Comment by dominotw
15 hours ago
developers now are expected to randomly jump around projects and ship without friction. For employers it means they can move us around like pawns. Lot of companies have not reorged themselves to this new type of workforce thats much more malleable.
it used to be that i pay your due at some enterpise and learn some corner of codebase really well and become go to person. that would give you job security.
Working in silos like this has always been an anti pattern though. You end up being employed for 10 years but only have 1 year of actual development experience. Just turning-the-crank and going home was always risky because one day you get laid off and realize you’re 10 years behind the competition.
What I found comfort it in was turning the crank and then using extra time to upskill in various other things (including non software dev domains). Things that weren’t immediately useful to my employer and I never would have been directly assigned, but did pay off after sometime.
Now I’m basically expected to do what my boss wants me to do every minute of the day, it’s gotten much more micromanaged.
As opposed to what? You seriously think that shipping 10 years, instead of turning-the-crank and going home, will save you from the interviewing gauntlet?
I cynically predict that some of the new practices being hyped could easily end up worse...
Before: "I learned very little this year, because I was placed in charge of the same stuff, and I've already learned most of what I could from tinkering with that code, stepping through its architecture, and dealing with those recurring problems."
Soon: "I learned very little this year, because I don't deeply interact with anything, I just pull the lever on the babbling slot-machine until I get lucky and things seems to quiet down."
So what enables job security now?
Your dad owning the company?
Let them attempt to use ai to build business critical systems and when they waste tens amd hundreds of millions they can rehire master builders who know what they're doing
They will attempt and then soon enough they will be succeeding, and the master builders will have all retired, and that's the point that humans become dependent upon AI's. I aim to live a couple more decades and I sadly expect to see it play out this way.
If you can move humans around like pawns, then by definition, they have no job security.
Being a really good engineer - the kind of engineer you can assign a feature to and they promptly turn around a robust, maintainable, secure and well documented implementation.
hey... claudex helps me being that.
5 replies →
> developers now are expected to randomly jump around projects and ship without friction
This describes the expectation my managers had of me at every software job I've had, and I've been doing this for a decade and a half
It's definitely not a new thing since LLMs came around, if that is what you were implying
> It's definitely not a new thing since LLMs came around, if that is what you were implying
It is on a scale that it is required now. Previously you could say "it'll take me a week to decipher the mess", now they can just say "can't you use an agent to make it fast?".
> it used to be that i pay your due at some enterpise and learn some corner of codebase really well and become go to person. that would give you job security.I
I had the displeasure of working with those types. One of them replies to any question or challenge to a technical problem emerging from the PRs they posted with variants of "I've worked here for over a decade, this is how we do things". And then proceeds to argue things like defensive programming is a code smell because it means developers don't trust themselves.
I cannot envision any healthy, effective engineering environment where developers don't periodically switch between projects.