5d ago

What opinions about the tech industry do you feel comfortable expressing here, but not in public/at work?

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.

181 comments

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.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  The tech industry is so very capitalistic, so many companies see devs as min max churn machines, tech debt? Nah FEATURES! AI! MODERNITY! That new dev needs to be trained in the basics and best practices? Sorry that's not within scope
- 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.
  
  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 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 😅
  
  The Peter Principle
  
  https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
- maybe not quite a majority
  VAST majority. This is 80-90% of devs.
- 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!

Most of the high visibility "tech bros" aren't technical. They are finance bros who invest in tech.
- Most of them speak the jargon, but can't explain what it means

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
  
  Are you a member? How is it?
  
  We need to be able to talk about unionizing without fear of repercussions.

Tech workers need to unionize
- This is more than self interest, self respecting tech workers would have refused to create our current panopticon-skinnerbox if they weren't at the mercy of the tech lords. Seniority based hiring and firing, that has to be demand number one, number 2 is layoff recall lists 5 years long.

The whole "tech industry" naming is bulllshit, there is more technology let's say in composite used to build an aircraft wing or in a surgerical robots, than in yet another mobile app showing you ads
The whole tech sector also tend to be over evaluated on the stock market. In no world Apple is worth 3 trillion while coca cola or airbus are worth around 200 billions
- More people own an iPhone than an Airbus plane.
  
  If you want apples to apples, why the hell is Tesla, a company that makes under 2m vehicles, have a market cap of 1.4T while Toyota, a company that makes 10 million vehicles a year, has a market cap of 233B. No matter how you look at it, Toyota has better numbers in every way, but Tesla is a tech company as far as the market is concerned.

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

I think most people who actually work in software development will agree with you on those things. The problem is that it's the marketing people and investors who disagree with you, but it's also them who get to make the decisions.
- I took some VC money to build some bullshit and I'll do it again!

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.
- An inability to understand that 'e-mail' doesn't get an S is not how I guessed you work in a lot of Azure.
  
  Few things would make me happier than to never log into an Azure instance ever again lol.
- 100% agree with everything you said. I used to absolutely love technology and the Internet, but I'm definitely feeling a lot less interested in it all as the years go on.
  Being techy I'm often asked to help out with systems / computer related stuff at work, and I just can't for the life of me fathom why we've got 5 different systems all frankensteined together trying to talk to each other, instead of just one fucking system that does it all.
  I learned the other day that our company spent something like 100 million on this prototype system that ended up being totally scrapped. We've now integrated all sorts of AI shite and switched to Microsoft purely because of Copilot, which, i can honestly say is a flaming pile of utter shit that never does what you need it to.
  The whole industry is in shambles at the moment. I wish all this AI and crypto shit would just disappear, along with the majority of programming languages and frameworks, and other bloated bullshit and just take us back to simpler times.

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.

For many real world, day to day tasks, computers and the software that ran on them were faster and easier to use 20 years ago.
- I hate so much that this is true. How did we manage to go so far backwards despite an army of UX designers? Oh wait...
  But seriously it's all this bullshit driven by engagement and weird metrics no one likes. For some reason even our ticketing system at work is built like it's supposed to hold my attention rather than be a purpose-built tool for making my job easier.
  
  And it's because the same designers are building ticketing systems as are building the other apps.
- I was using my school's website the other day and had a similar thought. I remember waiting a similar amount of time for many pages to load back in the dialup days. Why is it so slow to load a page that just shows some text and buttons??

Most IT infra exists solely to justify work that is pointless work.
One if the worst IT sectors is ad tech. The entire industry rationally should not exist.
- Good article on this:
  Advertising is a cancer on society

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

companies don't know how to interview. i don't need someone to walk me through a sorting algorithm. i need someone who will be responsive, and interested in the problems we actually face.
- Also, any number of interviews that is more than one is too many interviews.
  
  not sure i agree with that. I mean ok, i recently had three interviews for a company where each interviewer asked me almost the same questions. That was clearly a waste.
  At my place, we do a 30min introductory call with the boss first, to quickly weed out unfit candidates and not waste employee and interviewee time with interviews. if that's ok, then there's three interviews of 45-60 minutes, one with the product owner that focuses on soft skills and team fit, one with the team your applying to and one with the other team (like frontend or backend) with more technical things, and also just if you'd like to work with this person.
  no amount of interviewing will ever guarantee that things work out and unfit people can slip through cracks. And i hate wasting time in tons of interviews. But i'd also not want to work at a place where i know my coworkers were hired after just 1 hour quick chatting. That so little time to get an idea of a person, to spot any red flags. Heck, the 'tell me a bit about yourself' section of an interview is already 15 minutes and not usually very helpful.

