Comment by abduhl
7 hours ago
Well it is hypocritical. Hypocrisy is an action or statement that is contrary to a stated value or principle. Just because your values or principles changed doesn’t make you a suddenly no longer a hypocrite, it just admits that your former opinions are no longer tenable.
I’ve noticed this push to try to clothe hypocrisy in made up virtues like intellectual curiosity and mental plasticity a lot lately. All I can think is that it’s some kind of ego satisfaction play people make when their place in the world is threatened.
Old value: Producing high value software.
How to do it? Focus on writing code.
New value: Producing high value software.
How to do it? Focus on writing specs for code / identifying needs.
I expect there are a lot of hypocrites in the mix, scared for their job. But this isn't a fundamentally hypocritical position - agents are changing the game for how software gets produced and the things that were important as recently as a year ago might reasonably be said to be irrelevant now. Ironically, we might yet see a great software engineer who has never written a program in their entire life. The odds are slim but it is possible now.
This is shifting the principle/value discussion up to a level where it's meaningless. Let's use a different example.
Old value: Returning value to shareholders.
How to do it? Treat your employees like family and don't be evil.
New value: Returning value to shareholders.
How to do it? Treat your employees like human resources and get away with what you can get away with.
Is this hypocritical? Most people would say yes, but in your framing it's not because we've backed up to the least specific articulation of an underlying principle. It's a species of the motte and bailey fallacy.
Agents may be changing the game for how software gets produced, but all it's really done is switch software developers from being managed to being managers. And software developers trying to square their historic value/principle that management tasks are useless, easy, and ceremonial (to borrow GP's word) tasks that should take a back seat to ~flow state coding~ with their new view that management is an integral, difficult, and requisite part of writing code reeks of hypocrisy.
Sorry, did people not identify needs when developing "high value software" before? That doesn't seem true to me at all. I took a "Needs Assessment" course in my class of '09 undergrad...
I've noticed on hackernews in the past year, a certain type of comment. A deep suspicion to first call out a surface behavior, then psychoanalyze strangers with whatever the flavor of the month "deep observation" is.
You can't be a dick on this platform without fancy prose I guess.
Abduhl, the nature of the job has changed; before it was coding, now it is managing the AI coding. What was and remains valuable is delivering value. This principle has not changed.
If your job was only coding then you are the most replaceable of the bunch. Traditional software engineering is a broader domain that, as rightly pointed out, will require you to actually *sit and talk* with the worst communicators you'll meet in your life.
Looking at a slice of most folks' workday and calling it their whole job is in my opinion, incorrect.
> Just because your values or principles changed doesn’t make you a suddenly no longer a hypocrite
Uh yes it does?? What are you talking about.
https://www.google.com/search?q=hypocrisy
Bottom line is the people described as hypocritical in the comment have no principles, but rather feign passion in anything they think other people consider valuable. When devs thought coding skill was valuable, that's what they claimed to be passionate about, when the game changed and communication became key, they suddenly changed their passion. Either the timing is a coincidence, or they are hypocrites.
I don't think switching one's passion on a dime is a valid escape hatch from hypocrisy.