this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I've only started working with bootcampers post 2021. I've seen trash code/design/architecture mainly from college educated SWE's.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Recent grads, or older ones? I graduated in 2016 from a large state school and I had many very brilliant peers in the CS program. Obviously, there were still plenty of people who were, "what are you even doing here?"-tier. I assume the younger gen of grads (2020-onwards) got mega-screwed by COVID lockdowns, remote learning, etc.

One thing I'm being a bit dismissive of is for a lot of people college is just "the next step" for youngsters who get railroaded into it, without a clear vision of what they're doing and what they want to do with their lives. By contrast, some of the bootcamp people I've seen are driven, focused, and self-motivated. They figured out what they want, and they know how to direct themselves to get it. Those kinds of people tend to be good at anything they apply themselves to, including software dev.