- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
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Even in this day and age, when furniture is being mass-produced, there is still a niche for those who create furniture by hand, without the use of assembly lines and CNC.
The same goes for software development.
The downside is that you need to become the creative, the “ideas man” that can come up with that bespoke solution that AI can never truly provide. And you likely have to do it on your own, or if you are lucky, in a small company whose entire identity relies on bespoke solutions and high-quality, high-cost work.
The vast majority of software developers will never be able to make that jump, just like how hundreds of thousands of furniture-makers in the early 20th century, across North America, were also unable to make that jump. Those turning out bespoke furniture today represent an almost-unmeasurable rounding error compared to the same numbers of craftsman a century ago.
But they still exist. They can still make a living. And so can software developers with the right skills and attitudes.
I was a developer and then manager for 16 years before I saw what the industry was becoming and left, almost a year ago now.
I used to be excited about the work I was doing, solving tough problems and working/managing great people.
Unfortunately, like every company, we had mass layoffs and AI tooling mandated.
My very last year there was me just depressed while trying to keep morale up for the team I was left with (which is almost impossible if you can’t support the company).
The good news is, after I left I’ve made a horizontal shift to starting my own Indie game company. Obviously that has tons of risks and it’s own problems, but it’s been a breath of fresh air to work how I want to work, with a hope I can build a company and run it how I want to (which is not forcing AI tooling down everyone’s throats).
I suspect I’m not the only engineer who’s left to set up their own business over the past year, on the premise they want to start something small, with a healthy culture that they can hire engineers into.
I appreciate it’s not much of a lifeline, but over time I reckon you’ll see a correction with smaller companies starting up, who do engineering right and can set disruptive cultures that draw all the exceptional and clever engineers to come work with them.
I’ve just seen a draft PR with 60k lines added.
No, I’m not OK.
And I’ll definitely go: TL;DR , I refuse to take any responsibilities about this.
If I could make 70% as much in a different field, I would have switched by now.
I no longer enjoy my field as a profession. There is no “solving” anything anymore, it’s just prompting a bot and building tools that make it better and better at replacing me. But the reality is, without pursuing a masters in a different field, this is the most money I can make for the lowest amount of work. The field is dying and in the mean time we’re taking home standard salaries.
Personally I’m pursuing a fintech specialty since IMO specializing is our last hope to survive the AI destruction. But I don’t enjoy it.
I’d say tech workers in general are not doing okay. I quit my sysadmin job 3 years ago and have been desperately trying to switch careers.
I moved from sysadmin to technical pre-sales a few years ago and I’m happy with the move. Though honestly I enjoyed being a sysadmin as well - from my experiences it’s more the work environment and the collegues than the actual work you do that makes or breaks a job.
Really?
Because nearly each time I point out that software has been getting so bad that I legitimately can’t go more than 1 day without wild bugs in everyday software that was fine 6 years ago, I’m surrounded by 17 AI bros screeching about how “umm actually I’m way more productive and AI has found 6,500 issues in this code and that’s great!”
Yea what’s not great is when they use AI to “patch” the vulnerabilities.
You ever try to go back in basically any industry and figure out what the fuck the last person at a job site did?
Now imagine that, except instead of intuitively being able to figure some things out because human thought is at least a base to start from, you have no fucking clue what the AI was thinking.
AI is also a massive shortcut that tugs your dick anytime you use it.
Humans can’t be trusted to not optimize every little thing, and AI is taking advantage of that.
I genuinely pine for a time when it was hand coded and I’m tired of pretending this is better
Thing is, the ones who use ai to code large segments of code, don’t usually know how it works in sufficient detail. Even the block diagram is done by ai with little oversight. The fix is simply to ask the ai to do over.
I ask the bizfolks: would YOU allow a guy in a suit with no prior engineering knowledge, but with an ai design the structural elements for a bridge for thousands of vehicles a day? So why would you allow that when developing software that is critical for handling your enterprise data and finances?
would YOU allow a guy in a suit with no prior engineering knowledge, but with an ai design the structural elements for a bridge for thousands of vehicles a day?
