Warning

This post contains very toxic and negative thoughts about software and “the Industry” in general…

Content

Last week, I was “congratuled” for having done shit: making a project with a few human resources, a very very very short deadline, no tests at all (because testing is failing “lol”), and a few extra hours to spend in weekends and public holidays to “make it done”.
The project does not run well, developers and project managers are all burned out… and this is what the company called “a success”.

This made me very sad, and I asked myself since, after several more or less good experiences as a computer developer, if I still had a future in this industry.

Web development, which was a wonderful idea decades ago with a simple idea: unifying all platforms into one piece of code that can be run everywhere if you have a browser, is now a big pile of shitty libraries and weird pieces of code, that do nothing else than throwing powerful resources (hardware and humans) in trash, nothing more.
And this costs to the client thousands of euros…
This is making me sick, and frustrates me a lot.

I am frustrated about everything involving computer development those days, and I think I began to scratch the surface of what is a “developer” in 2022: someone who don’t know how to code but do it anyway because:

1. there is money in the table,
2. you can earn a shit ton of money if you are fast (which is totally different than beeing good at it),
3. it’s hype.

Note

I am making a difference between “being a programmer”, and “being a developer”:

• the programmer optimizes things and can create very great piece of software well, that can be reusable (or not) if he desires it, and understands how and where the code is running (or will learn),
• the developer will uses those resources to build something with those, and maybe combinating those little pieces to create a good software architecture and, at the end of the process, a product.
  I was considering myself as a programmer, but looking for other programmers, how they work and how they build incredible pieces of software from scratch, I am just a developer with a few programmer experiences.

This is difficult sometimes to discuss with a “3-months experienced Ruby developer” who contradicts you (many times) on facts (how a computer runs and why his code is slow… and may crash randomly), and to listen him explaining you why he will not optimize his code as “servers with 8 gigabytes of RAM are cheap now. And the entire project does not runs the fans of my macbook so… Dah.”.

There is no more passion in some of those guys, no more “Computer Science culture”, nothing more than, excuse me for that image, a code monkey.
A code monkey who is coding because “coding is fun” but not thinking deeply about what (s)he is doing…

I don’t blame the majority of them for “coding for fun” and not having a good “Computer Science culture”, but I blame the famous “Industry” for not proposing them to become better at programming, and I blame the “Industry” for deleting several strong components of what makes a good developer: culture, testing, and good overall engineering skills, in order to go fast (and make things quick & dirty).

Second note

For those who are interested about “collapse of programmers knowledge”, there is an interesting talk from Jonathan Blow about that, which resumes itself the current situation in the Industry.

I don’t remember also seeing the desastrous impact of companies everywhere now, which want to do “something fast, with less resources, and spending the less money as possible”. And this leads to many issues to the hands / shoulders of developers, just because “spending money in a company is not the purpose of a company”.
Today is about NFTs, web3, and how to fuck up Earth for big useless computational resources.

WHAT. THE. FUCK.

What is the purpose of making big plans for several years if we have to stop everything in a few years as we just fucked up the Planet?

I don’t remember the days I was happy to open the lide of my computer and doing open-source for “nothing” (except spending my time)… Actually, I remember some of those now, creating stuff for the redox-OS project, and it was a long time ago.
But looking at it now, I don’t understand why I spent so much time on this.

I am burned out, and we are only in February 2022… Oh god.