8 ms·

So in case you're worried about watching a 35 minute video and wishing you hadn't, here is what I think is an interesting observation that the speaker starts co

by spudlyo 2mo ago

So in case you're worried about watching a 35 minute video and wishing you hadn't, here is what I think is an interesting observation that the speaker starts coming around to at around the 7 minute mark. Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities, and isn't interested in doing the hard work required to increase the reliability and reduce the technical debt in software. Engineers who care about such things, often engage in acts of "benevolent noncompliance". Common workarounds are "asking for forgiveness instead of permission", secrecy, and misdirection. Alternately you can confront management and fight for doing what you think is right. These sorts of things can be risky. You can be fired, you can be reprimanded if caught, you can be retaliated against or lose political advantage. In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us. I haven't yet finished the whole thing, but there are sections around dark patterns and other forms of user-hostile software. I'll probably finish it.

ak39 2mo ago
Thank you for this. (I think HN should consider creating TLDR type of comments for upvoting separately from commentary. @Dan incentivise with different karma credits?)
conqrr 2mo ago
This hits so hard. I used to admire Senior developers who would do this. Now, I find myself in a place where there is no one to do this, and I've taken up to playing this role. It is the hardest job, but I cannot do any thing else as my team is committed to just non-stop slop thanks to management directives. I realize all the time I spent admiring, and now I have become.
- repeekad 2mo ago
  If the engineers were right the bill will come due on that tech debt eventually. Likely when that happens the company will just spend more than they needed to fixing the issues and no one will be around to say I told you so.
  - wk_end 2mo ago
    The problem is that the counterfactual isn't obvious. The company spends more time - and money - than they needed to fixing those issues, but how do they know? And how do they know that it would've amounted to less if they'd done those fixes sooner? Figuring that out, and figuring it out accurately, is often extremely difficult. A serious attempt might cost more than the fixes. ...and often the amount more isn't catastrophically more, so they don't even think about it. The company might be bleeding from paper cuts, it might be terribly unhealthy because of it, but still not unhealthy enough to kill it.
  - kentm 2mo ago
    The bill does come due. I've seen it happen over and over. But management fails to connect current problems to past mistakes, especially when they happen over the course of years. Thats setting aside when they insist that the correct decision was made, but have no real evidence that this is the case, other than the fact that "things worked out" even though maybe it would have been better had a different decision was made. People do get a pass on this -- you can't rigorously examine every decision and counter-factual or you'd never make forward progress. And I don't really have any great ideas on how to bridge this gap. It'd be nice if there were better ways to measure this but there aren't, so it really comes down to who is more convincing, which is often orthogonal to facts and correctness.
  - SR2Z 2mo ago
    > Likely when that happens the company will just spend more than they needed to fixing the issues and no one will be around to say I told you so. In my experience, yeah, but how they do it is... not what you'd expect. Leadership has no clue about the scope of tech debt in their products and if they do decide to fix it, it will be by coming up with a bunch of ridiculously optimistic estimates and then foisting them off onto engineers who are already overworked trying to keep up with tech debt to launch new stuff. This feels awful and generally doesn't lead to anything being properly fixed because it turns fixing tech debt into a "just get it barely good enough and mark it as done." After the inevitable surge in attrition, more often than not the tech debt is "solved" by throwing out the old codebase and starting from scratch with a new team. This is expensive, but in a lot of cases produces a better product.
autoexec 2mo ago
> In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us. This sounds like a job for unions. It would have been advantageous to have formed and joined them before so much power was lost, but it's easy to be shortsighted when you're happy and comfortable with where you are and ignore that the situation could easily change, if not for you then for the next generation. Companies are happy to leverage every advantage they have against workers. Unions can be a powerful tool for workers, one that could help solve a lot of problems current and future, and it's sitting there just waiting to be used.
- SR2Z 2mo ago
  I am 100% sure that I make more than the average person in my role and level (tbh more money than I even thought I'd make in my life). Why should I support a union? If the company couldn't fire me they wouldn't pay me so much. If a union advocates for everyone else, it's gonna be harder for me to get paid so much. I don't really mind the constant layoffs; I think that those are horrific for morale and lead to disengaged engineers and the bare minimum of work being done, but that's true with or without the union. I certainly look at the lack of opportunities for career growth and the constant threat of layoffs as a good reason to take it easy. What I think the union would be AMAZING at is the same thing unions are always amazing at in this country: stopping anyone from being fired and ending merit based promotions.
