“No, maybe that wasn’t it. Words precede and surpass me, they tempt and alter me, and if I am not careful it will be too late: things will be said without my having said them. Or, at the very least, that wasn’t the only thing. My entanglement comes from how a carpet is made of so many threads that I can’t resign myself to following just one; my ensnarement comes from how one story is made of many stories. And I can’t even tell them all— a more truthful word could from echo to echo cause my highest glaciers to crumble down the precipice.” - Clarice Lispector

  • 56 Posts
  • 547 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: December 9th, 2023
  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyztoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•How bad is the software engineering job today?
    2·
    2 months ago

    I am not a professional programmer but it seems to me that the idea that AI is needed to increase the firehose of code being written to “improve” programming and how well computers work is as absurd as the idea that the point of a university degree in a language is to increase the raw amount of words being written in that language.

    The point is to convey ideas with language not produce more language, same thing with code, the point is to solve problems not produce ever larger and larger amounts of code with automation.

    Something I know without a doubt is that for many people who love language, they desire a great deal less of the fake, hurtful, useless words that drown out the good ones. People who love words and work in crafting and shaping them tend to think it is inherently good to shape useful words not just mindlessly produce combinations of words in as great a volume possible.

    To put it in a more abstracted fashion, relying on AI to produce more and more code faster and faster feels like a Jazz musician saying they rely on AI to fill in all the empty spaces they leave between notes with complementary embelleshing notes. The point of a jazz musician is clearly not to produce the most notes possible, it is to convey meaning with notes.

    To bring it back to a concrete example, how many times has Google built a new chat program/app from scratch and then abandoned it? Sure there is lots of code there of very high quality, an intimidating amount to be sure, but isn’t the primary job of the programmer here to say “hey, why don’t we stop writing new code from the ground up for every chat app a different part of the company wants and standardize it to a much smaller codebase with a set of customizations different parts of the company can apply to the same core chat program”?

    It seems to me a good programmer would be good at framing problems from a perspective that requires as simple implementation in code as possible within reason, not be best at producing the program with the most lines of code fastest that still solves the problem.

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyztoProgrammer Humor@programming.dev•howItFeelsRightNow
    5·
    2 months ago

    6I really wish people actually listened to the crazy architect Christopher Alexander when he shat on the entire programming industry in 1996 for not having a value system around the basis for beginning to build architecture and systems in software. He pointed out all the way back then how much power programmers had and now have lost culturally to relinquishing the narrative to AI so heavily around software and programming. He was trying to say “THINK about what your industry is doing, organize, use your power while you have it.”. Well, it is mostly too late now, still necessary to do but programming will never be seen as a highly skilled and respected profession again the same way it used to because of how thoroughly programmers did not organize to resist the fundamental capitalist narratives being imposed upon them that have now been set in stone culturally.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_QzdKci6OY

    The methods that you have at your fingertips and deal with every day in the normal course of events are perfectly designed to do this so that if you have the interest, you have the capacity and you have the means. I heard a rumor at breakfast that some of the people in this room begin to worry about their jobs. I have no idea if that’s true, but I was told there’s a sort of undercurrent of unease of where is all this going? There’s this huge expanding phenomenon, programming and so forth, and yet an uneasiness about well, where is it all headed? What is it going to do?

    Please forgive me. I’m going to be very directly blunt for a horrible second. But it could be viewed that the technical way in which you look at programming at the moment is almost like guns for hire. In other words, you’re the technicians. You know how to make the programs work. Tell us what to do, Daddy, and we’ll do it. And what I’m proposing here is something a little bit different from that which is a view of programming as the natural genetic infrastructure of a living world which you are capable of creating, managing, making available and which could then have the result that a living structure ructure in our towns, houses, workplaces, cities is an attainable thing which it has not been for the last 50 to 100 years. That is an incredible vision of the future. I realize that you probably think I’m nuts because this is not what I’m supposed to be talking about to you and you may say, “Well, gosh, great idea, but we’re not interested.” But I do think you are capable of that and I don’t think anybody else is going to do this job. I’ve enjoyed uh talking to you very much. Thank you. Wow.

    If programmers and computer culture had actually organized and treated leftist ideas without an air of superior condescension as if understanding computers and factorio made the need to unionize obsolete… we would be in an entirely different world right now. People believed in the power of computers and programming in a way that gave computer culture the possibility to positively transform the world, but that trust has been irrevocably broken and computers will never have that same transformative potential again because people will never trust the profession of programmers the same way again.

    The public trusts engineers to build bridges because even though the public doesn’t understand how to build a huge bridge they know at some level engineers would throw a collective massive fit if people started demanding they build bridges in a dangerous way. On the other hand that trust is PERMANENTLY gone in how people look at software engineers and honestly the industry deserves it for being so obsessed about only focusing on the details and never thinking about the broader impact of the architecture being created.

    Software engineering has culminated in optimizing software for Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza and it is stain on the entire industry of programming and software engineering.

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/26/microsoft-cuts-israeli-militarys-access-to-some-cloud-computing-ai