Some people here probably disagree but nothing wrong with picking something you’re OK with, pays well, and you’re competent at.

YC and their startups were big perpetrators of the practice and spurred the trend further in software. I'm getting old so I was around for the late 2000's; YC used to con impressionable youths HARD. pg's cult of personality, his bad book, etc... it was all to get smart and passionate kids to overwork for him.

It's easy to look at this type of thing and moan that the MBAs finally won, or start talking about antitrust enforcement and too-big-to-fail. There's some truth to that but it fundamentally seems like a bigger shift where the social contract is broken almost everywhere and cooperation itself is just on the decline. Things are increasingly adversarial between corporations and labor, corporations and consumers, governments and citizens, governments and corporations, and the list goes on.

Not so sure. A generally well-paying professional job? Probably. A deep passion for tinkering and building mechanical things? Not so obvious.

I live in Scandinavia and it's not so much about being taxed the hell out of it, it's more that whatever your profession you will, most likely, have a decent income to live with dignity and some comforts, and getting "rich" by simply working for a FAANG-type/finance company with absurd amounts of bonuses through options/RSUs is not viable.

Also, there are safety nets in place in case you want to risk going self-employed/starting a company with your profession. If you are a carpenter and want to start a small business, failing is ok because you likely won't be homeless or starving.

My feeling is that it's more about income inequality being relatively low while still having enough range that it pays off in case you work with something that requires more extensive training (law, medical, etc.).

I think I've been very lucky to frequently have coworkers that want to do a good job, but what is remarkable is that I've never worked for a company that really wanted to do a good job. Leaders fail upwards, terrible companies often survive and thrive, and thrive even harder when they get more terrible. The product as such is often fake; the customer list is usually the really valuable thing, and the customers themselves cannot leave for whatever reason, because they have no alternatives or are somehow held hostage. Many B2B relationships are completely unnecessary, it's just a tactic for a person at the business to become or remain important. Most CEOs would much rather play power games with mergers and acquisitions than do the comparatively boring work of mastering fundamentals or being innovative in their industries. Some version of this kind of mentality is becoming common for investors and workers too. Real work just gets in the way of looting the corpse and arranging your exit plans.

As narratives become more important than substance at virtually every level of post-manufacturing economic activity in services, and incentive structures are screwed up enough for a long time.. it's sad but not surprising that workers eventually get the "no one else cares, why should I?" attitude.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1513176/the-rise-of-ho...

https://www.pcworld.com/article/443076/idc-hobbyist-programm...

Fast forward 10 years. Stack Overflow conducted a survey and only 5.56% of respondents said they programmed as "hobby" and were not employed as "developers". But 70.4% said they were employed as "developers" but also programmed outside of work as a "hobby".

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/

Perhaps there could be some ambiguity in the term "hobbyist" as applied to computer programming.

For example, my parents were originally musicians but were forced to change careers and became (music) teachers for financial reasons. However, they still practice and perform super often even though they don't make much (or anything) from it. It's kinda people like them that I'm referring to as "true hobbyists".

There is of course a difference in where the remoteness comes from though: is it because the talent is that much in demand that it can just require it?

Or is it because your employer is so cheap, he rather offshores the job to some emerging market, irrespective of the slop[1] he gets?

[1] why EM code might be slop is another topic in itself but let’s just say: Good ppl from EMs don’t need to slave through slopshops

Yeah, this is the real worry. The vast majority of the decision-making people in business are not at all trying to actually decide what is good for the business, they are trying to decide what is good for themselves.

As such it's not "can we effectively and efficiently fire people and replace them with robots and expect the business to continue to exist in a year". Instead it's more like "Can I get a bonus next quarter if I cut costs this quarter?".

People who are sitting around very rationally trying to discuss how much AI is improving or how fast are missing the point I'd say. Powerful people don't think in those kind of terms as far as the ground truth of things. Usually they are more interested in controlling the conversation and seizing initiative. They are happy to blow up the companies / countries / industries they operate in and depend on, because they can always find a way to profit from the chaos.

You can break my balls about having “high standards”, but the reality is our industry is absolutely plagued with MBAs and other non-technical folk who think they know better than we do about things like how we are most productive and how software should be written. It’s a plenty-toxic field made worse by, surprise, MBAs who don’t understand LLMs but have an unfounded belief that they can replace engineers outright (2024-)…. Or MBAs who thought hiring every SWE they possibly could would be a good idea because borrowing money was “basically free” and they could just throw things at the wall to see what stuck and ax the rest (2020-2022).

If being a software engineer means constantly swimming against the current with things like commuting to an office, allowing non-technical people to make architectural decisions, and getting yelled at and cursed at over the phone because an ML model is “only” ~90% accurate…. It’s not the career for me.

So in that sense, absolutely self-employed has been the route for me that has yielded income.

I will add another interesting quirk- he will never admit fault and in written communication tends to "make assertions" and I feel like I have to defend them or the lack of defense means his assertions are correct "in a court of law" - I don't know if I'm describing that well. Basically he has it so ingrained in him never to say anything that may be used against him later, even though obviously I have no intention of suing him now or in the future.

It amounts to a sense of under-appreciation and that I am not respected.

We have a patent together through this project. It's very interesting work that I wouldn't be doing anywhere else. It definitely could be worse.

AI slop often doesn't displace designers because it is used in places you would never buy a design for. If the react feature wouldn't be done without AI... It just wouldn't be done and the business would probably survive.

Every software project has an infinite list of feature requests, bug fixes, etc. The cost of doing the work can shift a lot before it makes sense to start firing people. If there were actually a 100x productivity improvement it might be noticeable, the realistic estimate is closer to 20-30%, maybe 50 if you're writing very simple React exclusively. I think staffing levels is driven more by business/HR constraints than some ticket/worker calculation.

This stuff replaces programmers just like LLMs do, they make the job easier/faster for experts, so you can do more with less.

They also make the job easier for laypeople, but there's specialised tooling for that already, mostly in the form of no code tools. Personally, I'd take an AI generated code base a non-developer whipped up over the no code nightmares I've seen _any_ day. But just like better tooling for experts, better tooling for laypeople isn't a particularly new thing.

The overemphasis on theory was probably justified when CSE program was created. Back then the field was quite new and engineers would often encounter problems that needed deep theoretical knowledge and mathematical modelling capabilities. In networking, compilers, distributed systems, OS, data storage systems etc., So a theoretical grounding was necessary to prepare them to solve those unknown problems.

However that doesn't seem to be the case anymore based on my experience. To build a typical business/consumer application there are well tested architecture patterns available along with technology and libraries.

Of course if one is operating at the bleeding edge (say chip design) then a deep grounding in theory (say physics of optics) is needed. But those are exception and not norm.

My frustration also stems from looking at the syllabus of typical CSE curriculum in India. In first year students learn a little bit of all other fields. Mechanical engineering, civil, electrical and so on. The CS courses start in real earnest from 4th semester. Why not start from CSE subjects right away? Why do they need to learn workings of an internal combustion engine!?

> the problem lies where the people holding the money think they can replace human with computer.

Those with money want to replace human workers with machines. Automation with robots and mechanisation has been happening in other fields (automobile, agriculture, construction...). That it'd happen to SWE was expected, no?

[1] https://vtu.ac.in/pdf/2022syll/csesch.pdf