Meanwhile the average millennial has already accepted they're going to die at work.
That won’t be the end of work though. We’ll all be powering Sisyphean gravity batteries in Hell. Pushing boulders uphill and then harnessing the energy when they slip and crush us rolling back to the bottom.
If the company lays out perverse incentives, it's not the employee's fault for following suit. Capitalism is all about ignoring ethics pursuing personal gain. Folks just get their panties twisted when non-billionaires learn how to play ball.
The majority of Australians seem to think that profiting out of property investment is a God given right, that it's the government's incompetency if their personal property investment doesn't return record profits and that the government should pump it up at whatever cost to "fix" the issue.
There's a serious disconnect between the mindset of landlords and reality.
This always happens when management is unwilling to drop their waterfall methodology while forcing everybody else into an agile workflow - you end up with dev bound by the very restrictions that agile is meant to address, while adding on all the stresses that come with waterfall development.
Scrum Teams are often Coached to Death, while the Problems are With Management
What makes for a fun job? Opinions vary, but I think it’s agency and impact. Agency means that your colleagues trust you to individually do your best work. It means not being told what to do, nor when to do it. It means working when you want to, and taking your kid to the doctor when you need to. And it means freely discussing designs with colleagues, with mutual respect and without pressure or politics. Impact means that the work you do directly improves the lives of our customers, and therefore makes the company better.
For example, we started out doing Scrum. But the sprint cadence made us take a single hard “do we release or not?” decision every two weeks, and it made no sense. Why not just ship a feature when it’s done? So we ditched the idea of sprints and switched to Kanban. Then we noticed that our Trello kanban board went outdated all the time, but it stopped nobody from shipping. So we cut that out too. Daily standups were interrupting half the team’s flow, so we cut those out too. We kept cutting things out, and by now, we’re a company with no deadlines, no obligatory meetings, no fixed working hours, and no bosses giving you tasks.
This works because, and only because, the entire company consists of people who move the fastest when they’re not held back by process. People who don’t need to be told what’s the most important thing to do right now (and who know to ask if they’re not sure). People who prefer to dive deep and emerge victorious, people who know how little sense it makes to try to split a performance problem into estimated “story point” tasks on sticky notes. People who know how to scope work down into small chunks, so we ship fast increments whenever we can.
But in the end, a pretty photo on the “careers” page touches you once. The freedom and trust to do your best work every day touches you all the time.
I’ve stopped trying to debate software developers on LLMs. You might have noticed if you’ve been following this blog. It’s a fruitless debate. Even if the believers in agents and copilots could be budged on empirical grounds, and the past few years have given us plenty of evidence that they can’t, this is still a crowd that is explicitly fine with using tools that are themselves deeply unethical.
Debating people who look past “chatbot psychosis”, the dismantling of the education system, the gendered abuse, the generated CSAM images, the overt attacks on the media industries, or the ultra-right’s glee about “AI”, by showing them a well-constructed academic study is never going to work.
Even the most staunch capitalist out there must acknowledge that this isn't it. There's no competition. There's no innovation. There's only a bunch of dumbasses who call themselves "product managers" whose whole job is to figure out novel ways to fuck you over, lock you in, and leave you with very little recourse. It's no longer about making cool shit that people like, if it was ever that. It's about setting the pieces in a way that you simply have no other choice. The highest achievement for this kind of enterprise today is not to have happy customers: is to get to the point where they can say "What are you going to do? Leave us for the competition? There's no competition."
This isn't about China — it's so much fucking easier if we let it be about China — it's about how the American tech industry is incurious, lazy, entitled, directionless and irresponsible. OpenAi and Anthropic are the antithesis of Silicon Valley. They are incumbents, public companies wearing startup suits, unwilling to take on real challenges, more focused on optics and marketing than they are on solving problems, even the problems that they themselves created with their large language models.
By making this "about China" we ignore the root of the problem — that the American tech industry is no longer interested in making good software that helps people.
When you come from an environment of cutthroat competition, of constant backstabbing, of extreme individualism where you have got to get yours, fuck everyone else, collaboration seems like a completely absurd idea. What's in it for me? It should also be clear by now that the whole "tech" scene these days is exactly like this. Get your VC money, sell out, fuck everybody else. If the game is not a zero-sum one, it's not worth playing: it's not sufficient for me to win. You need to lose.
So, instead of having a place where a lot of questions have been collectively answered satisfactorily, indexed, archived, and catalogued, we are choosing the method of individually asking the same questions over and over again. If I have the exact same question as you do, I need to ask the LLM again. All the tokens, and energy, and GPUs, and training data, and models, are doing the same work twice. Or thrice. Or a billion times. Instead of a thousand people finding one answer that's one search away, we are asking the same question a thousand times. Instead of a thousand people typing "How do I reference a specific list item in Python" on the search box and getting answers, we're asking LLMs to compute and generate the same answer a thousand times. And that's only possible for those who even have access to these tools.