I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent. It's far more often that I hear "we interviewed someone we thought looked good and they couldn't even write a for loop, where are all the good engineers".

I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.

> In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us.

This sounds like a job for unions. It would have been advantageous to have formed and joined them before so much power was lost, but it's easy to be shortsighted when you're happy and comfortable with where you are and ignore that the situation could easily change, if not for you then for the next generation. Companies are happy to leverage every advantage they have against workers. Unions can be a powerful tool for workers, one that could help solve a lot of problems current and future, and it's sitting there just waiting to be used.

I think such comment are the exact reason why "the speaker" has quit HN. This is literally some AI transcription from the video + "I find this interesting". Why is this even in the top?

This hits so hard. I used to admire Senior developers who would do this. Now, I find myself in a place where there is no one to do this, and I've taken up to playing this role. It is the hardest job, but I cannot do any thing else as my team is committed to just non-stop slop thanks to management directives. I realize all the time I spent admiring, and now I have become.

This not a rare thing to express. There are a lot of people raised under conservative Christian environments who have spent a considerable amount of time recovering from this. It is not surprising that they feel the need to express something of the journey that has dominated much of their early life.

Taylor Tomlinson puts much of this into her comedy. She often asks the audience to call out if they were similarly screwed up by their religious upbringing. The is a loud audience response every time.

While I don't agree with Andrew Kelly's adversarial attitude, I do understand it a little more from the perspective of someone who had to fight his way out of an ideology that will not seek consensus with his values.

I liked the talk and was about to post a link to it in the $dayjob slack, but this threw me off as well. Still watched it to the end, and I still recommended it to a friend (along with the Youtube channel of the "Software should work" conf), but I'm saddened that the talk paints Christianity as something that is inflicted upon you and that you should strive to get rid of.

It's clear that he had a bad experience, and I'm nobody to tell him what to put on the slides and what to leave out, but my impression is that there are lots of believers out there who do cherish their faith, experience it as a very positive force in their lives, and draw from it the power to make the world a better place around them. Speaking for myself, I'd say faith has been a net positive so far in my life.

I have so far only completed about 14 minutes of the talk, but I would imagine it to be some sort of relatable analogy which foreshadows what the thesis of the talk is about. The "Christian Parents" are the authority figure and following their rules, lessons, and expectations for dating is a lot like doing only the software engineering tasks that management prioritizes for you. You end up unsatisfied with your life to the point where you become jaded about software (software development is like "dating" in this analogy) instead of learning the skills necessary to wield influence over what you get to work on. I'll watch the rest to see if I'm right.

edit: it's wasn't just about developing software but also using software. You don't have to accept the bad situation you're in (or the bad software you've been given or told to use). Finally, I'll say that while the speaker's comment about conservative christian upbringing isn't a universal one, it is a widely shared one. If you take offense by it maybe take a moment to pause and consider that maybe the way you were exposed to it was probably more balanced than what many others experience, or in the worst case that maybe your negative reaction to it is a sort of defense mechanism that you've learned to shield yourself from confronting the reality that your own conservative christian upbringing was not so good after all?.

The man is running a slide deck in front of his colleagues that is full of crude graphics, memes, and, I guess some anime or something. It’s an unserious talk given by an unserious person for entertainment value. He dons the jester’s hat and signals his alignment with the monied San Francisco tribe to keep his easy job in an air-conditioned environment. If not, he might suffer the awful fate of having to earn his bread hanging drywall or driving a solid waste truck.

This viewpoint is preposterous to me in the first place.

I am Christian. Everything in the world seems to be falling apart these days and my faith is one of the few real-feeling things!

Man, we’ve come a long way from the halcyon days where the HBO Silicon Valley gag about coming out as Christian was genuinely hilarious. Time to shove the Bible thumpers back in the closet.

One of my favorite talks.

Yeah, I wasn't clear how his (lack of) religion/faith related to the theme. I like personal details shared thoughtfully in conference talks, but he structured the talk as if those details mattered to the overall message.

https://codeberg.org/awebo-chat/awebo

I expected the link [1] to be to the explaination of what "black pilled" means, but only because I already read and remember xkcd 1053.

"y'all are black pilled about computers and security. You believe, incorrectly, that computers can't be safe AND secure AND easy to use all at the same time"

This is basic fact. Man can make it; man can break it. I've never come across anything in my 44 years of life where this wasn't true.

Shield is the wrong word. At some point, the shield must fall, and then the young are no longer young, but are still näive.

There will always be exploiters, don't believe that they will die once we manage to shield the young for enough time for the exploiters to die of old age.

This comment is on a part of the video on Free Software Disillusionment, where people don't want to have their code ingested and used by AI. Andrew's thingy is basically that if you don't participate in open source there won't be high quality code for others/yourself in the future.

People generally don't like the AI using their code for a few reasons, one is replacement, like an AI can just copy your project without attribution. Two is that it feels like you are providing value for a soulless corporate machine without compensation.

If a person uses your code you get maybe happy that it was useful and maybe something cool gets made out it. If an AI uses your work it feels like you just did free labor.

I don't feel like Andrew made any particularly great points, but comments both here and on the youtube link have mentioned really liking that point.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive, shallow criticisms? So far all 3 of your comments have been of this sort, and we're trying for more thoughtful conversation here.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Note this one: "Don't be snarky."

Unreliable software is also expensive. Rather, building reliable software is incompatible with a management policy that rewards and punishes people based on KPIs (basically leading indicators). The concept of KPIs is fine, but they should (a) be actual indicators of progress, and (b) be kept secret from employees (so that we can avoid or mitigate Goodhart's Law). Both of those things are difficult, because you need a rigorous statistical model of what correlates, and you need to keep that model a secret, while also changing the KPIs periodically, to prevent employees from intuitively overfitting. That whole process would be very expensive (and if it would not, why is nobody doing it).

Furthermore, software that is reliable, is also software that is done (in the sense that AVL Trees, and ZFS, and DTrace, and ZSTD, and slab allocators are done -- they are very close to perfect, and require minimal changes, related to compilers and kernels and computer architectures). A team that builds reliable software, is a team that cannot be "managed". What exactly is there to manage?