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Software engineers are facing an 'identity crisis bordering on depression,' Menlo Ventures partner says (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 1 month ago* by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 183 points 1 month ago (9 children)

Software engineer, here. Yep, the burnout is real. I consider myself fortunate, however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.

I think that's pretty much where the entire industry will go soon.

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  • [–] 44 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Yeah based on WYEA’s articles recently I would say that is the case. As providers move to token based billing, trying to find a way to break even, the rising costs will lower usage, which will probably then drive up costs further as the (imaginary) capital has already been spent on the DCs.

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  • [–] 32 points 1 month ago* (3 children)

    Huh. Maybe I will have a shot at getting a job... Oh, wait, I have 35 years experience, am over 50 and have been unemployed for 16 months. Never mind.

    I gave up the humiliating shit show called a job search 3 months ago, and frankly my last job killed any interest in software development anyway.

    It's all idiots telling professionals they're wrong and incompetent while blaming them for the ongoing production failures we solved and explained every month for a year but still can't get the code past review because "it does too much". 30 fucking lines of code "does too much". Pompous morons.

    We're a threat of competence, and they're excising us relentlessly. I will laugh bitterly as I watch the soon to be torrent of fiascos and lamentations these idiots spout while still finding a way to blame software engineers.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I'm sorry that happened to you. I've also seen it happen to a lot of very good engineers I've known over the years. It's truly insane. I know some people who've had to dip into their 401k accounts early just to keep their heads above water, and it's going to be an economy-wide disaster soon.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    Yeah, I didn't want to retire yet, but like my father before me, the choice was not mine. I saved enough that I should be able to actually retire and survive on part-time low income jobs. Unless the market crashes for a year straight cuz after that I got to start selling stocks.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    Hey are you me?!

    Yeah I wonder how low I will go for a job, it's not bright exactly...

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    If, like me, you took it on faith (at the age of 23) that social security will be gone by the time I retire, you have been saving and investingcas much as possible. Then you can get by on low-end work.

    Remember, jobs don't really give you prestige. A job is a job. The issue is whether it can help you pay your bills or not.

    Note that Social Security is slated to not have enough money for full payments 3 years before I'm due to enroll (for full payments). You'd think I'd have earned Millions with my precognitive skills.

    ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    A bit different over here in the EU I guess, but similar too; got my apartment almost paid off, social security is guaranteed, retirement will be like 1k€/m in like 9 years...

    Hopefully RAM prices will have fallen by then 😁, or maybe we old C/C++ devs will be the new COBOL guys...

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (1 child)

    Hope springs eternal. There seems to be a strong movement to make Rust replace both C++ and C#. I should have taken python more seriously when I first saw it in Linux about 20 years ago, given the fever dream that grips the world now.

    If I can rekindle the joy I used to have in software, I am going to just do game mods and Android FOSS app development.

    Right now the thought of doing development practically gives me hives. Talk about PTSD. The thing I loved since writing assembly on a commodore 64 now brings dread.

    I suppose the fact (ha!) that I no longer have to know a programming language (but I have to have several memorized to get through the first interview) should make it easy.

    I have to admit my brief forays into local LLM assisted programming impressed me. I just can't motivate right now to "get serious".

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    Remember when Java was going to replace C/C++?

    Also, machincode before getting an assembler on the C64! JMP=32 JSR=96

    IIRC...

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    PEEK and POKE mostly, and typing hex codes into a special editor. Remember the games and utilities in the magazines? Also, a page of basic 2.0 code to draw a line And the amazing never before available Sprite Development.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    Bresenhams line algorithm 😁, you could invert it to speed it up (Bresenhams slice algorithm)! Also: fill area algorithms!

    Fun times

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  • [–] 25 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately

    Meanwhile, my company has forgotten how to write bash scripts... More and more things that could just be bash scripts are being added as stupid Claude.md scripts.

    Hahahaha. Let's go! grabs popcorn

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  • [–] 16 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Wow, that's some brilliant vendor lock in on Anthropic's side.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Not that good. Claude skills are cross-compatible with Cursor, and probably other options.

    Still good, cos it's locking in to AI in general, but not quite a specific vendor lock-in.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    The modern take of a disturbed idiom is "There is more than one way to microwave a cat!" (disclaimer please don't actually do this).

    At or near the bottom of complexity you would think it hard to fuck up "compress this directory and verify they are backed up before deleting the originals" but apparently some of these models have a RNG triggered Uno reverse card so "delete the originals, verify they are backed up, and compress this directory". Also that wasn't a mistake, maybe Claude will infer "they" is a specific set of files, but another model might decide you meant all the dot files at ~/?

    Joking aside, the devil is in the details which makes me think even more time will be sunk finding out the RC Cola bottom shelf AI model does things just a bit too differently than Claude.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 month ago

    More and more things that could just be bash scripts are being added as stupid Claude.md scripts.

    But they can pay an ongoing subscription cost for the Claude script, and it may sometimes hallucinate.

    The bash script would be free forever and keep working unchanged for decades.

    It's too soon to know which approach is the right way. (I nearly died of sarcasm, there.)

    Anyway, I agree. There may not be enough popcorn for all of this!

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  • [–] 14 points 1 month ago

    however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.

    and the Slop companies are still losing money... the end result still seems to be more expensive, crappier code, yet most companies seem to be so nearsighted they are not jumping into the spike pit face first

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago

    Yeah, I've seen a lot of places around me cut back. Thankfully, I'm not forced to use AI directly. We do have it for code reviews (which I don't hate as a concept, but would prefer local models trained on ethically-sourced data).

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I really hope you're right. My company is still in the "use as much as possible" phase, and my manager is quoting Jensen about "you need to use half your salary on tokens!". I'm looking for other work, but everyone is looking for vibe coders at the moment it seems...

    I've gone from really loving my job, to hate my life.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Mo Bitar had a bit of advice that I think is applicable here: Lie. Claim to be an extreme 10x vibe whatever. Put "AI enablement" (whatever the fuck that means) in your LinkedIn profile. And wherever you get hired, commit to using enormous amounts of tokens as they require.

    Then just... write code. Oh, definitely use the LLMs, too, but not for anything important. Set them to work writing BASH scripts or something. Get them burning through tokens to summarize all the corporate documentation you can find. Have agents creating agents to test the output of other agents and report to more agents on what the agents are doing. Meanwhile, do real work. Make sure that for every PR, you have the AI do one thing on it, to give it that code-slop shine.

    Sucks that this is where we're at, but it is what it is.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I've had LLM generate so many web sites about various random animals I've crammed into a prompt. No one wants web sites about those random animals, but my management is pleased at my token utilization.

    Can do my real work and get praised for my actual productivity, and burn the tokens to get praised on AI adoption...

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    Clever! And when sanity starts reasserting itself at your company, you can claim you're focusing on saving the company money by reducing your token usage and just... make fewer animal slop websites.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    That was my hope as well. But then my employer gave me 75 times the budget without me asking for it.

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