  - autoexec 2mo ago
    > I am 100% sure that I make more than the average person in my role and level..Why should I support a union? Even if that is true today, it may not be tomorrow. The corporation you work for is not your friend. They aren't looking out for your best interests. They are worried only about themselves. You should do the same and unions give you more power in negotiations with your employer and more protections against them as well. > If the company couldn't fire me they wouldn't pay me so much. That's a lie. First, because unions don't make it impossible to fire employees, but also because the ability to fire you for arbitrary (or even illegal) reasons does not force companies to pay you more. Removing that ability won't force them to pay you less. > the same thing unions are always amazing at in this country: stopping anyone from being fired and ending merit based promotions. Employers spend billions every singe year trying to con workers into thinking that unions are evil and wow, you really fell for their bullshit. Those are some commonly repeated lies, but they don't stand up to scrutiny. They're just supposed to trick people who don't bother questioning what they're told. At most, all a union does is force a company to actually document the disciplinary problems and give an employee an opportunity to correct their behavior before they fire them. This makes it more difficult for companies to fire employees for reasons that have nothing to do with their performance and for any reasons that the company isn't comfortable documenting (often because those reasons would be embarrassing or illegal). There's nothing preventing merit based promotions either. How promotions are handled will be determined in part by the contract between the company and the union and it's the workers who decide what the union asks for in their contract. If you want a contract with the employer that allows for merit based promotions you can have one. There are zero rules against that, but you should expect the union will require the terms to be well defined. Employers like to say they want "merit based promotions" when what they actually want is total control over promotions for whatever arbitrary reasons they decide to call "merit based". A union contract probably should require that an employer is able to justify the reasons for their merit based promotions using objective measures of productivity/performance that apply equally to all employees. That means the people who work the hardest and do the best work will be promoted even when the boss would rather promote their favored nepo baby, or when the boss would rather not promote someone who actually earned it. Even then, that'd all be according to the contract. If your union doesn't care about fair merit based promotion and wants the boss to be able to deny or award them to anyone at any time without justification that's fine too. Unions are organizations made up of people. There are good ones and bad ones. Workers get from them what they put into them. There are plenty of horror stories that get heavily promoted to scare you. Some of them are even true stories. Ultimately though, employees have the power to change or replace their union to make sure their needs are being met. You may still think that unions aren't for you, and that's okay. It's still probably worth looking into them a little though because you've been being lied to by people who want to keep you ignorant and misinformed on the subject. Those people are afraid of what unions are capable of and that isn't because they're worried about your career and want to protect you. Once you understand what unions actually are, and aren't, you can make up your own mind.
ianbutler 2mo ago
I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent. It's far more often that I hear "we interviewed someone we thought looked good and they couldn't even write a for loop, where are all the good engineers". I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.
- bryanrasmussen 2mo ago
  I don't think I have ever encountered anyone who could not write a for loop that got a job as a programmer. I encounter plenty that used a for loop when something else would have been advisable.
  - hungryhobbit 2mo ago
    I think he was being a little hyperbolic, but the core concern (that programmers look competent right up until you have them write a FizzBuzz) is very real. (Source: I've helped hire lots of programmers.)
    - foobarian 2mo ago
      Sadly I have run into people like that. To this day I am convinced they paid someone to stand in for the interviews.
      - thejazzman 2mo ago
        I'm probably the person ya'll are hating on. Writing code and writing code under pressure while you have a full blown anxiety attack are not the same thing. I'm lucky if I can accurately tell you what I had for breakfast once that triggers..
        jonhohle 2mo ago
