I'm still here, curious as ever. And for the truly curious, it's just gotten better. The ocean we swim in has gotten bigger and deeper.

I lamented when my career first started (2000 or so) that there were devs I worked with who didn't even own computers at home. While my bookshelves were full of books I aspired to learn and my hard drive was full of half-baked projects, they clocked out and their thinking was done.

I still know a few of those now 25 years after the fact. Some of them have made a career out of software. But they never got curious. It was a means to an end. I don't begrudge them that. But as someone who is internally driven to learn and improve and produce, I can't relate.

My primary fustration today is how many of my software peers are satisfied with updating a Jira status and not seeking to build excellent software. I've seen it at all levels - engineers, managers, and executives. I'm actualized by shipping good, useful software. They seem to be actualized by appearing busy. They don't appear to deliver much value, but their calendars are full. It has me at my professional wits end.

Truth be told, the phenomenon of appearing productive without being productive is an epidemic across multiple industries. I've had conversations with people in manufacturing and agriculture and academia and they all echo something similar. Eventually, Stein's law indicates that the productivity charade will end. And I fear it will be ugly.

>My primary fustration today is how many of my software peers are satisfied with updating a Jira status and not seeking to build excellent software. Truth be told, the phenomenon of appearing productive without being productive is an epidemic across multiple industries.

This is hardly a new phenomenon. Dilbert and its ilk have been lampooning this since the 80s.

> The ocean we swim in has gotten bigger and deeper.

IMO this is the part that the author is missing. Back in the 2000's, software development was a much smaller field and your main focus was the "curiosity pond" where all the developers went to tinker.

Now software dev has expanded into an ocean. That pond is still there but the author missed the pond for the ocean.

> it's just gotten better.

Couldn't agree more. Like many, I've had my honeymoon phase with AI and have now learned what it is good for and what it is not. What it has truly been good for is satisfying the nauseating number of topics I want to learn about. I can spend $20 a month and drill down into any topic I like for as long as I like in an incredibly efficient way. What a time to be alive.

I've been in that situation where I was coding by day and didn't have a computer at home. Or at least, I didn't have one that was the same platform as the one I was using at work. Growing up there was at one point a Commodore 64, some kind of Tandy, and a UNIX workstation, but at work I was developing on Windows NT, Solarix, and HP/UX.

In another case, I had recently moved to a new city and we were targeting an internal proprietary platform (again with Windows NT) and also targeting Solaris.

There was a time when you would go to work and you would be working with header files and libraries that were proprietary and for which your company was paying an exorbitant per-head license fee.

By the time I got my first job in 1996, I had been a hobbyist for 10 years and graduated from college. The last thing I was thinking about doing as a single 22 year old who had just moved to the big city and had free cash flow was sit down at a computer after work.

I have never in 30 years written a single line of code that I didn’t get paid for except a little work I did for charity.

I resonate with your message entirely. Have you been able to find a company/position where you are able to satisfy this drive?

I relate 100%; there are still a lot of people like us :)

Do we work at the same company? It's tough out there.

What "hackers" don't understand is that at certain scale, social cohesion is extremely important. A huge army of socially cohesive morons will achieve greater things than a small group of dedicated geniuses. This means that for any entity that grows beyond certain scale, socially cohesive morons are actually preferable over dedicated geniuses. The fact that your coworkers are unmotivated lazy stupid fucks is not a bug, it's a feature. They're not there to be smart, they're there to be socially cohesive.