I know people who would get an instant boner from that idea and be the first in line to drive over it
I ask the bizfolks: would YOU allow a guy in a suit with no prior engineering knowledge, but with an ai design the structural elements for a bridge for thousands of vehicles a day?
They would allow it. The difference is that our societies decided that liability for builders of bridges is a sensible thing and nonnegotiable, but for reasons unknown to me you can release any piece of crappy software to the public without any liability whatsoever as long as you tack on it some terms and conditions that absolve you of warranty and liability. This is unthinkable with all other commodities. When it comes to software, the people in charge turn off their brains.
I ask the bizfolks: would YOU allow a guy in a suit with no prior engineering knowledge, but with an ai design the structural elements for a bridge for thousands of vehicles a day?
For less money in less time with no liability? Yes, without hesitation.
I feel like this is the difference between the people who became developers for the craft and developers who became one just for the job
If you’re just doing it as a job, you tend to just want to get stuff done, as long as it works
If you became one for the art of the craft, you now feel the things described in the post. You don’t create anymore, you just delegate and code review. The LLM code might even be perfectly fine. But you don’t create, and it’s just tiring
Im a data janitor at my job. Theres no real love for stuff I make for the job. Sure I do a good job, but I dont pretend im making anything other than take data here -> clean it up -> put data new place half the time.
One thing LLMs have done is balloon the amount of projects that exist. Once a proof of concept is made, iterating on an AI project becomes a bit harder than normal, since your not the one who made the initial product. Also management often wants it out NOW rather than waiting on unsloppifying anything.
And management has now had a couple of years moving peoples jobs to an AI project. Which means ironically im doing MORE work since there is just more code all over the place. And AI is starting to get expensive per token… So they are hiring again haha.
Meanwhile at my house, ive been playing around with my open source ebook reader without any AI involvement. Its fun to make a small change and look at it from all angles. Small changes to make something for me.
Exactly.
And it’s not just programming, it’s in every career, artistry, journalism, etc.
When barriers are extremely low, one side effect is you no longer have the passionate people as easily rise to the top.
You have a shit load of people with surface level or worse understandings of things in charge.
See the following:
Parts of Hollywood from studios to directors, nepotism and mbas nearly ruined cinema.
Gaming companies often sell out to go public or allow themselves to be bought by soulless corps, this often but not always goes very very wrong.
The music industry is RIFE with plants, nepotism, and absolute garbage music.
Now programming is opened to the masses.
And you even have people like Linus Torvalds taking what I think is a stance that likely makes sense for him, but is such a damning thing to openly say because people take Torvalds use of AI as a blanket “look he uses it so it must be ok” where there is SO much nuance.
I miss times before AI lol
I considered killing myself last night. I self-harmed for the first time in many years. My company advertised remote work. I asked if I could move far away from Tokyo and sure, no problem. I got told if RTO, then it would be close and new people only. I got permission to run a side job doing a small farm. Sure no problem.
I’ve been in this industry for 20+ years now.
Mandatory return to office (I live 4 hours each way). They pay transportation expenses per month at a level that wouldn’t cover one day. If you’re nice and apply, we MAY approve (for three months only) 2 days a week required in the office. No guarantee it will be approved. I joined a union to fight this but it’s slow. They will likely still try to fire me.
I have a mortgage. I got a subsidy to move to this small town, that many in Japan provide, but it must be paid back if leaving within 5 years. I also am a registered farmer with farm land which means I legally have to maintain it properly.
Yesterday, they said no more side job is allowed. So I’m not allowed to sell anything I grow anymore, have to close my self-proprietorship, and have to close my company (which has tax impacts on me because now nothing counts as expenses and I lose my ability to do special tax forms). They apparently want food to rot. They want me to rot. The farm was not even yet at a point to make me money. They falsely claimed I got subsidies for farming (I did not and do not) and that it’s no longer just selling extra produce (it still is) and is a full-scale farming operation (it is not). My sales were like 10k yen last year and maybe will get to that this year.
