The idea that companies invested in "safe, performant software" before AI is laughable. Tech companies have never cared about the customers beyond their effect on KPIs.
Exactly. I cared, and the amazing engineers that taught me cared. We didn't have KPIs in 2008, we had code reviews and mean senior engineers (that were secretly kind) that would tear your code apart and send you back until you got it right.
And we were allowed to? I raised so many tickets over time that had no real business impact beyond "this is a security risk" and nearly all of them I was allowed to adress.
Maybe that makes me some kind of tech-boomer, like people responding to me are implying, but I don't really give a shit.
Sure, but the parent said "this is such a garbage industry now", implying it was not this way before LLMs. The individuals who care about quality can still pursue quality. In fact, they are better equipped to create quality software than ever. It's a matter of spending time and attention.
The underlying problem is that quality isn't profitable. It goes beyond tech. The companies that cared about quality had their lunch eaten by the companies that chased razor-thin margins and produced disposable junk. I'm not sure what it is about AI that makes everyone forget what the world was like five years ago.
While better equipped for security with frontier models (and I agree with that) I don't know any engineers in my circle that have the time to utilise it. Half of them are laid off, by the way.
The rest, including me, are supposed to take up the slack with ridiculous deadlines and pressure. I don't have time anymore. I have to trust that my prompt and testing descriptions and harness will take care of it. And I have no clue whether that's truly happening, because I have another ticket before I get time to review, or send some swarm of test/probe agents at it. And right now I don't trust it. (Literally look at the parent article?)
I did have that time and capacity in the past. Maybe you didn't. But the landscape is, to me, objectively different now.
I fully agree that tech workers have never been less empowered. When I said that individuals have never been better equipped to pursue quality, I meant within projects they control. There will likely never be agency again at a large company.
We're on the same page about most of this, but my perspective differs in a couple of ways:
- I have worked at companies that didn't prioritize quality and had unreasonable deadlines for most of my career. It's the default state of corporations with leverage over their workers.
- This was getting worse before AI. Big tech was the anomaly in terms of pay, perks, benefits, etc, and they were already jointly deciding not to do that anymore around the time of Musk's Twitter layoffs. The main reason they had offered such a compelling environment was to prevent talented people from being hired by their competition, in which case they were perfectly happy to let them "play around" and focus on quality.
I find it frustrating when people imply that employment was an idyllic wonderland before AI ruined everything. AI is another step, potentially the final step, in boiling the middle class. It didn't invent poor working conditions, it brought tech workers down closer to everyone else's level.
The best move right now is to move to a small startup or start something on your own. I fully understand that this is easier said than done, when you have bills to pay and deadlines keep you too exhausted to escape. To some extent, that's probably part of why the deadlines exist.
Companies never cared, and most engineers didn't care much either, at least not directly. But a lot still cared to cover their ass and try to do things correctly the first time to reduce future work and headaches. Now that it's all just a few prompts away "Who cares? Ship it now, if it's broken we'll just have Claude fix it later."
And we were allowed to? I raised so many tickets over time that had no real business impact beyond "this is a security risk" and nearly all of them I was allowed to adress.
Maybe that makes me some kind of tech-boomer, like people responding to me are implying, but I don't really give a shit.
The underlying problem is that quality isn't profitable. It goes beyond tech. The companies that cared about quality had their lunch eaten by the companies that chased razor-thin margins and produced disposable junk. I'm not sure what it is about AI that makes everyone forget what the world was like five years ago.
The rest, including me, are supposed to take up the slack with ridiculous deadlines and pressure. I don't have time anymore. I have to trust that my prompt and testing descriptions and harness will take care of it. And I have no clue whether that's truly happening, because I have another ticket before I get time to review, or send some swarm of test/probe agents at it. And right now I don't trust it. (Literally look at the parent article?)
I did have that time and capacity in the past. Maybe you didn't. But the landscape is, to me, objectively different now.
We're on the same page about most of this, but my perspective differs in a couple of ways: - I have worked at companies that didn't prioritize quality and had unreasonable deadlines for most of my career. It's the default state of corporations with leverage over their workers. - This was getting worse before AI. Big tech was the anomaly in terms of pay, perks, benefits, etc, and they were already jointly deciding not to do that anymore around the time of Musk's Twitter layoffs. The main reason they had offered such a compelling environment was to prevent talented people from being hired by their competition, in which case they were perfectly happy to let them "play around" and focus on quality.
I find it frustrating when people imply that employment was an idyllic wonderland before AI ruined everything. AI is another step, potentially the final step, in boiling the middle class. It didn't invent poor working conditions, it brought tech workers down closer to everyone else's level.
The best move right now is to move to a small startup or start something on your own. I fully understand that this is easier said than done, when you have bills to pay and deadlines keep you too exhausted to escape. To some extent, that's probably part of why the deadlines exist.
Now you'll be at least 50% slower and likely fired if you care, because caring means understanding the code.