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Software engineers are facing an 'identity crisis bordering on depression,' Menlo Ventures partner says
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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You worked places with style guides? Did... Did you have a real testing environment that wasn't prod too?
I got taken off a project recently for being too direct about how the rest of the team was just spray and praying entirely AI generated code with no standards or review whatsoever, and they were charging ahead like it was a race to implement features we hadn't even discussed if we wanted/needed.
If you can't tell me how it works, you can't confirm that we actually need it, you can't tell me the upstream and downstream effects (or confirm they don't exist), and you can't even confirm that we even want it to do the thing it only supposedly does, then we have better things to do than go on a wild goose chase trying to debug it when there's a looming deadline for things that legitimately do not work that we need. Stop vibe coding and actually review the existing shit for fucks sake. If the requirements have never been clear, solve that instead of generating more slop. Maybe update some of the existing documentation instead of having AI wholesale hallucinate entirely new not quite right ones over and over.
Anyway, please tell me more happy development bedtime stories. I need to chase away the nightmares.
Yes, and the style guides reached far beyond things like “use camel case”. I’m talking guidelines for how whole blocks of code should be formatted. Also weren’t allowed to throw exceptions at all even though we were using up-to-date modern C++. Some guidelines had good intentions and others were just put in by OCD control freaks that no one felt like opposing.
And yes, we had a testing environment, although we mostly depended on manual QA rather than software tests. Medical devices can’t test in prod, fortunately
There are many C++ features that make the language worse. Exceptions is one of them. It's not strange to have them banned.
Critical systems often only allow you to use a subset of the language. Dynamic (heap) allocations, recursive functions, exceptions are features that are often banned. In medical devices, safety is critical, so it makes sense. Otherwise you could get a Therac-like scenario due to an unhandled exception.