Why software engineers are grieving

qweqwe14

Claude, generate an article that will get to HN front page. Make no mistakes.

bitlad

I think I have seen the transition. Google, facebook, et al genuine believed they were changing the world unless they became seen as evil big corp. Then came the techbro, true nerds doing nerdy stuff got lost among the noise techbros created.

sroerick

Its okay to be a tradesman. You don't have to join a cult and save the world. Work is hard and unpleasant. That's okay.

tekla

Learn to weld.

codemog

> He told me more than once why he chose us over other offers. We were a B2B SaaS company that helped healthcare technology companies bring safer products to market faster. That mission mattered to him [..] Mate, come on. Modern corporate hellscape America forces people say stuff like this. He wanted the job because you pay him MONEY which is required to EAT and not DIE OF ILLNESS, because employment is tied to if you get to see a doctor without going bankrupt.

eterm

LinkedIn tier generated rubbish!

lwhi

I think I'm also grieving loss. I'm at a time in my life where I most probably have 15 to 20 years of gainful employment left in me. Perhaps too little time to retrain; but definitely too much time to retire comfortably now. A midlife crisis, coupled with an existential crisis. I thought I had a clear route ahead. What do I do when everything I've learnt and dedicated myself to, is no longer valuable?

sgt101

It's not about the money, it's about the money.

xpct

I think if change was fast it'd be less painful. Dragging this out is what makes it so. LLMs being as unreliable as they are, and being gaslit about model capabilities every other week burns you out fast.

dsjoerg

Those who pay no attention to history are surprised when things change. It's the temporal equivalent of never leaving your home town. Very provincial. Then one day change comes and they're all shocked pikachu face.

zug_zug

I think this is an interesting thesis that could have been expressed in 100-200 words.

jaredcwhite

We were literally told that because of the Computer/Internet revolution, the entire nature of business was changing… politics too! Companies would become collectives, employees would have immense power to set their own goals and be radically UX-focused, profits would be widely distributed, and the old corporate structures & crony capitalism would largely be done away with. In a certain sense, becoming a software engineer was to be birthing a new form of leftism. That largely turned out to be complete and utter hogwash. The instant capitalists realized they had extracted enough out of that myth to gain ultimate power and reassert dominance, they pounced. 2020-2026 has been a boiling-frogs-in-pots shift from collectivism to an extreme sort of New Oligarchy. Software engineers weren't making the world a more fair, creative, and democratic place. LOL! The exact opposite , in fact, has occurred. Yes, of course we're grieving. But using agents to generate "code" isn't the issue. That's merely a symptom, one among many. The root cause? Societal systems based on pure greed and bigoted supremacy which were NEVER properly dismantled. The new leftism of tech? Nothing but a mirage. Millennials got played. And wow did we fall for it. My only hope at this point: Gen Z will succeed where we clearly failed. Our best hope is to listen to them, partner with them, help them channel their rage into action, and take control back from the tech moguls and oligarchs.