| ▲ | birdsongs 2 hours ago |
| I work on my code this way, but I have no idea what my colleagues are doing, and it's impossible to review thousands of new/changed lines a week. I just approve PRs, because I have to. I don't know what else to do. I can barely keep an eye on all my code. Actively looking, but job market is rough in Northern Europe. I quit caring about quality in any capacity here, the company has clearly chosen its direction, against my very vocal complaints. My last interview, with what I thought was a great company, failed when I didn't understand what NLP was when they asked me about it. > NLP?
> Natural Language Programming, it's the future. Claude, GPT, etc. I laughed, he didn't, looked offended and said it was a serious question. I had thought it was a joke, said "oh you mean LLMs". I tried to answer seriously, of course, but that was my third round technical interview and I didn't get a call back. Just getting a paycheck and producing mediocre work until I get something new. (Senior engineer, 10 YOE, patents, 3 years at a unicorn). Also considering becoming an electrician. |
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| ▲ | hathawsh an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| I will be unhappy if they steal the meaning of NLP. NLP means Natural Language Processing and LLMs are only a subset of NLP. I would have concerns about anyone who claims to have technical knowledge and asserts NLP means "natural language programming." Those are the same kind of people who might suggest Lisp should add mutable objects. |
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| ▲ | riffraff an hour ago | parent [-] | | You may be surprised and annoyed that NLP is also "Neuro linguistic programming", I've met technical people talking of NLP and meaning that... | | |
| ▲ | hathawsh an hour ago | parent [-] | | Yes, but that's in psychology. Different fields have their own terms without causing too many issues. Communication breaks down when we reuse terms for different things within the same field. | | |
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| ▲ | annzabelle 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm in what I think will be my last tech job before retraining into something else. The aspects I like about the work are gone, I'm coasting at a small company that's not a great fit, has a visa cliff, and is poorly paid, and the steps it would take to become competitive in an LLM driven tech job market are less appealing to me than the steps it would take to switch over to a different career (likely in healthcare). |
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| ▲ | fasterik 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah, I imagine it's something that needs to be enforced at the organizational level. I sympathize with anyone who takes pride in their work and needs to deal with mindless coworkers pushing slop without any accountability. I left corporate software development (before LLMs were a thing) over frustration with the general culture and I can only imagine it's gotten worse since then. |
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| ▲ | birdsongs 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's really bad now, yeah. :( It just really hurts that I spent well over a decade of my life learning and honing skills to engineer safe, quality software and now it's just, useless. No one cares at best, or I'm callously told "keep up or fall behind" at worst. When that's not even the problem, it just, sucks now. There's no joy in anything I do professionally. Can I ask where you went? I'm seriously looking for an exit, I just don't know what yet. Maybe a trade, in Scandinavia the pay is actually comparable, I just don't want to go back to school. | | |
| ▲ | Silhouette 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | It just really hurts that I spent well over a decade of my life learning and honing skills to engineer safe, quality software and now it's just, useless. It can feel that way with all the hype but I very much doubt that is really true. I see an industry that is rapidly dividing into two camps - "move fast and break things" and "this actually needs to work". Writing everything with agents and merging while barely even checking what is in the PR has become standard practice in the former but it will get you laughed out of the room in the latter. | |
| ▲ | fasterik an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I was fortunate and saved up enough to live frugally and just work on passion/learning projects for a while. I've been considering going back into commercial software development as a solo dev and leveraging AI, but keeping the focus on quality and craftsmanship. In my opinion there's never been a better time to start a new, ambitious project if you're passionate about quality software. |
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| ▲ | fluoridation 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Sounds like a cushy job. Why would you want to leave? |
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| ▲ | swatcoder 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Some people just can't turn off their brains and play drone for dozens of hours a week for decades. It feels existentially, aesthetically, and sometimes ethically crushing to spend a whole life doing work you can't expect yourself to respect or value, no matter how much you get paid or how little the work overtly demands of you. Often, the lack of meaningfully challenging demands being put on you is punishing on its own. It can feel like a relief for a week or month or year, but if you catch a glimpse of that being your whole future, you can come to recognize yourself as being in a mind-eroding secular purgatory. This anguish is especially common among on highly capable people, high achievers, and those used to some kind of ambition. And by accident of its history, there's a lot of those people in this industry and some of them are going nuts now. | | |
| ▲ | Nevermark an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > This anguish is especially common among on highly capable people, high achievers, and those used to some kind of ambition. And by accident of its history, there's a lot of those people in this industry and some of them are going nuts now. I went nuts for years, until I sold off my interest in my dream partnership. 10 years of heaven. All the benefits and none of the downsides of my internal colleagues. Then 14 years of bureaucracy aimed at predictability over progress, which was infinitely more difficult for me to dodge as an external player. Compensation for my interest was very objectively valued, with the rate of stalled progress priced in. Which made complete sense, while also being its own madness. I walked away from so much value, but I don't regret it for a minute. | |
| ▲ | birdsongs an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > and some of them are going nuts now. Pretty much this. I know it sounds melodramatic but it literally feels like rotting. I don't solve anything anymore. I don't get any spark of fixing bugs. I don't DO ANYTHING, and it's fucking chipping away at me. Also I'm fairly sure people are going to realise soon that if they're happy with slop, they don't actually need highly trained engineers anymore. This whole thread actually prompted me to look into electrician work, especially in renewables that we have here in Norway. I might fix my burnout and go to school to get my 2 year qualification. AI can't rewire a hydro dam. | | |
| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | tomat_1000 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Man, I have the same feeling.
A long time in your life you build the career and now it’s just feeling so empty, like you are not a engineer anymore, now everyone can use AI and without checking code they would have good results. |
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| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] | | |
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| ▲ | footy 3 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | it sounds soul-destroying |
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