Please stop with the AI pushing. It's a solution looking for a problem, it's a waste in 90% of the cases.

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 lot of what is sold to consumers is straight up shite.

When I was in undergrad I did debate, and a term that was used to describe the debate topics was "a solution in need of a problem". I think that that very often characterizes the tech industry as a whole.
There is legitimately interesting math going on behind the scenes with AI, and it has a number of legitimate, if specialized, use-cases - sifting through large amounts of data, etc. However, if you're an AI company, there's more money to be made marketing to the general public and trying to sell AI to everyone on everything, rather than keeping it within its lane and letting it do the thing that it does well, well.
Even something like blockchain and cryptocurrency is built on top of somewhat novel and interesting math. What makes it a scam isn't the underlying technology, but rather the speculation bubbles that pop up around it, and the fact that the technology isn't being used for applications other than pushing a ponzi scheme.
For my own opinions - I don't really have anything I don't say out loud, but I definitely have some unorthodox opinions.
I think that the ultra-convenient mobile telephone, always on your person at all times, has been a net detriment societally speaking. That is to say, the average iPhone user would be living a happier, more fulfilling, more authentic life if iPhones had not become massively popular. Modern tech too often substitutes genuine real-in-person interactions for online interactions that only approximate it. The instant gratification of always having access to all these opinions at all times has created addictions to social media that are harder to quit than cocaine (source: I have a friend who successfully quit cocaine, and she said that she could never quit instagram). The constantly-on GPS results in people not knowing how to navigate their own towns; if you automate something without learning how to do it, you will never learn how to do it. While that's fine most of the time, there are emergency situations where it just results in people being generally less competent than they otherwise would have been.
For the same reason, I don't like using IDEs. For example when I code in java, the ritual of typing "import javafx.application.Application;" or whatever helps make me consciously aware that I'm using that specific package, and gets me in the headspace. Plus, being constantly reminded of what every single little thing does makes it much easier for me at least to read and parse code quickly. (But I also haven't done extensive coding since I was in undergrad).
Microsoft Office Excel needs to remove February 29th 1900. I get that they have it so that it's backwards compatible with some archaic software from the 1990s; it's an annoying pet peeve.
Technology is not the solution to every problem, and technology can make things worse as much as it can make things better. Society seems to have a cult around technological progress, where any new tech is intrinsically a net good for society, and where given any problem the first attempted solution should be a technological one. But for example things like the hyperloop and tesla self-driving cars and so forth are just new modern technology that doesn't come anywhere near as close to solving transportation problems as just implementing a robust public transit network with tech that's existed for 200 years (trains, trolleys, busses) would.
- For the same reason, I don't like using CLIs.
  IDEs?
  
  Yes, my bad, I get all the TLAs mixed up.
- I'm interested in reading more about coding java without an IDE, what's your usual workflow? Do you use maven or gradle or something else? Are there solutions or scripts you use to make up for some functionality of an IDE?

Neither Python nor JavaScript should be the primary language used in any production back end.
- Javascript I understand, but why Python?
  
  I don't agree with Akareth fully, but I'd argue it's difficult to write correct code at scale without static typing.
- Out of interest, why?
- https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript

