alt Hacker NewsGiven the amount of complaints and generally downtrending tone on HN over the past decade and a half, did people really enjoy programming for work? It feels like the vicissitudes of the market, from the “move fast and break stuff and technical debt be damned” era of ZIRP, to “move even faster because now companies have to show profit and we are post-ZIRP cracked 100x engineers” just led to a lot of sloppy inelegant code, features and products built that never shipped, and unending meetings about half-baked business requirements. And a lot of the programming just ended up writing API glue code.
If you’re a The Art of Computer Programming-reading, code golf-competing, blogging neat elegant hacks kind of programmer, were you really getting that experience coding at work?
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if you're code-golfing on a prod repo, i do not want you as my coworker. please add comments. make things readable.
Work always comes with bullshit. Its the nature of the thing. I don't think anyone was really getting code golf-style experiences at work, but they likely had enough positives that they outweighed the negatives, which resulted in net "enjoying" work. For a lot of people, AI removed a lot of the positives and left a lot of negatives, and some are still coping with that in one way or another.