        If you program daily, but were nervous during an interview, I would have been able to tell and always tried to get candidates comfortable before getting into any programming - talking about something they liked or were passionate about, reframing my questions in terms of something we talked about or was on their resume. I found most of the people who couldn’t program were not the nervous ones, but were smooth talkers who probably didn’t write much code. Maybe they did at one point, maybe they never did, it was hard to know, but I couldn’t get even logical steps to solve straight forward problems out of them. Those were the worst interviews, not because the candidate wasn’t a fit for the role, but because then I had to panic to try to keep the experience positive, constructive, and collaborative. When I expected to fill 20-40 minutes talking through a problem with someone who can’t solve problems, let alone produce anything remotely looking like code, I always found that painful. The questions I asked could be solved by non-programmers (my wife, who was an elementary teacher and even my kindergarten son could come up with reasonable solutions, but of course not code). That was probably the biggest issue I ran into with nervous people - they didn’t think about the problem first, they’d try writing code before really thinking through. That was usually easy to correct and I didn’t fault anyone who could handle correction and guidance.
enbugger 2mo ago
I think such comment are the exact reason why "the speaker" has quit HN. This is literally some AI transcription from the video + "I find this interesting". Why is this even in the top?
- baranul 2mo ago
  > why "the speaker" has quit HN Quitting HN[1] might have more to do with feeling he and Zig had already harvested the maximum benefit and marketing propaganda usage for elevating itself, including using it to thoroughly smear its C alternative language competitors. Thus, it came time to figuratively give HN the middle finger while on top (selling high before the stock may fall). Many might not have done a review of the history, as he quit Twitter and Reddit too[2], years ago (2023). Arguably excuses are given to cover for offloading any personal involvement on a particular social media platform, as either they are self sustaining without his presence or no greater benefit is thought to be possible. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47928645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47928645 (Tell HN: Site Is Trash Now) [2]: https://andrewkelley.me/post/goodbye-twitter-reddit.html https://andrewkelley.me/post/goodbye-twitter-reddit.html (So Long, Twitter and Reddit)
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - spacechild1 2mo ago
    Do you find it so unbelievable that Andrew is genuinely unhappy with the direction that HN has been taken? You can't deny that there is a real problem with AI generated submissions and comments.
aaron695 2mo ago
[dead]
chanux 2mo ago
> Engineers who care about such things, often engage in acts of "benevolent noncompliance". Common workarounds are "asking for forgiveness instead of permission", secrecy, and misdirection. Without the support of a unified vision, these good intentions could pave the path to hell by the way.
BrenBarn 2mo ago
> Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities This is Hacker News syndrome. What you described is why everything sucks. It's because people at the top are more concerned with making money than doing good things well.
AussieWog93 2mo ago
In defence of management, there is definitely a pattern of engineers (or employees in general, really) spending inordinate amounts on time doing something that they find personally gratifying but adds no real value to the product/business. I've been guilty of this myself.
- noisy_boy 2mo ago
  The pendulum has swung way too much to the other side. Now, people have to fight for just doing a reasonably basic job testing the code while the manager breathes down their neck with impatience fueled by unrealistic expectations of LLM magic (and this is even for those managers who are technically aware enough of LLM challenges so I can only attribute that to wilful ignorance). The expectation of the code not blowing up in production still stands though. There is no arguing with this unreasonableness. It basically sucks.
- veltas 2mo ago
  It's really easy to miss the value in Pointless Rewrite 5 of Core Module 4, but the grad who rewrites it will at least understand it afterwards and can fix the bugs they introduced and add new features to it easier. But the hard pill to swallow is they spent $200K of the engineering budget making the code worse. The way to understand the value is to see the engineer as an asset. Engineers aren't interchangeable and no codebase can truly be documented and CI'd to the point where expertise doesn't matter.
sureglymop 2mo ago
"You can be fired, you can be reprimanded if caught, you can be retaliated against or lose political advantage." You could also silently burn out. Especially if fighting this as your own personal sisyphean uphill battle. I think especially people driven by passion and curiosity are at risk of this. And I mean, that's pretty much what the "hacker mindset" of many people on here amounts to. There's also a reason why people with a lot of passion are often taken advantage of, e.g. game development industry.
honkycat 2mo ago
Aren't you glad the govt let them import a bunch of cheap labor they can treat like trash to undercut the US economy?
spopejoy 2mo ago
The title is bad. Anything "-pilled" is incel speak until proven innocent

