Ludicity is an anonymous data and software engineer who writes angry, humorous essays on workplace incompetence, AI hype, and engineering jobs.
Commenters call its AI mania post the best on the subject, but note the heavy hyperbole and a recurring view that most colleagues are incompetent.
Today's best post on complexity to me was the I accidentally saved my company half a million dollars, which is a story filled yes with a lot of poor developers but much much worse is a story filled with Conway's Law style lessons. Of madcap organizations & wild legacy systems that we live atop & typically just have to make do with. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38069710 https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-accidentally-saved-half-a-million-dollars/
So much of the grug-brained argumentation is same-side violence, is developers roasting developers. Assigning bad motives & declaring immoral bad people among us probably happens some, and various petty or criminal over engineering happens some too. But I usually think there are simpler Hanlon's Razor explanations that aren't even personal, are just the story of an org: an organizational body where so many constituent members of the body-whole have so little idea what others are doing or have done, and access to so few who can offer informed situational-appropriate wisdom for whatever dark end a squad finds itself tasked with.
In some ways, this has been the actual story of open source. We get to grow communities of practitioners with individual knowledge & experience that ports & can be compared & discussed with others, from outside our company. We get peership that companies can rarely afford or find after they grow mid-sized.
The Influx folks just talked about their 3.0, & replacing their custom built engine with Flight,…
Right now you're competing with people that have years of actual experience writing code for companies and an army of new grads who know nothing but have the degree and are desperate/young enough to work for nothing or near enough to as makes no difference.
You're also doing this somewhere in the vicinity of the peak of the "AI will replace all the programmers" stupidity.
> Unfortunately, a portfolio is nowhere to be found, as while programming for pleasure, my ADHD-tendencies flit from cool thing to cool thing to cool thing and I never seem to get a project really presentable.
Long term I'd say that you should fix this. You need to produce something that is either real or real adjacent. Now maybe all your half finished projects are the most impressive Python ever written, I don't know you. But nobody is really going to crawl through the graveyard of half started , half baked, and half finished projects looking for a reason to hire you these days. If they are HR they might not even look at your GH at all.
It's also worth considering if you're even suited to a corporate job coding. Mostly you're going to maintain and/or write old boring crap a lot. If you can't stay excited about your own ideas for long enough to finish anything, will it destroy your "sensitive super-introvert" soul to write yet another CRUD app or go change the crusty old TPS report collection system to add the new field?
Short term, get a crap job (like you said you plan to do) and apply for all…
I consider Venkatesh to be amongst the brightest and insightful thinkers of our times (The Gervais Principle being a particularly brilliant eye opener that I share with everyone who could be interested and ready to benefit from it).
I hadn’t quite appreciated how long he’s been blogging for, nor that we was nearing 50 (the latter point gives me some inspiration in my mid-30s that there’s still time to contribute).
In terms of the article, and this doesn’t injure his main point, but I feel he has been overgenerous about how long the blogosphere has lasted (though there are of course still exceptions eg for me recently Ludic’s blog https://ludic.mataroa.blog/, some old gems like Rands in Repose ticking away, and more focused series like Patrick McKenzie’s Bits about Money).
To my mind it was well and truly done (in the way that it once existed) before Covid, with the absence of a resurgence during a period with so many locked down and online proving its end.
By that point there had already been the rise of walled gardens, the fall of Google Search, the rise of social media and influencers (and since the subsequent fall post-Covid), clickbait, smartphones as the primary browsing device, constantly online culture, attention exhaustion, (low quality) content saturation, etc. If the blog had survived all this LLMs adding fuel to the attention harvesting noise would almost certainly have sealed the deal.
On the whole “online” feels like it’s falling apart.
The leading apps…
> Prototypes should get burned [...] But they usually are not.
"There's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution that works"
I loved reading this blog post[0]. Everything starts with a spreadsheet and then instead of replacing it, people just keep building on top of it forever.
While I found the post funny to read, honestly I'm fine with all the mess. I'm happy to embrace it instead of forever polishing something that I will never ship.
Vibe coded apps are next level of mess though and people don't seem to recognise that while betting on 'AI will fix it later'.
[0] https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-dropkick-you-if-you-use-that-spreadsheet/
Bit late here, but one point to consider is that people believe a lot of silly things when it comes to jobs. Maybe you don't, but still. Either through believing some cliche that people say, or letting some insecurity or fear have too much power over us, it can be easy to entertain fantasies about the workplace and our space of possibilities in it.
This is a very good and practical and humorous read on the subject. I suggest before you make any drastic decisions you try some of the stuff there, and see if you weren't nursing some illusions:
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ludics-guide-to-getting-software-engineering-jobs/
27% code acceptance, and generated documents that are 70% accurate, are 'good' outcomes in the following sense:
> Work at large companies has a tendency to blow up, run far behind schedule, then ultimately limp past the finish line in a maimed state.
> One of my friends talks about how, when faced by his first failed project on a team, a management consultant responded to all critical self-reflection with "But you'd say that, overall, this was a success?" in a desperate bid to generate a misleading quote to put into a presentation to the board.
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/tossed-salads-and-scrumbled-eggs/