I truly believe that innovating the internet is really running in place. Might be just me but I can't think of anything we can really do, to 'evolve' it. We're doing everything that we've been doing in the past three decades, but it's only just been more accessible and the speeds faster (depending where you are). But we're not actually moving the needle when it comes to progressing the internet as a whole.
And I see it this way as to why. We've experienced two big booms in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, with Web 1.0 being what some consider the Wild West of the internet. Web 2.0 is basically the great social media bubble that has blossomed for years. We're not doing anything new or different now than we did back in 2007. Every new social media platform that comes out is recycling the exact same things as many before it presented. I truly think we stopped evolving the internet the day we managed to get messengers onto phones when phones were developing and it's only been perfected by the age of the first wave of smartphones.
So I just think with all of this AI stuff, this "Web 3.0" I've been hearing about for a few years now, the Metaverse .etc are all just gimmicks. Gimmicks of shitty ideas coming from the wrong people that should be practicing said ideas, all saying that they're innovating the internet when all that they're doing is just taking advantage of the internet for themselves. All within political theater of course.
- What about Sir Tim Berners-Lee's SoLiD (social linked data)? I mean, I guess it only (or mainly) pertains to data, and doesn't necessarily change the web itself
  
  I briefly worked with Solid at a nonprofit, passing around turtle files and whatnot. It's a cool bit of tech that kind of harkens back to the days before JSON took over. Much more secure in theory too, it just would need the entire infrastructure of the web to change around the paradigm for it to really take off...but yeah its a cool idea akin in some ways to the fediverse.

MOBILE USERS CAN GO FUCK THEMSELVES.
Phew. That felt good.
- Only one in this thread willing to talk about the real problems.

The Microsh*t Office Suit is atrocious — both from a Software Dev and ordinary user perspective. Literally any alternative is better, Libre Office, Google Office, etc.
Word is bloated, slow, impractical, bad for collaboration, and politically dubious. Teams is buggy, impractical, also politically dubious, and lacks many basic features. At this point, I literally despise Microsoft. Also Windows really seems to be unusable, from the enlightened perspective of a Mac or Linux user (in my case the latter).
SystemD is bloated and stopping Linux from getting faster.
Most mainstream programming languages suck, Rust being the exception.
Alright, I'm done ;)
Edit: any website that breaks because of uBlock Origin medium mode is poorly made and not trustworthy. /endrant
- There is two types of languages, ones people removed about, and ones nobody uses.
- Thoughts on rust? Is it a good programming language to learn as a beginner?
  
  Fuck no. A beginner learning base concepts like arrays, conditionals, loops, variables, functions, etc. should use something much less punishing like Python. It's much easier to iterate, to understand your mistakes, and to learn from others when you use a simpler language.
  When you're ready to learn about pointers, memory management, etc. then you can take on Rust.
  
  I love Rust but specifically for a beginner it could be challenging. Have you learned any other languages or would it be your first?
- Hardly controversial I would say.
  
  The systemd take is goofy, but everything regarding Microsoft is spot on. Teams is an eldritch horror.
  
  My office forces everyone to use Microsoft (there's a lot of Mac and Windows users), and whenever I complain, people get pissed at me. God knows why.
  As for SystemD, I think a lot of people think it's fine and people like me are exaggerating. I guess that's fine, but non-systemD systems (Void Linux being my favorite) are so much faster, it's unbelievable.
  And then there's a lot of generic language programmers and business owners, who are very willing to defend their income source. Like everyone I know. (I'm really dying here; I gotta find a cool Rust or LISP company)
  As for uBO, it's a "progress" thing. If using masses of third parties and trackers makes stuff more innovative (not to mention laggy), then it's good, they claim.
  I'm happy to hear that Lemmy shares my opinion though, that's a little comforting :)
- What sucks the most about rust is that 90% of rust jobs are some crypto bullshit. I love the language, but finding normal jobs is near impossible.
  At the same time, i could find 20 Go positions but Go just isn't exciting. It's the new java imo, working with it probably good for job security, but i just don't see myself working in Go in the future as a main language.

At least half of the people working in tech shouldn't be. They have 0 clue what they're doing and that's dangerous. And far to many people solve everything with a golden hammer.
You don't need a Mac to work in IT. Especially if all your doing is ansible.
Ansible sucks. It's slow, it's limited, it gives a false sense of understanding to do many. I mean it's nice that it's a structured playground for some folks I suppose. But there are better tools that do the exact same thing. Or you could just write a proper script.
- People and I've been beaten over the head with it too, were marketed to believe that to make it successfully in life is to go with tech. The problem is that most of the people didn't begin with the chops to even understand tech to begin with and yet they try. That's why you see these people working in tech when they shouldn't be. Some are in tech because they got the obvious leg-up, word in about them through a friend which is common. And usually they're managing departments or sectors of tech that they have absolutely no grasp of but they're there for the gravy train of money because working in tech is where some big money is.
  
