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"

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.

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

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.

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 proliferation 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.

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.

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.]

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.

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.

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