Technical debt is the number one cause of developer frustration. Working with imperfect systems demoralizes programmers, making it difficult to do quality work.
I’d wager not being given time to tackle technical debt is indeed frustating…
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.
Seen a lot of that too. Execs who thinks all the devs are idiots and would be lost without their genius guidance, phoned in from a luxury remote location while all of us have to return to the office full time. Then stuff fails and we “pivot” to the next badly thought out fiasco. I guess it pays the bills.
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.
My boss legit says that he will give me some time to work on it every 2-3 months and then drops a “customer requires X feature and I promised that we will deliver in one week”. And mind you we have to patch up to 3 major versions in the past to back port the new feature because client haven’t upgraded and won’t in near future… which means sometimes our major releases are 60-70% same as our minor patches for old versions. Semvering much?
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?
Do the old devops folks get made into glue or something?
If i interpreted the “trend” correctly, “devops” was bastardized away from its original meaning to now mean “sysadmin”, at least in most cases.
Yeah. A “DevOps” is just a “sysadmin” who can pretend they don’t hate all developers for stretches of 20 minutes at a time. (I’m kidding. I know our SysAdmins love us… In their own secret ways.)
i interpreted the “trend” correctly, “devops” was bastardized away from its original meaning to now mean “sysadmin”, at least in most cases.
I don’t think I agree. The role of a sysadmin involved a lot of hand-holding and wrangling low-level details required to keep servers running. DevOps are something completely different. They handle specific infrastructure such as pipelines and deployment scripts, and are in the business of not getting in the way of developers.
“Devops” original intent meant you don’t have a separate “operations” department separate from teams “developing” your product / software due to competing incentives. “Dev” wants to push new stuff out faster; “ops” wants to keep things stable. Or “dev” needs more resources; but “ops” blocks or doesn’t scale the same. The idea was to combine both “dev” and “ops” people onto projects to balance these incentives.
Then managers and cloud clowns repurposed it to apply to every person in a project so now every member is expected to perform both roles (badly). Or even more overloaded to somehow refer to “developer infrastructure” teams.
There’s a lot of like management being like “we gotta hit this deadline (that we made up)” combined with “if I hit all my targets and put in some overtime, the boss can buy another sports car this year”
I don’t want to work extra to make someone else richer. Maybe if I had a shit load of shares. Maybe. But I don’t. So I do my job with professional standards, but I’m not doing 12 hour days
So, roughly 20% of developers have found the right mix of self-medication?
Will AI steal their jobs? 70% of professional programmers don’t see artificial intelligence as a threat to their work.
If your job can be replaced with GPT, you had a bullshit job to begin with.
What so many people don’t understand is that writing code is only a small part of the job. Figuring out what code to write is where most of the effort goes. That, and massaging the egos of management/the C-suite if you’re a senior.
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.
Yep! And we’re in the big tech era, so it can also be:
Business fails to produce any value and uses it’s influence to prevent the next business from popping up.
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.
To add on this, this doesn’t necessarily mean that there are fewer programing jobs in total. If people work 10% more efficently, that means that the cost of labor is only 91% of what it was before meaning that people might be able to afford to finance more programing projects. One thing that does matter is for example things like entry level jobs disappearing or the nature of the work changing. Doing less boring gruntwork can make the job more fun, but otoh digitization sometimes results in the worker having less agency in what they do since they have to fit everything into a possibly inflexible digital system.
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.
You’ve nailed to root of the misunderstanding by non-programmers. We’re already optimized past that target.
Some people think we type all day. We don’t. We stare at our screen saying “what the fuck?!” for most of the day. Those is especially true for the best programmers doing really interesting work.
There’s maybe three living humans who actually know how to correctly build a Windows installer. One of those three is paid to sell software to automate the task for everyone else. The other two retired already. (One is hiding out as a bar tender and claims to not speak any English if recognized from their MSI days.)
Pick an interesting topic in programming, and you’ll find similarly ludicrous optimization.
There’s a few hundred programmers building all banking automation, selling it to millions of bank employees.
