From the article: [...] [...] I relate heavily to this article. I'm not currently working in tech, but I have previously, and it was my preferred career for a long time. Well, mostly. I wanted to...
Exemplary
From the article:
Two weeks ago, I quit my job.
It wasn’t a bad job, not by most metrics. It ticked the boxes a job is supposed to tick: good pay. Health insurance. Remote work. Time off. Nice coworkers.
[...]
And yet, work was rendering me increasingly miserable. I questioned myself. Why am I here? Does any of this work actually matter? And if I stop caring about the quality of my work… will anyone notice? (An uncomfortable thought.)
I knew I was tired, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to quit. I took a week off to consider it, and told myself: if you still want to leave at the end of this week, hand in your resignation.
The following Monday, I handed in my resignation. I felt immediate relief. I had nothing else lined up, but I knew I needed to go. I’m unsure when (or if) I’ll return to full-time tech work.
What happened?
[...]
I use AI tools sparingly for assistance while refactoring code in languages I understand. I occasionally use it to help compose command line arguments for tools like ffmpeg. I never use AI to generate images, video, or prose.
The explosion of AI has played a significant role in my own burnout. Worse, it feels inescapable. Few tech organizations are taking a principled stance against AI use. But AI use is only one part of broader social trends within tech that leave me questioning whether I should remain here.
I relate heavily to this article. I'm not currently working in tech, but I have previously, and it was my preferred career for a long time. Well, mostly. I wanted to do game development, but that industry is having a grand old time and has been for decades, so I figured programming was safer, and it was still fun.
Emphasis on was.
I once wrote a post saying that "I feel like I could cleanly split my coding life into two phases: The part where I learned people found many programmers insufferable, and the part where I learned first-hand why that was." Neither of these two phases were to do directly with AI, but AI was still the context in which I wrote it. I understood before it, of course; tech fields have always had a big issue with understanding the humanities at even basic levels, unfortunately. But the AI boom has caused the issue to metastasize.
These days, I'll regularly encounter people on a few places who will tell me they understand why AI is bad – and sometimes even demonstrate proof of that understanding – only to cut down my relief with a shame-free admission of willful LLM use. And "willful" is a key word here, because I'm not talking about folks forced to use the tech or be fired. I've got nothing against them. I'm talking about people who've clearly understood the harm, yet still feel fine encouraging it by lending their contribution to usage metrics and resource consumption. It boggles the mind.
And that's some of the better things to find. Actual careers are rife with worse: Job after job where recklessness is practically the explicit goal, and understanding is nowhere to be found. I cannot imagine a scenario where I could work in such an environment and not become incredibly angry and depressed.
There's some hope to be had in the fact that the games industry seems better in this regard. Most indie developers hate AI, and many players are right there with them. There's some irony in that for me. But it remains the case that my ideal job appears to be trying to kill itself right as I was starting to develop a career in it, and regardless of if that actually ends up happening, it still really hurts.
From the article:
The whole system is broken; AI alone didn’t break it, but it is widening the cracks.
I guess what I’m trying to say is I wish none of us had to live like this. I would like to imagine a future that does not look like this.
Ironically, what I’ve gained from AI is a deeper appreciation for human communication, in all its messy imperfection. The point of a code review is not simply for good code to make it into a codebase, but to build institutional knowledge as people debate and iterate and compromise, slow as it may be. Friction is good.
There are nuances here, from my experience this hate is conditional and depends on what AI was used. Players hate Gen AI, but only the ones for creating visuals or sounds - like image, music and...
Most indie developers hate AI, and many players are right there with them.
There are nuances here, from my experience this hate is conditional and depends on what AI was used.
Players hate Gen AI, but only the ones for creating visuals or sounds - like image, music and voice. There are games that use these kind of gen AI that did quite well commercially speaking, like Arc Raiders, PUBG and Inzoi.
Expedition 33 got their award revoked over an asset in the game that was AI generated, but from what I’ve seen the communities mostly shrugged.
So in my mind, it’s not that the players hate AI, they hate slop. If you were to manage to make a game with AI visuals that looked good and consistent, I would bet real money that most players wouldn’t care.
LLMs, out of sight out of mind kind of a deal here. I can’t think of any examples where a game got backlash or flopped over its use; not counting Interactive Fiction games (aka text adventures), but in those cases using a LLM would be the equivalent of using it for visuals in a normal 2D/3D game.
That's the big issue, though. You do proper AI-assisted development with current tools and see it over with a careful eye... you really don't save much time in development. And with current...
If you were to manage to make a game with AI visuals that looked good and consistent, I would bet real money that most players wouldn’t care.
That's the big issue, though. You do proper AI-assisted development with current tools and see it over with a careful eye... you really don't save much time in development. And with current token-driven costs, you're not exactly saving money either (it's certainly not good enough to replace an artist or programmer you may have otherwise hired, that's for sure). You also don't get a quality boost. You end up with none of the triangle of benefits, and you will still end up getting flak if people find out. So what was the point?
At least if you resign to slop and buffer the PR, you're getting something fast. That's the only benefit to vibecoding or gen AI right now. Low quality, medium (for now) costs, blazing fast development (until it's not, but hey. you got features out for now).
I can’t think of any examples where a game got backlash or flopped over its use
All your examples got backlash. Did it matter to any of them? No, not financially. But that's PR prevailing rather than the tech genuinely saving money. Especially since one of the examples existed for a decade without AI (side note: I didn't know what Inzoi was until now and I instantly hated the look. It's also early access so TBD on its success).
But the biggest impacts won't be on large publishers, it'll be on indies who only need a dozen bad reviews to tank their release. Those are the level of development that needs to be very careful about how they present themselves.
I am not in games development, but in my work as a software developer, I can say that this is simply not true. Me and many of my colleages use AI in a very thorough way and it still saves time....
That's the big issue, though. You do proper AI-assisted development with current tools and see it over with a careful eye... you really don't save much time in development.
I am not in games development, but in my work as a software developer, I can say that this is simply not true. Me and many of my colleages use AI in a very thorough way and it still saves time. Most time is saved in tasks along the lines of "Do A, which is like B I already made, but with XYZ done in different ways". Or think of things like helper scripts, helping with work for deploying software/a game, etc.
On the cost front, remember that good developers are quite expensive, so even a few hundred dollars a month is worth it with a productivity boost.
YMMV per field. My experience in games; coding is rarely the bottleneck, asset creation is. If you ever tried gen AI'ing any 3D models, you'd know immediately why this is a fruitless effort in...
I can say that this is simply not true. Me and many of my colleages use AI in a very thorough way and it still saves time.
YMMV per field. My experience in games; coding is rarely the bottleneck, asset creation is.
If you ever tried gen AI'ing any 3D models, you'd know immediately why this is a fruitless effort in terms of the 3 budgets. At best you might get some static environmental props and you lean on Unreal Engine to LOD it for you. You're not getting anything out of it that needs to be textured with anything more than the basics, skinned, nor animated. And even if you do keep it to static meshes, you have one of the easiest ways to be discovered of using gen AI.
Gen AI'ing sprites/character textures? Very easy to discover. Maybe you make a good static sprite, but it completely and utterly falls apart making a spite-sheet. Peak (or I guess "subterranean") uncanny valley.
I'm not saying you can't vibecode a full game; there's plenty of means to make simpler games without any direct coding these days. But code doesn't make 99.99% of indie games out there. I'd be surprised if anyone single-handedly made a competent game with current tech that wasn't immediately outed as Gen AI slop.
On the cost front, remember that good developers are quite expensive, so even a few hundred dollars a month is worth it with a productivity boost.
And soon (if not now) this will be thousands in token consumption. We missed the subscription train.
About the point of making games with AI that still look good, I was talking about the metaphorical how the sausage gets made. If you manage to make a good game, most people don’t care about what...
About the point of making games with AI that still look good, I was talking about the metaphorical how the sausage gets made. If you manage to make a good game, most people don’t care about what you used or how you did it. Thus why I said the hate for AI tools, imo, is conditional.
all those games got backlash
To be clear, when I said that I was talking about using LLMs (text generation - i.e. coding and general descriptions). I have yet to see a game getting backlash for using LLMs. All the examples I mentioned got backlash but it was over the other type of generative AI.
Sure, I agree. Gamers are fickle but ultimately they follow the rule of cool. You do something good enough and they'll overlook war crimes. Get on their bad side and you made enemies for life most...
If you manage to make a good game, most people don’t care about what you used or how you did it. Thus why I said the hate for AI tools, imo, is conditional.
Sure, I agree. Gamers are fickle but ultimately they follow the rule of cool. You do something good enough and they'll overlook war crimes. Get on their bad side and you made enemies for life most times.
I mostly wanted to emphasize that the quality bar for "look good" is higher than ever now. Hitting that while still bsing AI assisted runs into the problems I highlighted above. \
To be clear, when I said that I was talking about using LLMs (text generation - i.e. coding and general descriptions). I have yet to see a game getting backlash for using LLMs.
It can happen. I don't know any large scale examples, but I just saw a recent example with an indie dev. They kept the ChatGPT prompt in their other languages on the Steam page and that got them some very avoidable flak.
That's the kind of missing care that makes people so volatile towards this stuff. I don't even disagree with using LLM's for that kind of translation, but it runs into all the same issues as machine translation or even a very bad faith human localizer; you don't know the end result and the end result is so obvious to your audience. Easily suggesting a low quality cash grab.
"Hope" is definitely not how I put it when I browse my LinkedIn feed these past few weeks :(. We were already used to layoff cycles and it's gone maximum overdrive these past few years. But yes,...
There's some hope to be had in the fact that the games industry seems better in this regard.
"Hope" is definitely not how I put it when I browse my LinkedIn feed these past few weeks :(. We were already used to layoff cycles and it's gone maximum overdrive these past few years.
But yes, attitude-wise I agree. The environment is awesome and encouraging for those who want to genuinely make art and not just push out slop. At least on the PC/console dev side. The gaming audience is very fickle, but them being loud against obvious slop is at least trying to at worst make devs work harder to hide the gen AI (thus, more or less cancelling out any savings made) and at best keeping some otherwise tempted devs honest.
I resonated a lot with the author's end points as a philosophy:
Things that are worth doing are worth doing well.
Things that are done well require time and effort.
You make meaning through the doing.
Ideas are common; effort is not.
There are no shortcuts.
Maybe I'll take a shortcut here and there (seeing the jank needed to pull off some crazy tech feats on your favorite game is always a fun read/watch), but overall: effort is living in my eyes. And I want to live and hopefully create a legacy in my craft.
The answer is yes. The entire article is a very eloquent way to say: Yes, you belong in tech. You, Ky Decker, if you ever read this, you belong in tech. You've explained why. Your engineers don't...
Exemplary
The answer is yes. The entire article is a very eloquent way to say: Yes, you belong in tech. You, Ky Decker, if you ever read this, you belong in tech.
You've explained why. Your engineers don't care, and when tokens become too expensive to maintain the habits, they're going to be left with overcommented garbage code. They don't care about design if the AI churns out things that are passable, for a few weeks, until the internet has been so saturated that we can all spot the AI Habsburg jaw on any given web app.
That is exactly why you belong in tech. Money can't buy taste, compute can't generate values. There absolutely needs to be a person, a Rubin, if you will, who's willing to put their foot down and say no, you fucking morons, we're not putting AI images on our home page. Who can say no, you will take the time to review the 1000 line PR. That is what you're paid for, god damn act like it.
The luddites didn't hate the machines, the luddites hated what the machines turned the factory owners into.
I get your take but I think this is only gonna happen if Ky Decker starts his own company. It's pretty much impossible to change the machine as a cog, even as a important big cog that a few other...
I get your take but I think this is only gonna happen if Ky Decker starts his own company. It's pretty much impossible to change the machine as a cog, even as a important big cog that a few other small cogs follow.
