> Why am I awake at 1:00am, ruining my brain and body
Stop. They don't deserve it. If you have to sacrifice yourself, do it for someone who deserves it.
Value your body, value your life. Your bosses see you as a piece of meat.
No matter what you do, entrenched engineers will make SURE they will be the only ones maintaining everything until their retirement, because they will make life impossible for everybody else until they leave.
Entrenched engineers don’t want to you to alleviate or god forbid share the pain. Pain is good for employment security. And if the ship goes down, they’ll make sure they’re the last one to get fired, because there’s nothing the entrenched engineer fears more than having to job hunt.
I live by these words: “if the client could enunciate a perfect spec, they would code it themselves”.
Software development is about helping people get what they want out of a computer. Not what they can specify, that’s asking way too much.
This is a false dichotomy. Software development has always been about keeping people in agreement, from the customer to the coder, and all the people in between (the fewer the better).
Meetings that increases sync between customer and coder are few and precious.
In large organisations ceremonial meetings proliferate for the wrong reasons. People like to insert themselves in the process between customer and coder to appear relevant.
I personally am fond of meetings with customers, end-users, UX designers, and actual stakeholders.
I loathe meetings with corporate busybodies who consume bandwidth for corporate clout.
No, I don’t need another middle manager to interface themselves between me and my users.
It's always been that way. They're looking for a senior at the price of a junior. That kind of job listing has always been around, and it makes companies look good to have openings.
It works in China because they have growth. In the west thousands of college kids thought they could land cushy management positions or at least highly paid expert jobs.
Then these kids realise these jobs don’t exist, that they should have gone to trade school instead, and that their student debt will cripple them for life.
Same thing will happen in China. For now their economy grows so fast it can absorb many intellectuals, but that won’t last forever.
You just wanted to jam in this conversation your dislike of DEI (which can be criticised but it’s not the subject).
Elite overproduction is about everybody wanting to be basically managers and nobody wanting to be production workers.
Except that without enough production workers it’s impossible to justify “elite” positions.
College graduates took on huge debt only to realise they’re not needed. That’s how you get a class of young, angry and unemployed intellectuals which is every government’s worst nightmare.