  Ive been programming as a hobby before I got a degree in game programming last year. I applied to as many companies as I could, for 6 months, before my funds ran dry. I was forced to go back to min wage.
  I've seen people program, and I've seen people "program". People who "program" do it 10 times faster than someone who takes the time to solve the problem and build a modular solution that scales.
  Who is the company going to hire, the person who fixes it fastest, or the person who fixes it right?
  I'm using my degree to seek a new career. I love programming, but I can't fight the industry.
- I def disagree about ansible... Because it's impossible to write a "proper script" without making a whole lot of repetitive things, that ansible handles.
  It is slow though, and agent-based configuration management, imo, is better for mandating configurations. ie, puppet, for example.
  I agree with the rest, though :)

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.

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.
- Well, this scenario COULD result in the fabled Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, where machines take care of most of the labor and the benefit of this is shared among everyone. But more likely, most of the benefit of this will be given to a select few.
  
  Shoot for the FALGSC, fall amongst the CyberpunkDystopia.
  War will be automated too. That's going to be "fun" too. Not even Star Trek skipped that part.

It's one of the reasons I enjoy working on open source. Sure the companies that pay the bills for that maintenance might not be the ones you would work for directly but I satisfy myself that we are improving a commons that everyone can take advantage of.
- I told my lib colleague about how many software creators provide their stuff and its source code for free and he could barely get why; I also told him historically many nations just left their research and findings available publicly for people to learn from and he can't grasp why that was either.
  He does truly believe the profit motive is the only (best?) way to advance science.
  
  Yes and no. A lot of the projects I work on the majority of the engineers are funded by companies which have very real commercial drivers to do so. However the fact the code itself is free (as in freedom) means that everyone benefits from the commons and as a result interesting contributions come up which aren't on the commercial roadmap. Look at git, a source control system Linus built because he needed something to maintain Linux in and he didn't like any of the alternatives. It solved his itch but is now the basis for a large industry of code forges with git at their heart.
  While we have roadmaps for features we want they still don't get merged until they are ready and acceptable to the upstream which makes for much more sustainable projects in the long run.
  Interestingly while we have had academic contributions there are a lot more research projects that use the public code as a base but the work is never upstreamed because the focus is on getting the paper/thesis done. Code can work and prove the thing they investigating but still need significant effort to get it merged.

IT reconversions are bullshit and dangerous to the industry. Everyone and their grandma are becoming "programmers". We're in the "fuck around" phase, the "find out" will be explosive. Companies are inundating themselves with these "reconverted" juniors and doing soft-layoffs to seniors..
crypto, Blockchain and AI are just bs to make a quick buck out of investors. They are truly disastrous to the environment
If you use chatgpt et al. I'll look down on you from a technical competence level
marketing and middle management are mostly useless. A good, and small, sales+marketing team is very effective but the moment they start growing they start to degenerate pretty fast into BS world and imposing company culture
- If you use chatgpt et al. I'll look down on you from a technical competence level
  Eh, I have to say I find it quite usefull sometimes for brainstorming solutions. It is esentially a rubber duck that answers and sometimes gives good ideas.
  Of course the answers are often bullshit, but they can sometimes point you in the right direction/to the right words to google.
  (All of this ignoring the enviromental problems ofc.)
- Phhht....AI rocks. Nobody else tells me "you're absolutely right, I'm very sorry for any inconvenience caused" in every sentence. They make me feel so smart.
  /s, obviously.
- If you use chatgpt el al. I’ll look down on you from a technical competence level
  If someone asks "But using google is the same", no they are not the same. Chatgtp is a toddler which has been force-fed information and is rewarded if the generated answer statistically makes sense. Google, or any search engine, points to a page where actual humans have discussed about the problem. They can also be wrong, but you can see the thought process of the individuals, and sometimes you can even ask the experts directly. It's a very different experience.
  
  You can also ask chatgpt its thought process and it's very easy to sniff out when it's hallucinating something. It's an incredibly useful tool and I really don't know anyone in tech that doesn't use it.
  
