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] 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

as a now-canned midlevel moron I wish I had actually taken ownership of my career and learned how to actually design systems and apply theory instead of just working on x feature in isolation

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

No you don't. This is me IRL now:

I have such sights to show you on the borders of sensation (pain, anger, frustration, mechanical keyboards).

But seriously tho, it's a thankless job that drives you insane. My experience differs from yours most likely in that I was already predisposed to this insanity. I figured out how to sell myself. I am very sensitive to corporate politics because I often find myself in vulnerable positions (startups, tooling and platform teams). I don't really chase huge bumps in pay because I don't want to stand out on the P&Ls. I'm also fairly insulated in my personal life (no kids, live below my means, etc) so that I am well equipped for these fights and more well equipped if I ever lose.

Honestly most companies believe they are looking for me, but I've found that not to be the case. They simply believe someone with my qualifications will prove that they're right in terms of how they do things. It's a hard thing politically.

That and my real job is talking to morons and cleanup. I wrote a data modeling system for typescript from scratch last year so that we could actually manage a eternal data registry (which is part of our goals). It auto-generates TS Types, Factories, Typeguards, Validators etc. I also had to ask for 2 months extension from some senior execs, because I couldn't upload a file and the team that owns the file management service is under resourced and underutilized. Guess how much management time each project took up? Data modeling system? comparable to IC reporting hours over 2 months. File Upload? A week and a half.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

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.

[–] [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 11 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

I have no problem with designers. They have a real job and the best of them make really great interfaces. It's a really difficult skill. They are a parallel work capacity to me. Most of the time most software has really bad UI/UX because designers are treated even worse than us at companies that have been financialized to the hilt. I've been at several places that have fired designers only to have to rehire them again.

I know I make programmer interfaces. Designers help refine those to something simpler and more usable. I actually have had multiple talks to designers at multiple companies saying how we needed to push for a unified product style guide + component theme to standardize the visual language and design. This helps lighten everyone's load because it makes time for building important shit on both sides. It's so hard to explain to business how valuable it is to have a process for building a durable library off the shelf components.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

And how do you expect to build a design system without some kind of task tracking or governance process?

Certainly it's an issue how product people get to control these mm processes but that's an implementation thing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

And how do you expect to build a design system without some kind of task tracking or governance process?

Business does not actually govern according to anything but profits. Product is highly aligned with business goals at the majority of places because they often have the same metrics breakdown of the problem, marketability = features, features = money, new features = recurring revenue from subscriptions. Product managers going against business is often a sign of a toxic company or a misalignment in strategy/market position/expectations. Enterprise features = durable recurring revenue.

I usually advocate for increasing the scope of governance decisions to include production stakeholders (not just tech, but design and other production functions depending on industry I'm in) to achieve economies of scale for systems. The reality is the governance process at most places is nonexistent, and is solely a managerial function. The reason that leadership is split into technical and managerial in most modern tech companies is to consecrate governance power. We're told to as tech dweebs who cannot commune with the scam that is stock companies that we need to "manage up" instead.

I'm not against ticket tracking. I'm against the corpo culture where process is used as a soft power against people who are only treated with respect because the relation of their job to the market that leads to micromanagement and worse financial outcomes anyway.

Enterprise sales is a death knell for so many software teams because it disconnects the payer from the user. Meaning recurring revenue from sales to the same user aren't an organic process of conversion based on good software, they are a managed process of procurement. It creates a bad product and a bad set of incentives that ends up undercutting the original value prop. This happens bright as day within our own industry with our own tooling. Things like Jira, Trello, DataDog, AWS, tableau, looker, etc. I have a friend who's in the data science space with purchasing power and they change tooling every 2 years because as companies ramp up to the enterprise sales pipeline they stop maintaining the core offering as well and things get slow. Tableau and Looker are perfect examples that I've personally seen completely hollow out in my life time.

Certainly it’s an issue how product people get to control these mm processes but that’s an implementation thing.

This is the agile version of real (capitalism/communism/socialsm) hasn't ever been tried. Not only are processes picked by their susceptibility to managerial meddling, but managerial meddling is a feature. That's why nobody uses XP and everyone uses scrum. That's why companies where there's push-back on mid sprint re-prioritization and waste go to kanban. These systems are ultimately products and are sold as such to management. That's why SAFe is getting incredibly popular in enterprise despite being overwrought garbage that cuts its own legs out from under it, and is more waterfall in design than the average scrum implementation.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 22 hours ago

If you build it, they will come.

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

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago

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.