What’s a Dirty Secret No One Wants To Admit In The Tech/Software Industry?

Industry as a whole or within software engineering.

AI is not making engineers more productive. It makes them lazy and think less critically. Also leads to soft-mindedness.

Virtually no one in tech seems interested in doing what Jobs suggested despite the level of success he delivered.

Telling an average developer to work backward from the customer will generally be met with a foul mood. Especially when that constraint suggests that the currently preferred technical ideology or tribe is no longer suitable.

The whole thing is one big ego trip most of the time.

120 hours of leetcode prep to get a job centering divs with claude

Automation isn't having robots assemble things, it's laying off accountants who read numbers from spreadsheets, type them into their calculator, and enter the number back into the spreadsheet, and replacing them with a spreadsheet that was created by someone who actually knows what they're doing.

Most production code nobody actually understands in full. People just know their part, and the rest runs on inertia and fear of touching it.

It's all bash scripts

People who work in tech aren't as interested in the tech as they are in the money.

The average programmer is an illusion. Most programmers working in software, and I’m including not just the tech industry specifically, but all companies that employ or contact for programming are not very good. The relatively few who are outstanding skew the average. You know the joke about Bill Gates walks into a bar?

Most programmers were already doing what vibe programmers do with AI now, just more manually.

1. True security cannot rely on code correctness but only on reliable compartmentalization. Qubes OS does this right.

2. Your phone is an entire computer, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47367568

3. Intel ME / AMD PSP is a computer inside your computer that obeys someone else, not you.

4. Ads are an attack, aimed at your brain. They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49282599, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269

The business customers don't understand the concept of a dangling else.

That most people could care less about tech and are just in it for the grift.

The same programmers that shame others for using AI tools like Codex, Claude are also secretly using it themselves.

Whether at work or personal projects or anything else.

Nobody wants to admit it, but they are using AI.

Most of the work is meaningless and some form of theater, lots of folks are chasing total comp and resume driven development. Many metrics measured are orthogonal to success, and the work that matters to success is hard to measure at all. Complexity for complexity's sake. "Just one more framework|technology|abstraction bro."

Choose Boring Technology (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289512 - August 2026 (245 comments)

In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39440179 - February 2024 (436 comments)