The engineer tech needs, but not the one it deserves. but yeah, I want to eventually (as in: probably 5+ years out) try to at least take more matters into my own hands and have my own inconme...
The engineer tech needs, but not the one it deserves.
but yeah, I want to eventually (as in: probably 5+ years out) try to at least take more matters into my own hands and have my own inconme source. I won't claim to fix the system (I'll perform civic duties for larger groups with that goal), but I can at least (professionally) stay in my corner and work on my own bespoke projects. My craft isn't something controlled by corporate interests.
Not the first time I’ve seen this article, but each time I read it resonates deeply with me. The way they describe the day to day is very similar to my company. Here’s how we use “AI”: New massive...
Not the first time I’ve seen this article, but each time I read it resonates deeply with me. The way they describe the day to day is very similar to my company. Here’s how we use “AI”:
New massive feature request dictated by the business with an impossibly short timeline and zero customer validation
AI used to build 20 different, disconnected UI prototypes that don’t match the design or UX of the software at all (but hey, don’t sweat the details, “you get the overall point”)
100 page requirements document generated with AI
Jira cards created with AI based on the AI requirements document
Jira cards worked by AI, PR opened with AI generated description
AI used for PR review of the 50-700 files changed, maybe even used for visual QA
PR merged, release notes generated with AI
Human engineers blamed when things break the next morning
Nobody looks at code anymore, considers the “why” behind features or intentionally designs an interaction. Its slop all the way down, but hey at least we’re hitting deadline after deadline (in part thanks to AI, but also thanks to 80 hour work weeks).
I feel like a lot of these discussions lack context. I’ve worked a lot of jobs in my life I didn’t particularly like or enjoy. Why? Because my family needs money to live. In tech we have above...
I feel like a lot of these discussions lack context. I’ve worked a lot of jobs in my life I didn’t particularly like or enjoy. Why? Because my family needs money to live.
In tech we have above average pay, work from home, flexible schedules, etc etc
I’m not saying we shouldn’t push for it to be better or that burnout isn’t real, but take a step back and look at it objectively.
I worked as a data scientist for years and have recently had to take a job at Starbucks while I continue to job hunt, as it's so hard to get tech roles in the current job market. I understand that...
I worked as a data scientist for years and have recently had to take a job at Starbucks while I continue to job hunt, as it's so hard to get tech roles in the current job market. I understand that burnout is real and can harm you a lot, and probably a lot of the same problems OP experiences are at least partially responsible for the current market too... but it's hard to feel a ton of pity for someone who not only has a job but apparently also has the financial security to willingly quit that job. This is, of course, not the most charitable way to respond to a post like this on my part, but it is where it hits me emotionally.
This is the same conclusion Ive made. I came to this conclusion years before AI was even a thing My conclusion: If you find everyone around you cares much less about the quality of their work than...
This is the same conclusion Ive made.
I came to this conclusion years before AI was even a thing
My conclusion: If you find everyone around you cares much less about the quality of their work than you do, consider lowering the amount that you care. The pay is the same either way.
I don't... Why? Why should you lower your own standards? Just because it's convenient? Is you job not important? Is the work you are doing not valuable? If it isn't, why are you doing it? Why work...
I don't... Why? Why should you lower your own standards? Just because it's convenient? Is you job not important? Is the work you are doing not valuable? If it isn't, why are you doing it? Why work towards something pointless?
Not everyone has the luxury of doing a job they love, and that's alright. However, everyone does need food and shelter and those take money, so sometimes we must work toward something pointless. I...
Not everyone has the luxury of doing a job they love, and that's alright. However, everyone does need food and shelter and those take money, so sometimes we must work toward something pointless. I do work that is not individually fulfilling so I have money and support for hobbies that I enjoy but are not financially viable.
If your work towards the pointless, what's the point? You need to make a point in life, because life won't make it for you. And that's decreasingly becoming a reality for the next generation.
so sometimes we must work toward something pointless.
If your work towards the pointless, what's the point? You need to make a point in life, because life won't make it for you.
I do work that is not individually fulfilling so I have money and support for hobbies that I enjoy but are not financially viable.
And that's decreasingly becoming a reality for the next generation.
Even a distant threat of homelessness and destitution is a powerful motivator to remain in currently available employment True but the person you replied to already mentioned their hobbies....
If your work towards the pointless, what's the point?
Even a distant threat of homelessness and destitution is a powerful motivator to remain in currently available employment
You need to make a point in life, because life won't make it for you.
True but the person you replied to already mentioned their hobbies. Personally I believe enjoyable hobbies funded by less enjoyable work is a better balance than aligning your work with your purpose in life, because if your workplace changes or you lose your job, it hits you in the wallet rather than also taking your soul down with it too.
If your job aligns with your intrinsic motivation, then an uncaring employer (I believe that’s basically all of them) can leverage that to extract more from you than reasonable, and put you in a much more difficult choice when they make demands. I suspect that’s a substantial part of why the AAA games industry is such a toxic industry to be part of.
I think there’s substantial benefit and value to keeping the two separate.
I've found that the stress from not having a job left me unable to enjoy hobbies as well. So even if I agreed that a boring, unfurfilling job was optimal, the fear and increasingly long job search...
because if your workplace changes or you lose your job, it hits you in the wallet rather than also taking your soul down with it too.
I've found that the stress from not having a job left me unable to enjoy hobbies as well. So even if I agreed that a boring, unfurfilling job was optimal, the fear and increasingly long job search distracts from hobbies or anything else.
I don't think that's a way to live. Just shuffling from job to job, hoping this one will fund my hobbies life for 1 year or 2 before I spend another 6-12 months shuffling through the lifeless job search. Even if it's for a boring job, labor laws are important.
I get that, makes total sense. If all jobs available to ones skill are about equally pointless and the pay for ones sector is at a level where going down in pay would leave one with financial...
I get that, makes total sense. If all jobs available to ones skill are about equally pointless and the pay for ones sector is at a level where going down in pay would leave one with financial troubles, then of course the value of the work done cannot be prioritized.
I live in a part of the world where tech work is very well paid. Like, where the average pay leads to a very comfortable life. Assuming this environment, it seems absurd to me to spend a full work week doing soemthing that in the grand scheme is pointless, if one could get a job that might pay less but which actually has a point. Working for government organisation, infrastructure company, health and services. I'm not talking something that is more fun, definitely not something to be loved, but work that actually has a point. Something that Needs Doing.
Has tech becomre so fulky saturated with nonsense work that this isn't genrally feasible? Taking a payloss, but doing work that matters?
I admit that I didn't really address your original comment - you're talking about work that has an impact, while I mentioned work being fulfilling to people as individuals. I would argue that the...
I admit that I didn't really address your original comment - you're talking about work that has an impact, while I mentioned work being fulfilling to people as individuals. I would argue that the former can definitely impact the latter, but for a large enough organization it's easy to feel like a cog in a machine so the company itself doesn't matter.
I work in IT as a server and network admin. I'm good at it, and the company I work for is producing software that is actually valuable to its users, but I can completely ignore the vast majority of business and product announcements because they do not impact my role and tasks. It's less that the job is pointless, and more that it's so disconnected from the purpose of the company that it could be dropped into a different company in a different industry and likely see few changes. The biggest things keeping me where I am are that my team and the ones adjacent to it are genuinely pleasant to work with, and I don't have to do overtime or on-call.
Maybe you're located somewhere else, but the middle-class in America has become eroded to the point that giving up pay for a job that has more meaning is not a possibility for many. It would be great if we could all pick companies that have a positive impact, but to say that it's currently an option for everyone is unfortunately not a reflection of reality (in my opinion).
And then what? We do that for 40 years, and then die? Is that a way to live life? Making the elite class happier? Those kinds of questions are what drive someone to do what they did. If they have...
And then what? We do that for 40 years, and then die? Is that a way to live life? Making the elite class happier?
Those kinds of questions are what drive someone to do what they did. If they have the savings for it, I don't see the point of shame.
Yes. Its how people have lived life throughout human history. Often with even fewer comforts and choices. Plenty of them find all sorts of ways to be happy and enjoy things without expecting their...
And then what? We do that for 40 years, and then die? Is that a way to live life?
Yes. Its how people have lived life throughout human history. Often with even fewer comforts and choices. Plenty of them find all sorts of ways to be happy and enjoy things without expecting their "job" to the sole source of it. Sure it's great if you find fulfillment in work, but it's not like we live in an era where "you raise sheep" is going to be your life because there is jack all else within miles of you and it's what your family has done to feed themselves for the past couple of centuries.
Life isn't perfect, but god it's hard for me to read all this hyperbolic teeth gnashing about AI and not roll my eyes. "Oh no....your industry doesn't spew rainbows and unicorns anymore"...which even that feels silly because tech has been a mixed bag of fullfilling work and backbreaking nonsense since the word go.
"How people live life through human history" for my people was mostly (and still is, in some parts of the world), in chains with whips behind them. So forgive my indignity for refusing to lie down...
Its how people have lived life throughout human history.
"How people live life through human history" for my people was mostly (and still is, in some parts of the world), in chains with whips behind them. So forgive my indignity for refusing to lie down and accept the statue quo for what it is. Doing so would be a slap in the face to centuries of work my forefathers did to get me to a point where I can sit in comfort at my computer, learn to read, cast a vote without questioning my literacy, and even one day consider owning property (an aspect so recent in my history that my gradfather couldn't do it until his late 30's)
You can find it silly and you're free to. My grandfather gave me stories of how he was laughed at too while facing injustices. I choose to keep fighting. Just because I live off the mountains of progress doesn't mean there is not more progress to be done.
I work in a pretty new AI tech division of a fairly non-tech company, and a lot of the people around me (in spirit anyway, it's a remote team) are extremely hard working and genuinely seem to...
I work in a pretty new AI tech division of a fairly non-tech company, and a lot of the people around me (in spirit anyway, it's a remote team) are extremely hard working and genuinely seem to enjoy or at least have great interest in the work they do; they keep up with the latest developments, attend talks and stuff like that, and are excited to share things they learn. I uh, I really don't give a shit. I probably should, I'm pretty young and early in my career and if I did care more it would probably lead to greater growth and pay, but I just really do not care. I don't hate it, and I do have a tech background so I'm not entirely unfamiliar, but the ONLY reason I am doing this job is for the solid pay and good benefits. I do not do tech related stuff in my free time to build more skills, I play games and watch shows like the common consumer sheep. I do my job and I do it to the standard it should be done, and if I'm asked to do a bit more then I do that, maybe I'll spend some time after hours to finish something I'm stuck on (it's remote so it's barely an issue for me honestly).
Point being, my work life and my personal life are somehow very separate from each other but it works and I'm not particuarly keen on disrupting that balance. I like to think I'm part of a silent majority but I'll never know because usually people that are satisfied don't feel the need to talk about it.
And what happens if/when you get laid off and can't find another job? Like many in tech the last few years? I'm not saying this to say "you need to stay on top of tech", because no. That is not...
And what happens if/when you get laid off and can't find another job? Like many in tech the last few years?
I'm not saying this to say "you need to stay on top of tech", because no. That is not the reason people cannot get jobs these days. But because you're essentially saying "the system works for me and I'm fine" and all I see is the system slowly crumbling. We need to reinforce or rebuild the system before it's too late.
I think that you definitely aren't alone in having that opinion. I at least recognise this opinion in my contemporaries. And I don't think that that attitude is a problem in itself? At least, that...
I think that you definitely aren't alone in having that opinion. I at least recognise this opinion in my contemporaries.
