Tech workers need to unionize

For many real world, day to day tasks, computers and the software that ran on them were faster and easier to use 20 years ago.

It's all trash. Everything normal people use on a daily basis is pure dumpster fire level garbage with massive, HEINOUS, unforgivable amounts of tracking built in.

They know all of this. They just don't care.

MOBILE USERS CAN GO FUCK THEMSELVES.

Phew. That felt good.

A lot of what is sold to consumers is straight up shite.

No class consciousness. Too many tech workers think they're rugged individuals that can negotiate their own contracts into wealth.

Working for free on nights and weekends to "hit that deadline" is not good. You're just making the owners rich, and devaluing labor. Even if you own a lot of equity, it's not as much as the owners.

And then there's bullshit like return to office mandates and people are like "oh no none of us want to do this but there's no organized mechanism to resist"

A very large portion (maybe not quite a majority) of software developers are not very good at their jobs. Just good enough to get by.

And that is entirely okay! Applies to most jobs, honestly. But there is really NO appropriate way to express that to a coworker.

I've seen way too much "just keep trying random things without really knowing what you're doing, and hope you eventually stumble into something that works" attitude from coworkers.

The Microsh*t Office Suit is atrocious — both from a Software Dev and ordinary user perspective. Literally any alternative is better, Libre Office, Google Office, etc.

Word is bloated, slow, impractical, bad for collaboration, and politically dubious. Teams is buggy, impractical, also politically dubious, and lacks many basic features. At this point, I literally despise Microsoft. Also Windows really seems to be unusable, from the enlightened perspective of a Mac or Linux user (in my case the latter).

SystemD is bloated and stopping Linux from getting faster.

Most mainstream programming languages suck, Rust being the exception.

Alright, I'm done ;)

Edit: any website that breaks because of uBlock Origin medium mode is poorly made and not trustworthy. /endrant

Most of the high visibility "tech bros" aren't technical. They are finance bros who invest in tech.

companies don't know how to interview. i don't need someone to walk me through a sorting algorithm. i need someone who will be responsive, and interested in the problems we actually face.

Most programmers suck ass, including myself

Ah, the upside of being autistic. I'll say anything i believe is true at work or here.

Much of what we do and have built is overpriced and useless bullshit that doesn't make anybody better off.

We are inventing solutions and products to manage other solutions and products to manage other solutions and products to...etc etc.

Websites used to be static HTML pages with some simple graphics, images, and some imbedded stuff. Now, you need to know AWS for your IaaS, Kubernetes to manage your scaling and container orchestration for the thousands of Docker containers that you use to compose your app written in some horrific pile of JavaScript related web stacks like NodeJS, Typescript, React, blah blah blah...

Then you need a ton of other 3rd party components that handle authentication, databasing, backups, monitoring, signaling, account creation/management, logging, billing, etc etc.

It's circles within circles within circles, and all that to make a buggy, overpriced, clunky web app.

Similar is true for IT, massive software suites that most people in the company use 10% of their functionality for stupid shit.

I'm all for advancing technology, I love technology, it's my job and my hobby.

But the longer I work in this industry, the more I get this sick feeling that we lost the train long time ago. Buying brand new $1,500 laptops every 3 years so that most of our users can send emails, browse the web, and type up occasional memos.

Neither Python nor JavaScript should be the primary language used in any production back end.

So Just for context I work as an engineer but I consider myself pretty low level. I am completely self taught as I sort of flunked out of college and didn't pay much attention anyway. I've just been the sort of person who takes everything apart and tinkers around to figure things out or reads documentation. So I am not some genius programmer or anything. However what I have noticed over the span of my ( 40 + years ) is that the Internet and technology used to be a challenge but rewarding. Things were skewed towards creativity, sharing, community, and knowledge. I remember spending lots of time on forums like Usenet and later bulletin boards of various types. I remember when Wikipedia first became a thing and it really seemed to me that we were going to get this amazing platform to learn and self teach just about any subject imaginable. Then somehow the Internet just became an endless fucking scroll farm. My dumbass uncles and older family members who used to be content with just eating aerosol cheese while channel surfing got online and became complete fools. Instead of creativity and debate we just have endless AI slop, morons reacting to videos of nothing, Bots, and click bait. It seems like the industry just loves it because before they could barely figure out how they could make money off of this crap and now they have it figured out "turn everyone into fucking zombies". People at work are at times blown away at my stamina to work through problems and it's like bro I used to sleep next to my 486 so I could put in disk 20 of 50 to install something and it would take like all friggin night. I used to have to find a dude that got a catalog so I could get a CPU upgrade or part because there was no internet. I used to have to fight for every damn piece of documentation or software I could get my hand on. Now it's all right there and people have decided to watch Tik Tok instead of being able to do anything on their own. We screwed the hell up the Internet and tech has made people lazy, less capable, and focused on instant gratification. It was supposed to make us curious, creative, and engaged. Now with AI we are like "hmm how can I even be lazier?". I would get if they used AI to help solve really complex problems reserved that compute and stuff to assist on certain things that humans are not good at. However we are using this shit to just circumvent having to think and a substitute for community. Why ask a friggin bot when all the answers were in forums where you could interact with people make friends and learn? Now I am looking down the barrel of the gun of being replaced in the next 5 years or so going, Great so this shit which was "my thing" the only damn thing I was ever good at or interested in is going to be taken away from me because of some lazy ass people who just want to watch Tik Tok all day? -End rant.

