Mastodawn

This is *brutal*...

"There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember."

https://www.stvn.sh/writing/programming-still-sucks-fqffhyp

ETA:
This is by @stevendotjs, who absolutely nails a bunch of things I've been feeling for a while now, but had no idea how to articulate...

Programming Still Sucks. — Writing

Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a few faces turning around toward us, rolling their eyes ever so slightly before returning to their previous conversation. Yes, this question again.

Matt Barlow 4d ago

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)5d ago

Why does our industry keep looking at things, claiming it's doing them, and doing the exact opposite of what the original idea was? A few examples:

Alan Kay (who coined the term) defined the key idea of object orientation as late bounding, so we ended up with a load of things that use rigid nominal type systems to tightly couple components, marketed as 'object oriented'.

The Agile Manifesto's core idea was 'people over process'. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen places claim they're using 'the agile methodology' because they have sprints, standups, and other processes taken from Agile.

The Zero Trust paper said, at its core, 'assume endpoints are compromised, design your systems so that an endpoint compromise doesn't automatically give control over everything', yet almost everything I've seen branding itself as Zero Trust has been of the form 'run some over-privileged thing on the endpoints to increase their attack surface, then if that thing reports that the endpoint isn't compromised allow it to do a load of things it shouldn't be allowed to do'.

Matt Barlow 6d ago

Anon Opin 6d ago

No, you *used* to be a software engineer. Now you're just a prompter. The funny thing is, the longer you slop prompt, the less likely you could go back to being an engineer even if you wanted to. Deskilling yourself is not something you all should be bragging about.

Matt Barlow Apr 29

I know everyone hated the iPod shuffle that had no buttons and needed headphone remote or voice input but I feel like if Siri got a lot better it could work today for a screen-less Apple Watch focussed on fitness?

Mostly just in the background tracking health stuff but you could use AirPods tap controls or voice for music/calls/etc

Matt Barlow Apr 26

In a just world layoffs would be considered an extreme failure of management. Share prices would tumble and boards would be demanding more competent leadership.

Matt Barlow Apr 26

The unreliability of iCloud Tabs combined with the (as far I can tell still present) bug where Safari just randomly loses tabs has me feeling like I’m losing my mind. I’ll go to read an article and it’s either not where I think I left it or not there at all.

Having to Reading List everything just in case

Matt Barlow Apr 20

Voline Apr 20

Zarah Sultana MP entered this into the public record by saying it in the House of Commons on 14 April 2026. Today it remains illegal for UK media to report on this. It can only be published in Hansard or the Parliament's own video service.

https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-04-14

Not to mention *moral injury* to the people who know better and are forced to use it by their bosses, or watch their teams use it and see their ability to do what they used to be interested in essentially disappear, and the quality of their work precipitously decline.

And the externalities!

No, LLMs are not capable. They shouldn't be "given a chance" nor should people "keep working on them". They should be banned outright, relegated to small instances in research facilities.

Fuck 'em.

Matt Barlow Apr 16

@mwichary sorry if someone already mentioned this to you. From your post about Mini rear lights

> If you use the iPad in landscape mode, the volume buttons seem to go “the wrong way”

They changed this a few years back to change with orientation so they were always “right”. Maybe it only applies to newer models?

For a while there was a setting to toggle between the new and original behaviour, but I can’t find it anymore. Oddly the iPhone is still fixed regardless of orientation.

Matt Barlow Apr 5

If you think macOS is bad with its notifications, my Synology just sent me a whole-ass email for yanking a drive