And I don't think that that attitude is a problem in itself? At least, that is not what I'm trying to advocate for. I don't think it's important that what we do at our jobs is something we live for, something we'd die for. I don't think our jobs have to feel important to us when we go do them. I even think that it is probably healthy for most people not to live and breath their job, and do something completely different in their off hours
What I'm advocating for is that the work we do serves some general good purpose, that it creates something of value, serves the commons, helpa people, inspires them, whatever. The the job isn't pointless, bullshit, money generation. That it is important to people in general, if not to us doing it persobally.
In other words, if people are going to half ass a 9 to 5, then I'd rather that be as a garbage man than as a energy trader.
(Also, I coukd give a rats ass that full commitment to a skill in and outside work leads to personal mastery of that skill. Everyone doesn't need to be masters, total efficiency should not be a prerequisite for taking part in society)
I’ve had important jobs before they were stressful and they didn’t pay well and honestly I’m a lot happier now with this job that pays really well but doesn’t matter. Since it doesn’t matter I...
I’ve had important jobs before they were stressful and they didn’t pay well and honestly I’m a lot happier now with this job that pays really well but doesn’t matter.
Since it doesn’t matter I have a lot of freedom to do whatever I want. I phone it in for weeks sometimes. Other times I feel like learning a new technique so I build something involving that, just for me.
It’s actually quite the privilege to get paid so much for doing so little. If I let the laziness of everyone around me affect how I feel about my job it would ruin a really good thing Ive got going. I learned years ago to just cover my own ass and do what I can, and enjoy the freedom and the money they’re giving me cause it wont last forever.
I think I'm sorry to hear that maybe? I'm happy that you are doing something that makes you happy and that you get to learn new things and explore. sounds really great! But I'm sad to hear that...
I think I'm sorry to hear that maybe? I'm happy that you are doing something that makes you happy and that you get to learn new things and explore. sounds really great! But I'm sad to hear that you've stopped doing something you consider important.
Under the assumption that our ideas of what is important are at least similar, I think that we need more people to do that important work, not less.
To gauge whether or not my mixed feelings are well founded, may I ask what kinds of important jobs you previously did?
I was an EMT for a few years. It was terrible and terribly underpaid work. You couldn’t pay me to go back. What Ive found in software is for some reason the whole industry just pushes out busywork...
I was an EMT for a few years. It was terrible and terribly underpaid work. You couldn’t pay me to go back.
What Ive found in software is for some reason the whole industry just pushes out busywork for no reason and we’re all really highly paid and that really feels like some kinda artificial class related status symptom in a society where the money you have is the only thing that means anything for your quality of life.
Like I could take a huge pay cut and go do something people actually need like healthcare, public service, literally even being a cashier would be more helpful, but thats not where the money is. I wanted money, so I have to do a bullshit job no one really needs because all the labor people need is kept cheap on purpose.
So I just use my spare money and my spare time to volunteer and donate a bunch.
There's something to be said for "I don't care about my job because I can't afford that luxury." It's a very understandable position. But I do also get the feeling that your conclusion has...
There's something to be said for "I don't care about my job because I can't afford that luxury." It's a very understandable position. But I do also get the feeling that your conclusion has somewhat trapped you there. There's a real risk of that position becoming "I don't care about my job and I've stopped trying to find one that lets me."
This can happen from defeatism, or it can happen from carelessness, but it's bad either way. If you accept a bad environment like that for too long, it'll change you for the worse. Sometimes this just results in low quality output for unimportant work — but sometimes it also results in negligence on vital software, and someone gets hurt. Jobs impact more than just paychecks, after all.
I support the overall point. But after becoming completely disillusioned with how major tech companies behave, after seeing Google at their best become what they are now, after becoming beyond fed...
sometimes it also results in negligence on vital software, and someone gets hurt
I support the overall point. But after becoming completely disillusioned with how major tech companies behave, after seeing Google at their best become what they are now, after becoming beyond fed up with the state of software being shoved everywhere it does not belong:
What vital software?
Because I don't think it's a thing outside of specific industries. Someone will point me to THERAC-25, but that adds to my point - it's been decades, and that's what we have for examples. Tell me aerospace has problem and I'll agree. People can get hurt there, but there are pretty strict human factors requirements there too.
Like today I'll use the software in my car, or on the bus, to get to work, but a glitch in my infotainment system is not going to kill me. The bus having delayed stop announcements isn't life-threatening. My fiancee will change her flight online, use her VISA, chat on Discord... and none of that is life-threatening. At most the VISA is kept secure because it's cheaper for VISA not to be inundated with calls of "I need my money back"
There are a handful of places where, if software goes wrong, people can and will get hurt. It's just a miniscule minority, and I think the absolute state of modern software supports that assumption. Google pays for some of the best programmers in the world (that are willing and able to work there), and not only could they not be bothered to support VOIP, they can't always get their dialer to recieve phone calls [0, 1]. If that is software engineering at it's modern best, am I wrong for thinking so poorly of it?
Sure tons of programmers just write mobile apps and web apps and crap that doesn't really matter their whole careers. I've worked on diagnostic medical devices - a bug could mean your software...
Sure tons of programmers just write mobile apps and web apps and crap that doesn't really matter their whole careers.
I've worked on diagnostic medical devices - a bug could mean your software tells someone they don't have HIV or influenza when they do, or that a suspicious powder is inert when it's really anthrax, or that a pig doesn't have ASF when it does, leading to the disease spreading and thousands or millions of animals being slaughtered (a la the Asian ASF outbreak of 2019ish).
I've also worked on software for heavy equipment that was human-rated but for off-highway use. Most modern heavy equipment platforms are just as software-defined as modern passenger vehicles are. If your accelerator pedal doesn't have a physical cable running to the throttle body (like on a bicycle brake) then software is controlling the acceleration. Most automotive brake systems are still fully hydraulic but there are some now that are brake-by-wire - oopsie something in there and then you can't stop the car. The collision avoidance systems are all sensors and software, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was software in airbag systems too.
Then what about things like EMS communications? Traffic control systems? Or the mountains of military hardware getting pumped out that's all software-controlled?
The THERAC-25 is the ur-example, but there's an ass-ton of software out there that would be killing people and causing mayhem every day if it were halfassed. Mostly it doesn't misbehave so we don't think about it, but that's because when you work on safety-critical software there's heavy process in place to make sure that your team doesn't write code that kills people.
All these safety-critical software standards that are used to build software development processes that don't kill people predate LLM coding agents of course, so they probably don't address them yet. Mostly what I've seen is that the people making potential user-safety decisions err on the side of safety, even if it affects hitting release targets. But I'm sure there are sociopaths out there somewhere rubber-stamping anything to get the product out the door faster, thinking something like "I'm sure it will be fine" lol. Hopefully I'm wrong, but I think we'll see a case of LLM-written software causing human death due to lack of proper human code oversight within the next year or two.
Who knows, maybe eventually the coding agents get so good that the thing we'll need to be suspicious of is human-written software.
I work with systems ajacent / parallel to emergency services communications, and we have fallback systems we test fairly frequently, as the system is put in maintenance mode for upgrades,...
I work with systems ajacent / parallel to emergency services communications, and we have fallback systems we test fairly frequently, as the system is put in maintenance mode for upgrades, maintenance, testing, etc.
Large vehicles continue to have air brakes that fail safe, and collision-avoidance is the backup to people - which I actively turn off because my Honda thought it saw something on the highway, on a clear day, and decided to emergency stop at highway speed.
I'd also like to point to Toyota's spaghetti code being at least partially blamed (rightly or wrongly) for unintended acceleration.
You're not wrong, some industries are safety-critical and need to have good quality controls in place for software. But my core argument is that I don't believe for a moment it's anywhere near the majority that is safety-critical, and of the majority that isn't safety critical, the quality leaves quite a bit to be desired
Courts are seeing lawyers submit AI generated documents mentioning cases that do not exist. Medical devices or even advice guided by AI are costing lives. Healthcare is using AI to deny people...
Because I don't think it's a thing outside of specific industries.
Courts are seeing lawyers submit AI generated documents mentioning cases that do not exist.
Medical devices or even advice guided by AI are costing lives. Healthcare is using AI to deny people their coverage.
Education is under a complete (and IMO, overdue) reckoning of its core goals. College as a "jobs prepearation program" is being brought into question. Acedemia is dealing with faulty research.
pretty much every white collar industry is being put under this microsope, it's not limited to crappy Windows updates. The only reason blue colllar isn't hit (yet) is because robotics development is still maybe 5-10 years out from wide commercial adoption. But I bet we'll see cases of self driving cars at fault for killing pedestrians in avoidable situations, malfunctioning robots injuring humans or destroying property, etc. Especially if the level of care in robotics is the same as we do with LLM's here.
I'm personally not convinced the abysmal state of software is due to AI. Google dropped VOIP around Android 10, roughly 6 years ago, and turned Maps from a method of organizing the world's...
I'm personally not convinced the abysmal state of software is due to AI. Google dropped VOIP around Android 10, roughly 6 years ago, and turned Maps from a method of organizing the world's information to being primarily ad-focused several years ago as well. Microsoft was struggling with Windows monetization and slow-to-open applications like the file explorer, and even the Start Menu, since well before AI as well - and this doesn't even touch on SteamOS beating Microsoft in gaming benchmarks, and doing so running Windows system calls, leading Microsoft to launch project K2. Apple did not abandon their Human Interface Guidelines and push out LiquidGlass because of Claude.
This is the software quality of the best programmers money can buy, from the best leadership these outrageously well-funded boardrooms can attract. AI is infecting other industries, but AI is not the reason I don't take the major software companies seriously
To quote the article (which ultiamtely agrees with you): And I think we can both agree with that. It speeds up the current status quo, and the current status quo hasn't cared about quality for at...
I'm personally not convinced the abysmal state of software is due to AI.
To quote the article (which ultiamtely agrees with you):
The whole system is broken; AI alone didn’t break it, but it is widening the cracks.
And I think we can both agree with that. It speeds up the current status quo, and the current status quo hasn't cared about quality for at least 6 years (arguably up to 10 years). Nothing happening here (outside of maybe AI psychosis ) is novel, it's just more widespread and easier to fall into now, with guardrails that should have existed not being there or being actively torn down.
I actually agree with you here. Computers themselves have practically become an overapplied technology at this point. Usually in service of privacy invasion, no less. When I mention vital...
I actually agree with you here. Computers themselves have practically become an overapplied technology at this point. Usually in service of privacy invasion, no less.
When I mention vital software, I'm thinking of things like cybersecurity, medical software, or heavy machinery operation — the kind of stuff that causes severe issues when it breaks, and I only bring that up as an example. The actual point is that mentally or morally checking out of your job is a great way to end up doing something negligent-at-best without realizing it, and as such you should never just give up and say "well, what can I do?"
It's not even necessarily a case of making a mistake, either. Some companies do awful shit, and folks who shrug their shoulders at it serve only to make that all the worse.
Perhaps beside your point, and it was just an example, but cybersecurity isn't taken seriously either. The people that do the work, and give a damn, are serious people that do good work, and my...
Perhaps beside your point, and it was just an example, but cybersecurity isn't taken seriously either. The people that do the work, and give a damn, are serious people that do good work, and my hat's off to them. Corporations do not, generally, take cybersecurity seriously, and the public knows it. That's how we end up with scenes like this [0] one from Mythic Quest
My job isn’t important, no one will even notice if I don’t do it. I’ve had important jobs before and they were stressful and they didnt pay well and it sucked, this is much better. Since my job...
My job isn’t important, no one will even notice if I don’t do it. I’ve had important jobs before and they were stressful and they didnt pay well and it sucked, this is much better.
Since my job doesn’t matter, I have the freedom to do it the way I want. I can pretend to do it by fluffing up some power points and presenting and thats like an hour of work thats worth like two weeks, so when I’m tired or something needs to get done around the house I do that. Other days when I’m feeling like I want to learn something I start an effort related to that and do it.