CEOs and all management suite are mostly useless except for making the business worse for the employees and customers for the sake of investors.

Most employees are perfectly fine with slow and steady growth instead of maximizing it.

All software should be open source

Most IT infra exists solely to justify work that is pointless work.

One if the worst IT sectors is ad tech. The entire industry rationally should not exist.

I truly believe that innovating the internet is really running in place. Might be just me but I can't think of anything we can really do, to 'evolve' it. We're doing everything that we've been doing in the past three decades, but it's only just been more accessible and the speeds faster (depending where you are). But we're not actually moving the needle when it comes to progressing the internet as a whole.

And I see it this way as to why. We've experienced two big booms in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, with Web 1.0 being what some consider the Wild West of the internet. Web 2.0 is basically the great social media bubble that has blossomed for years. We're not doing anything new or different now than we did back in 2007. Every new social media platform that comes out is recycling the exact same things as many before it presented. I truly think we stopped evolving the internet the day we managed to get messengers onto phones when phones were developing and it's only been perfected by the age of the first wave of smartphones.

So I just think with all of this AI stuff, this "Web 3.0" I've been hearing about for a few years now, the Metaverse .etc are all just gimmicks. Gimmicks of shitty ideas coming from the wrong people that should be practicing said ideas, all saying that they're innovating the internet when all that they're doing is just taking advantage of the internet for themselves. All within political theater of course.

I think that the AI industry is particularly harmful to writers, journalists, actors, artists, and others. This is not because AI produces better pieces of work, but rather due to misanthropic viewpoints of particularly toxic and powerful individuals at the top of the tech industry hierarchy pushing AI as the next big thing due to their general misunderstanding or outright dislike of the general public.

I'm a writer and my work is increasingly making me use AI to do things. I'm 98% sure I'm just training this thing to replace me at this point, and am planning accordingly.

At least half of the people working in tech shouldn't be. They have 0 clue what they're doing and that's dangerous. And far to many people solve everything with a golden hammer.

You don't need a Mac to work in IT. Especially if all your doing is ansible.

Ansible sucks. It's slow, it's limited, it gives a false sense of understanding to do many. I mean it's nice that it's a structured playground for some folks I suppose. But there are better tools that do the exact same thing. Or you could just write a proper script.

• IT reconversions are bullshit and dangerous to the industry. Everyone and their grandma are becoming "programmers". We're in the "fuck around" phase, the "find out" will be explosive. Companies are inundating themselves with these "reconverted" juniors and doing soft-layoffs to seniors..

• crypto, Blockchain and AI are just bs to make a quick buck out of investors. They are truly disastrous to the environment

• If you use chatgpt et al. I'll look down on you from a technical competence level

• marketing and middle management are mostly useless. A good, and small, sales+marketing team is very effective but the moment they start growing they start to degenerate pretty fast into BS world and imposing company culture

The whole "tech industry" naming is bulllshit, there is more technology let's say in composite used to build an aircraft wing or in a surgerical robots, than in yet another mobile app showing you ads

The whole tech sector also tend to be over evaluated on the stock market. In no world Apple is worth 3 trillion while coca cola or airbus are worth around 200 billions

I think most people who actually work in software development will agree with you on those things. The problem is that it's the marketing people and investors who disagree with you, but it's also them who get to make the decisions.

It will create a fully autonomous and self sufficient robot army one day and the 1% will genocide the working class with said army after our labor is no longer needed.

Please stop with the AI pushing. It's a solution looking for a problem, it's a waste in 90% of the cases.

I think companies that use unethically trained AI (read: basically all gen AI) should be subject to massive litigation, or at least severely damaging boycotts.

Have mentioned it to a lawyer at work, and he was like “I get it, but uh… fat chance, lol”. Would not dare mention it to the AI-hungry folks in leadership.

Not a software dev, but for me it’s the constant leap from today’s “next best thing” to tomorrow’s. Behind the Bastards did an episode on AI, and his take resonated with me. Particularly his Q&A session with some AI leaders at, I think, CES not long ago. When the new hotness gets popular, an obscene amount of money is paired with the “move fast and break things” attitude in a rush to profit. This often creates massive opportunities for grifters as legislators are mind numbing slow to react to these new technologies. And when regulations are finally passed (or more recently, allowed by the oligarchs), they’re often written to protect the billionaires (read: “job creators”) more than the common customer. Everyone’s bought into the idea that slow and methodical stifles innovation. At least the people funding and regulating these things have.

Right now, Ai is a party trick.

Tomorrow, Ai will inform the FBI that #29933 is planning on murdering his sister, and deploy a team of armed drones to escort him to prison, if he makes it.

Tomorrow, the department stores and supermarkets will be empty and you'll pick up your groceries from an automated warehouse that inserts them into your car.

Tomorrow, the mail bot will barf your mail into a labeled box, wherin you'll find your prescription medication, bottled labeled and packaged by nobody, which you take right after you go out to eat at an empty restaurant, where your food is brought to you by an automated track that says tHaNk Yo in an inhuman tone before cutting off too soon.

No conversations, no traveling, no hassle, no humanity, or sincerity whatsoever.

hooray?

Why the fuck is everyone so stoked about this? Vending-machine land sounds insufferable.