My wife does not work. There are few jobs out here. No remote jobs in the US or Canada are responding and few would even allow Japan time zone even with overlap. Remote jobs for a backend engineer (primarily golang lately with very rusty Java somewhere in my brain unused for many years) are basically non-existent. I’ve applied for jobs in the EEA but, as a non-EEA-citizen, I can basically go fuck myself. My body is way too messed up (multiple broken bones, back issues, etc.) for any really hard manual labor.
So I lose my job, I lose my income, I lose the house, I will never get another mortgage in Japan again, there’s no point to being alive. My wife’s birthday is coming up, which is basically what stopped me. She’ll have a better life without me and at least the house will get paid off so she can do whatever with it.
Living in an apartment in Tokyo would also violate the terms of my mortgage making me lose it (on top of losing a huge chunk of my paycheck) and would also make it impossible to keep up with farm maintenance, let alone the rest of the house and property.
I am fine for now. Just not sure I’ll survive any future attacks from my company. Thanks for the kind words.
Wow, I’m so angry for you. But your wife would not be happy to lose you, so don’t tell yourself you’d be doing her a favor by dying.
It sounds like you’re in an impossible situation, and it truly is a bind, but have you explored whether you have any legal recourse? Your company set you up to fail by making promises they didn’t keep. Do you have those promises in writing? Emails, texts, contract terms, anything?
Is your wife Japanese? If so, she can help you communicate with a lawyer. I know Japanese law is very neoliberal and pro-corporation, but this seems like exceptional circumstances so it would be worth at least looking into.
In any case, breathe. Whatever comes, you still need oxygen.
Lawyer up. Meanwhile, just keep doing what you’re doing. I refuse to believe living on a farm counts as a side job, especially since it’s not for meaningful profit, especially since it’s not the same line of work.
I’m sorry for your situation. Other comments have pointed out that legally you don’t have to comply with the “no side job” bs, so i agree to keep proceeding with it, and if they try to fire you, bring in the lawyers.
On another note, stories like yours are why I want to watch the entire system burn, using executives as fuel for the fire.
Better to resist and flip the bird to these asshats rather than comply in advance.
Good luck to you, keep fighting, and never give up, if only to spite the bastards
I wish I could help more, but the old “side jobs are forbidden” being in the company handbook is legally flimsy, if not completely unenforceable. Just because your company says so, or it’s in your contact doesn’t actually make it legal.
The MHLW states that it actually has to provably interfere with your job in some way. The hours outside your day job are your own, not your companies. Don’t close your kojinjigyo and just submit your own tax adjustment every year. Unless you’re making lots of money your HR won’t even know.
People have already given you good advice, so I’ll give you a less than stellar advice: don’t become statistics, every year lots of people kill themselves due to their work or die of overworking in Japan and nobody gives a fuck. You’re not the wrong person here, so why would you suffer by yourself? If you’re fucked either way and has nothing else to lose, do something real about it. I saw your comments about getting sued, does it matter? Bro, you were considering taking your own life, justice matters more. If you think you still have shit to lose, then don’t even entertain taking your own life.
With your backend skills in golang, is there any business you can start on your own? Do you guys have savings that would allow you to live for a while without your main work? Don’t give up, bro. As long as there’s still some alternatives, keep going. And, please, if you and your wife truly do love each other, go talk to her about this.
I’m nobody in your story, but you’re now somebody in mine, because this is so relatable. I can only commiserate with you, but I can’t fully understand the stress you must be under. My employer is doing much the same, and it breaks my heart how many people around the world are or are about to be in similar situations.
The crushing weight of executives not giving a fuck about the harm they are causing is both enraging and deeply saddening.
But what makes life worth living is a moving target. I have, a few times, seen no light in the dark. But then, somehow I crawl back out and see all the reasons I still want to be here. I hope you find a way to okay. If nothing else, “I want to watch it all go down. I want to see the world give way.”
I’m very sorry for your situation. Please do not let these fuckers decide what you are worth, and leash you.
Your wife loves you, and you are more important to everyone around you than to your company. Live for your love, and your friends. Even if your life has to change a little, that’s not the end.
make your way out of that company painful. Point fingers, humiliate them, politely. Call the media, do the drama, make them feel ashamed.
Best of luck, do not quit life, you are bigger than them.
