Programming Still Sucks

This was beautiful. I also appreciated the backlink to Peter Welch’s spiritual ancestor to this essay, which I had forgotten how to find, and had the joy of reading again.

Archive link as the site seems down - https://web.archive.org/web/20260507003341/https://www.stvn....

Lovely writing!

> ... to which they nod before moving on to a lighter topic, like whether we're going to nuke Iran or not.

> There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came.

> AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did.

Love the sarcasm, it carries a cynical form of experience :)

This is absurdly well written.

I don’t know how someone takes the familiar anxiety around AI replacing developers and turns it into something this beautiful and funny.

Once again, the programming industry has robbed literature of a potential Nobel Prize candidate.

The USB stick hints at a big problem in our trade though: how do you "reboot" your IT infrastructure if it literally burns to the ground? I'm not talking about Google-scale systems (which still couldn't restart from scratch IIUC but they're actually working on it?) but only about SMEs.

How does a medium-sized SME were all the payrolls depends on Sara and her USB stick do if, literally, their servers do catch fire.

You've got backups, then what? How automated is the reinstallation of your typical SME's infra?

The closest I saw to that scenario was some documentary where some little trading firm had just time to fetch the backup hard drives before leaving the building on fire after a plane crashed into it on 9/11. The CEO (I think it was the CEO) was explaining that had he not grabbed a HDD with the backups, the company was done (not that I advice onsite/offline backups on HDDs that you must not forget to grab when the shit hits the fan as a solution btw).

I understand the "just drink the cloud kool-aid" angle: but are SMEs typically doing that?

How many SMEs out there are depending on Sara's knowledge of the USB memory stick and how to use it?

I've definitely seen similar things. And I'm sure many of you did too.

Many houses of cards?

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Normal will end up as programming at the end as a normal thing, this is what I know, I feel the same. Same shit happened so many times. Shit people become programmers as an excuse to all the shit happened before. People asking visa to stay in a country are programmers too. People asking military service to other people are programmers as well. People sending PDF invoice to other people are programmers, too. People march in 1st of May for labor rights are programmers too, it is originally first of April.

You are a one who claims you are a German person so you hold the most valuable passport bla bla, as I see your linkedin profile, plus you are looking for work. So you are the same shit person. I block you, I will not recommend you to my recruiter friend for an open position if it will happen.

Good read.

I think one thing that has changed permanently is coding by hand has become unnecessary. Programmers had edge over others because they knew the spec and syntax. Now that field has been leveled.

You still need to know the syntax but not the nitty gritty details and you don't need to be able to code a java's lambda's anonymous override or streams anymore. Just knowing it "somewhat" is enough.

But that's all that has changed.

What has not changed is the requirement for "systems" thinking and the general good practices. In fact, that has become even more important because earlier we were forced to think in existing patterns (editing pre-existing code), but now with coding agents, it can very easily duplicate the logic in its own module and call it a day.

So we need to be the forcing function here with our systems thinking and guardrails.