4mo ago

I'm an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don't speak for me - ratfactor

ratfactor.com /tech-nope

48 comments

I'm also a software engineer and I can't stand most other people in this field. I got into this field because I love computers and was tweaking garry's mod scripts when I was 12. I read scifi books and enjoy reading about the lore of the tech industry.
I would estimate that AT LEAST 75% of people in this industry are ladder climbing yuppies who got into it for the money. The gym rat, tesla-driving podcaster types who have invented their own language about syncing up, achieving alignment, creating action items and eating dog food. And for some reason they're all into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Lex Fridman/Joe Rogan
I do not socialize with my coworkers because they are the most obnoxious fucking money-obsessed pieces of shit I've ever met
- Bit of an unhinged and unreasonable nerd rant but here it goes:
  The second dot com boom in the 2010s ruined us. Like holy shit. As someone younger looking down the line, living in tech bro culture, but exposed to the likes of the jargon file, y combinator and their venture capitalists literally ruined hacker culture.
  We used to have a thriving culture that cherished freedom, real freedom, not freedom for the rich. What happened to the culture that spawned Windows buyback day? What of the dream that networked freedom would one day break the chains of economic heirarchy?
  Like holy fucking shit. If you're not here for the love of the machine stop touching a compiler or better yet go loose your fucking hands.
  
  Preach.
  Information wants to be free.
  
  A total crash would scare the money away but leave all the hardware and software behind
  
  Minor note: Jargon file is much older than any of that (and most of us).
- I just wanna build cool shit and solve puzzles using the smallest amount of code possible that still makes sense to read. That’s fun to me. I’ve honestly gotten incredibly sick of renting by brain out to people for the majority of my waking hours mostly just to put a roof over my head.
  
  This is me. We had a public holiday the other day and, since the weather wasn't great, I decided to start a new project to write code because I enjoy it. Also, Twitch's event/API documentation does not spark joy (weird grammar like "one of the following" what looks like a partially deleted line; response/requests that are in tables aligned by a number (only two, so good luck people like me) spaces to indicate level, and just plain wrong and missing info ("this API responds 202" -- LIAR!).
- Where are you? My experience has been that most developers are obsessed with programming and politically liberal. I'm in the midwest, though, so maybe things are not so rosy on the west coast. It could also just be one person's experience, but I have worked at a lot of different places in the last 35 years.
  
  Also from midwest. Same experience, with the exception of a few people who get really cranky when politics comes up and they realize they are working with a bunch of liberals.
  
  FAANGlikes are the typical breeding ground. “Move fast and break stuff” industry disrupters whose plan is to corner a market and squeeze it. VC gooners. Crypto perverts. Technofeudalism pedos.
  
  As another east-coaster, I feel comfortable saying there's a huge cultural difference in the industry between here and the west coast (and Silicon Valley specifically). It's a gap that's been growing wider for over a decade now.
  It used to be that everyone followed the Microsoft/Apple culture nationwide (and before them — IBM's). Then Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Silicon Valley startup culture took over the West.
- I have a couple friends that are software devs, and they echo the exact same sentiment. We've bonded over computers over the years, and they all wish they'd chosen a different career path at times because there are so many morons, and typically the morons are the worst devs out there.
  
  What career is better?
  All well paid professions have this culture of striver bootlicker trying to get ahead by any means necesst expect doing the real work
  Everyone knows being a work horse is a stupid proposition now... Working hard to get somebody else promoted haha
- I'm with you. I used to build maps, models, and textures for Battlefront 2 and share the files for free on Filefront. I got into programming for the joy of creating things that make people happy, or solve some little problems they have. I still make mods, the communities are out there and I'm glad I found them.
  But tech evangelists and bro culture ruined the idea of programming as a career for me. The greed of late stage capitalism infected our industry the moment Facebook hit the scene, crypto accelerated it, and AI may as well be the final nail in the coffin. It's no longer a worthy or noble profession.
- Studying software engineer, the amount of weird looks I got from windows users for having a terminal open on my linux pc is scary
  
  Windows has a terminal now too!
- Hey, I'm only money-obsessed because I'm trying to retire.
  
