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”
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
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.
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.
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.
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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…
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crypto, Blockchain and AI are just bs to make a quick buck out of investors. They are truly disastrous to the environment
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If you use chatgpt et al. I’ll look down on you from a technical competence level
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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 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
IT is slowly starting to get regulated like a real engineering field and that’s a good developement.
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.