  Google searches have become increasingly worthless over time. I find it depressingly difficult to find things now.
  Considering grabbing a sub on one of the paid search engines like Kagi: the search actually works.

So Just for context I work as an engineer but I consider myself pretty low level. I am completely self taught as I sort of flunked out of college and didn't pay much attention anyway. I've just been the sort of person who takes everything apart and tinkers around to figure things out or reads documentation. So I am not some genius programmer or anything. However what I have noticed over the span of my ( 40 + years ) is that the Internet and technology used to be a challenge but rewarding. Things were skewed towards creativity, sharing, community, and knowledge. I remember spending lots of time on forums like Usenet and later bulletin boards of various types. I remember when Wikipedia first became a thing and it really seemed to me that we were going to get this amazing platform to learn and self teach just about any subject imaginable. Then somehow the Internet just became an endless fucking scroll farm. My dumbass uncles and older family members who used to be content with just eating aerosol cheese while channel surfing got online and became complete fools. Instead of creativity and debate we just have endless AI slop, morons reacting to videos of nothing, Bots, and click bait. It seems like the industry just loves it because before they could barely figure out how they could make money off of this crap and now they have it figured out "turn everyone into fucking zombies". People at work are at times blown away at my stamina to work through problems and it's like bro I used to sleep next to my 486 so I could put in disk 20 of 50 to install something and it would take like all friggin night. I used to have to find a dude that got a catalog so I could get a CPU upgrade or part because there was no internet. I used to have to fight for every damn piece of documentation or software I could get my hand on. Now it's all right there and people have decided to watch Tik Tok instead of being able to do anything on their own. We screwed the hell up the Internet and tech has made people lazy, less capable, and focused on instant gratification. It was supposed to make us curious, creative, and engaged. Now with AI we are like "hmm how can I even be lazier?". I would get if they used AI to help solve really complex problems reserved that compute and stuff to assist on certain things that humans are not good at. However we are using this shit to just circumvent having to think and a substitute for community. Why ask a friggin bot when all the answers were in forums where you could interact with people make friends and learn? Now I am looking down the barrel of the gun of being replaced in the next 5 years or so going, Great so this shit which was "my thing" the only damn thing I was ever good at or interested in is going to be taken away from me because of some lazy ass people who just want to watch Tik Tok all day? -End rant.
- I 1000% agree with this sentiment and to be honest im similar (except engineering EE srufent) and I was managing the world fine with all the increased algorithm and whatnot till COVID hit. I went from immensely internet literate and techy to depressed and stuck on social media all the time from waking up to sleeping I'll check Instagram (even tho I avoided tiktok for that same reason) honestly I still struggle with this, cause social media is more toxic, pain, and mind destroying then ever before. I hope I can cut this addiction before it's too late
  
  This is why I love lemmy so much. The only people here are people who have realised that mainstream social media is a steaming pile of trash and came hear to find a nice community.
- I don't think it's really uncomfortable to say but whatever.
  There used to be a digital social contract that we were all stewarding a global information database. That was before the era of "inflluencers" and information arbitrage. In other words people deriving monetized content from other content. Why would anyone want to do the leg work for some random jerk to take all for personal gain.
  The whole proposition is a negative spiral. The paradigm changed from stewardship to something shit. This scroll zombie thing or whatever. We have the few users who are the "creators". Everyone else are consuming whatever is fed to them. It has discouraged people from thinking for themselves and maybe even adding something to the pot.
  One thing I've noticed the git repo snipers. People will camp on forks looking at your work. If you don't submit to upstream then someone else will copy your patch(es) and make a pull request.
  Also more generally things I do that I don't publish to posts/blogs is liable to be sniped. So might as well keep it to myself unless I'm will to go the full mile making a big show of staking ownership.
- I would argue that people you are describing enjoying Tik Tok and being too lazy to look stuff up themselves, are not really engineers. You could also frame it as, information technology got so mainstream, even people with no technical background whatsoever are part of it. Engineers and tech nerds still exist, but they are a minority now.
  
  Engineers aren't the only people who should want to learn and look stuff up right? Everyone should want to learn. And tiktok is just not the way to do it at all. I think it's wild how many people "learn" from platforms like tiktok and tell it to others like it's a fact without doing any extra research.

