What opinions about the tech industry do you feel comfortable expressing here, but not in public/at work?

A lot of what is sold to consumers is straight up shite.

Tech workers need to unionize

The Microsh*t Office Suit is atrocious — both from a Software Dev and ordinary user perspective. Literally any alternative is better, Libre Office, Google Office, etc.

Word is bloated, slow, impractical, bad for collaboration, and politically dubious. Teams is buggy, impractical, also politically dubious, and lacks many basic features. At this point, I literally despise Microsoft. Also Windows really seems to be unusable, from the enlightened perspective of a Mac or Linux user (in my case the latter).

SystemD is bloated and stopping Linux from getting faster.

Most mainstream programming languages suck, Rust being the exception.

Alright, I'm done ;)

Edit: any website that breaks because of uBlock Origin medium mode is poorly made and not trustworthy. /endrant

I think that the AI industry is particularly harmful to writers, journalists, actors, artists, and others. This is not because AI produces better pieces of work, but rather due to misanthropic viewpoints of particularly toxic and powerful individuals at the top of the tech industry hierarchy pushing AI as the next big thing due to their general misunderstanding or outright dislike of the general public.

I'm a writer and my work is increasingly making me use AI to do things. I'm 98% sure I'm just training this thing to replace me at this point, and am planning accordingly.

So Just for context I work as an engineer but I consider myself pretty low level. I am completely self taught as I sort of flunked out of college and didn't pay much attention anyway. I've just been the sort of person who takes everything apart and tinkers around to figure things out or reads documentation. So I am not some genius programmer or anything. However what I have noticed over the span of my ( 40 + years ) is that the Internet and technology used to be a challenge but rewarding. Things were skewed towards creativity, sharing, community, and knowledge. I remember spending lots of time on forums like Usenet and later bulletin boards of various types. I remember when Wikipedia first became a thing and it really seemed to me that we were going to get this amazing platform to learn and self teach just about any subject imaginable. Then somehow the Internet just became an endless fucking scroll farm. My dumbass uncles and older family members who used to be content with just eating aerosol cheese while channel surfing got online and became complete fools. Instead of creativity and debate we just have endless AI slop, morons reacting to videos of nothing, Bots, and click bait. It seems like the industry just loves it because before they could barely figure out how they could make money off of this crap and now they have it figured out "turn everyone into fucking zombies". People at work are at times blown away at my stamina to work through problems and it's like bro I used to sleep next to my 486 so I could put in disk 20 of 50 to install something and it would take like all friggin night. I used to have to find a dude that got a catalog so I could get a CPU upgrade or part because there was no internet. I used to have to fight for every damn piece of documentation or software I could get my hand on. Now it's all right there and people have decided to watch Tik Tok instead of being able to do anything on their own. We screwed the hell up the Internet and tech has made people lazy, less capable, and focused on instant gratification. It was supposed to make us curious, creative, and engaged. Now with AI we are like "hmm how can I even be lazier?". I would get if they used AI to help solve really complex problems reserved that compute and stuff to assist on certain things that humans are not good at. However we are using this shit to just circumvent having to think and a substitute for community. Why ask a friggin bot when all the answers were in forums where you could interact with people make friends and learn? Now I am looking down the barrel of the gun of being replaced in the next 5 years or so going, Great so this shit which was "my thing" the only damn thing I was ever good at or interested in is going to be taken away from me because of some lazy ass people who just want to watch Tik Tok all day? -End rant.

companies don't know how to interview. i don't need someone to walk me through a sorting algorithm. i need someone who will be responsive, and interested in the problems we actually face.

• IT reconversions are bullshit and dangerous to the industry. Everyone and their grandma are becoming "programmers". We're in the "fuck around" phase, the "find out" will be explosive. Companies are inundating themselves with these "reconverted" juniors and doing soft-layoffs to seniors..

• crypto, Blockchain and AI are just bs to make a quick buck out of investors. They are truly disastrous to the environment

• If you use chatgpt et al. I'll look down on you from a technical competence level

• marketing and middle management are mostly useless. A good, and small, sales+marketing team is very effective but the moment they start growing they start to degenerate pretty fast into BS world and imposing company culture

Neither Python nor JavaScript should be the primary language used in any production back end.

At least half of the people working in tech shouldn't be. They have 0 clue what they're doing and that's dangerous. And far to many people solve everything with a golden hammer.

You don't need a Mac to work in IT. Especially if all your doing is ansible.

Ansible sucks. It's slow, it's limited, it gives a false sense of understanding to do many. I mean it's nice that it's a structured playground for some folks I suppose. But there are better tools that do the exact same thing. Or you could just write a proper script.