Call the media, do the drama
Even saying 100% true things, this gets you sued in Japan. This is specifically why I don’t name the company.
If you will be fucked either way… Create a trail, try the good path first. Humanize, try sympathy.
If they don’t care, threat media exposure, Japanese are really prideful and that hurts them the most
And I assume that you (and many others) were being lied to about this RTO policy, so you’ll most likely have public sympathy on your side. Also, you can start a GoFundMe (or similar) to support you in your Situation. Be vulnerable, let the communuty pick you up. And when you’re up again, pay the compassion forward.
Contact some social media ppl (like https://m.youtube.com/@AbroadinJapan) and publicly shame your company, they broke their agreements. They lied. It’s not you that is at fault, so it’s not you that should suffer.
My family gets sued. AboardInJapan would also get sued which is why no news orgs ever pick this stuff up.
Can lawyer do nothing for you? Or some sort of NGO?
Can you do hidden audio recordings in Japan? Record them admitting that they promised one thing and are doing another. Take the recordings to a lawyer.
I’m sorry, I wish I had some smarter ideas.
My union says we will go to the legal system if no agreement is reached. It’s just been very slow going and, at first, felt like nothing was happening.
People do hidden recordings. I’ve heard a mix of things about them actually being admissible if it goes to court (mostly that they are not).
Why do you get sued when they are breaching contract? What can their allegations against you possibly be?
Japanese reputational damage laws. You can get sued even when what you are saying is 100% true
Well that is 100 % fucked, wtaf
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I am sorry for your situation. Since you entertained the idea of killing yourself, I strongly believe you should consult an expert or a doctor. As others mentioned: The people around love you and do care about you.
you fell for the “move to the countryside” incentive. they give you money to move in the middle of nowhere, then you pay for that circumstance for the rest of your life with poor transportation, no jobs, expensive maintenance etc.
also you went into farming while also having severe physical health issues?? really?
Farming is a hobby. A lot of it is done on tractor or seated in the dirt.
I was also tired of the constant noise and business of Tokyo. Don’t really have expensive maintenance.
If you get the opportunity, join a union.
Capitalism. The people calling the shots and keeping the profits are not the people doing the work.
It’s bad and will continue to be bad for everyone except the top layer of rich people.
I would argue it’s normalizing.
For fucks sake, the last 30 years have been insane, especially with the dotcom boom and bust.
Suddenly every dipshit adult was telling their kids, “computers are the future, the internet is the future, and you can’t survive with just a highschool degree. You better go to college and learn programming!!”
Those parents are a bit to blame with how things got. And it seemed like they were pretty accurate too as high speed internet became huge, and lithium batteries thus mobile phones…
I always was interested in programming, since before my mom pushed me into it, because she was one of those types too. Then I went to college, and I met a bunch of teenagers who said, “uhhh I don’t know what I want to do but I want it make money so I’m doing computer science”.
The first year of college usually filtered those people out. Usually.
And i’ve always said, don’t join this career for the money. It’s not worth it, if you don’t love engineering. This is the most stressful fucking job I’ve ever had, and there are tons of meetings and social activity to go with it. You can’t just solve puzzles in a vacuum, even if you like programming, and that’s EVEN if you enjoy it. You have to start leading others at some point, act like a mentor.
You take on a fucking lot of responsibility, start giving demos, working with product managers, marketers, help teach people what is possible in the product and what isn’t. This isn’t a chill gig. It rarely is. It usually involves a fuck ton of effort and planning.
You get paid a lot… But honestly, if you’re actually doing the job well, you’re underpaid even then. Often you will be underpaid compared to the effort you put in. Especially now.
Not as many people should be in software engineering as there are. I talk to people sometimes and you can tell they hate this job. It’s okay, and I don’t blame them, but way too many people got sucked into this career for the wrong reasons, then kinda now have to keep doing it to survive.
I’m glad I still enjoy it but I see a lot of fucking burnout right now. But I have to say, the people leaving the job now, some of them, not all but some, might be some of the types that shouldn’t have jumped into it in the first place. Lots of people were told they’re smart and good with computers so should make money doing it.
