this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2026
264 points (97.5% liked)
Technology
88390 readers
3022 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I would argue it's normalizing.
For fucks sake, the last 30 years have been insane, especially with the dotcom boom and bust.
Suddenly every dipshit adult was telling their kids, "computers are the future, the internet is the future, and you can't survive with just a highschool degree. You better go to college and learn programming!!"
Those parents are a bit to blame with how things got. And it seemed like they were pretty accurate too as high speed internet became huge, and lithium batteries thus mobile phones...
I always was interested in programming, since before my mom pushed me into it, because she was one of those types too. Then I went to college, and I met a bunch of teenagers who said, "uhhh I don't know what I want to do but I want it make money so I'm doing computer science".
The first year of college usually filtered those people out. Usually.
And i've always said, don't join this career for the money. It's not worth it, if you don't love engineering. This is the most stressful fucking job I've ever had, and there are tons of meetings and social activity to go with it. You can't just solve puzzles in a vacuum, even if you like programming, and that's EVEN if you enjoy it. You have to start leading others at some point, act like a mentor.
You take on a fucking lot of responsibility, start giving demos, working with product managers, marketers, help teach people what is possible in the product and what isn't. This isn't a chill gig. It rarely is. It usually involves a fuck ton of effort and planning.
You get paid a lot... But honestly, if you're actually doing the job well, you're underpaid even then. Often you will be underpaid compared to the effort you put in. Especially now.
Not as many people should be in software engineering as there are. I talk to people sometimes and you can tell they hate this job. It's okay, and I don't blame them, but way too many people got sucked into this career for the wrong reasons, then kinda now have to keep doing it to survive.
I'm glad I still enjoy it but I see a lot of fucking burnout right now. But I have to say, the people leaving the job now, some of them, not all but some, might be some of the types that shouldn't have jumped into it in the first place. Lots of people were told they're smart and good with computers so should make money doing it.
Some of those smart people should've done other smart jobs. Biotech is huge too, but I don't see the drive to it like there was for making fucking websites.
This is just part of jobs in general and if you had any indication it wouldn't be you were lied to. One of the early things I remember being told in engineering school is that you will have to be social and work on a team. As soon as a project requires more than a few people then you will be working on cross-functional teams and need to work together with a variety of people.
You might be shocked to learn that employers do not pay for "effort", they pay for the (perceived) value you bring to the business. People that get paid well are value multipliers (or they play the game well enough to appear that they do). The people that work with them do more because they are there guiding things. If you don't bring that value, you tend to top out at "Senior" engineer titles and the pay that brings with it. I've had to have somewhat blunt conversations with people to explain that I've given them a poor performance review not because they haven't put in the hours, but because they aren't using their effort efficiently. Working overtime consistently is an indication of poor prioritization and delegation more than having too much work.
At this point even the Futurama randomised job assigner machine seems better than our current system
its essentially like the voyager/sg1 version, where the person(of course kidnapped memory suppresed) and given a job in a sector which is assigned.
i think futurama one reads the person/mind and determines the job ahead of time.
At this point, those booths from Futurama seem better than our current system
4D Bullet Hell Game (With Tactile Feedback)!
Unfortunately in my country this doesn't happen. There's a bell curve and as long as you submit your homework and do the bare minimum for the exams, you get your degree. You're gonna have a pretty mid GPA, but you'll have a degree which effectively makes the degree useless as an indicator of competency. The amount of people I've interviewed who couldn't answer a simple programming question is astounding.
Most of these people end up picking up jobs as project managers because that's all they can do. And the country's leaders wonder why we don't have much software R&D here.
same here in some universities in the states, the harder stem classes ten dot lower thier avg grades like D,C,B,(not As though) so people can get a better grade. that tells you theses classes are quite difficult to pass.
India?
Singapore
For me it’s starting to feel very draining. I’ve worked on small teams the past several years but now my current internal-only project is picking up steam and we’ve got a product owner and manager on board.
The amount of planning, discussing, iterating, changing requirements, etc. is absolutely demanding. I’m starting to miss just programming. The overhead is what starts to make all this feel soul-sucking after a while.
I’m a computer scientist and got into it before it became popular.
I suck at programming and have never labeled myself as a programmer. I write software to solve problems and know my way around the SDLC, but there’s a LOT of CS work out there that isn’t being a code monkey.
The shame was the number of people who went to college specifically to learn how to write software that can now be generated by AI, at the quality level generated by AI. Those jobs are now gone. Being a software analyst, integrator, architect, security engineer, information systems analyst, data scientist, etc? Thise are still in high demand, as are programmers who are subject matter experts or can lead a team.
I really enjoy programming, and i don't mind all of the planning, mentorship, and working with stakeholders to formulate solutions. But for the past few weeks 90% of the work I've been doing had been around deployment, migrating services to new servers, and fucking with azure resources. I haven't written a line of code for 3+ weeks. That has been draining.
Couple that with picking up work items that are poorly written with way to little information on what needs doing and it's also frustrating as hell.
