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.
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
We need to be able to talk about unionizing without fear of repercussions.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
‘Using cloud software will lead to lower costs and a better overall service quality’
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.
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.
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 agree with you wholeheartedly. Before I fully started using Lemmy maybe a month ago, Instagram and my former safe haven Reddit become absolutely toxic. I go from one to another and it’s always people being blown up and comments saying most racist shit ever. People being racist misogynistic and other bs all the time (which can be funny in certain circumstances but not these one) So far I love the Lemmy community I’ve had some actual thought provoking conversation I’ve not had since early Reddit. I pray to get Lemmy never changes to to much in that regard
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.
Tesla doesn’t just make cars. Tesla also makes batteries and photovoltaic panels.
I agree that Tesla is wildly overvalued and treated as a tech stock, but electric cars isn’t the only thing Tesla makes.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
Ok, but can you just whiteboard code me a Fibonacci sequence function.
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.
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:
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
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.
Thoughts on rust? Is it a good programming language to learn as a beginner?
I love Rust but specifically for a beginner it could be challenging. Have you learned any other languages or would it be your first?
I am a python beginner it would probably be a good idea to get better at python before moving onto something like rust. And if rust is so good is there any reason to learn any other low level language like c or c++ unless you are working on a current project that already uses c or c++?
I have only leaned a bit of the Cs, but others have written that learning Rust first is a great way to learn the concepts and best practices of those languages.
A lot of the difficult concepts (pointers, ownership, multi thread concurrency) are shared between all three.
Thats nice to know, thanks.
