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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30419 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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There are a lot of novel bad things that are happening in America right now, ranging from inconvenient to life altering. The things I've been hearing about from my social circle include major tech layoffs, inflation, and increased serious illness due to diseases like RSV and flu hitting people in unexpectedly strong ways. My general response to this has been, "well maybe next time, we shouldn't shut down the entire world due to a relatively non-dangerous disease like coronavirus." Basically, I'm implying that there's a line of causation from COVID lockdowns of a few years ago to the economy now failing, and to people's immune systems now failing, etc. Do you think this is a fair response to take? To be honest, there's probably a lot of other factors at play as well that I'm not accounting for in that analysis, due to my unfamiliarity. These factors may include foreign issues, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine, leading to increased energy prices, etc.

They're doing dull, rote work that often amounts to little more than taking someone else's code or architecture and adapting it very slightly to fit a specific new situation.

Come to think of it, why did computer programming stop being the "women's work" it originated as? Because that... actually kind of fits the description of secretaries and computers (as in, the job title), but in practice (in 2022, but it was true in 2010 to a large extent too) it's a little different than that. And I can kind of see it with more imperative "only do this thing" FORTRAN and, later, Excel-as-programming language, but it's weird that it doesn't apply to software as a whole (though MS' Power Apps platform might have something to say about that).

I think that it might be worth looking at the tooling and tools; I believe that software and developers are just uniquely bad at writing good documentation and it's to the point where you actually have to do heavier analysis to get anything done any more.

Maybe having to dig hard to get anything done in all these damn frameworks was job security after all?

My understanding is that "computer programming" as we think of it today was never women's work. What the Buzzfeed articles called programming was more like taking a program written by a man and transcribing it on to punch cards, similar to how a secretary would take dictation in shorthand and then type it up.

That job was called "keypunch operator" and as far as I know was never considered "programming".

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