"The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon" by Sean Goedecke https://www.seangoedecke.com/the-just-say-no-engineer-was-a-zirp-phenomenon/

I have definitely been that engineer. This one hits hard.

The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

@nolan Footnote 1, "Part of the appeal here is the lure of the guru. [...].", really resonates with me. The idea of applying expertise plus careful thought to write a small amount of code to solve the problem, rather than cranking out reams of code (presumably via an LLM these days).