At my company, we have dozens, probably over one hundred different repos that we maintain, and no less than 30 actively worked on projects. It's bitter sweet in that I get a good mix of work to break up the monotony of working on the same project, but at the cost of not being able to master any of them. I've only been in my role for 6-8 months coming from a non programming background, and it's been tough to learn and keep up with the pace required. Being full stack is nice but shitty at the same time.
Does your current stretch have a foreseeable end? Or do you think the very little programming will continue?
It's just the way work has played out for us right now. A couple servers are being decommed at the end of the month, so it's priority. I work on team of about 14 people and we use Azure dev ops for work items and sprint planning. The way we do it is once you finish a task, you grab the next available item in sprint rather than cherry picking. I've just been a bit unlucky in my timing. We do have some projects in the works that will be hitting us soon, and some new implementations, so I yea, it's likely I'll be writing actual code again in the near future.
Hilarious to throw biotech out there at the end as its a similar case with a lot of smart people doing not what they want and hard to pivot out of. The filter also works similarly.
Could be STEM as a whole. Everyone glamorizes it, but it's definitely not for everyone. Shit, my family literally got upset when I suggested I might want to be a writer.
its glamorized because some of the more popular jobs, like engineering , scientists for stem is in the media/cinema alot, and they assume its easy for people find a job in it, when a fresh graduate doesnt find one thier whole family/friends gang up on them and rag on them about it. they dont see the the actual ugliness behind it, need a competitive gpa for grad school(depends which grad school and which program), and then research/lab experience,,,,etc and its also not easy getting these. alot of phds/MS trying to get academic jobs in our area are like in thier 30- 40s already. plus there is a demographic preference at the lower levels.
I was close to finishing my molecular biology degree. I always had a nice quaint job in some lab doing basic stuff in mind - an ok paycheck, no big ambitions.
In the last 2 years i realized how big the "socializing" part of this whole gig is. The first years i was getting by learning on my own (i've always been good at that). The amount of seminars and group work where working alone was not an option anymore was suffocating for me (i was able to deal with presenting stuff as long as i could work on it on my own, but cooperation over a longer timeframe with random people was insane stress for me), and in combination with my mental issues made me drop out in the phase of choosing a project (I even already had decided on a bioinformatics project) and seeking a mentor for finishing my degree.
The amount of social competency STEM needs is very underemphasized - i am pretty sure this extends into all of STEM.
we had to collaborate alot in one of my bio classes, 1 where i had a lab partner that did all the work without consulting me, so i dint know what was going on, she dint let me do any of the measurements,or whatever. then she disappeared midway into the semester(she dint even register for the class properly and only found out halfway) so i was left alone.
then comes the 2nd partner, who was absent most of the semester herself for health reasons. she touted as being in labs for 4 years(which she used in a rant against me), she was one of the most unhelpful people out there, she did not like the slides i was doing , and i should be doing it a certain way to make "digestible" to audience, but she would not offer any help, other than saying this or that is wrong. she was saying how she went to "talks" and conferences, she knows what she is doing, but she wouldn't offer how she was doing her part of the slide projects. as soon as she found out grades were separate for each person. she largely stopped helping(which was just criticizing) and only would get together to combine said slides.
later down teh line, i was thinking this btch was cutthroat asf, is biotech industry have people like this worried about thier perceived reputation so much, they would sabotage the group for thier own ends, also the PI/instructor was no help, but he has own problems, having an attitude. all the other groups in class dint have this much abrasiveness, and dint have interruptions like i did. losing 1 partner due to her being absentminded, and then gaining a btchy one.
I had mostly luck in my labs, outside 2 occasions: a lab partner (an exchange student - luckily his english was passable, because he had no local language skills) who was utterly unable to work under sterile conditions and KEEPING them sterile, scratching his head while holding the tools in in that hand at the same time. it was infuriating to watch, and gently telling him did not result in behavioral change.
The other one was a professor for an organic chemistry lab course that had obvious problems with me being overweight, including fucked up comments in front of the class. I was already over 30 and had my share of rude costumers beforehand when i started, so outside of being pissed at him i ignored him as far as possible. Imagine being 19, still not really an adult and getting disrespected like that in front of the class by the person who should be the last to be guilty of such an behavior.
The seminars which required long term close cooperation, especially outside the lab or class itself, were where things truly fell apart for me. I wasn't able with the constant, long term social noise in my life at all - the separation between private and work practically vanished with those.
i think because biotech is has a small gatekeeped job market, its hard to get into, its essentially a catch-22, its also complicated by other things, , and requires upfront experience years before graduation.
they already have the situation where they dont train people for biotech out of graduation already, you are expected to have it already.
Yep, getting actual experience in the summer months was practically a requirement, even if noone told you that outright. I was lucky enough for my ex knowing someone in a neighboring town working in an university research group on heliobacter pylori where i was able to gain some experience in a friendly environment, which would have sufficed if i had been actually able to finish my degree.
internships are quite uncommon around here, its mostly extra-curricular lab work(not from yuor courses), or getting published from said lab work. extremely rare, i knew someone who worked as a lab tech and was published by said PI(separate from school work). plus universities do not inform students about labs in the same universities they go to, and the PI themselves do not like mentioning it at all.