I like my job. It’s a privilege to get paid for nothing. This wont last forever, I wish it would, but theres no way it’s sustainable for society to have so many highly paid people like me just doing nothing of value.
Looking at it objectively – insofar as one can even do that – doesn't make things better. We're not just talking about the tech industry being less fun to work in. We're also talking about it...
Looking at it objectively – insofar as one can even do that – doesn't make things better. We're not just talking about the tech industry being less fun to work in. We're also talking about it being immoral to an ever-greater degree, and the article explains this by highlighting several ways AI is damaging both us as individuals and society at large.
In that context, I don't really care that the pay's good. I don't want to help make the world worse.
Edit: To make it clear you know best what is best for you. I’m just sharing my opinion as someone else in the industry. I wish you nothing but the best. I would argue AI at the job you describe...
Edit: To make it clear you know best what is best for you. I’m just sharing my opinion as someone else in the industry. I wish you nothing but the best.
I would argue AI at the job you describe isn't the thing making the “world worse” in the context of that job. What you describe in your article is a complete and total failure of technical leadership. Based on what is happening I’m going to make an assumption that it was organizationally a mess long before AI.
We use it at work, and we use it responsibly. Nothing gets merged without a human code review. We have explicit policies against “slop bombs” - if you generate AI output you MUST personally review and edit it first before asking another human to do it.
We wouldn’t allow a 12,000 line pull/merge request with or without AI. We’d make them split it up.
You shouldn’t be the one fighting these fights, leadership/management should be.
I appreciate the sentiment,1 but: From the article: As I stated in my original post in this thread, choosing to use AI contributes to usage metrics, which in turn is used to justify further...
I appreciate the sentiment,1 but:
I would argue AI at the job you describe isn't the thing making the “world worse” in the context of that job.
From the article:
[...] Generative AI tools, powered by data centers which consume vast amounts of water and pollute our environment, are built on the collective theft of the works of millions of artists, developers, authors, and other creatives, supercharge the spread of disinformation and fascism, have repeatedly provoked psychosis and suicide, and concentrate wealth in fewer hands while providing cover for widespread layoffs.
As I stated in my original post in this thread, choosing to use AI contributes to usage metrics, which in turn is used to justify further overexpansion, risk, and community harm. And when the individual impacts of deskilling, psychosis, or just plain being confidently wrong are thrown into the mix, I think it is very much fair to say that AI use writ large makes the world worse.
With the sole exception of researching the tech's impact on people, I don't think responsible AI usage can exist while the hype bubble's still going. It's just not possible to opt out of the economy like that.
1. Although I'm wondering a bit if you've confused me for the article's author?
I did confuse you for the author with the way you replied to me and the OP tag, my mistake. With our current economic and political systems the cat is already out of the bag on AI. Hype is already...
I did confuse you for the author with the way you replied to me and the OP tag, my mistake.
With our current economic and political systems the cat is already out of the bag on AI. Hype is already deflating as costs are increasing and experiments in certain areas have failed. Regardless of how it was built - it exists, and can be useful. It will be used from this point forward for sure (at least in software). I wouldn’t ban people from using calculators because it makes them worse at doing the math mentally. I wouldn’t ban them from using Windows, even though Microsoft is largely an unethical company.
My company (and my personal usage) did switch from OpenAI to Anthropic due to the whole Pentagon thing. We are also exploring using open weight models locally instead of paying for models but the laptops we have aren’t great at it.
The author seems to make a similar conclusion: emphasis mine. It's a similar conclusion I came to where AI is merely a catalyst for what was already happening. I'm sure your workflow would fix...
What you describe in your article is a complete and total failure of technical leadership.
The author seems to make a similar conclusion:
I don’t blame people for opting to use tools that promise quick, convenient solutions to problems. We all operate under capitalism. Many of us have bullshit jobs where the goal is not, in fact, to make something good, or even to learn, but to simply make money to pay rent and medical expenses. To hopefully find a little joy on the side. The whole system is broken; AI alone didn’t break it, but it is widening the cracks.
emphasis mine. It's a similar conclusion I came to where AI is merely a catalyst for what was already happening. I'm sure your workflow would fix half the issues brought up in this article.
You can blame the leadership for not holding it accountable, but at the end of the day: if you see a fissure widening and only speeding up, it's natural to want to get away from that. You don't have the means as one person to fix it.
"Objectively", the author had a good 15 years to work in their career and can quit without a job lined up because of the savings from that period. A person coming into the job market has none of...
"Objectively", the author had a good 15 years to work in their career and can quit without a job lined up because of the savings from that period. A person coming into the job market has none of the money (and likely a lot of school debt) and all the misery.
"Objectively", this new grad may not even get to see that misery because companies aren't hiring at all. And this isn't in tech but across almost every industry. So it's institutional knowledge that can leave, leaving. And no new people to take up the mantle. Things are going to start breaking pretty pad by the time we hit the 2030's
I suspect the job industry has far more to do with over hiring during COVID, Trumps changes to R&D tax credits, interest rates being at essentially zero then raising, a poor economy, and...
I suspect the job industry has far more to do with over hiring during COVID, Trumps changes to R&D tax credits, interest rates being at essentially zero then raising, a poor economy, and offshoring.
Companies cite AI for the layoffs because it frames them as innovative rather than incompetent. We haven’t replaced a single person with AI at my company.
I know not to take companies at their word, but: I don't think 2020-2022 created an environment where half of them can say in plain english that they plan to hire zero entry-level employees in...
I suspect the job industry has far more to do with over hiring during COVID, Trumps changes to R&D tax credits, interest rates being at essentially zero then raising, a poor economy, and offshoring.
I know not to take companies at their word, but: I don't think 2020-2022 created an environment where half of them can say in plain english that they plan to hire zero entry-level employees in 2027. Interest rates and "corrections" cannot explain that kind of mentality.
We're also in a very weird situation of economic slowdowns, and companies still needing to re-hire employees they laid off under that smokescreen of AI. So the job market is indeed bad, but it also isn't even working. We're in an oddly sticky economy right now;' if you have a job, you're not easy to fire, but there's also very little hiring if you're out of a job.
Yeah, it’s weird right now. I am seeing a bit of a thaw though. Anecdotally I know a handful of people that have switched jobs in the last few months. But that seems to be mostly employed people...
Yeah, it’s weird right now. I am seeing a bit of a thaw though. Anecdotally I know a handful of people that have switched jobs in the last few months. But that seems to be mostly employed people shifting around. Mobility is a good sign though.
I think the last time I was ever happy working was 2015. Just before our company was acquired and we just did a normal deployment of off-the-shelf software at a big client. Spend a couple of...
I think the last time I was ever happy working was 2015. Just before our company was acquired and we just did a normal deployment of off-the-shelf software at a big client. Spend a couple of months in the middle of nowhere. Get requirements. Build to a dev environment. Go to war with MS and SAP to get integration working. Get UAT sign off. Rehearse change over for a week. Full system update over a long weekend. Had a nice wrap up party and collected a bonus.
It was a normal job. I had no doubt that I was doing anything dubious and harmful. Hell, I'm proud to say that I had a minuscule role in getting clean water pumped to half the country.
After that, we had to convince a client to change their safety requirements because a reasonable ask was not part of the cloud strategy. After that I worked on a massive cloud migration project that got several dozen people fired, some of them close friends. And then I was dealing with startups which effectively killed any joy I got from tech and development.
You're driven to a special kind of insanity when you see your boss go on stage and say the illustrative prototype that was made on a flight the previous day, is actually a production ready suite of Blockchain-enabled work/asset management software that could replace SAP, WorxHub and Maximo. And I apparently made it a plug-and-play cloud solution with one-click migration and integration. That got me out of tech by the end of 2019.
And the worst part is that a lot of the things I knew to be bad business and technical decisions panned out pretty close to how I expected. The client we told had "impossible" requirements for on-prem failover ended up just building the feature in house and expanded the project to phase out our software entirely. The company that was sold cloud-transformation as a cure-all to their problems are now desperately trying to rebuild their infrastructure because costs and service issues have spiraled and everything they sold is now far more expensive while the skills are all gone. And all of the damn founders I'd worked for are now AI shills but they seem no closer to their grand visions being magically materialized. All they do is post about how many concurrent AI instances they have spitting out more code than 10000 devs.
The worst part is that it's not like the working world outside of corporate tech is any better. Did a stint consulting and that got blown up because I'm not "AI forward" enough, simply because I prefer a safe and measured approach to development. I worked at my family business and that just resulting in more of the abuse I'd originally tried to get away from. I did a bit of academic work and AI sort of blew up that whole field as well. I had no idea how effectively teach kids who are terrified that a single slip up will essentially tank their entire lives. I do not blame them for using the correct-answer-generator for everything.
So yeh. 15 years of work and I'm effectively worse off than I started. I have no more motivation to work any harder because for myself, my wife and everyone else that I know who did things the "right way", we are all broke, miserable and exhausted. I'm content doing enough to keep my family safe and get my kid set up as best we can. Planning beyond that is a moot point. On the flip side, the only people who seem to have anything going for them seem to cheaters, scammers and grifters.
I feel for the author. I'm in software and work for a similar company which is being myopic and heavy handed in their AI first approach. I also feel that, while I cant speak to everyone's...
I feel for the author. I'm in software and work for a similar company which is being myopic and heavy handed in their AI first approach. I also feel that, while I cant speak to everyone's situation, quitting is usually the wrong move (particularly right now).
Leadership will never truly understand the needs of those that report to them and this compounds up the chain.. we're destined to live in this world forever but we can adapt to it and be the voices that help steer and fix these problems. Yes, AI is dumping problems on our plates way faster than before, but they're actually basically the same problems we've always been dealing with.
My thoughts going through the author's specifics:
You join a meeting with a coworker. Your coworker has enabled an AI tool to automatically take notes and summarize the meeting. They do not ask for consent to turn it on. The tool mischaracterizes what you discuss.
Is it really a problem- who actually goes back and reads meeting notes? Plus, if there's something in there that you disagree which causes problems later I find it's much easier to say "No, I didn't say that, the AI messed it up" then it is to say "<coworker who took notes> misunderstood me".
A team lead adds an AI chatbot to a Slack channel. Anyone can tag the bot to answer questions about the company’s products. Coworkers tag the chatbot many times a day. You never see someone check that the bot’s responses are correct.
Does anyone check the human answers? Some will be right, some will be wrong/outdated. Continue to do what you need to do to get the right answers. This is not your problem.
An engineer adds 12,000 lines of code affecting your app’s authentication. They ask that it be reviewed and merged same-day. Another engineer enlists a “swarm” of AI agents to review the code. The code merges with no one having read the full set of changes.
This is nothing to do with AI, coworkers dumping massive changesets and then expecting quick turnarounds is a problem as old as software. The answer is establishing rules for how your code review process works and sticking to them. Point out these problems (e.g. resulting reverts) and deviations from best practices at your Retro or equivalent meeting.
A designer is tasked with exploring a new feature. They prompt an AI tool for an interactive prototype. Design crit is spent analyzing visual details in the generated prototype, with minimal discussion of core ideas, goals, or tradeoffs.
Would need specifics here but sounds like a process flow issue but also not your job?
One of your pull requests has been open for a few days. You ask other engineers to leave a code review. Minutes later, an engineer pastes a review that was generated by an AI tool. There are no additional thoughts of their own.
:O a lazy code reviewer?! Never! This same engineer is not going to put up a fight- dismiss the comment and move on with your day.
You point an engineer to the relevant section of a library’s docs in order to request a feature. They tell you that the feature request is not possible, and send a screenshot of their chat with an AI tool as proof.
That sucks. This ones genuinely a new problem and idk how to solve it yet. Maybe send a screenshot back asking the AI if you should walk or drive to the car wash?.