by spudlyo 2mo ago

ak39 2mo ago

Thank you for this. (I think HN should consider creating TLDR type of comments for upvoting separately from commentary. @Dan incentivise with different karma credits?)

conqrr 2mo ago

This hits so hard. I used to admire Senior developers who would do this. Now, I find myself in a place where there is no one to do this, and I've taken up to playing this role. It is the hardest job, but I cannot do any thing else as my team is committed to just non-stop slop thanks to management directives. I realize all the time I spent admiring, and now I have become.

repeekad 2mo ago
If the engineers were right the bill will come due on that tech debt eventually. Likely when that happens the company will just spend more than they needed to fixing the issues and no one will be around to say I told you so.
- wk_end 2mo ago
  The problem is that the counterfactual isn't obvious. The company spends more time - and money - than they needed to fixing those issues, but how do they know? And how do they know that it would've amounted to less if they'd done those fixes sooner? Figuring that out, and figuring it out accurately, is often extremely difficult. A serious attempt might cost more than the fixes. ...and often the amount more isn't catastrophically more, so they don't even think about it. The company might be bleeding from paper cuts, it might be terribly unhealthy because of it, but still not unhealthy enough to kill it.
- kentm 2mo ago
  The bill does come due. I've seen it happen over and over. But management fails to connect current problems to past mistakes, especially when they happen over the course of years. Thats setting aside when they insist that the correct decision was made, but have no real evidence that this is the case, other than the fact that "things worked out" even though maybe it would have been better had a different decision was made. People do get a pass on this -- you can't rigorously examine every decision and counter-factual or you'd never make forward progress. And I don't really have any great ideas on how to bridge this gap. It'd be nice if there were better ways to measure this but there aren't, so it really comes down to who is more convincing, which is often orthogonal to facts and correctness.
- SR2Z 2mo ago
  > Likely when that happens the company will just spend more than they needed to fixing the issues and no one will be around to say I told you so. In my experience, yeah, but how they do it is... not what you'd expect. Leadership has no clue about the scope of tech debt in their products and if they do decide to fix it, it will be by coming up with a bunch of ridiculously optimistic estimates and then foisting them off onto engineers who are already overworked trying to keep up with tech debt to launch new stuff. This feels awful and generally doesn't lead to anything being properly fixed because it turns fixing tech debt into a "just get it barely good enough and mark it as done." After the inevitable surge in attrition, more often than not the tech debt is "solved" by throwing out the old codebase and starting from scratch with a new team. This is expensive, but in a lot of cases produces a better product.

autoexec 2mo ago

> In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us. This sounds like a job for unions. It would have been advantageous to have formed and joined them before so much power was lost, but it's easy to be shortsighted when you're happy and comfortable with where you are and ignore that the situation could easily change, if not for you then for the next generation. Companies are happy to leverage every advantage they have against workers. Unions can be a powerful tool for workers, one that could help solve a lot of problems current and future, and it's sitting there just waiting to be used.

