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.
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.
It’s all trash. Everything normal people use on a daily basis is pure dumpster fire level garbage with massive, HEINOUS, unforgivable amounts of tracking built in.
They know all of this. They just don’t care.
A lot of what is sold to consumers is straight up shite.
Most programmers suck ass, including myself
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.
Also, any number of interviews that is more than one is too many interviews.
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++?
There is two types of languages, ones people bitch about, and ones nobody uses.
Hardly controversial I would say.
My office forces everyone to use Microsoft (there’s a lot of Mac and Windows users), and whenever I complain, people get pissed at me. God knows why.
As for SystemD, I think a lot of people think it’s fine and people like me are exaggerating. I guess that’s fine, but non-systemD systems (Void Linux being my favorite) are so much faster, it’s unbelievable.
And then there’s a lot of generic language programmers and business owners, who are very willing to defend their income source. Like everyone I know. (I’m really dying here; I gotta find a cool Rust or LISP company)
As for uBO, it’s a “progress” thing. If using masses of third parties and trackers makes stuff more innovative (not to mention laggy), then it’s good, they claim.
I’m happy to hear that Lemmy shares my opinion though, that’s a little comforting :)
I use Artix Linux with runit as my daily driver. I’ll admit, its very nice, but I haven’t run systemd except on my VPSs for years now, so I really don’t know if it’s slow or not as my point of reference is long gone.
The systemd take is goofy, but everything regarding Microsoft is spot on. Teams is an eldritch horror.
My school somehow broke it, so teahcers and students are on different organisations.
Probably setup two entirely separate tenants
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 read somewhere that everyone is bad at their job. When you’re good at your job you get promoted until you stop being good at your job. When you get good again, you get promoted.
I know it’s not exactly true but I like the idea.
They call that the Peter Principle, and there’s at least one Ig Nobel Prize winning study which found that it’s better to randomly promote people rather than promote based on job performance.
I don’t want to get promoted… Once my job isn’t mainly about programming anymore (in a pretty wide sense though), I took a wrong turn in life 😅
I think it’s definitely the majority. The problem is that a lot of tech developments, new language features and Frameworks then pander to this lack of skill and then those new things become buzzwords that are required at most new jobs.
So many things could be got rid of if people would just write decent code in the first place!
Most of the high visibility “tech bros” aren’t technical. They are finance bros who invest in tech.
It will create a fully autonomous and self sufficient robot army one day and the 1% will genocide the working class with said army after our labor is no longer needed.
Neither Python nor JavaScript should be the primary language used in any production back end.
Out of interest, why?
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’m a writer and my work is increasingly making me use AI to do things. I’m 98% sure I’m just training this thing to replace me at this point, and am planning accordingly.
At least half of the people working in tech shouldn’t be. They have 0 clue what they’re doing and that’s dangerous. And far to many people solve everything with a golden hammer.
You don’t need a Mac to work in IT. Especially if all your doing is ansible.
Ansible sucks. It’s slow, it’s limited, it gives a false sense of understanding to do many. I mean it’s nice that it’s a structured playground for some folks I suppose. But there are better tools that do the exact same thing. Or you could just write a proper script.
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.
100% agree with everything you said. I used to absolutely love technology and the Internet, but I’m definitely feeling a lot less interested in it all as the years go on.
Being techy I’m often asked to help out with systems / computer related stuff at work, and I just can’t for the life of me fathom why we’ve got 5 different systems all frankensteined together trying to talk to each other, instead of just one fucking system that does it all.
I learned the other day that our company spent something like 100 million on this prototype system that ended up being totally scrapped. We’ve now integrated all sorts of AI shite and switched to Microsoft purely because of Copilot, which, i can honestly say is a flaming pile of utter shit that never does what you need it to.
The whole industry is in shambles at the moment. I wish all this AI and crypto shit would just disappear, along with the majority of programming languages and frameworks, and other bloated bullshit and just take us back to simpler times.
An inability to understand that ‘e-mail’ doesn’t get an S is not how I guessed you work in a lot of Azure.
Few things would make me happier than to never log into an Azure instance ever again lol.
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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 et al. I’ll look down on you from a technical competence level
Eh, I have to say I find it quite usefull sometimes for brainstorming solutions. It is esentially a rubber duck that answers and sometimes gives good ideas.
Of course the answers are often bullshit, but they can sometimes point you in the right direction/to the right words to google.
(All of this ignoring the enviromental problems ofc.)
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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Advertising passed that point a long time ago. Practically everyone is alienated as a result
