I’m also a software engineer and I can’t stand most other people in this field. I got into this field because I love computers and was tweaking garry’s mod scripts when I was 12. I read scifi books and enjoy reading about the lore of the tech industry.
I would estimate that AT LEAST 75% of people in this industry are ladder climbing yuppies who got into it for the money. The gym rat, tesla-driving podcaster types who have invented their own language about syncing up, achieving alignment, creating action items and eating dog food. And for some reason they’re all into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Lex Fridman/Joe Rogan
I do not socialize with my coworkers because they are the most obnoxious fucking money-obsessed pieces of shit I’ve ever met
Bit of an unhinged and unreasonable nerd rant but here it goes:
The second dot com boom in the 2010s ruined us. Like holy shit. As someone younger looking down the line, living in tech bro culture, but exposed to the likes of the jargon file, y combinator and their venture capitalists literally ruined hacker culture.
We used to have a thriving culture that cherished freedom, real freedom, not freedom for the rich. What happened to the culture that spawned Windows buyback day? What of the dream that networked freedom would one day break the chains of economic heirarchy?
Like holy fucking shit. If you’re not here for the love of the machine stop touching a compiler or better yet go loose your fucking hands.
A total crash would scare the money away but leave all the hardware and software behind
Marching orders if I ever saw some. Drop a neutron bomb on the investors class. I think a good anti-AI FUD campaign might get off the hook. Something good enough to crash every silicon valley bank!
Bring back little websites ran by furries
Studying software engineer, the amount of weird looks I got from windows users for having a terminal open on my linux pc is scary
Windows has a terminal now too!
I just wanna build cool shit and solve puzzles using the smallest amount of code possible that still makes sense to read. That’s fun to me. I’ve honestly gotten incredibly sick of renting by brain out to people for the majority of my waking hours mostly just to put a roof over my head.
This is me. We had a public holiday the other day and, since the weather wasn’t great, I decided to start a new project to write code because I enjoy it. Also, Twitch’s event/API documentation does not spark joy (weird grammar like “one of the following” what looks like a partially deleted line; response/requests that are in tables aligned by a number (only two, so good luck people like me) spaces to indicate level, and just plain wrong and missing info (“this API responds 202” – LIAR!).
Recently I’ve started working on coding a forum. I want to add in all the classic features of early 2000s/early 2010s forums like PhPBB and such. The goal would be to have no javascript at all
Recently I’ve started working on coding a forum. I want to add in all the classic features of early 2000s/early 2010s forums like PhPBB and such. The goal would be to have no javascript at all
This person got so so close to the real answer as to why most software today sucks.
Money.
Capitalism.
Line go up - Forever.
It’s the systems we choose to live in, not the leaders who take advantage of them.
Really cool software has been coming out all the time for the last decade or so, and then the second it goes public and starts trading stocks, it immediately starts going south. A company, making cool stuff I love, goes public, and I know to immediately start grieving for its death. Money makes all creative endeavors so so much worse. And I truly believe software is a creative pursuit. It’s been hijacked by capitalists to automate every living being on this planet out of work. Right now the list of people truly put out on their ass for good by automation isn’t very big. But we’re accelerating very quickly to a future where nothing fun ever happens again. Useful, functional, problem solving software, from now until forever, will be made and used to kick your ass, stomp you into the dirt, and sell your stupid crying face to anybody who wants to purchase it. Then while we’re at it, it’ll take the things you love to do and do them for you. And then make you pay money just to see it.
If you want to see and participate in some of the most unique and amazing uses of software engineering in our time, there are so many open source projects that achieve incredible and fun things for absolutely $0
- Video Game Randomizers
- And their decomp partners
- Mod Communities
- Free Digital Art Programs
- Open up Github, sort by most Starred projects, and just fuckin scroll until you can’t scroll anymore
- And even this has been captured. Code made freely for everyone to use, instead being fed to machine learning bullshit. To what end? To fully replace the need for any human to ever write software ever again.
It’s endless. There are truly too many projects for me to list in one post. I’d spend weeks editing this comment, adding all the coolest things software has done for us and can do for us. But it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. I am 100% confident society and its leaders will abuse the good will, passion, and creativity of many a programmer from now until the end of my life. It’ll do that to every profession. As long as we cling to the idea that we only do work to make profits, as long as the only way we can survive is by making money, this will be our fate.
- Video Game Randomizers
It’s distressing how often the track of inventors has been overtaken by the plans of hyper-capitalists.
- Tesla cars were invented by
Elon MuskMartin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who were then cut out by their investor to enshittify the interface. - Keurig coffee pods were invented by a pair of roommates that wanted them to become recyclable so they wouldn’t cause so much waste.
- Blizzard used to make fun games, and is now bought out by people that don’t.
I still need to put out my big, long-form video promoting the Accountable Capitalism Act - something that could lead a large body of software devs at a big company to be present for the big-shift plans to, say, “Remove error messages from Windows!” and tell their bosses: Hell no. The same style of issue exists in many industries.
- Tesla cars were invented by
Actually, my distaste for Big Tech is nothing new. It’s been building for decades.
First, little stuff like the inkjet printer that you invited into your house that claims to need, “Just a little more cyan, bro. I’ll print your black and white page after I get my cyan. Come on, bro.”
That’s because it needs to print the tracking dots on every page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
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