It’s possible that AI will force a dozen people to stop doing banking automation. It’s a lot more likely that the backlog of unmet banking automation need will instead just get very slightly smaller.
Now, the reality of the economics won’t stop CIOs from laying off staff and betting that AI will magically expand to fill the gap. We’re seeing that now. That’s called the “fuck around” phase.
But we’ve seen “this revolutionary technology will make us not need more programmers” before (several times). The outcomes, when the dust settles are:
- The job is now genuinely easier to do, at least for beginners. (Senior professionals had access to equivalent solutions, before everyone else got excited.)
- More people are now programmers. (We laid a bunch of them off, and we meant to not hire any back, but it turned out that our backlog of cool/revolutionary/necessary ideas was more important to leadership than pinching pennies.)
- A lot of work that was previously ignored completely now gets done, but done very badly by brand new programmers. (We asked the senior developers to do it, but they said “Fuck you, that’s not important, make the new kid do it.” I think they’re just still cranky that we spent three years laying off staff instead of training…)
- The average quality of all software is now a bit worse, but there’s a lot more variety of (worse) software now available.
But that is always happening. Software that now can be built by two programers needed IBM few decades ago, just because of hardware, languages, available libraries and shared knowledge.
But we still have so many “app ideas” that there is more work to be done. I would be happy to have AI write all those apps that I need and have no time or money to make them.
My conclusion is that it is only about money and economy. We are in unofficial recession so everyone is cutting costs, as soon as money comes back we will go back into bulking/exploration phase.
If all you bring to the job is looking shit up and telling me yes or no instead of actually trying to help me find solutions, or explaining me what I did wrong, you’re just a glorified robot. You’re in line for replacement and you’ll fucking deserve it. At least that’s what I wanna say to “the computer said” people.
I would say 80% of employees are unhappy, but I don’t have any data to back this up.
80% seems too high, but the US Surgeon General declared a loneliness epidemic https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
And Gallup claims that 29% of Americans have been diagnosed with depression at one point: https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-new-highs.aspx
So… That is not good. It is almost like humans evolved to live in tight knit, walkable communities.
And Gallup claims that 29% of Americans have been diagnosed with depression at one point:
That really doesn’t mean anything. The only requirement for succumbing to a depression is being alive, because all it takes is something bad happening in your life (loss lf friend, loved one, even pet, etc) to fall into a pit of despair.
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.
It’s cloud based though… Not ideal. I get why they had to do that (they didn’t want to expose people to the Python infra shit show) but it’s still kind of a shame.
Would be better if they added Typescript support IMO.
was told we’d do it in excel/vba instead, still unhappy.
I just threw up in my mouth a little. Fifteen years ago, “I’ll stick to Excel” was a (bad, but) defensible position in data automation. Today that’s just insanity.
I’m still in a mechanical engineering world so just saying INT and FLOAT has people running away. Excel is the “safe zone” for them, sadly it means that I’ll just be doing the VBA part and oh gawd please get me out of here…
Every job lately seems to have been infected by Meta/google “data driven” leadership. Its so painful and wasteful sometimes.
Yeah. I, like most leaders, spent some time learning all that crap. It was awful and worse than useless.
Google and Meta’s secrets are recruiting top talent to for top dollars, and then buying every start up that threatens their empire. There’s no secrets to great management to be had there.
I just threw out my copy of “product engineering at Google”.
20 years ago it was the people who worshipped Jack Welch, not realizing (or not caring) that he was running GE into the ground.
Every job lately seems to have been infected by Meta/google “data driven” leadership. Its so painful and wasteful sometimes.
It’s cargo cult mentality. They look at FANGs and see them as success stories, and thus they try to be successful by mimicking visible aspects of FANG’s way of doing things, regardless of having the same context or even making sense.
I once interviewed for a big name non-FANG web-scale service provider whose recruiter bragged about their 7-round interview process. When I asked why on earth they need 7 rounds of interviews, the recruiter said they optimized the process down from the 12 rounds of interviews they did in the past, and they do it because that’s what FANGs do. Except FANGs do typically 4, with the last being an on-site.
But they did 7, because FANGs. Disregard “why”.
