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?
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.