'Using cloud software will lead to lower costs and a better overall service quality'

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.

It's all trash. Everything normal people use on a daily basis is pure dumpster fire level garbage with massive, HEINOUS, unforgivable amounts of tracking built in.
They know all of this. They just don't care.

Software dev tools and process are so convoluted and unnecessary. We need to find a happy medium between sites being published via FTP uploads like before and the CI/CD madness of today. And there’s too many tooling options available. It’s caused a huge amount of disparity between options. Look at the JavaScript ecosystem for example.
- The abortion known as Terraform is a great example of what you mean.
  
  Meh, I don't think Terraform was so bad. I mean, I wouldn't vote to use it all the time. But I didn't mind it.

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'm a writer and my work is increasingly making me use AI to do things. I'm 98% sure I'm just training this thing to replace me at this point, and am planning accordingly.
- I really don't get the use of AI to replace creative roles. At worst I've used it as a sort of "lorem ipsum" generator but for various placeholders. I think AI's true value is in understanding the sometimes overwhelming amount of documents, records, datasets and databases that organizations can amass. Being able to have an AI help sift through the garbage is real helpful actually.
  I've seen governments using it to do things like handle access-to-information type requests or help patent examiners find relevant patents: those uses make a lot of sense.

My opinion on tech is that there are cool things being done that do one shiney thing, but everyone disregards the shit it produces behind the scenes. Blookchain is an awesome concept, the whole chain depends on all the other parts of it, but the fact that in order to use it, you have to download the whole thing in several systems. The size of a single will grow so large, only a few companies will be able to analyze it at scale. And AI is a huge joke. Nobody should be celebrating generative AI. A ton of computing power that is dangerous to our eco system, and it's all trained on shady material. Nobody is doing anything significant about the power consumption, just coming up with agencies to help companies use AI properly. It's all a joke. Most of our most influencial technologies are just someone asking how to make big bucks off something comes else created for free.

There are some highly intelligent, very dangerous people out there, and 95% of companies will be incapable of stopping them. Most people, across all industries, are too slow, uneducated, lazy or just uncaring enough that no amount of training or tools will fix it.

Most programmers suck ass, including myself
- Fair, but it's also just a way of saying that programming isn't a task for humans. (At least not in the correctness aspect)
  
  Partially, it’s not really a job for computers either

The proliferators of theftbox technology and everyone who ups it/demands it for my career's advancement deserves to get put on an upturned pike, chest-first. To me it's like being a battle rapper: like a battle rapper better not EVER be relying on ghostwriters for their bars, if you need CoPilot to code, you don't deserve to call yourself a programmer; and I was an artist first-- so I don't see any of this LLM bullshit as anything more than tricknology that robbed me and everybody I consider my actual peers (which is to say, not the theftbox touchers).
I'd rather see a journeyman programmer cracking open the books they taught themselves out of than see them turning to CoPilot.
- I’ve introduced my coworkers to the concept of the “copilot pause” where you stop typing and your brain turns off while you wait for copilot to make a suggestion. Several of them can’t unsee it now and have stopped using copilot.
  
  Several of them can’t unsee it now and have stopped using copilot.
  Gigabased; you're doing God's honest work with that

I’m personally very conflicted between my love of computers and the seeming necessity of conflict minerals in their construction. How much coltan is dug up every year just to be shoved into an IoT device whose company will be defunct in six months, effectively bricking the thing? Even if the mining practices were made humane, they wouldn’t be sustainable. My coworkers are very cool for tech workers. Vague anticapitalist sentiments. Hate Elon. But I don’t think they’re ready for this conversation.
- How much coltan is dug up every year just to be shoved into an IoT device whose company will be defunct in six months, effectively bricking the thing?
  Man, there's a lot of this. But what really gets me going is electronics that are actually made to be disposable. Motherfuckers hitting a vape with a little LCD screen then littering it. No hope.

rabbits in skinner boxes pressing two buttons for a treat is not a far cry from tech workers sitting in cublices pressing 104 buttons for paycheck nor internet users doing it for imaginary internet points.

Commercial freebie tech turns us into short-sighted muppets and pulls apart the fabric of society

Ah, the upside of being autistic. I'll say anything i believe is true at work or here.
- You don't need to be autistic to do that.
  Wait a second...