Documents and code are being generated faster than team members can review. You get the feeling that most people have stopped reading altogether.
Same as before- make code review processes and stick to them. No one properly read the docs before they were AI either.
Organization leadership has mandated that each person adopt new AI tools to “uplevel” themselves and their team.
Also sucks, also a problem, but.. play the game. I'm sure it's not the first time you've be asked to adopt tools/procedures/systems/etc that you disagree with or doesn't make sense. It wont be the last. Smile and nod and keep doing what works.
I am very thankful my org has a “agentic programming guidelines” document that includes: At least 2 people must review someone’s merge/pull request Do not use agents to leave comments on someone...
I am very thankful my org has a “agentic programming guidelines” document that includes:
At least 2 people must review someone’s merge/pull request
Do not use agents to leave comments on someone else’s merge/pull request
Do not use agents for replying to merge/pull request comments (can use to address the comment, but not to reply to it)
Now, we still have a agent-auto-reviewer that leaves an initial comment on an MR (that frequently mentions latest compiler features are invalid and not supported, but does sometimes have a relevant thing it mentions).
So, not the perfect LLM policy, but certainly better than the “Wild West” many places using LLMs seem to be. And I have not felt pressure forcing me to use LLMs so I use it pretty sparingly.
I don't think it's generally a good idea to dismiss issues by applying a binary thinking to them of "did it exist before, yes or no?" It ignores the degree to which these issues existed in the...
I don't think it's generally a good idea to dismiss issues by applying a binary thinking to them of "did it exist before, yes or no?" It ignores the degree to which these issues existed in the past versus now, and in doing so leaves a blindness to the problem, both in terms of how it's worsening and in terms of the new forms of harm it's now causing. Both of those factors are too important to leave behind.
You somewhat mention this in passing when you describe how AI has accelerated these problems, but the point-by-point teardown that follows rather sweeps that under the rug pretty thoroughly. It ends up reading like reckless optimism that nothing is truly wrong because similar problems existed before. I very strongly disagree with that, because the magnitude of these issues today is so massive that it ceases to be comparable.
This doesn't necessarily mean some of your solutions wouldn't work, but many of them require a company with the good sense and good culture to implement them — and good luck with that, because those companies are few and far between. The AI hype is virtually everywhere, and that's the biggest problem of them all.
Most people have already expressed my sentiment a lot better so I won't repeat those and how ridiculous and un-human both tech corporate (FAANG adjacent) or startup culture is. Call me crazy but...
Most people have already expressed my sentiment a lot better so I won't repeat those and how ridiculous and un-human both tech corporate (FAANG adjacent) or startup culture is.
Call me crazy but we have so many people who are disillusioned by bad corporate culture and carelessness usage of AI leading to terrible product decisions and terrible products. Like I don't know, I hear the sentiment echoed here constantly among friends and I always say well we're all freaking engineers, why not get together and create something?
Tidles is a perfect example that tech can also be used for good things.
I'm too busy finding a job, sadly. I want to create more. But I'm also pretty much in the red financially and pretty much surviving through parental support at this point. Best I can do at this...
Exemplary
I hear the sentiment echoed here constantly among friends and I always say well we're all freaking engineers, why not get together and create something?
I'm too busy finding a job, sadly. I want to create more. But I'm also pretty much in the red financially and pretty much surviving through parental support at this point.
Best I can do at this point is try to silently rebel against as much of this big tech as possible.
More de-googlefying this year with not paying for drive storage and preparing a new email domain. I think I'm down to search (which I have a post job plan for), maps, and Youtube.
I'm as detached from Microsoft as I can be without leaving Windows 11 as a whole (which I'd love to do, but I do need it professionally, sadly).
Amazon Prime is cancelled and I try to leave Amazon as a whole as a last resort after getting out around town first.
All my streaming services are canceled (and my NAS is getting some very nifty usage).
With the new reddit policies, I'm off all major social media aside from Discord (which I cancelled Nitro for).
I'm ready for the next things in all of these (except Youtube, probably the one true monopoly on the Internet).
Hey man, the market is crazy bad right now, so I can totally relate. Gotta take care of yourself first mate. 2 of my friends quit FAANG cuz they just couldn't deal with the bullshit and politics...
Hey man, the market is crazy bad right now, so I can totally relate. Gotta take care of yourself first mate. 2 of my friends quit FAANG cuz they just couldn't deal with the bullshit and politics so its a weird world out there right now with execs pushing AI slop into every corner.
I'm doing what I preach by making a idk Reddit + forum + a bit of Discord platform that's basically my own UX playground. I've read way too many sentiment and views that basically echo that if you don't have money you can't create Discord-like UX and the way to get money is to focus on engagement and gamify the platform for clicks. Like I think from a business perspective that's pretty much right but its absolutely possible to break that rule and web dev (IMO) isn't that complicated so that's what pushed me to start this project. Also I miss good old gaming forums where people actually discussed game design vs. 1 min video clips.
Tildes alone has countless horror stories of behavior exactly like that described in this article. Friends of mine in tech have described the same. While exceptions do exist, I think it's safe to...
Tildes alone has countless horror stories of behavior exactly like that described in this article. Friends of mine in tech have described the same. While exceptions do exist, I think it's safe to say that a great many tech companies are like this.
A great many tech companies were already like this. I don't know where you've worked or what you've heard, but clearly you were already aware that the gaming industry is a meat grinder. I've been...
While exceptions do exist, I think it's safe to say that a great many tech companies are like this.
A great many tech companies were already like this. I don't know where you've worked or what you've heard, but clearly you were already aware that the gaming industry is a meat grinder. I've been hearing horror stories about tech from generations that started the entire thing.
AI is the latest fad, and like cloud, it's a fad with a real use case and so it's going to be extra prevalent. Like cloud, I expect as the bills rise in the next 5-10 years suddenly we'll be back to "so what was that other option you were talking about?".
I don't wish to invalidate anyone else's stories. (I wasn't there so how would I know?) But I've worked in the tech industry too and in my experience each company's management was different,...
I don't wish to invalidate anyone else's stories. (I wasn't there so how would I know?) But I've worked in the tech industry too and in my experience each company's management was different, because the people and circumstances were different. It would be odd if it were a monoculture now.
Tech has become shockingly monoculture over the last few years. Most of the companies copy each other down to employee policies (see: RTO, AI policies, layoffs, etc). My previous employer told me...
Tech has become shockingly monoculture over the last few years. Most of the companies copy each other down to employee policies (see: RTO, AI policies, layoffs, etc). My previous employer told me they were making very dumb choices (not their words of course) purely because YCombinator said so. This sort of delusional groupthink runs deep, in the executive and VC class especially.
There are tech jobs outside startups and mainstream tech of course but usually the pay and benefits aren’t even remotely comparable and as you’ve alluded to can vary greatly. I was offered a position at a company that was outside tech, but after begging them to raise the salary slightly or at least bump me up a single level (which I was qualified for) to grant me stock they refused. They offered ~$70k/year less than the other more mainstream tech job I was offered and ultimately took. A part of me wishes I had taken it just to be shielded from current tech nonsense, but I’m not in a place right now where I can take that big of a pay cut.
Given my effective 130k pay cut the over the last few years, I sure wish I could have only dropped 70k. I'd need to abandon some luxuries, but I'd be more than comfortable surviving by myself. But...
A part of me wishes I had taken it just to be shielded from current tech nonsense, but I’m not in a place right now where I can take that big of a pay cut.
Given my effective 130k pay cut the over the last few years, I sure wish I could have only dropped 70k. I'd need to abandon some luxuries, but I'd be more than comfortable surviving by myself.
But I'm a single 30YO male. I'm sure there are area and family considerations so I'm not casting judgement. I'm just venting at the current state of the world right now.
There are probably some good ones, but they sure aren't hiring. The ones who claim to be sure are yelling at the rooftops that the author's experience will not change there.
Maybe look around first?
There are probably some good ones, but they sure aren't hiring. The ones who claim to be sure are yelling at the rooftops that the author's experience will not change there.
From the article:
[...]
[...]
I relate heavily to this article. I'm not currently working in tech, but I have previously, and it was my preferred career for a long time. Well, mostly. I wanted to do game development, but that industry is having a grand old time and has been for decades, so I figured programming was safer, and it was still fun.
Emphasis on was.
I once wrote a post saying that "I feel like I could cleanly split my coding life into two phases: The part where I learned people found many programmers insufferable, and the part where I learned first-hand why that was." Neither of these two phases were to do directly with AI, but AI was still the context in which I wrote it. I understood before it, of course; tech fields have always had a big issue with understanding the humanities at even basic levels, unfortunately. But the AI boom has caused the issue to metastasize.
These days, I'll regularly encounter people on a few places who will tell me they understand why AI is bad – and sometimes even demonstrate proof of that understanding – only to cut down my relief with a shame-free admission of willful LLM use. And "willful" is a key word here, because I'm not talking about folks forced to use the tech or be fired. I've got nothing against them. I'm talking about people who've clearly understood the harm, yet still feel fine encouraging it by lending their contribution to usage metrics and resource consumption. It boggles the mind.
And that's some of the better things to find. Actual careers are rife with worse: Job after job where recklessness is practically the explicit goal, and understanding is nowhere to be found. I cannot imagine a scenario where I could work in such an environment and not become incredibly angry and depressed.
There's some hope to be had in the fact that the games industry seems better in this regard. Most indie developers hate AI, and many players are right there with them. There's some irony in that for me. But it remains the case that my ideal job appears to be trying to kill itself right as I was starting to develop a career in it, and regardless of if that actually ends up happening, it still really hurts.
From the article:
There are nuances here, from my experience this hate is conditional and depends on what AI was used.
Players hate Gen AI, but only the ones for creating visuals or sounds - like image, music and voice. There are games that use these kind of gen AI that did quite well commercially speaking, like Arc Raiders, PUBG and Inzoi.
Expedition 33 got their award revoked over an asset in the game that was AI generated, but from what I’ve seen the communities mostly shrugged.
So in my mind, it’s not that the players hate AI, they hate slop. If you were to manage to make a game with AI visuals that looked good and consistent, I would bet real money that most players wouldn’t care.
LLMs, out of sight out of mind kind of a deal here. I can’t think of any examples where a game got backlash or flopped over its use; not counting Interactive Fiction games (aka text adventures), but in those cases using a LLM would be the equivalent of using it for visuals in a normal 2D/3D game.
That's the big issue, though. You do proper AI-assisted development with current tools and see it over with a careful eye... you really don't save much time in development. And with current token-driven costs, you're not exactly saving money either (it's certainly not good enough to replace an artist or programmer you may have otherwise hired, that's for sure). You also don't get a quality boost. You end up with none of the triangle of benefits, and you will still end up getting flak if people find out. So what was the point?
At least if you resign to slop and buffer the PR, you're getting something fast. That's the only benefit to vibecoding or gen AI right now. Low quality, medium (for now) costs, blazing fast development (until it's not, but hey. you got features out for now).
All your examples got backlash. Did it matter to any of them? No, not financially. But that's PR prevailing rather than the tech genuinely saving money. Especially since one of the examples existed for a decade without AI (side note: I didn't know what Inzoi was until now and I instantly hated the look. It's also early access so TBD on its success).
But the biggest impacts won't be on large publishers, it'll be on indies who only need a dozen bad reviews to tank their release. Those are the level of development that needs to be very careful about how they present themselves.
I am not in games development, but in my work as a software developer, I can say that this is simply not true. Me and many of my colleages use AI in a very thorough way and it still saves time. Most time is saved in tasks along the lines of "Do A, which is like B I already made, but with XYZ done in different ways". Or think of things like helper scripts, helping with work for deploying software/a game, etc.
