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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31782 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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I read HN daily and have found some of its threads to be incredibly important for understanding how organizations work. That being said, it gets hilarious consistently on two fronts:

  1. When the largely Software Engineering (SWE) crowd comments on something larger and complex outside of their domain of expertise. I can't think of a good example of late, but it always goes the same way -- the SWEs analyze the problem as a linear system to be optimized, point to the stupidly obvious inflection point and go "lol the normies are too dumb to fix it" while blindly missing all of the second and third order implications of that change to the system. This hints at their cavalier attitudes and, frankly, to a certain laziness. I've seen SWEs who should know better bork production systems because of some off-the-cuff optimization. The default response is always "Oh, shit, yeah, sorry ... here, here, that's an easy fix." Well, then we're playing a game of fix one bug and cause 3 more. The hubris is real.

Which makes the second thing odd:

  1. So, so, so many of HN posters have had negative experiences that made them deeply permanently insecure. I'm not trying to be cute when I say this - they're all literally nerds. Somebody bullied them in high school, or the cute girl in their philosophy class friendzoned them. It's weird how often personal attacks and highly emotional reasoning are levied in there, what with them being a self-avowedly "rational" crowd. Everyone's a human and everyone has emotions. You're allowed to feel however the hell you want, but life gets easier if you control how you act. There's a childishness.

The other thing I've noticed reading HN daily now for close to a decade is that the typical individual contributor software job, even at FAANGs, is a shitty bill of goods being sold. For a really precise timeframe, about 2005-2020, the "rest and vest, work 20 hours a week" strategy worked and did make multimillionaries of state-school slackers. Those days are over - for everyone! New CS kids are (a) oversaturating the market and (b) not actually competent. The greybeards are encountering the fact that ageism is real and they never learned how to actually work with people, so trying to step up to a manager role is really fucking hard for them. And, the low hanging fruit has all been picked. AdTech and basic social network building is either done or dominated. The new problems are harder and require way more end-to-end thought and not lazy hot fixes. There was a thread maybe a month ago asking what being a professional dev was like in the 80s and 90s .... all the dinosaurs who came out said shit like "compiling took forever and we couldn't really snapshot-and-rollback the way you can today .... we had to test the shit out of our code and think through corner cases. We would have day long whiteboarding sessions where we ended up worse off than we started."

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