  I saw my retirement fund .
  I'll probably be in the ground and STILL working.
- Who also have absolutely ZERO moral compass. Like literally don’t give two shits if they’re coding a piece of software going into a baby killing machines.
- i wish there was a place where normies didn't want to work so we could all go there
- I read scifi books and enjoy reading about the lore of the tech industry.
  If it’s any consolation, we’re kinda heading into the futuristic dystopian tech hellscape portrayed by so much sci fi. So that’s fun.
  
  One hell of a consolation prize
- who have invented their own language about syncing up, achieving alignment, creating action items
  My soul contracted in upon itself a little as I read that.
- I'm the same way. I thought websites were cool and wanted to make one. So I did and taught myself. Then I took a class at my high school, then again at the local community college once I could do concurrent enrollment. In college, I worked on software projects to relax from my CS classes, and I still do that today.
  Even if AI takes my job, I'll probably still hack on stuff. I'm in it because I love software dev. I probably could've climbed the ladder long ago, but that would've required sacrificing what I want to do.
  So yeah, hopefully I can keep making money with my hobby, but I'm not interested in becoming a corporate hack just to make a buck.
- I work at a soulless megacorp these days, but I have to say I'm lucky and the vast majority of developers I work with arr not like this.
It's distressing how often the track of inventors has been overtaken by the plans of hyper-capitalists.
Tesla cars were invented by ~~Elon Musk~~ Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who were then cut out by their investor to enshittify the interface.
Keurig coffee pods were invented by a pair of roommates that wanted them to become recyclable so they wouldn't cause so much waste.
Blizzard used to make fun games, and is now bought out by people that don't.
I still need to put out my big, long-form video promoting the Accountable Capitalism Act - something that could lead a large body of software devs at a big company to be present for the big-shift plans to, say, "Remove error messages from Windows!" and tell their bosses: Hell no. The same style of issue exists in many industries.
This person got so so close to the real answer as to why most software today sucks.
Money.
Capitalism.
Line go up - Forever.
It's the systems we choose to live in, not the leaders who take advantage of them.
Really cool software has been coming out all the time for the last decade or so, and then the second it goes public and starts trading stocks, it immediately starts going south. A company, making cool stuff I love, goes public, and I know to immediately start grieving for its death. Money makes all creative endeavors so so much worse. And I truly believe software is a creative pursuit. It's been hijacked by capitalists to automate every living being on this planet out of work. Right now the list of people truly put out on their ass for good by automation isn't very big. But we're accelerating very quickly to a future where nothing fun ever happens again. Useful, functional, problem solving software, from now until forever, will be made and used to kick your ass, stomp you into the dirt, and sell your stupid crying face to anybody who wants to purchase it. Then while we're at it, it'll take the things you love to do and do them for you. And then make you pay money just to see it.
If you want to see and participate in some of the most unique and amazing uses of software engineering in our time, there are so many open source projects that achieve incredible and fun things for absolutely $0
Video Game Randomizers
And their decomp partners
Mod Communities
Free Digital Art Programs
Open up Github, sort by most Starred projects, and just fuckin scroll until you can't scroll anymore
And even this has been captured. Code made freely for everyone to use, instead being fed to machine learning bullshit. To what end? To fully replace the need for any human to ever write software ever again.
It's endless. There are truly too many projects for me to list in one post. I'd spend weeks editing this comment, adding all the coolest things software has done for us and can do for us. But it doesn't matter. None of it matters. I am 100% confident society and its leaders will abuse the good will, passion, and creativity of many a programmer from now until the end of my life. It'll do that to every profession. As long as we cling to the idea that we only do work to make profits, as long as the only way we can survive is by making money, this will be our fate.
You’re seeing the end result of “boycott” problems right now though
They will simply take your money. They will pay you increasingly less, tax the little bit they pay you increasingly more, and use the money from the taxes they forcibly take from you to launder your money right back to the oligarchs. Why do you think musk is destroying shit? Why do you think they are pushing to privatize everything? That last little bit of power you have, to vote with your wallet, will become increasingly meaningless
This person's website got me motivated to start programming in Zig a few weeks ago. Love his website's design, too.

48 comments