This was always due to pressures by management and the company environment, not the workers themselves. It's hard to blame the people writing code when they have to deal with nontechnical leadership that wants to have a feature factory or never given appropriate resources to solve problems.

Blaming workers is always an excuse by poor management.

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hax0ron3 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

The pressures from management and the company environment are not always a bad thing. It really depends on whether the pressures are coming from a logical business perspective or whether they are just coming from stupidity or ignorance. In a business environment, taking a long time to ship great code can mean that the company goes out of business, and then the software developers have a lot of great code and no income.

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shimman 3 days ago | parent [-]

I'm sorry but pressuring workers over this stuff is frankly disgusting and I reject you for your anti-worker + anti-human sentiment.

What sort of human looks at a group of people and goes "it would be really nice if we made people miserable."

Absolutely disgusting.

	▲	hax0ron3 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Wait. I didn't say anything about making people miserable. And I'm not talking about some weird kind of pressure like yelling at people. I just mean the normal, almost inevitable kind of pressure that comes from the business situation. Management has to somehow figure out strategies to handle the pressure and it has to communicate these strategies and the reasoning for them to the engineers in a constructive way. Generally, this is the pressure to be competitive and make money. It does the developers no good if they spend so much time writing great code that the company goes out of business.

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Retric 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Many people were and still are simply terrible developers.

Hand those people an LLM and they don’t suddenly become competent, but they do start slinging more code.

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shimman 3 days ago | parent [-]

Nah, you're still blaming workers and not leadership. If leadership is okay with not training workers (something American corporations would do in the distant past) then it's not fair to continue to blame workers when leadership is clearly aware of the problem and would rather pocket the money than help workers.

These companies pay management more than workers for a reason, if you can't even admit that they are to blame then what are you trying to do here? Just attack workers for what reason exactly? Being anti-worker is a great tell to never trust a person.

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ndriscoll 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

We're talking about professionals here. People who (at least in the US) often make several multiples of the median worker. Competence is assumed, and every company I've been at has had programs to pay for additional school if the employee wants it. IIRC at least one had an explicit book allowance, and I don't doubt that I could expense books right now if I asked. Do surgeons and lawyers complain so regularly that management doesn't train them? Or are software engineers just this desperate to be seen as "not a real professional"?

Who even is supposed to be training us? We're supposed to be the experts. Unless you mean mentorship, which is also generally already a thing at any company that has more than a handful of engineers.

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shimman 3 days ago | parent [-]

There is no professional developer in the US. There are no licensing requirements to write code. There are no repercussions against developers that write code that immiserate or kill Americans. The person slinging wordpress plugins at an agency is equivalent to the person writing malware at Meta in the eyes of the government.

No one is training us because there are no regulations in our industry. Sorry but I still reject the premise of the other poster.

Also yes, in other industries professionals do complain when they aren't given their mandated time to learn while working on the job.

	▲	ndriscoll 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		We are given time though. Maybe not at some small sweatshop? But at least at big companies all the jobs are salaried, and either no one cares how exactly you spend your time, or they explicitly say it's fine to spend some time learning, and will pay for materials or courses. They're generally not going to teach you how to program or what the latest technologies are or what the best ways to do things are because that's literally what they're paying you for. But IME they definitely give you plenty of time and autonomy to be learning things at work.

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Retric 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I do blame management for letting these people through the interview process and then not firing them. But that’s independent of the fact they exist.

Training doesn’t solve every problem, the worst programmer I ever worked with that a PHD in computer science. Everything he made was horribly slow, wildlife overly complicated, and buggy. Worse he wouldn’t listen to anyone correcting his issues. He’d store numbers in the database as strings to be database agnostic etc.

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shimman 3 days ago | parent [-]

Let me throw a curve ball at you: do you accept the premise that most modern corporations are centrally planned economies under the rulership of monarchies, oligarchies, or general authoritarians? If so, do you think introducing democracy into the workplace would help alleviate issues you care about?

You do not like bad workers, management doesn't care. They pay bad workers the same as you, bad workers can get promotions the same as you, you will also get laid off with the bad workers as well; or maybe even worse, the bad workers get promoted into management themselves. How do you want things to change in such an environment?

You have no authority to do anything meaningful as a single worker, what if you were given a voice to actually make these claims and have other workers decide what to do based on your voice?

Workplace democracy seems like an interesting concept to explore if you truly want to create better environments with beneficial outcomes to all, not just the few:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy

Or are you just trying to bash your co-workers so you become the next pick me?

	▲	Retric 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> do you accept the premise that most modern corporations are centrally planned economies under the rulership of monarchies, oligarchies, or general authoritarians? No stock owners are ultimately in control of public companies. That doesn’t fit any of the models you just described. Similarly companies are not independent of government control which inherently separates them from management systems associated with governments. A CEO is limited by the law in ways that a dictator isn’t.

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Kiro 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I've only worked at companies with great leadership. This is in the Nordics with very strong worker protection. And yet most of my colleagues including myself have been pretty terrible and write dirty code. It's not a management issue and it's not anti-worker to acknowledge this fact.

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shimman 3 days ago | parent [-]

Your great leadership doesn't seem to care, so either your management knows better than you or maybe you should push back on the notion that you worked with "great leadership."

Only poor leaders ignore their workers, which is what you seemed to have actually experience.

	▲	Kiro 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Sounds like you've only worked with brilliant people. Good for you but don't use your experience to spread these obviously delusional ideas.