Clothes have never been cheaper. These days a t-shirt is often cheaper than a decent cup of tea in a cafe. The wonders of capitalism. At least that is how it is often described. And when you point at the underpaid, gruesome labor that people in poorer regions of the planet have to do to […]
Thanks OOP for putting words on what I’ve been feeling for months.
Were “incentivized” (read “threatened into”) pushing features quicker than humanly possible with no regard for quality, sustainability and proper ownership of the code to please one (1) stakeholder who had a barely thought out idea. The amount of tech debt in staggering, broken features come and go as the code is “rewritten” with each commit.
It’s completely unsustainable and the only ones who profit from it are the LLM providers. When the whole product collapses, the only one to suffers the losses are the company building that product and their clients. Their employees get fired because it’s somehow their fault. LLM providers get even richer because now the remaining employees burn through tokens to try and “fix” millions of nine of code nobody has ever thought out, written and reviewed.
Companies pivoting to “full AI” code are literally committing suicide, for the exclusive benefit of LLM providers. I get that that’s Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s plan all along. I just can’t understand the utter stupidity, hubris and amount of kool-aid drinking most CTOs are riding right now.
I had a manager tell me that “2 weeks” for an involved feature somehow wasn’t quick enough and I needed something by a week or else execs would bring the pain.
We’re in such a batshit timeline. I want off.
My entire professional career has had threats of the boogeyman coming if things don’t get done faster than they can realistically get done.
I’ve been doing this long enough that my estimates are actually pretty reliable. Two weeks too long? No problem. It’s still a negotiation. Put the ball in thier court by saying what scope they’re willing to cut to get it in the timeframe they were imagining.
They’ll either play ball and cut, accept that it’ll take as long as you originally said, or say “no, everything, do it in 2 days.”. The managers who do the latter in my experience don’t last very long… because usually THEY’RE the ones that were making impossible promises that never quite seem to pan out. They eventually get canned in favour of someone who is more reliable.