the last year due to being chronically overburdened, overworked, and underpaid.