Comment by whstl
3 days ago
For me that turning point was 10-15 years ago.
I guess it was slow-boiling, but somewhere between 2010-2015 was the turning point.
It got dominated by brogrammers who judged you by whether you used vim or not, teams of 20 people producing the same output as a team of two, designers doing mockups for absolutely everything and trying to boss the programmers, product managers making mountains of useless documents for everything and trying to boss the programmers, some rando had Scrummaster certification (who doesn't) and wanted to boss the programmers.
It was also when everyone started copying Google and Spotify and etc and a meeting was required for every decision, RFCs or other documents that would be produced but wouldn't survive reality, the software would have more trackers than features, and subscription was the default software model.
People keep saying "you only need 1 or 2 people to make a product now".
Well that was already the reality for me from 2000-2016.
> brogrammers who judged you by whether you used vim or not
When I hear that term I usually think of people who brag about their job and sling copy-pasted untyped Python and JS from StackOverflow while being willfully ignorant of infrastructure, architecture, security, algorithmic efficiency, and anything else that makes maintainable software. Micro-dosing K and listening to too many Huberman podcasts are probably solid tells too. When I hear vim, however, I think about greybeards.
Did I miss the memo? There has been a non-zero amount of performative TUI obsession happening in the technical space for the past five or six years but I didn't think that using a fifty-year-old modal text editor was a shibboleth for being a brogrammer...
It’s putting tools and buzzwords ahead of actually building and creating. Does it matter more what you create or the editor you use, the language, etc… A lot of that dickwaving seems like it came in the past decade or two.
Vim experienced a revival in the late 2000s and 2010s due to influential Ruby on Rails people using it. The "editor wars" of old were won long ago—by vim; subsequent heats pit vim against JetBrains IDEs, Atom, and Visual Studio Code.
As IDE user since the MS-DOS days, having learnt vi on Xenix, adopting XEmacs in 1995 until UNIX got good IDEs, I missed that supposed vim victory in the 2000's.
Vim has plugins/extensions for all of those. Vim is a setting now. Even Obsidian I use with vim mode (obsidian plugin).
Maybe depends on industry? Working in finance during that time, the brogrammers were vim types, and super dogmatic about everything (first and foremost their workout regiment but also design patterns and algorithmic efficiency, to the point of exhaustion.)
>> It got dominated by brogrammers who judged you by whether you used vim or not, teams of 20 people producing the same output as a team of two, designers doing mockups for absolutely everything and trying to boss the programmers, product managers making mountains of useless documents for everything and trying to boss the programmers, some rando had Scrummaster certification (who doesn't) and wanted to boss the programmers.
That's because word got out that the field pays well but most people who had the sociopath desire to make a lot of money didn't also have the skill to get a programmer job. So they did what they always do: attach themselves to a living host and leech it's blood. In a pond of IT field water, for every fish (programmer) there were at least 20 leeches (project managers, product managers, scrum masters, designers, architects, you name it).
I thought several times why I chose to be a fish and not a leech and the answer was not that it's the moral thing to do or that I'm not that bothered as long as they let me with a little blood left. Rather pragmatically that it seemed safer being able to find and make my own food than rely on finding and sucking out the blood of someone who does it already.
For 20+ years they added more and more blood sucking parasites to the poor fish and now, finally, they eliminate the fish altogether. Fine!
I'm just curious where will all the leeches go. What they'll suck on from now on. Can you suck the blood from an AI agent? The future looks exciting if only to see how the parasites adapt (or die).