Ask HN: Anyone else feels that their job quality has declined severely recently?
5 pointsby falloutx15 hours ago4 comments
  • Nextgrid15 hours ago
    > cant seem to convince anyone that we are useful

    I wonder if the issue there isn’t AI but that a lot of jobs (including in tech) are bullshit and it turns out it doesn’t matter how well it’s being done.

    AI absolutely fails where quality is a requirement… but if it’s not then AI appears to be a good stand-in for a human. This was the case pre-AI too, plenty of mediocre developers were able to coast because the outcome of their work didn’t actually matter.

    > most promotions are in non-SDE fields too

    They’re just better at playing politics and maybe you should start too.

    • falloutx11 hours ago
      Thats definitely possible that a lot of dev jobs were just surface level and I would argue that if 90% of the feature dev is halted tmrw, you wouldn't even notice it for atleast couple years. This is why IBM and Oracle can still coast without having any new ideas. Lets even imagine 50% of the devs were never good enough, but that would still be less fluff any other field except labor.

      It always feels like we get held accountable for every little lapse, but higher up PMs, execs never get any consequences for their actions. They could run the company to the ground and still get promoted. If the top is incompetent, you cant really expect the bottom to be carrying all the weight.

  • rankiwiki13 hours ago
    Feels less like engineers became useless and more like incentives broke. AI raised expectations faster than orgs updated rewards, so extra effort just gets normalized instead of recognized.
  • ludicrousdispla15 hours ago
    From what you describe it sounds like software development is starting to get categorized as 'labor', and that a lot of companies will be having system problems over the next few years.
  • austin-cheney14 hours ago
    I was a web developer from about 2006-2023 and all I remember was decline and insecurity. For most of that the backend was Java and the Java people were deathly afraid of JavaScript, not always but certainly more than 90%. The JavaScript people were afraid of everything. Insecurity was everywhere.

    I have since switched to enterprise API management and it has been great. I blame two things for the greatness: 1. Everybody has to obtain a certification, 2. It’s more operationally focused.

    Everything related to web development always felt like a race to the bottom. Almost nobody seemed competent to do the work and the goal was always delivery in the most minimal capability imaginable.

    There was a bright spot though. When I was the A/B test engineer for this major dot com life was great. I just built out experiments that defaced the production web site. There were many times the super hacky experiment code was less defective and executed faster than the real code that eventually rolled out to production.