I truly believe that innovating the internet is really running in place. Might be just me but I can't think of anything we can really do, to 'evolve' it. We're doing everything that we've been doing in the past three decades, but it's only just been more accessible and the speeds faster (depending where you are). But we're not actually moving the needle when it comes to progressing the internet as a whole.

And I see it this way as to why. We've experienced two big booms in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, with Web 1.0 being what some consider the Wild West of the internet. Web 2.0 is basically the great social media bubble that has blossomed for years. We're not doing anything new or different now than we did back in 2007. Every new social media platform that comes out is recycling the exact same things as many before it presented. I truly think we stopped evolving the internet the day we managed to get messengers onto phones when phones were developing and it's only been perfected by the age of the first wave of smartphones.

So I just think with all of this AI stuff, this "Web 3.0" I've been hearing about for a few years now, the Metaverse .etc are all just gimmicks. Gimmicks of shitty ideas coming from the wrong people that should be practicing said ideas, all saying that they're innovating the internet when all that they're doing is just taking advantage of the internet for themselves. All within political theater of course.

There are some highly intelligent, very dangerous people out there, and 95% of companies will be incapable of stopping them. Most people, across all industries, are too slow, uneducated, lazy or just uncaring enough that no amount of training or tools will fix it.

My opinion on tech is that there are cool things being done that do one shiney thing, but everyone disregards the shit it produces behind the scenes. Blookchain is an awesome concept, the whole chain depends on all the other parts of it, but the fact that in order to use it, you have to download the whole thing in several systems. The size of a single will grow so large, only a few companies will be able to analyze it at scale. And AI is a huge joke. Nobody should be celebrating generative AI. A ton of computing power that is dangerous to our eco system, and it's all trained on shady material. Nobody is doing anything significant about the power consumption, just coming up with agencies to help companies use AI properly. It's all a joke. Most of our most influencial technologies are just someone asking how to make big bucks off something comes else created for free.

Most IT infra exists solely to justify work that is pointless work.

One if the worst IT sectors is ad tech. The entire industry rationally should not exist.

Much of what we do and have built is overpriced and useless bullshit that doesn't make anybody better off.

We are inventing solutions and products to manage other solutions and products to manage other solutions and products to...etc etc.

Websites used to be static HTML pages with some simple graphics, images, and some imbedded stuff. Now, you need to know AWS for your IaaS, Kubernetes to manage your scaling and container orchestration for the thousands of Docker containers that you use to compose your app written in some horrific pile of JavaScript related web stacks like NodeJS, Typescript, React, blah blah blah...

Then you need a ton of other 3rd party components that handle authentication, databasing, backups, monitoring, signaling, account creation/management, logging, billing, etc etc.

It's circles within circles within circles, and all that to make a buggy, overpriced, clunky web app.

Similar is true for IT, massive software suites that most people in the company use 10% of their functionality for stupid shit.

I'm all for advancing technology, I love technology, it's my job and my hobby.

But the longer I work in this industry, the more I get this sick feeling that we lost the train long time ago. Buying brand new $1,500 laptops every 3 years so that most of our users can send emails, browse the web, and type up occasional memos.

CEOs and all management suite are mostly useless except for making the business worse for the employees and customers for the sake of investors.

Most employees are perfectly fine with slow and steady growth instead of maximizing it.

No class consciousness. Too many tech workers think they're rugged individuals that can negotiate their own contracts into wealth.

Working for free on nights and weekends to "hit that deadline" is not good. You're just making the owners rich, and devaluing labor. Even if you own a lot of equity, it's not as much as the owners.

And then there's bullshit like return to office mandates and people are like "oh no none of us want to do this but there's no organized mechanism to resist"

All software should be open source

Blockchain is a joke

CI/CD and a lot of container fuckery is entirely unnecessary for like 80-90% of orgs

The jobs AI will eliminate are managerial and their hustle to implement it will their own death sentence

I don't feel comfortable sharing any personal opinions at work. The workplace is somewhere one should arrive, work, go home, not somewhere to share opinions and in doing so make potential enemies or risk your position.

Why do I care if my colleagues know my opinion on X or Y? It changes nothing about my life or theirs, we're not even friends, just colleagues, or work friends at best.

Anyway yeah, that's just my thoughts :-)

Right now, Ai is a party trick.

Tomorrow, Ai will inform the FBI that #29933 is planning on murdering his sister, and deploy a team of armed drones to escort him to prison, if he makes it.

