Comment by rubikscube09
8 hours ago
I'm just saying that before programmer feelings used to be loosely aligned with advancing society: fun work (for some people) was useful work. Now that's starting to be decoupled and it sucks when your choices are hate your job and contribute or do fun stuff and don't contribute. Granted this is the dilemma most people have faced, but for people who like their work as it is right now it sucks.
> Granted this is the dilemma most people have faced
I don't agree. There are many creative and useful fields: engineering, law, finance. And others that don't require as much creativity but may be enjoyable due to social factors: medicine, teaching, emergency services.
The dilemma that people have faced is that they don't want to do earnest work, but still need money to live. There are enough types of work that are useful and stimulating in different ways that everyone should be able to find one, so long as they are given opportunities as children (we do a decent job of this in the developed world). At least, that was the contract. Many fields, not just software, are facing existential crises.
I'm a programmer and I'm having more fun than ever thanks to AI. I do think a lot of programmers are pretty conservative by nature, so maybe that's the group that's struggling more. If I had to wager, I think the camp is split between those who spent a long time in university vs self-taught hacker types (I'm the latter).
I just don't understand how it can be fun to commission work from Big Tech
I'll take open models any day of the week. We're almost there but they're not quite good enough yet. Re: fun, don't you have a backlog of incredibly weird experiments and projects you'd like to build? I did and now I'm building them, it's very fun (and educational).
Fair enough. I don't mean to speak for all programmers (I'm not one). In fact I'm an academic so that's probably why I'm upset.