Asklemmy

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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