Tomorrow, the department stores and supermarkets will be empty and you'll pick up your groceries from an automated warehouse that inserts them into your car.

Tomorrow, the mail bot will barf your mail into a labeled box, wherin you'll find your prescription medication, bottled labeled and packaged by nobody, which you take right after you go out to eat at an empty restaurant, where your food is brought to you by an automated track that says tHaNk Yo in an inhuman tone before cutting off too soon.

No conversations, no traveling, no hassle, no humanity, or sincerity whatsoever.

hooray?

Why the fuck is everyone so stoked about this? Vending-machine land sounds insufferable.

rabbits in skinner boxes pressing two buttons for a treat is not a far cry from tech workers sitting in cublices pressing 104 buttons for paycheck nor internet users doing it for imaginary internet points.

IT is slowly starting to get regulated like a real engineering field and that's a good developement.

Most of the high visibility "tech bros" aren't technical. They are finance bros who invest in tech.

A very large portion (maybe not quite a majority) of software developers are not very good at their jobs. Just good enough to get by.

And that is entirely okay! Applies to most jobs, honestly. But there is really NO appropriate way to express that to a coworker.

I've seen way too much "just keep trying random things without really knowing what you're doing, and hope you eventually stumble into something that works" attitude from coworkers.

Luckily, as I work for the local govt, I can talk all the shit I want about the tech sector and technologies as a whole. My colleagues obviously don't agree with every opinion I share (some 3 even think Amazon is "actually good" and one networking guy is a cryptobro), but none of us are at any risk from talking shit about companies and their leaders, or tech shenanigans in general. Now, talking about our higher ups is trouble.

Please stop with the AI pushing. It's a solution looking for a problem, it's a waste in 90% of the cases.

I think companies that use unethically trained AI (read: basically all gen AI) should be subject to massive litigation, or at least severely damaging boycotts.

Have mentioned it to a lawyer at work, and he was like “I get it, but uh… fat chance, lol”. Would not dare mention it to the AI-hungry folks in leadership.

On a bright note I'm optimistic that ai bloated garbage and advertising will eventually push a critical mass of people to using decentralized and open source tools, or possibly that non-profits and co-ops will start to spring up to manage more ethical services that could potentially replace the mainstream ones.

When you're not trying to make some dude disgustingly richer, you don't need a ton of advertising (imo).

I also think tech workers should unionize. On a darker note, I think outsourcing/offshoring post-covid is going to kill any unions viability. You need bargaining power (withhold your labor) and I'm not sure that will exist for this trade because of how easy it will be to find workers.

Not a software dev, but for me it’s the constant leap from today’s “next best thing” to tomorrow’s. Behind the Bastards did an episode on AI, and his take resonated with me. Particularly his Q&A session with some AI leaders at, I think, CES not long ago. When the new hotness gets popular, an obscene amount of money is paired with the “move fast and break things” attitude in a rush to profit. This often creates massive opportunities for grifters as legislators are mind numbing slow to react to these new technologies. And when regulations are finally passed (or more recently, allowed by the oligarchs), they’re often written to protect the billionaires (read: “job creators”) more than the common customer. Everyone’s bought into the idea that slow and methodical stifles innovation. At least the people funding and regulating these things have.

The whole "tech industry" naming is bulllshit, there is more technology let's say in composite used to build an aircraft wing or in a surgerical robots, than in yet another mobile app showing you ads

The whole tech sector also tend to be over evaluated on the stock market. In no world Apple is worth 3 trillion while coca cola or airbus are worth around 200 billions

I think most people who actually work in software development will agree with you on those things. The problem is that it's the marketing people and investors who disagree with you, but it's also them who get to make the decisions.

If the person I will report to can't code, I pass on the contract.

Too many management types are the classic middle management who knows people, but not the tech they manage.

Also related - I will NEVER take a contract if my report to drives a Mercedes. 101% I will pass on that opportunity. Life's too short to deal with that type of entitlement. After 30 years in the industry, that single vehicle type is by far, to me, the largest of red flags.

My secret sexist opinion is: Fill your DBA team with women, lead by a woman, and then just stand back and turn them loose. I absolutely love all female DBA teams because they kick fucking ass always. [edit I'm a cis wm 50s for context]

[Dbl edit - I will also never hire anyone who was 'educated' in a Florida University. They are fucking worthless.]

like pretty much all industries there are holding companies buying up anything profitable that is not to big to aquire consolidating a hold on the industry. this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vista_Equity_Partners bought out my company. I was let go and I don't think that came from vista but the separation agreement they put in front of me Im pretty sure was. Needless to say I did not sign it as it was crazy.

