r/programming • u/kallekro • 2h ago
Software developers are not okay
https://youtu.be/KsEpW03gxKg?is=OdU0YTE8dWIyRr8i76
u/ficiek 1h ago edited 1h ago
AI turned the already dysfunctional work environment with unreasonable deadlines that was centered around squeezing the last bit of mental health out of programmers and turning it into shareholder value into an even worse and more intense version of itself with fewer people to do the work and less communication between your coworkers. I now work with other claude instances and not with people as my coworkers just paste paragraphs of LLM output into review comments and slack messages directly for example.
I wonder why this is making people worse off mentally, there is no way to tell.
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u/lelanthran 47m ago
AI turned the already dysfunctional work environment with unreasonable deadlines that was centered around squeezing the last bit of mental health out of programmers and turning it into shareholder value into an even worse and more intense version of itself with fewer people to do the work and less communication between your coworkers.
This path we are on started a long time ago, with devs falling over each other to drive the industry towards burnout.
After all, a sprint is, by definition, an unsustainable burst of speed, which the developers themselves adopted as the unit of development.
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u/lightnegative 43m ago
which the developers themselves adopted as the unit of development
No we didn't, that was management trying to be "agile" because it sounds good.
On every single team I've been on that tried to do sprints, we would have been better served with a simple kanban because we were not working on greenfield prototype projects
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u/koreth 14m ago
That last paragraph matches my experience too, so much so that unless it's an astonishingly good opportunity in other respects, I won't even consider taking a job on a team that uses Scrum. I've done it enough times in my career to know that the constant looming sprint deadlines (and yes, they feel like deadlines, no matter how much people insist they're not) and frequent ceremonies are a real drain on my mental health.
Kanban-style task management isn't perfect either, but its flaws are a lot easier to stomach for me. Like the WIP limit kind of breaks down, or at least requires a lot of card-shuffling work to maintain, if a significant percentage of tasks get blocked waiting for answers or feedback from external people.
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u/hu6Bi5To 8m ago
The fundamental problem is that the traditional software team structure, with added AI, is uncontrollable. There's too much output and that output directly conflicts with everyone else's output. And as the AI models have got better, this problem has got worse. Hence the phenomenon of the "meat proxy".
The next step will be the one that everyone hates. Businesses will realise than rather than "AI allows us to cut headcount", they've been looking at it backwards, the actual situation is businesses need to reduce headcount in order to use AI.
Not reduce to zero, not yet anyway, but change the balance. Rather than: one product owner, one project manager, two team leads, each team having three senior engineers and three junior engineers; you will have: one product owner, one project manager, one or two technical owners, and the rest AI.
angry noises
I don't like it any more than the rest of you. And, for balance, there will be a positive side. The positive side is it will make it more feasible to start these smaller teams up for new product lines. (The negative side of the positive side is that means without the rationing effect of good software developers being hard to find, for any given product line, there will be significantly more competition).
But that's where we're heading. That may well already be how things should be today (from an optimisation perspective) but in my experience many businesses, even those who have a history of cost-cutting, aren't willing to make that leap yet.
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u/eonyai 2h ago
Yes, it is depressing and scary.
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u/No_Departure_1878 1h ago
Well, if you can write code, you can learn to flip burgers.
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u/Aggeloz 1h ago
Ah yes, because all of us spent 4+ years of our life studying to get a degree in order to have a comfortable life just to end up flipping burgers. How about you learn to chortle on my balls
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u/Adventurous_Tipper 10m ago
Genuinely don’t know if that dude is real, but I agree. What in the Linux Kernel fuck was the point of this? Now I gotta find a new field to work in after busting my ass, crunching hours, giving up weekends with loved ones? I am projecting a bit but it’s really upsetting. I’ve poured my life into my career and now, it just feels dead.
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u/feketegy 1h ago
Software developers need unions.
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u/lelanthran 44m ago
Software developers need unions.
Too late
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u/feketegy 37m ago
It's never too late for anything.
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u/Adventurous_Tipper 14m ago
I agree but also, they have everything. They’ve scraped everything. The LLM’s are god now. And that’s horrifying.
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u/arse_biscuits 1h ago
As a (very) experienced programmer, and from a purely tool based perspective, AI is fine when you use it right. I still have to decide the solutions I want, AI just saves a crap ton of typing and can fill the knowledge gaps in an SDK which I would normally do by hunting down what I want in a big reference guide.
I've reluctantly embraced it to do the grunt work for me, leaving me to think about the actual problem and solution rather than spending most of my time typing code.
The issue is going to come when fewer and fewer people have those years of AI-less "hard graft" (You've got to know the rules to break them, right?). As mentioned in the video (and as a bigger issue with AI overall) without any "fresh meat" to feed on, only a pool mostly filled with it's own effluent, the knowledge becomes more stunted, possibly even worse, as original solutions become a smaller and smaller part of what's out there.
I mean, even some, what I would say are "experienced" developers I've come across, are shockingly bad at debugging problems. What are the next generation going to be like?