On the cost front, remember that good developers are quite expensive, so even a few hundred dollars a month is worth it with a productivity boost.
YMMV per field. My experience in games; coding is rarely the bottleneck, asset creation is.
If you ever tried gen AI'ing any 3D models, you'd know immediately why this is a fruitless effort in terms of the 3 budgets. At best you might get some static environmental props and you lean on Unreal Engine to LOD it for you. You're not getting anything out of it that needs to be textured with anything more than the basics, skinned, nor animated. And even if you do keep it to static meshes, you have one of the easiest ways to be discovered of using gen AI.
Gen AI'ing sprites/character textures? Very easy to discover. Maybe you make a good static sprite, but it completely and utterly falls apart making a spite-sheet. Peak (or I guess "subterranean") uncanny valley.
I'm not saying you can't vibecode a full game; there's plenty of means to make simpler games without any direct coding these days. But code doesn't make 99.99% of indie games out there. I'd be surprised if anyone single-handedly made a competent game with current tech that wasn't immediately outed as Gen AI slop.
And soon (if not now) this will be thousands in token consumption. We missed the subscription train.
About the point of making games with AI that still look good, I was talking about the metaphorical how the sausage gets made. If you manage to make a good game, most people don’t care about what you used or how you did it. Thus why I said the hate for AI tools, imo, is conditional.
To be clear, when I said that I was talking about using LLMs (text generation - i.e. coding and general descriptions). I have yet to see a game getting backlash for using LLMs. All the examples I mentioned got backlash but it was over the other type of generative AI.
Sure, I agree. Gamers are fickle but ultimately they follow the rule of cool. You do something good enough and they'll overlook war crimes. Get on their bad side and you made enemies for life most times.
I mostly wanted to emphasize that the quality bar for "look good" is higher than ever now. Hitting that while still bsing AI assisted runs into the problems I highlighted above. \
It can happen. I don't know any large scale examples, but I just saw a recent example with an indie dev. They kept the ChatGPT prompt in their other languages on the Steam page and that got them some very avoidable flak.
That's the kind of missing care that makes people so volatile towards this stuff. I don't even disagree with using LLM's for that kind of translation, but it runs into all the same issues as machine translation or even a very bad faith human localizer; you don't know the end result and the end result is so obvious to your audience. Easily suggesting a low quality cash grab.
"Hope" is definitely not how I put it when I browse my LinkedIn feed these past few weeks :(. We were already used to layoff cycles and it's gone maximum overdrive these past few years.
But yes, attitude-wise I agree. The environment is awesome and encouraging for those who want to genuinely make art and not just push out slop. At least on the PC/console dev side. The gaming audience is very fickle, but them being loud against obvious slop is at least trying to at worst make devs work harder to hide the gen AI (thus, more or less cancelling out any savings made) and at best keeping some otherwise tempted devs honest.
I resonated a lot with the author's end points as a philosophy:
Maybe I'll take a shortcut here and there (seeing the jank needed to pull off some crazy tech feats on your favorite game is always a fun read/watch), but overall: effort is living in my eyes. And I want to live and hopefully create a legacy in my craft.
The answer is yes. The entire article is a very eloquent way to say: Yes, you belong in tech. You, Ky Decker, if you ever read this, you belong in tech.
You've explained why. Your engineers don't care, and when tokens become too expensive to maintain the habits, they're going to be left with overcommented garbage code. They don't care about design if the AI churns out things that are passable, for a few weeks, until the internet has been so saturated that we can all spot the AI Habsburg jaw on any given web app.
That is exactly why you belong in tech. Money can't buy taste, compute can't generate values. There absolutely needs to be a person, a Rubin, if you will, who's willing to put their foot down and say no, you fucking morons, we're not putting AI images on our home page. Who can say no, you will take the time to review the 1000 line PR. That is what you're paid for, god damn act like it.
The luddites didn't hate the machines, the luddites hated what the machines turned the factory owners into.
I get your take but I think this is only gonna happen if Ky Decker starts his own company. It's pretty much impossible to change the machine as a cog, even as a important big cog that a few other small cogs follow.
The engineer tech needs, but not the one it deserves.
but yeah, I want to eventually (as in: probably 5+ years out) try to at least take more matters into my own hands and have my own inconme source. I won't claim to fix the system (I'll perform civic duties for larger groups with that goal), but I can at least (professionally) stay in my corner and work on my own bespoke projects. My craft isn't something controlled by corporate interests.
this is everything in life.
Not the first time I’ve seen this article, but each time I read it resonates deeply with me. The way they describe the day to day is very similar to my company. Here’s how we use “AI”:
Nobody looks at code anymore, considers the “why” behind features or intentionally designs an interaction. Its slop all the way down, but hey at least we’re hitting deadline after deadline (in part thanks to AI, but also thanks to 80 hour work weeks).
I feel like a lot of these discussions lack context. I’ve worked a lot of jobs in my life I didn’t particularly like or enjoy. Why? Because my family needs money to live.
In tech we have above average pay, work from home, flexible schedules, etc etc
I’m not saying we shouldn’t push for it to be better or that burnout isn’t real, but take a step back and look at it objectively.
I worked as a data scientist for years and have recently had to take a job at Starbucks while I continue to job hunt, as it's so hard to get tech roles in the current job market. I understand that burnout is real and can harm you a lot, and probably a lot of the same problems OP experiences are at least partially responsible for the current market too... but it's hard to feel a ton of pity for someone who not only has a job but apparently also has the financial security to willingly quit that job. This is, of course, not the most charitable way to respond to a post like this on my part, but it is where it hits me emotionally.
This is the same conclusion Ive made.
I came to this conclusion years before AI was even a thing
My conclusion: If you find everyone around you cares much less about the quality of their work than you do, consider lowering the amount that you care. The pay is the same either way.
I don't... Why? Why should you lower your own standards? Just because it's convenient? Is you job not important? Is the work you are doing not valuable? If it isn't, why are you doing it? Why work towards something pointless?
Not everyone has the luxury of doing a job they love, and that's alright. However, everyone does need food and shelter and those take money, so sometimes we must work toward something pointless. I do work that is not individually fulfilling so I have money and support for hobbies that I enjoy but are not financially viable.
If your work towards the pointless, what's the point? You need to make a point in life, because life won't make it for you.
And that's decreasingly becoming a reality for the next generation.
Even a distant threat of homelessness and destitution is a powerful motivator to remain in currently available employment
True but the person you replied to already mentioned their hobbies. Personally I believe enjoyable hobbies funded by less enjoyable work is a better balance than aligning your work with your purpose in life, because if your workplace changes or you lose your job, it hits you in the wallet rather than also taking your soul down with it too.
If your job aligns with your intrinsic motivation, then an uncaring employer (I believe that’s basically all of them) can leverage that to extract more from you than reasonable, and put you in a much more difficult choice when they make demands. I suspect that’s a substantial part of why the AAA games industry is such a toxic industry to be part of.
I think there’s substantial benefit and value to keeping the two separate.
I've found that the stress from not having a job left me unable to enjoy hobbies as well. So even if I agreed that a boring, unfurfilling job was optimal, the fear and increasingly long job search distracts from hobbies or anything else.
I don't think that's a way to live. Just shuffling from job to job, hoping this one will fund my hobbies life for 1 year or 2 before I spend another 6-12 months shuffling through the lifeless job search. Even if it's for a boring job, labor laws are important.
I get that, makes total sense. If all jobs available to ones skill are about equally pointless and the pay for ones sector is at a level where going down in pay would leave one with financial troubles, then of course the value of the work done cannot be prioritized.
I live in a part of the world where tech work is very well paid. Like, where the average pay leads to a very comfortable life. Assuming this environment, it seems absurd to me to spend a full work week doing soemthing that in the grand scheme is pointless, if one could get a job that might pay less but which actually has a point. Working for government organisation, infrastructure company, health and services. I'm not talking something that is more fun, definitely not something to be loved, but work that actually has a point. Something that Needs Doing.
Has tech becomre so fulky saturated with nonsense work that this isn't genrally feasible? Taking a payloss, but doing work that matters?
I admit that I didn't really address your original comment - you're talking about work that has an impact, while I mentioned work being fulfilling to people as individuals. I would argue that the former can definitely impact the latter, but for a large enough organization it's easy to feel like a cog in a machine so the company itself doesn't matter.
I work in IT as a server and network admin. I'm good at it, and the company I work for is producing software that is actually valuable to its users, but I can completely ignore the vast majority of business and product announcements because they do not impact my role and tasks. It's less that the job is pointless, and more that it's so disconnected from the purpose of the company that it could be dropped into a different company in a different industry and likely see few changes. The biggest things keeping me where I am are that my team and the ones adjacent to it are genuinely pleasant to work with, and I don't have to do overtime or on-call.
Maybe you're located somewhere else, but the middle-class in America has become eroded to the point that giving up pay for a job that has more meaning is not a possibility for many. It would be great if we could all pick companies that have a positive impact, but to say that it's currently an option for everyone is unfortunately not a reflection of reality (in my opinion).
Respectfully, fuck money
Wish we could!
And then what? We do that for 40 years, and then die? Is that a way to live life? Making the elite class happier?
Those kinds of questions are what drive someone to do what they did. If they have the savings for it, I don't see the point of shame.
Yes. Its how people have lived life throughout human history. Often with even fewer comforts and choices. Plenty of them find all sorts of ways to be happy and enjoy things without expecting their "job" to the sole source of it. Sure it's great if you find fulfillment in work, but it's not like we live in an era where "you raise sheep" is going to be your life because there is jack all else within miles of you and it's what your family has done to feed themselves for the past couple of centuries.
Life isn't perfect, but god it's hard for me to read all this hyperbolic teeth gnashing about AI and not roll my eyes. "Oh no....your industry doesn't spew rainbows and unicorns anymore"...which even that feels silly because tech has been a mixed bag of fullfilling work and backbreaking nonsense since the word go.
"How people live life through human history" for my people was mostly (and still is, in some parts of the world), in chains with whips behind them. So forgive my indignity for refusing to lie down and accept the statue quo for what it is. Doing so would be a slap in the face to centuries of work my forefathers did to get me to a point where I can sit in comfort at my computer, learn to read, cast a vote without questioning my literacy, and even one day consider owning property (an aspect so recent in my history that my gradfather couldn't do it until his late 30's)
You can find it silly and you're free to. My grandfather gave me stories of how he was laughed at too while facing injustices. I choose to keep fighting. Just because I live off the mountains of progress doesn't mean there is not more progress to be done.
I work in a pretty new AI tech division of a fairly non-tech company, and a lot of the people around me (in spirit anyway, it's a remote team) are extremely hard working and genuinely seem to enjoy or at least have great interest in the work they do; they keep up with the latest developments, attend talks and stuff like that, and are excited to share things they learn. I uh, I really don't give a shit. I probably should, I'm pretty young and early in my career and if I did care more it would probably lead to greater growth and pay, but I just really do not care. I don't hate it, and I do have a tech background so I'm not entirely unfamiliar, but the ONLY reason I am doing this job is for the solid pay and good benefits. I do not do tech related stuff in my free time to build more skills, I play games and watch shows like the common consumer sheep. I do my job and I do it to the standard it should be done, and if I'm asked to do a bit more then I do that, maybe I'll spend some time after hours to finish something I'm stuck on (it's remote so it's barely an issue for me honestly).
Point being, my work life and my personal life are somehow very separate from each other but it works and I'm not particuarly keen on disrupting that balance. I like to think I'm part of a silent majority but I'll never know because usually people that are satisfied don't feel the need to talk about it.
And what happens if/when you get laid off and can't find another job? Like many in tech the last few years?
I'm not saying this to say "you need to stay on top of tech", because no. That is not the reason people cannot get jobs these days. But because you're essentially saying "the system works for me and I'm fine" and all I see is the system slowly crumbling. We need to reinforce or rebuild the system before it's too late.