When I was in undergrad I did debate, and a term that was used to describe the debate topics was "a solution in need of a problem". I think that that very often characterizes the tech industry as a whole.

There is legitimately interesting math going on behind the scenes with AI, and it has a number of legitimate, if specialized, use-cases - sifting through large amounts of data, etc. However, if you're an AI company, there's more money to be made marketing to the general public and trying to sell AI to everyone on everything, rather than keeping it within its lane and letting it do the thing that it does well, well.

Even something like blockchain and cryptocurrency is built on top of somewhat novel and interesting math. What makes it a scam isn't the underlying technology, but rather the speculation bubbles that pop up around it, and the fact that the technology isn't being used for applications other than pushing a ponzi scheme.

For my own opinions - I don't really have anything I don't say out loud, but I definitely have some unorthodox opinions.

• I think that the ultra-convenient mobile telephone, always on your person at all times, has been a net detriment societally speaking. That is to say, the average iPhone user would be living a happier, more fulfilling, more authentic life if iPhones had not become massively popular. Modern tech too often substitutes genuine real-in-person interactions for online interactions that only approximate it. The instant gratification of always having access to all these opinions at all times has created addictions to social media that are harder to quit than cocaine (source: I have a friend who successfully quit cocaine, and she said that she could never quit instagram). The constantly-on GPS results in people not knowing how to navigate their own towns; if you automate something without learning how to do it, you will never learn how to do it. While that's fine most of the time, there are emergency situations where it just results in people being generally less competent than they otherwise would have been.

• For the same reason, I don't like using IDEs. For example when I code in java, the ritual of typing "import javafx.application.Application;" or whatever helps make me consciously aware that I'm using that specific package, and gets me in the headspace. Plus, being constantly reminded of what every single little thing does makes it much easier for me at least to read and parse code quickly. (But I also haven't done extensive coding since I was in undergrad).

• Microsoft Office Excel needs to remove February 29th 1900. I get that they have it so that it's backwards compatible with some archaic software from the 1990s; it's an annoying pet peeve.

• Technology is not the solution to every problem, and technology can make things worse as much as it can make things better. Society seems to have a cult around technological progress, where any new tech is intrinsically a net good for society, and where given any problem the first attempted solution should be a technological one. But for example things like the hyperloop and tesla self-driving cars and so forth are just new modern technology that doesn't come anywhere near as close to solving transportation problems as just implementing a robust public transit network with tech that's existed for 200 years (trains, trolleys, busses) would.

I’m personally very conflicted between my love of computers and the seeming necessity of conflict minerals in their construction. How much coltan is dug up every year just to be shoved into an IoT device whose company will be defunct in six months, effectively bricking the thing? Even if the mining practices were made humane, they wouldn’t be sustainable. My coworkers are very cool for tech workers. Vague anticapitalist sentiments. Hate Elon. But I don’t think they’re ready for this conversation.

The proliferators of theftbox technology and everyone who ups it/demands it for my career's advancement deserves to get put on an upturned pike, chest-first. To me it's like being a battle rapper: like a battle rapper better not EVER be relying on ghostwriters for their bars, if you need CoPilot to code, you don't deserve to call yourself a programmer; and I was an artist first-- so I don't see any of this LLM bullshit as anything more than tricknology that robbed me and everybody I consider my actual peers (which is to say, not the theftbox touchers).

I'd rather see a journeyman programmer cracking open the books they taught themselves out of than see them turning to CoPilot.

Dear Skippy,

I'm sorry to hear you're going home and leaving one of the prettiest cities in the country. I understand you were frustrated with the pacing and guardrails in place around large-scale enterprise projects where privacy and security and auditing are paramount.

I worry that it took you a long time to realize that you weren't a good fit for the job, and I worry that blaming the inability to find a decent house to buy near work - when you could have moved anywhere in the country in the WFH programme and found a place that brought you joy or just something to rent - on your decisions to move away to where your schoolchums and your parents live, may make that discovery harder to reach than ever. I'm glad if you're going somewhere you believe will make you happier, but a clear audit of this last situation needs to be done.

The truth is, you weren't a good fit. The first, last, and every word in any solution you suggested to every problem was merely a regurge of every last-5-years buzzword, and incredibly short-sighted. "Just use AI in the cloud" was neat to discuss the first time, but no solution built on such jello could pass muster by security people who were not new in their job -- which meant they were maybe old, but also VERY experienced. It's this experience that seemed to cockblock every resume-based solution you dreamt up.