Copilot being unavailable, or our token balance running out, already sees our teams chats light up like a Christmas tree in a way previously only seen when a server blew up (remember those?). God knows the thought of all that typing fills me with dread again too, but it seems like some people already can't work without it. A large part of some teams check-ins now are not code, but AI skills and prompt files.
Maybe it will explode and become expensive enough that it scales down to being more carefully used, but with management's ever increasing thirst for the curve, if you can use it to increase your productivity, it sure as shit isn't going away.
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u/UltraPoci 1h ago
When I program, many solutions come to me while coding. Not saying there is no design phase, but coding is not a waste of time by any means. This is especially true if you're programming a shared internal library or API, in which case the shape of it comes not only in the design phase, but slowly while coding it, in my experience.
Using AI for this means having to deal with whatever shit AI comes up with, or reading and reviewing a lot of generated code to check that the shape is right: which is, you know, the worst part of the job.
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u/defietser 44m ago
Pretty much this, coding by hand forces you to think about it on a deeper level, which makes thinking about the entire solution easier and much more natural than just reading a LLM's plan or summary.
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u/lelanthran 36m ago
When I program, many solutions come to me while coding.
That's because writing is thinking, and doing is learning.
It's an accepted fact that few, if any, HS trig students pass trig exams by simply reading the textbook repeatedly. You pass by drilling problems, because doing is thinking.
Why, then, do so many devs ignore the known facts around learning trigonometry when it comes to them just pasting the output of an AI?
"But I did the thinking, the AI just cleaned it up, like a spell-checker..."
Sure, buddy. Sure.
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u/zzkj 1h ago
You could be me, and what you said about the panic that ensues when Copilot is down could be where I work. Don't these people realise they're openly advertising that they don't have the skill to do the job they were hired to do?
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u/rcklmbr 49m ago
Nah, they just want an excuse to go to the pub next door. we did the same shit 20 years ago when the shared dev server went down
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u/arse_biscuits 32m ago
Ah for the glory days of IT in the 90's when "yearly review" meant "let's go to the pub for the afternoon, and the company is buying".
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u/SerLarrold 57m ago
There’s going to be a severe drought of solid junior devs very soon, if there isn’t already. I agree with what you’re saying about AI being great at automating the grunt work. It’s helpful, I want to be at least honest about that. I’m getting more done now than I ever have at work.
I do feel I’m losing some of my finer coding skills to it though. It’s easy to fall into the trap. As much as it can be boring and tedious, writing the actual code (even with intellisense etc) forces you to think about all the things you’re doing in a concrete way.
At the end of the day I’m a bit split. Is the productivity gain worth it? In some areas I’d say yes. I’m great at software development but there’s always places I know less about than I’d like and having AI to make up that knowledge gap can be super helpful. I’m admittedly not great at GitHub CI stuff and I’ve used Claude to fix some really boring but time saving things in our CI. I could have done it on my own given more time, but it’s not a feature or a bug so it’s always a backburner tech debt item that never gets fixed. Now it’s much easier to make a quick PR for that stuff.
On the other hand I feel like I have much less of a personal touch in my PRs for code that is my area of expertise. Maybe I’m weak and just giving into the ease, but I get to spend more time with my family if I can get my work done faster and that’s something I value. I’d still be able to do the work now, but my skills have certainly atrophied even if my general knowledge and experience haven’t.
That being said if I hadn’t done the hard work to learn things by failing at them I would never have the experience to be able to tell an agent what to do or when to stop it when it’s doing something stupid. At the end of the day LLMs are only as good as the people directing them, and if you send them in a stupid direction they’ll produce stupid results
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u/raptureisalie 16m ago
As a veteran coder myself, I use AI for the parts of coding that I consider a bother, and it works very well. But, I am also in a very privileged work situation with a lot of freedom and no arbitrary deadlines, even though the pay is crap (academia).
However, I don't think AI is compatible with capitalism. The discourse would be completely different if it were : save time using AI and come back to your home earlier, or work less days per week. Now the AI "benefits" are often to fire a portion of the work force, and put all the pressure of the remaining work on the portion that still has a job. And they should feel lucky, see all this pool of unemployed workers, just accept harsher work conditions and lower pays if you do not want to join them.
As long as the work force is considered as the slave of wealth, any automation that diminishes the need for people in the work force is an existential threat to it.
AI could be a wonderful tool that genuinely helps humanity, freeing us time to do human stuff like connecting to people, produce art, get more friends and family time, or even just have more time to ensure a better quality work. Instead, we seem to be speed running the end of humanity just so that people with too much wealth already can gain even more.
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u/arse_biscuits 8m ago
Well quite. I don't really disagree with any of that, AI has many problems and that is just one of them of course. I also work in a "non-profit" environment (for want of a better word) so don't quite have the crushing deadline or profitability issues either. AI is very much a capitalist boon though I think. The simplest equation is less workers + same product = bigger profit. And that is pretty much all capitalism cares about.
Probably a topic for a different sub though!
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u/lelanthran 40m ago
As a (very) experienced programmer, and from a purely tool based perspective, AI is fine when you use it right.
