The Programmer Identity Crisis

> One could only wonder why they became a programmer in the first place, given their seeming disinterest in coding.

To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself.

> careful configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments

That may be fun for you, but it doesn’t add value. It’s accidental complexity that I am happy to delegate.

The point of most jobs in the world is to "solve problems". So why did you pick software over those?

Why would someone who likes solving problems choose a very lucrative career path solving problems… hmmm

You can also solve problems as a local handyman but that doesn’t pad the 401K quite as well as a career in software.

I feel like there’s a lot of tech-fetishist right now on the “if you don’t deeply love to write code then just leave!” train without somehow realizing that most of us have our jobs because we need to pay bills, not because it’s our burning passion.

You owe your cushy job and big paycheck entirely to those tech-fetishists that came before you.

Secondly, you are very blind if you don’t see that the AI making your job “easier” is close to replacing you entirely, if you don’t also have a deep understanding of the code produced. What’s to stop the Project Manager from vibe coding you out of the loop entirely?

We all owe every part of everything to those who’ve come before us. That goes without saying, really.

> Secondly, you are very blind if you don’t see that the AI making your job “easier” is close to replacing you entirely, if you don’t also have a deep understanding of the code produced.

Brother don’t patronize me. I’m a senior engineer I’m not yeeting vibe code I don’t understand into prod.

I also understand the possibility of all of this potentially devaluing my labor or even wholesale taking my job.

What would you like me to do about that? Is me refusing to use the tools going to change that possibility?

Have yet to hear what else we should be doing about this. The hackernews answer appears to be some combination of petulance + burying head in the sand.

It’s simpler than that.

It’s more of a funeral, collective expression of grievance of a great, painful loss. An obituary for a glorious, short time in history where it was possible to combine a specific kind of intelligence, creativity, discipline, passion and values and be well compensated for it. A time when the ability to solve problems and solve them well had value. Not just being better at taking credit than other people.

It was wonderful.

I know you don’t care. So just go to some other forum where you don’t have to endure the whining of us who have lost something that was important to us.

I get it, but fundamentally this is a forum discussing technology, and AI is part of that. Especially as it relates to software engineering.

I come here to learn, discuss, and frankly, to hang onto a good life as long as I can have it.

The collective whinging in every AI topic is both annoying and self-defeating.