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.

Blockchain is a joke
CI/CD and a lot of container fuckery is entirely unnecessary for like 80-90% of orgs
The jobs AI will eliminate are managerial and their hustle to implement it will their own death sentence

It will create a fully autonomous and self sufficient robot army one day and the 1% will genocide the working class with said army after our labor is no longer needed.

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.

I don't feel comfortable sharing any personal opinions at work. The workplace is somewhere one should arrive, work, go home, not somewhere to share opinions and in doing so make potential enemies or risk your position.
Why do I care if my colleagues know my opinion on X or Y? It changes nothing about my life or theirs, we're not even friends, just colleagues, or work friends at best.
Anyway yeah, that's just my thoughts :-)

The job of a software developer should be regulated like a job of a lawyer/doctor/real engineer, that is a requirement of a degree/formal training and a professional society
- lawyer/doctor/real engineer
  We are all just wage slaves subject to the same economic conditions. Professional regulation is a charade to provide air of legitimacy for these professionals so peasants feel a bit more at easy.
  Out do the three engineers have most integrity IMHO since gravity is a removed yo
  
  I used it as an example of jobs that require credentials and have a professional society where those workers are organized and have ethical rules governing their jobs (even if they're very frequently ignored)

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.
Can you please expand on this and help me out here?
I’m coming across people who are true believers in crypto and while I insist it’s a scam and it’s destroying the fucking planet, they go down the rabbit hole into places I can’t follow because I’ve literally not had the interest nor desire to read up on crypto.
They keep saying that what’s really destroying the planet is the existing financial system with all of the logistics involved with keeping it up as opposed to the cryptofarms adding to the demand on the electric grid. They say that is the goal, to replace the existing financial energy demand with crypto but again, it’s only added to it. Another talking point is that in the case of global climate catastrophe there will be pockets of electricity and cryptoservers somewhere on the planet and that while crypto will remain all the other financial systems will disappear
They also seem to somehow think it’s the fix to workplace bureaucracy somehow and everything in sight
Please impart some knowledge.
- Bitcoin and all similar crypto were intentionally designed to be self deflating, it won't replace finance, it's speed running the same problems. The reason almost every country on earth switched to fiat/self inflating currencies is that the best way to invest a deflating currency is to stash it and forget about it.
  
  Please explain like I’m a bean

Advertising passed that point a long time ago. Practically everyone is alienated as a result

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.

I'm not verbose today but let me just get intro into my thoughts that I grew up in the 3rd world and then moved to Australia in my late 30s, and I think I had a better life where I grew up instead of where you are. The capitalism periphery has downsides but at least quality of life is minimally compatible with logic.
I've seen bigger concentration of power in my home country, but it still blows my mind how your country didn't get a revolution along side with rights movement decades ago when the momentum was there, and things are going down very fast since then. For you people I mean.
Your country is a cancer to the world democracy. Yes ussr was also a demon, and Russia is trying hard to match. Everybody else want you both to sink.
Economy like history is written by the victors.
Insert usual rant that your country doesn't even have a proper name..
Yep that's my short version. You should see me when I'm worked up by what evil CIA has done all around.

I don't get the term 'technical debt'. Most people seem to use it to say "We took shortcuts previously, so now we need to go back and do things properly".
FIrst, it's a bad metaphor. You take on debt to invest in long term things that will provide future benefits. Telling the bean counters that you need to stop working on useful features to 'pay back technical debt' is not making things clearer to them.
Second, you write software, what the heck are you talking about? Compare to civil engineering. If an area gets busier and the existing narrow wood bridge is no longer suitible, engineers don't say "Wow what idiots built this road with no eye to future growth?" It was built with the needs and resources of the time. To improve it, the bridge needs to be closed, demolished, and rebuilt with planning, labour and materials.
Instead software is empherial. You don't need to demolish what's there. No need to build temporary alternative infrastructure. No need for new materials and disposal of the old. It's just planning and labour to redo a piece of software. It always seems so whiny when people complain about technical debt, as if switching to a different build system is anywhere close to the difficulty of fixing real life; replacing lead pipes with copper for an entire city, or removing asbestos from buildings.

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