I think that you definitely aren't alone in having that opinion. I at least recognise this opinion in my contemporaries.
And I don't think that that attitude is a problem in itself? At least, that is not what I'm trying to advocate for. I don't think it's important that what we do at our jobs is something we live for, something we'd die for. I don't think our jobs have to feel important to us when we go do them. I even think that it is probably healthy for most people not to live and breath their job, and do something completely different in their off hours
What I'm advocating for is that the work we do serves some general good purpose, that it creates something of value, serves the commons, helpa people, inspires them, whatever. The the job isn't pointless, bullshit, money generation. That it is important to people in general, if not to us doing it persobally.
In other words, if people are going to half ass a 9 to 5, then I'd rather that be as a garbage man than as a energy trader.
(Also, I coukd give a rats ass that full commitment to a skill in and outside work leads to personal mastery of that skill. Everyone doesn't need to be masters, total efficiency should not be a prerequisite for taking part in society)
I’ve had important jobs before they were stressful and they didn’t pay well and honestly I’m a lot happier now with this job that pays really well but doesn’t matter.
Since it doesn’t matter I have a lot of freedom to do whatever I want. I phone it in for weeks sometimes. Other times I feel like learning a new technique so I build something involving that, just for me.
It’s actually quite the privilege to get paid so much for doing so little. If I let the laziness of everyone around me affect how I feel about my job it would ruin a really good thing Ive got going. I learned years ago to just cover my own ass and do what I can, and enjoy the freedom and the money they’re giving me cause it wont last forever.
I think I'm sorry to hear that maybe? I'm happy that you are doing something that makes you happy and that you get to learn new things and explore. sounds really great! But I'm sad to hear that you've stopped doing something you consider important.
Under the assumption that our ideas of what is important are at least similar, I think that we need more people to do that important work, not less.
To gauge whether or not my mixed feelings are well founded, may I ask what kinds of important jobs you previously did?
I was an EMT for a few years. It was terrible and terribly underpaid work. You couldn’t pay me to go back.
What Ive found in software is for some reason the whole industry just pushes out busywork for no reason and we’re all really highly paid and that really feels like some kinda artificial class related status symptom in a society where the money you have is the only thing that means anything for your quality of life.
Like I could take a huge pay cut and go do something people actually need like healthcare, public service, literally even being a cashier would be more helpful, but thats not where the money is. I wanted money, so I have to do a bullshit job no one really needs because all the labor people need is kept cheap on purpose.
So I just use my spare money and my spare time to volunteer and donate a bunch.
There's something to be said for "I don't care about my job because I can't afford that luxury." It's a very understandable position. But I do also get the feeling that your conclusion has somewhat trapped you there. There's a real risk of that position becoming "I don't care about my job and I've stopped trying to find one that lets me."
This can happen from defeatism, or it can happen from carelessness, but it's bad either way. If you accept a bad environment like that for too long, it'll change you for the worse. Sometimes this just results in low quality output for unimportant work — but sometimes it also results in negligence on vital software, and someone gets hurt. Jobs impact more than just paychecks, after all.
I support the overall point. But after becoming completely disillusioned with how major tech companies behave, after seeing Google at their best become what they are now, after becoming beyond fed up with the state of software being shoved everywhere it does not belong:
What vital software?
Because I don't think it's a thing outside of specific industries. Someone will point me to THERAC-25, but that adds to my point - it's been decades, and that's what we have for examples. Tell me aerospace has problem and I'll agree. People can get hurt there, but there are pretty strict human factors requirements there too.
Like today I'll use the software in my car, or on the bus, to get to work, but a glitch in my infotainment system is not going to kill me. The bus having delayed stop announcements isn't life-threatening. My fiancee will change her flight online, use her VISA, chat on Discord... and none of that is life-threatening. At most the VISA is kept secure because it's cheaper for VISA not to be inundated with calls of "I need my money back"
There are a handful of places where, if software goes wrong, people can and will get hurt. It's just a miniscule minority, and I think the absolute state of modern software supports that assumption. Google pays for some of the best programmers in the world (that are willing and able to work there), and not only could they not be bothered to support VOIP, they can't always get their dialer to recieve phone calls [0, 1]. If that is software engineering at it's modern best, am I wrong for thinking so poorly of it?
[0] https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/google-pixel/pixel-users-arent-receiving-calls-but-the-issue-might-be-googles-phone-app
[1] https://www.androidheadlines.com/2026/07/your-pixel-phone-might-be-dropping-calls-without-you-even-knowing-it.html
Sure tons of programmers just write mobile apps and web apps and crap that doesn't really matter their whole careers.
I've worked on diagnostic medical devices - a bug could mean your software tells someone they don't have HIV or influenza when they do, or that a suspicious powder is inert when it's really anthrax, or that a pig doesn't have ASF when it does, leading to the disease spreading and thousands or millions of animals being slaughtered (a la the Asian ASF outbreak of 2019ish).
I've also worked on software for heavy equipment that was human-rated but for off-highway use. Most modern heavy equipment platforms are just as software-defined as modern passenger vehicles are. If your accelerator pedal doesn't have a physical cable running to the throttle body (like on a bicycle brake) then software is controlling the acceleration. Most automotive brake systems are still fully hydraulic but there are some now that are brake-by-wire - oopsie something in there and then you can't stop the car. The collision avoidance systems are all sensors and software, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was software in airbag systems too.
Then what about things like EMS communications? Traffic control systems? Or the mountains of military hardware getting pumped out that's all software-controlled?
The THERAC-25 is the ur-example, but there's an ass-ton of software out there that would be killing people and causing mayhem every day if it were halfassed. Mostly it doesn't misbehave so we don't think about it, but that's because when you work on safety-critical software there's heavy process in place to make sure that your team doesn't write code that kills people.
All these safety-critical software standards that are used to build software development processes that don't kill people predate LLM coding agents of course, so they probably don't address them yet. Mostly what I've seen is that the people making potential user-safety decisions err on the side of safety, even if it affects hitting release targets. But I'm sure there are sociopaths out there somewhere rubber-stamping anything to get the product out the door faster, thinking something like "I'm sure it will be fine" lol. Hopefully I'm wrong, but I think we'll see a case of LLM-written software causing human death due to lack of proper human code oversight within the next year or two.
Who knows, maybe eventually the coding agents get so good that the thing we'll need to be suspicious of is human-written software.
I work with systems ajacent / parallel to emergency services communications, and we have fallback systems we test fairly frequently, as the system is put in maintenance mode for upgrades, maintenance, testing, etc.
Large vehicles continue to have air brakes that fail safe, and collision-avoidance is the backup to people - which I actively turn off because my Honda thought it saw something on the highway, on a clear day, and decided to emergency stop at highway speed.
I'd also like to point to Toyota's spaghetti code being at least partially blamed (rightly or wrongly) for unintended acceleration.
You're not wrong, some industries are safety-critical and need to have good quality controls in place for software. But my core argument is that I don't believe for a moment it's anywhere near the majority that is safety-critical, and of the majority that isn't safety critical, the quality leaves quite a bit to be desired
Courts are seeing lawyers submit AI generated documents mentioning cases that do not exist.
Medical devices or even advice guided by AI are costing lives. Healthcare is using AI to deny people their coverage.
Education is under a complete (and IMO, overdue) reckoning of its core goals. College as a "jobs prepearation program" is being brought into question. Acedemia is dealing with faulty research.
pretty much every white collar industry is being put under this microsope, it's not limited to crappy Windows updates. The only reason blue colllar isn't hit (yet) is because robotics development is still maybe 5-10 years out from wide commercial adoption. But I bet we'll see cases of self driving cars at fault for killing pedestrians in avoidable situations, malfunctioning robots injuring humans or destroying property, etc. Especially if the level of care in robotics is the same as we do with LLM's here.
I'm personally not convinced the abysmal state of software is due to AI. Google dropped VOIP around Android 10, roughly 6 years ago, and turned Maps from a method of organizing the world's information to being primarily ad-focused several years ago as well. Microsoft was struggling with Windows monetization and slow-to-open applications like the file explorer, and even the Start Menu, since well before AI as well - and this doesn't even touch on SteamOS beating Microsoft in gaming benchmarks, and doing so running Windows system calls, leading Microsoft to launch project K2. Apple did not abandon their Human Interface Guidelines and push out LiquidGlass because of Claude.
This is the software quality of the best programmers money can buy, from the best leadership these outrageously well-funded boardrooms can attract. AI is infecting other industries, but AI is not the reason I don't take the major software companies seriously
To quote the article (which ultiamtely agrees with you):
And I think we can both agree with that. It speeds up the current status quo, and the current status quo hasn't cared about quality for at least 6 years (arguably up to 10 years). Nothing happening here (outside of maybe AI psychosis ) is novel, it's just more widespread and easier to fall into now, with guardrails that should have existed not being there or being actively torn down.
I actually agree with you here. Computers themselves have practically become an overapplied technology at this point. Usually in service of privacy invasion, no less.
When I mention vital software, I'm thinking of things like cybersecurity, medical software, or heavy machinery operation — the kind of stuff that causes severe issues when it breaks, and I only bring that up as an example. The actual point is that mentally or morally checking out of your job is a great way to end up doing something negligent-at-best without realizing it, and as such you should never just give up and say "well, what can I do?"
It's not even necessarily a case of making a mistake, either. Some companies do awful shit, and folks who shrug their shoulders at it serve only to make that all the worse.
Perhaps beside your point, and it was just an example, but cybersecurity isn't taken seriously either. The people that do the work, and give a damn, are serious people that do good work, and my hat's off to them. Corporations do not, generally, take cybersecurity seriously, and the public knows it. That's how we end up with scenes like this [0] one from Mythic Quest
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h7OuAkNzBT0
My job isn’t important, no one will even notice if I don’t do it. I’ve had important jobs before and they were stressful and they didnt pay well and it sucked, this is much better.
Since my job doesn’t matter, I have the freedom to do it the way I want. I can pretend to do it by fluffing up some power points and presenting and thats like an hour of work thats worth like two weeks, so when I’m tired or something needs to get done around the house I do that. Other days when I’m feeling like I want to learn something I start an effort related to that and do it.
I like my job. It’s a privilege to get paid for nothing. This wont last forever, I wish it would, but theres no way it’s sustainable for society to have so many highly paid people like me just doing nothing of value.
Looking at it objectively – insofar as one can even do that – doesn't make things better. We're not just talking about the tech industry being less fun to work in. We're also talking about it being immoral to an ever-greater degree, and the article explains this by highlighting several ways AI is damaging both us as individuals and society at large.
In that context, I don't really care that the pay's good. I don't want to help make the world worse.
Edit: To make it clear you know best what is best for you. I’m just sharing my opinion as someone else in the industry. I wish you nothing but the best.
I would argue AI at the job you describe isn't the thing making the “world worse” in the context of that job. What you describe in your article is a complete and total failure of technical leadership. Based on what is happening I’m going to make an assumption that it was organizationally a mess long before AI.
We use it at work, and we use it responsibly. Nothing gets merged without a human code review. We have explicit policies against “slop bombs” - if you generate AI output you MUST personally review and edit it first before asking another human to do it.
We wouldn’t allow a 12,000 line pull/merge request with or without AI. We’d make them split it up.
You shouldn’t be the one fighting these fights, leadership/management should be.
I appreciate the sentiment,1 but:
From the article:
As I stated in my original post in this thread, choosing to use AI contributes to usage metrics, which in turn is used to justify further overexpansion, risk, and community harm. And when the individual impacts of deskilling, psychosis, or just plain being confidently wrong are thrown into the mix, I think it is very much fair to say that AI use writ large makes the world worse.