I'm relieved you've landed a job at some dot-co-dot-in startup -- not because I bear you any ill-will "boy needs to learn a lesson" thing and I know that the odds are vastly against long-term employment, but because chasing the constant churn of buzzword products will get it out of your system; and in this day and age, still suffering from the loss of our mentors and gurus 20 years ago and the Lost Boys age of Tech that followed, you need to discover yourself the things you refuse to hear from people eschewing certain tech not because they're old but because they're critical of the gilded shit that likely will never survive long enough to realize a return on the investment and churn costs.

I wish you a speedy end to that slow soul-search and a placement at the company ready to receive the mature you as we hope to gain a more mature version of your astounding intellect and enthusiasm in your seat very quickly to carry on the work you should have been fucking doing.

Keep in touch, so I can witness your transformation into a focused force of nature.

Sincerely, your friend and peer,

--cg

It's one of the reasons I enjoy working on open source. Sure the companies that pay the bills for that maintenance might not be the ones you would work for directly but I satisfy myself that we are improving a commons that everyone can take advantage of.

Software dev tools and process are so convoluted and unnecessary. We need to find a happy medium between sites being published via FTP uploads like before and the CI/CD madness of today. And there’s too many tooling options available. It’s caused a huge amount of disparity between options. Look at the JavaScript ecosystem for example.

You’re becoming an old man yelling at clouds. People sad all the same shit about websites back in the 90s. They said the same shit about personal computers in offices in general over the mainframe systems. Unless your software is going to be responsible for actual lives it’s better to get something buggy out on time then drag things out like star citizen soaking up money for no returns.

'Using cloud software will lead to lower costs and a better overall service quality'

Commercial freebie tech turns us into short-sighted muppets and pulls apart the fabric of society

The job of a software developer should be regulated like a job of a lawyer/doctor/real engineer, that is a requirement of a degree/formal training and a professional society

I think that the industries based around cryptocurrencies and other blockchain technologies have always been, and have repeatedly proven themselves to be, nothing more or less than scams run and perpetuated by scam artists.

Can you please expand on this and help me out here?

I’m coming across people who are true believers in crypto and while I insist it’s a scam and it’s destroying the fucking planet, they go down the rabbit hole into places I can’t follow because I’ve literally not had the interest nor desire to read up on crypto.

They keep saying that what’s really destroying the planet is the existing financial system with all of the logistics involved with keeping it up as opposed to the cryptofarms adding to the demand on the electric grid. They say that is the goal, to replace the existing financial energy demand with crypto but again, it’s only added to it. Another talking point is that in the case of global climate catastrophe there will be pockets of electricity and cryptoservers somewhere on the planet and that while crypto will remain all the other financial systems will disappear

They also seem to somehow think it’s the fix to workplace bureaucracy somehow and everything in sight

Please impart some knowledge.

I don't get the term 'technical debt'. Most people seem to use it to say "We took shortcuts previously, so now we need to go back and do things properly".

FIrst, it's a bad metaphor. You take on debt to invest in long term things that will provide future benefits. Telling the bean counters that you need to stop working on useful features to 'pay back technical debt' is not making things clearer to them.

Second, you write software, what the heck are you talking about? Compare to civil engineering. If an area gets busier and the existing narrow wood bridge is no longer suitible, engineers don't say "Wow what idiots built this road with no eye to future growth?" It was built with the needs and resources of the time. To improve it, the bridge needs to be closed, demolished, and rebuilt with planning, labour and materials.

Instead software is empherial. You don't need to demolish what's there. No need to build temporary alternative infrastructure. No need for new materials and disposal of the old. It's just planning and labour to redo a piece of software. It always seems so whiny when people complain about technical debt, as if switching to a different build system is anywhere close to the difficulty of fixing real life; replacing lead pipes with copper for an entire city, or removing asbestos from buildings.

We should stop making software for others.

A prerequisite for reasonable tech use is understanding the amount of energy and materials you need to "burn through" for any given piece of tech to 1) exist and 2) do its useful work. Call me naive, but I really doubt that we'd be accelerating climate change this much if every person contributing to the "X thousand hours of videos uploaded to YouTube each day" was required to write their own video hosting software first. I doubt our social networks would become so captured by propagandists of every user of one had to write their own. (Obviously as an absolute this is a bit too restrictive - it's more the tone and direction that I'm trying to convey).

Instead, we should be teaching and helping others reach our knowledge /skill level.

Maybe the execs would stop pushing shitty UI dark patterns if they had to code the service themselves (and then use it afterwards!).

One^can^dream...