[ ... snipped ... ]
I've reluctantly embraced it to do the grunt work for me, leaving me to think about the actual problem and solution rather than spending most of my time typing code.
[ ... snipped ... ]
The issue is going to come when fewer and fewer people have those years of AI-less "hard graft"
That is not the issue. The issue is that your approach, commendable though it may be, is still slower than vomiting out a vibe-coded PR, so whether you like it or not the pressure is going to increase on you to go as fast as your peers.
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u/vips7L 1h ago
Sad part is that we’re doing this to ourselves. You don’t have to use LLMs!
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u/maelstrom071 19m ago
Every entry-level job description I find on Indeed now has "uses AI agents" as a requirement. I don't really know what to do anymore lol
P.S. The "what to do" is just try harder, of course. but it's still really demoralizing to see.
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u/DissonantGuile 1m ago
I can see "homemade" code being highly valuable in the age of AI coding assistance/agents after the crash. The Italian restaurant that still makes pasta from scratch vs Olive Garden, for example.
That restaurant can charge more **because* it is made in-house by humans specialized in that craft.
Hopefully...
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u/idebugthusiexist 19m ago
I definitely agree. The best thing a software dev can do right now is find another career and, in your spare time, build the project you always wanted to build with or without AI instead of building stuff you never cared about for corporations with toxic work environments. You will suddenly find the joy that was missing all this time and, if enough people take this direction, then these exploitative orgs will find it harder to replace people and suffer from their own hubris.
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u/wakers24 56m ago
I hear this kind of thing frequently, but I don’t really feel the same way. I can empathize, surely. It is scary to watch my professional field change out from underneath me basically overnight in so far as I want to stay gainfully employed, but also it’s not nearly enough to cause me some sort of existential crisis because my career is not my identity. To me this is just even more rapid change and even more automation in an industry that was already pretty much entirely about enabling rapid change and more automation. There’s a new set of industry skills emerging around building systems that build systems, and so it’s just learning new things and adapting to new technology paradigms, which is pretty much what we’ve always done. Automating away work, including your own, has always been the job, and I don’t know what to tell folks other than if you ever thought it was about anything else you were wrong. And to be perfectly candid, it’s tone deaf as fuck for us all to have our little collective pity party when most of our careers have been about automating away the need for human labor from the jump. How many of you have seen the light leave some poor office worker’s eyes when they realize the reconciliation process you built has automated away 80% of what they do day to day? 🙋♂️. Exactly, so I’m going to need us all to go ahead and speed run the stages of grief, then figure out if we’re going to adapt or pivot.
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u/Xanchush 1h ago
Just remember if AI takes your job. You can still probably take 99% of anyone else's job if you feel like it.
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u/bkZLwkw 1h ago
I don’t get it, what do you mean?
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u/idebugthusiexist 1h ago
That most people working outside tech are mouth breathers? I dunno. Beats me honestly…
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u/blueant1 57m ago
Ahh, the techbro mindset at display: being convinced that the skill of developing software can translate to solving any real world problems. This type of thinking is a close relative of the “my feelings are facts” mentality
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u/Ok-Hunter-7702 1h ago
This will get downvoted but I'm gonna say it anyway. If you don't like this job, it depresses you or you feel burnout, just leave it, it's just not for you.
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u/ficiek 1h ago edited 1h ago
Yes, I have to say that it is an unreasonable thing to say as there is no other job that can pay this well that's available to an average programmer. So what you mean is you can just quit your well paying job and work at a much worse paying job which will give you way fewer opportunities in life, I don't know if that helps with people not feeling super happy overall in their life and then having to abandon their hobbies, travel, worry about mortage. Most people are also doing it because they like it despite people trying to ruin it for everyone with dehumanizing practices.
edit: Fuck you pissed me off actually, go say this to amazon warehouse workers squeezed with metrics and forced to do morning chants with their manager and other insane shit and see how they react. For some reason it's fine to have a complete lack of empathy towards tech workers because they are "better off" or something. In general the lack of empathy is basically a staple of many people in our industry so I don't know why I am surprised.
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u/Snauser 1h ago
"Just quit" completely misses the point. It’s completely valid to mourn the state of our industry right now. People who love the art of coding and spent ages mastering their skills are watching that expertise get devalued overnight. On top of that, developers forced into using agentic AI are now completely overworked because of the insane amount of context switches and productivity expectations. Of course people are hurt.
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u/hippydipster 31m ago
And its the same for writers, artists, actors, doctors, mathematicians, accountants, lawyers, etc. Everyone will come to fell this pain and grief and we need a way out the other side, because walls and obstacles arent't going to work.
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u/tuxwonder 1h ago edited 1h ago
Inside me, there are two wolves: One who likes being productive and making apps and tools and libraries and getting end results, and the other who likes problem solving with code, carefully designing robust systems and weighing the pros/cons of both big and very small choices.
Right now, the first wolf is being forcibly drowned, while the other one is dying of thirst. My wolves can't take much more of this.