With the sole exception of researching the tech's impact on people, I don't think responsible AI usage can exist while the hype bubble's still going. It's just not possible to opt out of the economy like that.
1. Although I'm wondering a bit if you've confused me for the article's author?
I did confuse you for the author with the way you replied to me and the OP tag, my mistake.
With our current economic and political systems the cat is already out of the bag on AI. Hype is already deflating as costs are increasing and experiments in certain areas have failed. Regardless of how it was built - it exists, and can be useful. It will be used from this point forward for sure (at least in software). I wouldn’t ban people from using calculators because it makes them worse at doing the math mentally. I wouldn’t ban them from using Windows, even though Microsoft is largely an unethical company.
My company (and my personal usage) did switch from OpenAI to Anthropic due to the whole Pentagon thing. We are also exploring using open weight models locally instead of paying for models but the laptops we have aren’t great at it.
The author seems to make a similar conclusion:
emphasis mine. It's a similar conclusion I came to where AI is merely a catalyst for what was already happening. I'm sure your workflow would fix half the issues brought up in this article.
You can blame the leadership for not holding it accountable, but at the end of the day: if you see a fissure widening and only speeding up, it's natural to want to get away from that. You don't have the means as one person to fix it.
I’ve seen this a friends companies as well. If you have poor leadership or weak processes and introduce AI it will just amplify that problem.
"Objectively", the author had a good 15 years to work in their career and can quit without a job lined up because of the savings from that period. A person coming into the job market has none of the money (and likely a lot of school debt) and all the misery.
"Objectively", this new grad may not even get to see that misery because companies aren't hiring at all. And this isn't in tech but across almost every industry. So it's institutional knowledge that can leave, leaving. And no new people to take up the mantle. Things are going to start breaking pretty pad by the time we hit the 2030's
I suspect the job industry has far more to do with over hiring during COVID, Trumps changes to R&D tax credits, interest rates being at essentially zero then raising, a poor economy, and offshoring.
Companies cite AI for the layoffs because it frames them as innovative rather than incompetent. We haven’t replaced a single person with AI at my company.
I know not to take companies at their word, but: I don't think 2020-2022 created an environment where half of them can say in plain english that they plan to hire zero entry-level employees in 2027. Interest rates and "corrections" cannot explain that kind of mentality.
We're also in a very weird situation of economic slowdowns, and companies still needing to re-hire employees they laid off under that smokescreen of AI. So the job market is indeed bad, but it also isn't even working. We're in an oddly sticky economy right now;' if you have a job, you're not easy to fire, but there's also very little hiring if you're out of a job.
Yeah, it’s weird right now. I am seeing a bit of a thaw though. Anecdotally I know a handful of people that have switched jobs in the last few months. But that seems to be mostly employed people shifting around. Mobility is a good sign though.
I think the last time I was ever happy working was 2015. Just before our company was acquired and we just did a normal deployment of off-the-shelf software at a big client. Spend a couple of months in the middle of nowhere. Get requirements. Build to a dev environment. Go to war with MS and SAP to get integration working. Get UAT sign off. Rehearse change over for a week. Full system update over a long weekend. Had a nice wrap up party and collected a bonus.
It was a normal job. I had no doubt that I was doing anything dubious and harmful. Hell, I'm proud to say that I had a minuscule role in getting clean water pumped to half the country.
After that, we had to convince a client to change their safety requirements because a reasonable ask was not part of the cloud strategy. After that I worked on a massive cloud migration project that got several dozen people fired, some of them close friends. And then I was dealing with startups which effectively killed any joy I got from tech and development.
You're driven to a special kind of insanity when you see your boss go on stage and say the illustrative prototype that was made on a flight the previous day, is actually a production ready suite of Blockchain-enabled work/asset management software that could replace SAP, WorxHub and Maximo. And I apparently made it a plug-and-play cloud solution with one-click migration and integration. That got me out of tech by the end of 2019.
And the worst part is that a lot of the things I knew to be bad business and technical decisions panned out pretty close to how I expected. The client we told had "impossible" requirements for on-prem failover ended up just building the feature in house and expanded the project to phase out our software entirely. The company that was sold cloud-transformation as a cure-all to their problems are now desperately trying to rebuild their infrastructure because costs and service issues have spiraled and everything they sold is now far more expensive while the skills are all gone. And all of the damn founders I'd worked for are now AI shills but they seem no closer to their grand visions being magically materialized. All they do is post about how many concurrent AI instances they have spitting out more code than 10000 devs.
The worst part is that it's not like the working world outside of corporate tech is any better. Did a stint consulting and that got blown up because I'm not "AI forward" enough, simply because I prefer a safe and measured approach to development. I worked at my family business and that just resulting in more of the abuse I'd originally tried to get away from. I did a bit of academic work and AI sort of blew up that whole field as well. I had no idea how effectively teach kids who are terrified that a single slip up will essentially tank their entire lives. I do not blame them for using the correct-answer-generator for everything.
So yeh. 15 years of work and I'm effectively worse off than I started. I have no more motivation to work any harder because for myself, my wife and everyone else that I know who did things the "right way", we are all broke, miserable and exhausted. I'm content doing enough to keep my family safe and get my kid set up as best we can. Planning beyond that is a moot point. On the flip side, the only people who seem to have anything going for them seem to cheaters, scammers and grifters.
I feel for the author. I'm in software and work for a similar company which is being myopic and heavy handed in their AI first approach. I also feel that, while I cant speak to everyone's situation, quitting is usually the wrong move (particularly right now).
Leadership will never truly understand the needs of those that report to them and this compounds up the chain.. we're destined to live in this world forever but we can adapt to it and be the voices that help steer and fix these problems. Yes, AI is dumping problems on our plates way faster than before, but they're actually basically the same problems we've always been dealing with.
My thoughts going through the author's specifics:
Is it really a problem- who actually goes back and reads meeting notes? Plus, if there's something in there that you disagree which causes problems later I find it's much easier to say "No, I didn't say that, the AI messed it up" then it is to say "<coworker who took notes> misunderstood me".
Does anyone check the human answers? Some will be right, some will be wrong/outdated. Continue to do what you need to do to get the right answers. This is not your problem.
This is nothing to do with AI, coworkers dumping massive changesets and then expecting quick turnarounds is a problem as old as software. The answer is establishing rules for how your code review process works and sticking to them. Point out these problems (e.g. resulting reverts) and deviations from best practices at your Retro or equivalent meeting.
Would need specifics here but sounds like a process flow issue but also not your job?
:O a lazy code reviewer?! Never! This same engineer is not going to put up a fight- dismiss the comment and move on with your day.
That sucks. This ones genuinely a new problem and idk how to solve it yet. Maybe send a screenshot back asking the AI if you should walk or drive to the car wash?.
Same as before- make code review processes and stick to them. No one properly read the docs before they were AI either.
Also sucks, also a problem, but.. play the game. I'm sure it's not the first time you've be asked to adopt tools/procedures/systems/etc that you disagree with or doesn't make sense. It wont be the last. Smile and nod and keep doing what works.
I am very thankful my org has a “agentic programming guidelines” document that includes:
Now, we still have a agent-auto-reviewer that leaves an initial comment on an MR (that frequently mentions latest compiler features are invalid and not supported, but does sometimes have a relevant thing it mentions).
So, not the perfect LLM policy, but certainly better than the “Wild West” many places using LLMs seem to be. And I have not felt pressure forcing me to use LLMs so I use it pretty sparingly.
I don't think it's generally a good idea to dismiss issues by applying a binary thinking to them of "did it exist before, yes or no?" It ignores the degree to which these issues existed in the past versus now, and in doing so leaves a blindness to the problem, both in terms of how it's worsening and in terms of the new forms of harm it's now causing. Both of those factors are too important to leave behind.
You somewhat mention this in passing when you describe how AI has accelerated these problems, but the point-by-point teardown that follows rather sweeps that under the rug pretty thoroughly. It ends up reading like reckless optimism that nothing is truly wrong because similar problems existed before. I very strongly disagree with that, because the magnitude of these issues today is so massive that it ceases to be comparable.
This doesn't necessarily mean some of your solutions wouldn't work, but many of them require a company with the good sense and good culture to implement them — and good luck with that, because those companies are few and far between. The AI hype is virtually everywhere, and that's the biggest problem of them all.
Most people have already expressed my sentiment a lot better so I won't repeat those and how ridiculous and un-human both tech corporate (FAANG adjacent) or startup culture is.
Call me crazy but we have so many people who are disillusioned by bad corporate culture and carelessness usage of AI leading to terrible product decisions and terrible products. Like I don't know, I hear the sentiment echoed here constantly among friends and I always say well we're all freaking engineers, why not get together and create something?
Tidles is a perfect example that tech can also be used for good things.
I'm too busy finding a job, sadly. I want to create more. But I'm also pretty much in the red financially and pretty much surviving through parental support at this point.
Best I can do at this point is try to silently rebel against as much of this big tech as possible.
I'm ready for the next things in all of these (except Youtube, probably the one true monopoly on the Internet).
Hey man, the market is crazy bad right now, so I can totally relate. Gotta take care of yourself first mate. 2 of my friends quit FAANG cuz they just couldn't deal with the bullshit and politics so its a weird world out there right now with execs pushing AI slop into every corner.
I'm doing what I preach by making a idk Reddit + forum + a bit of Discord platform that's basically my own UX playground. I've read way too many sentiment and views that basically echo that if you don't have money you can't create Discord-like UX and the way to get money is to focus on engagement and gamify the platform for clicks. Like I think from a business perspective that's pretty much right but its absolutely possible to break that rule and web dev (IMO) isn't that complicated so that's what pushed me to start this project. Also I miss good old gaming forums where people actually discussed game design vs. 1 min video clips.
I’m wary of assuming that other tech companies are just as bad. Maybe look around first?
Tildes alone has countless horror stories of behavior exactly like that described in this article. Friends of mine in tech have described the same. While exceptions do exist, I think it's safe to say that a great many tech companies are like this.
A great many tech companies were already like this. I don't know where you've worked or what you've heard, but clearly you were already aware that the gaming industry is a meat grinder. I've been hearing horror stories about tech from generations that started the entire thing.
AI is the latest fad, and like cloud, it's a fad with a real use case and so it's going to be extra prevalent. Like cloud, I expect as the bills rise in the next 5-10 years suddenly we'll be back to "so what was that other option you were talking about?".
I don't wish to invalidate anyone else's stories. (I wasn't there so how would I know?) But I've worked in the tech industry too and in my experience each company's management was different, because the people and circumstances were different. It would be odd if it were a monoculture now.
Tech has become shockingly monoculture over the last few years. Most of the companies copy each other down to employee policies (see: RTO, AI policies, layoffs, etc). My previous employer told me they were making very dumb choices (not their words of course) purely because YCombinator said so. This sort of delusional groupthink runs deep, in the executive and VC class especially.
There are tech jobs outside startups and mainstream tech of course but usually the pay and benefits aren’t even remotely comparable and as you’ve alluded to can vary greatly. I was offered a position at a company that was outside tech, but after begging them to raise the salary slightly or at least bump me up a single level (which I was qualified for) to grant me stock they refused. They offered ~$70k/year less than the other more mainstream tech job I was offered and ultimately took. A part of me wishes I had taken it just to be shielded from current tech nonsense, but I’m not in a place right now where I can take that big of a pay cut.
Given my effective 130k pay cut the over the last few years, I sure wish I could have only dropped 70k. I'd need to abandon some luxuries, but I'd be more than comfortable surviving by myself.
But I'm a single 30YO male. I'm sure there are area and family considerations so I'm not casting judgement. I'm just venting at the current state of the world right now.
There are probably some good ones, but they sure aren't hiring. The ones who claim to be sure are yelling at the rooftops that the author's experience will not change there.