this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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Programming
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Definitely agree with tech debt. Seems like nobody except me cares about improving things, which is surprising given this survey!
Also definitely agree about reliability of tools/systems, but again it feels like it's just me that cares about robustness - everyone else is very happy to churn out hacky Bash scripts, dynamically typed Python and regexes with abandon.
Either you're all a bunch of hypocrites or the SO survey is quite a biased sample!
Consider that to go on a site specifically for programming questions and then take a survey about it, you have to be the kind of person that cares about getting their code "right". The majority of programmers I've met would only go there to copy-paste a quick answer, and those people have all moved to asking chat-gpt for code now.
Why is that? I've read them referred to as dark matter developers (forget where I read this, maybe a book many years ago). They're out there, they make up a majority of the field, yet they leave no trace because they do not blog, post on SO, or back in the day forums either as questioners or answerers.
Wow, hadn't thought about that one in a long time. I thought it was an old Scott Hanselman blog and I was correct! I'll have to reread it, been years now.
I'm not sure there's much why to it exactly. I feel like a small fraction of people I've met in life were truly passionate and excited about the work they did. Most had some passion for an art, or a hobby, or for their kids very commonly, but people who really want to grow and master their craft are somewhat rare generally. Most folks just want to do well enough to keep their jobs and then go home to whatever they actually care about.
Job kills passion
I'm just a hacker. I'll never be a thought leader. But I am passionate about my work. And my kids.
I love solving the problems. I have a few posts on the company blog but they put a chat bot on it a while back and didn't care that it felt offensive to me.
But I'm here, reading this. Maybe I'm grey matter.
The memes that I remember being all over Reddit about "where did you get that code ... I stole it [from stack overflow]" honestly terrified, and continue to, terrify me.
Yep, the ones who are doing some kind of input on stack overflow (even just a survey) are way beyond the “let’s keep everything the same because to get rid of tech debt sounds like a bunch of work” camp.
I'm currently chancing jobs due to fact that while we are getting rid of the legacy tech debt, we are rushing with the new stuff in a such stupid way that we are instantly building new tech debt. Change, hooray!
Actually makes me feel a bit better. Of all the issues this could be the easiest to tackle. Most other issues are completely above your pay grade, unless your boss/PO is adamant about always producing new features and tweaking old code is a waste of time.