SR2Z 2mo ago
I am 100% sure that I make more than the average person in my role and level (tbh more money than I even thought I'd make in my life). Why should I support a union? If the company couldn't fire me they wouldn't pay me so much. If a union advocates for everyone else, it's gonna be harder for me to get paid so much. I don't really mind the constant layoffs; I think that those are horrific for morale and lead to disengaged engineers and the bare minimum of work being done, but that's true with or without the union. I certainly look at the lack of opportunities for career growth and the constant threat of layoffs as a good reason to take it easy. What I think the union would be AMAZING at is the same thing unions are always amazing at in this country: stopping anyone from being fired and ending merit based promotions.
- autoexec 2mo ago
  > I am 100% sure that I make more than the average person in my role and level..Why should I support a union? Even if that is true today, it may not be tomorrow. The corporation you work for is not your friend. They aren't looking out for your best interests. They are worried only about themselves. You should do the same and unions give you more power in negotiations with your employer and more protections against them as well. > If the company couldn't fire me they wouldn't pay me so much. That's a lie. First, because unions don't make it impossible to fire employees, but also because the ability to fire you for arbitrary (or even illegal) reasons does not force companies to pay you more. Removing that ability won't force them to pay you less. > the same thing unions are always amazing at in this country: stopping anyone from being fired and ending merit based promotions. Employers spend billions every singe year trying to con workers into thinking that unions are evil and wow, you really fell for their bullshit. Those are some commonly repeated lies, but they don't stand up to scrutiny. They're just supposed to trick people who don't bother questioning what they're told. At most, all a union does is force a company to actually document the disciplinary problems and give an employee an opportunity to correct their behavior before they fire them. This makes it more difficult for companies to fire employees for reasons that have nothing to do with their performance and for any reasons that the company isn't comfortable documenting (often because those reasons would be embarrassing or illegal). There's nothing preventing merit based promotions either. How promotions are handled will be determined in part by the contract between the company and the union and it's the workers who decide what the union asks for in their contract. If you want a contract with the employer that allows for merit based promotions you can have one. There are zero rules against that, but you should expect the union will require the terms to be well defined. Employers like to say they want "merit based promotions" when what they actually want is total control over promotions for whatever arbitrary reasons they decide to call "merit based". A union contract probably should require that an employer is able to justify the reasons for their merit based promotions using objective measures of productivity/performance that apply equally to all employees. That means the people who work the hardest and do the best work will be promoted even when the boss would rather promote their favored nepo baby, or when the boss would rather not promote someone who actually earned it. Even then, that'd all be according to the contract. If your union doesn't care about fair merit based promotion and wants the boss to be able to deny or award them to anyone at any time without justification that's fine too. Unions are organizations made up of people. There are good ones and bad ones. Workers get from them what they put into them. There are plenty of horror stories that get heavily promoted to scare you. Some of them are even true stories. Ultimately though, employees have the power to change or replace their union to make sure their needs are being met. You may still think that unions aren't for you, and that's okay. It's still probably worth looking into them a little though because you've been being lied to by people who want to keep you ignorant and misinformed on the subject. Those people are afraid of what unions are capable of and that isn't because they're worried about your career and want to protect you. Once you understand what unions actually are, and aren't, you can make up your own mind.

ianbutler 2mo ago

I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent. It's far more often that I hear "we interviewed someone we thought looked good and they couldn't even write a for loop, where are all the good engineers". I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.

bryanrasmussen 2mo ago
I don't think I have ever encountered anyone who could not write a for loop that got a job as a programmer. I encounter plenty that used a for loop when something else would have been advisable.
- hungryhobbit 2mo ago
  I think he was being a little hyperbolic, but the core concern (that programmers look competent right up until you have them write a FizzBuzz) is very real. (Source: I've helped hire lots of programmers.)
  - foobarian 2mo ago
    Sadly I have run into people like that. To this day I am convinced they paid someone to stand in for the interviews.
    - thejazzman 2mo ago
      I'm probably the person ya'll are hating on. Writing code and writing code under pressure while you have a full blown anxiety attack are not the same thing. I'm lucky if I can accurately tell you what I had for breakfast once that triggers..
      - jonhohle 2mo ago
        If you program daily, but were nervous during an interview, I would have been able to tell and always tried to get candidates comfortable before getting into any programming - talking about something they liked or were passionate about, reframing my questions in terms of something we talked about or was on their resume. I found most of the people who couldn’t program were not the nervous ones, but were smooth talkers who probably didn’t write much code. Maybe they did at one point, maybe they never did, it was hard to know, but I couldn’t get even logical steps to solve straight forward problems out of them. Those were the worst interviews, not because the candidate wasn’t a fit for the role, but because then I had to panic to try to keep the experience positive, constructive, and collaborative. When I expected to fill 20-40 minutes talking through a problem with someone who can’t solve problems, let alone produce anything remotely looking like code, I always found that painful. The questions I asked could be solved by non-programmers (my wife, who was an elementary teacher and even my kindergarten son could come up with reasonable solutions, but of course not code). That was probably the biggest issue I ran into with nervous people - they didn’t think about the problem first, they’d try writing code before really thinking through. That was usually easy to correct and I didn’t fault anyone who could handle correction and guidance.

