The only good programming sub on reddit was /r/ExperiencedDevs because it used to be a sub that was just devs who had actually worked on difficult code bases and scenarios, actually built teams and software soup to nuts.
For the last year or two it’s the same ChatGPT careerist bullshit that doesn’t even understand what it’s saying. There’s literally a post on there where a dev is complaining that tech lead is telling him to refactor code he’s touching and he’s asking the peanut gallery for solutions.
Most of the peanut gallery is telling him to try to throw the work back through the ticketing/prioritization process.
Any place that I’ve ever worked at, good software, or at the very minimum software that wasn’t extremely painful to work on, was created in spite of managerial decisions and processes. I’ve been a senior tech leader for like 10 years now, and all this is telling me is that people have no fucking clue.
Is there any community out there that understands that no matter what, when you put 2 proposals in front of a bean counter business guy who barely comprehends how to breathe, they’re going to choose the one that is proposing a new revenue stream and not the one that’s nerd bullshit --and that all decision making in companies is boiled down to a sequence of these moments? that all of your backlogs and engineering roadmaps are just wasted effort and time that creates a mountain of tech-debt debt to go through? that the only way to actually fix this shit is to enforce professionalized boundaries and tell the business that it’s your job as developers to decide how to implement things and not theirs?
ExperiencedDevs used to actually tell people like this to fuck off, that they weren’t a career advice sub. It used to be a sub where OP would be questioned if they were presenting themselves in a weird or perfect way because so much of this job at high levels is incredibly contextual and systems based. Now it’s just the same shit as every other “the sky is falling”, careerist, opportunist tech bro dump. It’s worse than fucking Hacker News, because Hacker News at least understands P&L and knows it exists, that how you interact with it has conseqeuences. Half the comments in ExperiencedDevs are now like ‘You have to have you Product Owner make the decision.’
Every product owner I’ve ever met was only focused on defining their own product within the business context (you know their job?). They had no idea how to build it. Most of them could barely systematize their own product features in a sensible way.
I’m so tired of this corpo trash where the only unsaid growth strategy is throwing “bodies at it” in a completely wasteful con-artist way. These people have never worked in different economies of scale let alone built systems at the higher levels, which is why they suggest these corpo processes to each other as if they actually produce anything other than trash code and maybe conversions. Then these absolute apes pat themselves on the back because they think smashing the keyboard to make the shittiest website was the “most valuable thing” in the process.
tl;dr is there a programming sub that isn’t filled with mid-level morons that don’t even know how their businesses work that simply fall back on these corpo agile processes as if they weren’t captured bullshit? Where can I find a place that isn’t this Medium, Learn2Code, I learned this from an influencer whose never actually done anything garbage?
Big brain time: /c/commrequest. Make them come to Hexbear. “You want high quality war stories and advice from diligent and thoughtful professionals? Guess you’re just gonna have to absorb a little revolutionary spirit, nerd.” I will post there constantly.
I just assume communities like that are dead, because SWE used to be an actually good job and fellow SWEs were probably on average more competent. Then the 2010s happened. Coding bootcamps, floods of people who are just coming into the field because it pays well but without a fundamental curiosity or interest in what’s technically going on, MOOCs, FreeCodeCamp… you name it.
Everyone was told to learn to code and that they could code. I think it’s even fundamentally true. I don’t want to gatekeep knowledge, but the people orchestrating this kind of thing were just trying to make today’s moment happen: make software engineer labor cheap.
Except what they did is they just attracted a lot of people into a field who are clueless, or as you said careerists, AND cheap. So now we’re in the 2020s and ChatGPT has come and just made everything that much worse for everybody. Let’s take stock of the kinds of people who became SWEs over time.
Always true: You could be very talented and self-taught. These people do exist. before 2012: You had to pass an accredited computer science curriculum to get into the field. [ Up until 2012 everyone fit the above two categories. Computer science is not an easy topic. It weeded out people who couldn't keep up with the work. This kept the skill level relatively high. ] 2012-2021: You had to hack it in a coding bootcamp or MOOC with a basic certificate that claims competency. More people could just claim being self-taught than before. Especially for the web, frameworks can cover for the harder parts of programming. Think: the NPM importer developer. [ Now you have a lot of people joining the field with various competencies. Some of these people are really good, but many are not. Computer science departments expanded to accommodate more students with massive grants from places like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, so more people are coming into these programs, too. ] 2022-2023 (layoffs) [ Now the situation is getting desperate for many people. People who were nicer before are now tightening their belts because they've seen hundreds of thousands of layoffs. Do you want to be next on the chopping block? Are you happy with life right now? ] 2023-2025: You just ask the chatbot to give you the answer. You have no way of assessing if it's the right answer. [ Anyone can do this. Many people try to do this. I've spoken to very tired recruiters who just have to sift through endless bullshit AI spam applications and applicants. People who were bad at their job are now offloading what little skill they used to have to this, and are therefore de-skilling themselves, too. ]I think you want to rewind the clock, but unless you build a new community and set the rules this stuff is just dead.
I’m so tired of this corpo trash where the only unsaid growth strategy is throwing “bodies at it” in a completely wasteful con-artist way.
currently happening at my work. trying to push out the team thats been building their shit for 10 years and got it to the successful place that it is, in favor of interns and new hires who have no clue whats going on but want to use every new shiny object technology whether it accomplishes anything or not. So many people come to me with plans directly copy pasted from chatgpt for how to accomplish whatever task. No real coherent architecture being designed
If you build it, they will come.
Hopefully, but if not, it’s not too crazy to start one on .ml or something. Fediverse shouldn’t be too crazy of a sell to actual computer nerds. They probably wouldn’t like you posting about it in the open on the sub (if they were cool they’d straight up migrate), but if you have a relationship with anyone else on the sub you can probably ask them to help you get it off the ground.
Honestly you sound kind of toxic to work with. I agree with some of what you’ve said but there’s like zero capacity for self criticism displayed here.
Where do you see designers playing a role in all this, for instance?
I would question why people give out free professional advice like that anyway. It’s one thing to contribute to open source, where you can take personal credit for your contributions to add to your CV. It’s cool to help someone set up a home server as a side project.
But spending hours to consult with someone for their actual job? That’s no different than sleuthing Yahoo Answers just to do other people’s homework for them.
If there is a trend of dying spaces like these, I guess it is people not wanting their good-faith advice to be monetized, and also being burned out because software engineering isn’t the stable cash cow it once was.
I think that ExperiencedDevs still is decent. There has been some quality problems lately due to the downturn but I think generally it has been good.
Look, it’s better than The Orange Site so at least that’s something.
It might also be the case that the people youre describing have moved on to having families or focusing on some other aspect of their lives instead of posting. From my recent job search, it seems like anyone mildly motivated it just trying to suckle on VC money and have their own company slicing off a few million from porky. Still better than big corpTM
