| ▲ | socketcluster an hour ago | |
Most software developers are incapable of writing secure or maintainable code. Maybe like 5% can do it. Yet it has no correlation with pay or even access to job opportunities because recruitment has been broken since the dawn of the industry. Now we literally have business people who never coded in their lives telling software engineers what tools and platforms to use and how to do their jobs. That's the current reality. You can't even tell which engineers are good today because the good ones aren't allowed to make the decisions that they need to make to properly leverage their own skills and experience. It's like if a manager gave Djokovic a tennis racket made out of led with spikes on the handle and expecting him to win tournaments. Under such conditions, you won't be able to tell him apart from a novice. Now we have non-technical managers who never coded in their lives leading teams of vibe-coders who also never coded in their lives... Using AI agents trained on mediocre, insecure code from Stack Overflow and GitHub; written by mediocre developers for practice. And the fact that I'm downvoted for pointing this out is what seals the fate, IMO. North Korea has a bright future ahead of it thanks to its elite hacking team. If you see what they were able to pull off without open weight models, wait till you see what they'll be able to pull off with them! The situation is unfixable because: - It would be physically difficult to fix the mess due to extreme complexity. Open source devs who control all the pieces of the global infra have checked out of the socio-economic system. They are apathetic, or worse. The average open source dev I know makes me look optimistic by comparison. - People don't understand that there is problem, let alone understand the problem. - People have no idea what skills are required to fix the problem. - The current social structure is not compatible with the social structure required to provide a solution. You have all the wrong people in the wrong places. We don't have a free market to identify top performers so we can't identify them. If you think that the top-paid engineer at Google who spent their career styling and aligning elements with CSS is the kind you need to fix the deep security problems we have now, you're in for a surprise. - Even if the problems AND solutions were correctly identified (both of which sound impossible to me), there would be no will to fix them. | ||