enbugger 2mo ago

I think such comment are the exact reason why "the speaker" has quit HN. This is literally some AI transcription from the video + "I find this interesting". Why is this even in the top?

baranul 2mo ago
> why "the speaker" has quit HN Quitting HN[1] might have more to do with feeling he and Zig had already harvested the maximum benefit and marketing propaganda usage for elevating itself, including using it to thoroughly smear its C alternative language competitors. Thus, it came time to figuratively give HN the middle finger while on top (selling high before the stock may fall). Many might not have done a review of the history, as he quit Twitter and Reddit too[2], years ago (2023). Arguably excuses are given to cover for offloading any personal involvement on a particular social media platform, as either they are self sustaining without his presence or no greater benefit is thought to be possible. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47928645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47928645 (Tell HN: Site Is Trash Now) [2]: https://andrewkelley.me/post/goodbye-twitter-reddit.html https://andrewkelley.me/post/goodbye-twitter-reddit.html (So Long, Twitter and Reddit)
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- spacechild1 2mo ago
  Do you find it so unbelievable that Andrew is genuinely unhappy with the direction that HN has been taken? You can't deny that there is a real problem with AI generated submissions and comments.

aaron695 2mo ago

[dead]

chanux 2mo ago

> Engineers who care about such things, often engage in acts of "benevolent noncompliance". Common workarounds are "asking for forgiveness instead of permission", secrecy, and misdirection. Without the support of a unified vision, these good intentions could pave the path to hell by the way.

BrenBarn 2mo ago

> Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities This is Hacker News syndrome. What you described is why everything sucks. It's because people at the top are more concerned with making money than doing good things well.

AussieWog93 2mo ago

In defence of management, there is definitely a pattern of engineers (or employees in general, really) spending inordinate amounts on time doing something that they find personally gratifying but adds no real value to the product/business. I've been guilty of this myself.

noisy_boy 2mo ago
The pendulum has swung way too much to the other side. Now, people have to fight for just doing a reasonably basic job testing the code while the manager breathes down their neck with impatience fueled by unrealistic expectations of LLM magic (and this is even for those managers who are technically aware enough of LLM challenges so I can only attribute that to wilful ignorance). The expectation of the code not blowing up in production still stands though. There is no arguing with this unreasonableness. It basically sucks.
veltas 2mo ago
It's really easy to miss the value in Pointless Rewrite 5 of Core Module 4, but the grad who rewrites it will at least understand it afterwards and can fix the bugs they introduced and add new features to it easier. But the hard pill to swallow is they spent $200K of the engineering budget making the code worse. The way to understand the value is to see the engineer as an asset. Engineers aren't interchangeable and no codebase can truly be documented and CI'd to the point where expertise doesn't matter.

sureglymop 2mo ago

"You can be fired, you can be reprimanded if caught, you can be retaliated against or lose political advantage." You could also silently burn out. Especially if fighting this as your own personal sisyphean uphill battle. I think especially people driven by passion and curiosity are at risk of this. And I mean, that's pretty much what the "hacker mindset" of many people on here amounts to. There's also a reason why people with a lot of passion are often taken advantage of, e.g. game development industry.

honkycat 2mo ago

Aren't you glad the govt let them import a bunch of cheap labor they can treat like trash to undercut the US economy?

spopejoy 2mo ago

The title is bad. Anything "-pilled" is incel speak until proven innocent