Fuck AI

The problem with so much of the IT industry - and it's been like this ever since I've started - is that it's so prone to fads and bandwagoning for fear of being called "legacy" or what have you.

So the same lessons have to be learned over and over for the hype and delusion cycle. If someone considered "old" (>25) might say that this new shiny object looks like something in the past, only with a minor twist and some new branding, they are ignored, etc.

The other problem is that it has a real problem with worshiping whatever is (perceived as) new and shiny. Pair that with what I think Uncle Bob pointed out about how we basically keep adding new people into the field at a fairly rapid-fire rate, and push out the more experienced, because they are considered "old". You see this kind of culture skewered fairly well in Silicon Valley series, where they act like someone who is 25 is over the hill.

There is a real craft to these things, and learning things at the feet of people with real, applied experience is useful. Unfortunately, a whole lot of the industry is not really set up that way at all. For a set of people that call themselves "engineers", I fail to see anything approaching that level of rigor when it comes to properly setting up a pipeline that goes from apprenticeship to master and proper stewardship of systems that run so much of our lives now.

Instead, what you often see is job screening that strongly selects for recent grads and people grinding on leetcode and learning algorithms that most people in programming likely won't be using at all in the day-to-day. People in their early 20s making all the hiring decisions. People on both sides of the hiring equation trying to use LLMs to game the hiring process.

The whole thing seems to be set up like a fucking casino where the goal is to go to a prestigious school, grind incessantly on useless trivia for the interview, land a job either at some BigTech place or some startup and work towards burnout there, then retire or switch to another field entirely before you leave your 20s. I'm not sure how a serious industry can be expected to sustain itself in a stable way on such thinking. There is not much expectation that you work until a normal retirement age - not unless you get into some non-technical aspect like management. And that management is almost never looked to for any direction, LOL. Even the most recent hire can often convince entire teams to do shit like rewriting working systems using language du jour (Rust, anyone?).

And the thing is, it's not all that new - if you read something like Microserfs you'll see it skewered back then (1995). I would not be surprised to learn there are even early precedents.