Pointless rant. Please ignore. I'm a software developer and we all know how AI has changed our industry. How we work or why we're fired and why we can't afford PCs.
Anyways, we're already all forced to use AI already and we're already atrophying the minds of our juniors. It's great.
New team meeting and one of our managers tells us that we're never going to write code anymore at all. The AI will read the JIRA ticket and create the pull request (change request to the codebase) on GitHub. Our job is to only review the code on GitHub and then rank how well AI did and then comment and then get AI to fix it. We have to do this so we can improve the AI process. Which is funny because none of the people who plan this AI shit are data scientists. The only way they can change things is by promoting, it's not like we're releasing our own coding models but anyways ... He's like, now you should be able to do much more work and just review PRs all day now and that we should never be doing only one thing. You can only tell AI through a GitHub comment to fix a mistake and then you can start reviewing the next thing.
We were like, if it's a simple fix why can't we just fix it?
"Because we need to improve the AI process"
But then, I have to context switch.
"Yes that's the point you can come back to it later"
Why come back to it later when we can solve it now? We can even use AI to solve it now.
"No, we want you just comment on the PR so the bot can handle it"
Context switching is free apparently... It's actually infuriating because apparently we're not using IDEs any more. I personally use the GitHub plugin to review PRs in my IDE but no one else seems to do it so I don't think they even took that into account.
These guys have auto merged AI code that's taken us weeks to unravel and which we still haven't fully been able to fix. They just merge shit all the time and a lot of it is fucking slip. AI merged hundreds of tests and no one cares when they break. They didn't configure prettier because AI doesn't use it so it breaks out formatting when humans do it.
I ranted to my own manager for 30 minutes about it today and he was just as upset because every developer is now asking what exactly are they doing. My manager asked me what I would do. I said the process sucks but what are we supposed to do as devs. If I review 20 PRs a day, how is the company going to ensure my skills are gonna be sharp? What are we doing about taking in ideas from regular devs? How do we ensure code ownership when we're just merging tickets we don't write and code we had no hand in shaping?
Sorry. I actually thought I had faith in my company with AI because they were coming up with thoughtful approaches but it seems like utter incompetence.
The software developer job had to go through the meat grinder. Your salaries have been so inflated these past 20 years that it has kept the entire economy afloat as the rest of the jobs in every other sector have been dragged through shit in every way possible and we're all miserable. We all hate our jobs and we all have friends in tech who can't see what our problem is. We need you to hate life to be in the muck with us. We need you to reject the behemoth management industry - lower management, middle management, and upper management, until finally the goddamn message gets to C-suite that the workers of the world are unhappy. We need you to revolt and force upheaval in the entire tech industry before anything will change.
That's only valid in some countries like the USA. In France, the salaries of developers are a tiny bit higher than other jobs, but not that much.
Well doesn't big tech in the USA create this problem for everyone? We're platforming fascism in your country too. All the dynamics are interconnected.
All that and I still cannot find a point anywhere.
I actually agree with a lot of what you said. Software engineers didn't want to form a union and stuff because they had high salaries and we're so sought after. lol, to be clear, I'm not one of those crazy useful or overpaid tech guys (not anywhere close to FAANG). Although overpaid is always relative. Regardless, I think all workers should unite beyond tech ... it's the "tech bros" that are also making the world worse right now and I'm not happy these chuds are holding that moniker.
Unionizing in my country is pointless. You have to join the union of your employers branch, i.e. sales or metal work. Sales however includes cashiers and other low skill jobs. That changes entirely how the union acts. Want to change employer? Have to change union too. Just all the hassle. Also low skill low pay jobs dont understand why SWEs should complain because you got homeoffice and better pay. Lets just say solidarisation is stopped by envy. I worked as cashier too and studied twice but workers council sides with employers because we didnt work our way up???
Tell me any other profession that expects sample project work during application. Keeping up with ever changing tech in your private time. Have solid / strong understanding of dozens special tech only XY company uses, do dev ops on weekends and night.
Meanwhile managers bullshit their way into jobs and waste our time with useless meetings earning notably more.
Also this is not about SWE only. Any office job will be changed by AI. Then people will flock to non AI jobs deflating their value and so on.
LET'S SHOUT AT EACH OTHER IN AGREEMENT
I mostly agree. I've worked service industry, construction, and more before doing software development. I now work in Japan as a full-time engineer and part-time farmer. Salaries in Japan (outside of FAANG) are not nearly as high as elsewhere. It does come with some reason though: to be successful, there is a lot of time outside of work hours spent reading, studying, etc. to keep up with the industry and extra salary compensates for that.
HOWEVER, I think we'd all do better if salaries were closer, we had better rights (especially in countries like the US and, to a lesser extent, Japan). I think people should be compensated for all the time we have to spend (not just engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc. do this after all) and get our fair share of the value we bring rather than it going increasingly to the top.
I think there’s some truth there, but will say that prior to the modern era, software engineers were actually worth their salt. They tended to have higher levels of competence and mastery.
Nowadays it’s hard to find a coworker who really gives a damn. Especially the younger ones. Lots of blank faces when you try to engage them on ideas that are esoteric to software engineering.
And of course if you have people who don’t care they need more management to make sure they’re on track. And many of them don’t really read about software either.
So the industry became more bloated than before (yes even compared with the dot com boom when you could get hired if you could write HTML). And we all suffer.