Some of those smart people should’ve done other smart jobs. Biotech is huge too, but I don’t see the drive to it like there was for making fucking websites.
You take on a fucking lot of responsibility, start giving demos, working with product managers, marketers, help teach people what is possible in the product and what isn’t. This isn’t a chill gig. It rarely is. It usually involves a fuck ton of effort and planning.
This is just part of jobs in general and if you had any indication it wouldn’t be you were lied to. One of the early things I remember being told in engineering school is that you will have to be social and work on a team. As soon as a project requires more than a few people then you will be working on cross-functional teams and need to work together with a variety of people.
Often you will be underpaid compared to the effort you put in
You might be shocked to learn that employers do not pay for “effort”, they pay for the (perceived) value you bring to the business. People that get paid well are value multipliers (or they play the game well enough to appear that they do). The people that work with them do more because they are there guiding things. If you don’t bring that value, you tend to top out at “Senior” engineer titles and the pay that brings with it. I’ve had to have somewhat blunt conversations with people to explain that I’ve given them a poor performance review not because they haven’t put in the hours, but because they aren’t using their effort efficiently. Working overtime consistently is an indication of poor prioritization and delegation more than having too much work.
At this point even the Futurama randomised job assigner machine seems better than our current system
At this point, those booths from Futurama seem better than our current system
4D Bullet Hell Game (With Tactile Feedback)!
The first year of college usually filtered those people out. Usually.
Unfortunately in my country this doesn’t happen. There’s a bell curve and as long as you submit your homework and do the bare minimum for the exams, you get your degree. You’re gonna have a pretty mid GPA, but you’ll have a degree which effectively makes the degree useless as an indicator of competency. The amount of people I’ve interviewed who couldn’t answer a simple programming question is astounding.
Most of these people end up picking up jobs as project managers because that’s all they can do. And the country’s leaders wonder why we don’t have much software R&D here.
same here in some universities in the states, the harder stem classes ten dot lower thier avg grades like D,C,B,(not As though) so people can get a better grade. that tells you theses classes are quite difficult to pass.
India?
Singapore
For me it’s starting to feel very draining. I’ve worked on small teams the past several years but now my current internal-only project is picking up stream and we’ve got a product owner and manager on board.
The amount of planning, discussing, iterating, changing requirements, etc. is absolutely demanding. I’m starting to miss just programming. The overhead is what starts to make all this feel soul-sucking after a while.
I’m a computer scientist and got into it before it became popular.
I suck at programming and have never labeled myself as a programmer. I write software to solve problems and know my way around the SDLC, but there’s a LOT of CS work out there that isn’t being a code monkey.
The shame was the number of people who went to college specifically to learn how to write software that can now be generated by AI, at the quality level generated by AI. Those jobs are now gone. Being a software analyst, integrator, architect, security engineer, information systems analyst, data scientist, etc? Thise are still in high demand, as are programmers who are subject matter experts or can lead a team.
I really enjoy programming, and i don’t mind all of the planning, mentorship, and working with stakeholders to formulate solutions. But for the past few weeks 90% of the work I’ve been doing had been around deployment, migrating services to new servers, and fucking with azure resources. I haven’t written a line of code for 3+ weeks. That has been draining.
Couple that with picking up work items that are poorly written with way to little information on what needs doing and it’s also frustrating as hell.
At my company, we have dozens, probably over one hundred different repos that we maintain, and no less than 30 actively worked on projects. It’s bitter sweet in that I get a good mix of work to break up the monotony of working on the same project, but at the cost of not being able to master any of them. I’ve only been in my role for 6-8 months coming from a non programming background, and it’s been tough to learn and keep up with the pace required. Being full stack is nice but shitty at the same time.
Does your current stretch have a foreseeable end? Or do you think the very little programming will continue?
It’s just the way work has played out for us right now. A couple servers are being decommed at the end of the month, so it’s priority. I work on team of about 14 people and we use Azure dev ops for work items and sprint planning. The way we do it is once you finish a task, you grab the next available item in sprint rather than cherry picking. I’ve just been a bit unlucky in my timing. We do have some projects in the works that will be hitting us soon, and some new implementations, so I yea, it’s likely I’ll be writing actual code again in the near future.
Hilarious to throw biotech out there at the end as its a similar case with a lot of smart people doing not what they want and hard to pivot out of. The filter also works similarly.
Could be STEM as a whole. Everyone glamorizes it, but it’s definitely not for everyone. Shit, my family literally got upset when I suggested I might want to be a writer.
its glamorized because some of the more popular jobs, like engineering , scientists for stem is in the media/cinema alot, and they assume its easy for people find a job in it, when a fresh graduate doesnt find one thier whole family/friends gang up on them and rag on them about it. they dont see the the actual ugliness behind it, need a competitive gpa for grad school(depends which grad school and which program), and then research/lab experience,etc and its also not easy getting these. alot of phds/MS trying to get academic jobs in our area are like in thier 30- 40s already. plus there is a demographic preference at the lower levels.
I was close to finishing my molecular biology degree. I always had a nice quaint job in some lab doing basic stuff in mind - an ok paycheck, no big ambitions.
In the last 2 years i realized how big the “socializing” part of this whole gig is. The first years i was getting by learning on my own (i’ve always been good at that). The amount of seminars and group work where working alone was not an option anymore was suffocating for me (i was able to deal with presenting stuff as long as i could work on it on my own, but cooperation over a longer timeframe with random people was insane stress for me), and in combination with my mental issues made me drop out in the phase of choosing a project (I even already had decided on a bioinformatics project) and seeking a mentor for finishing my degree.
The amount of social competency STEM needs is very underemphasized - i am pretty sure this extends into all of STEM.
i think because biotech is has a small gatekeeped job market, its hard to get into, its essentially a catch-22, its also complicated by other things, , and requires upfront experience years before graduation.
they already have the situation where they dont train people for biotech out of graduation already, you are expected to have it already.
Yep, getting actual experience in the summer months was practically a requirement, even if noone told you that outright. I was lucky enough for my ex knowing someone in a neighboring town working in an university research group on heliobacter pylori where i was able to gain some experience in a friendly environment, which would have sufficed if i had been actually able to finish my degree.
I don’t think I’ll ever stop working on my own projects. Even if I leave the software industry otherwise.
This is the way to keep being attached to what you create. Noone can force you to use AI for your own stuff. And if corporate life does get unbearable, there’s still the path of trying to sell your own software. Not using LLMs for that is a big plus nowadays in the eyes of costumers too.
I think this is part of the reason for the massive explosion - close to cambrian proportions - in the indie games market in the last years. It gives people a creative outlet and if it goes well (sadly that is not often the case - yet. Steam has been experimenting heavily on matching the right player with the right game which has already made some impact in actual sale numbers from what i read, and the fruits of this experimentation are bound to come into play next year), it might pay the bills.
Edit: Here’s Steams announcement where the are replacing curated slots with ones personalized to the account: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/676258795703240952
Sadly, I’m way more burned out than Pre-AI and I was a bit before then. (So I guess it just sped up the pace).
I have no desire to come home and work on personal software or devops projects. My Homelab sits in the same state it was since the last real vacation I had. Corporate/industry work has removed all desire for personal development work.
Yeah one of my hobbies used to be computational math, I used it to learn about complex analysis, shaders, group theory…
Now I’m like “fuck all of that”, I do tai chi, I cook carnitas, I read manga.
I’m spoiled on the whole thing, I take no pride that I used to be someone who knew a lot about computers and having worked at Google/MSFT is now a source of shame.
I guess I’m really lucky that I never had to use AI, and when I tried it on my own, I quickly realized how awful it is.
I’ve started my own project a few months ago (fully free mobile game on Android and iOS), it can be a fun hobby, but when it’s not so fun you burn out even quicker. So I guess it depends on if it’s just a small project for yourself or if you make it public…
I’m thinking about getting into cyber security, or maybe get an MFT and be a shrink. Idk. Job market kinda sucks
cyber is suffering badly as IT, and tech from what ive heard.
Seems like cyber security is the new hot thing now
Will probably become so, LLM used badly will create disasters.
