alt Hacker NewsI remember arriving at Apple Park to meet a friend/coworker a few years before I retired. Sitting there enjoying the food by one of the huge, curved glass walls, he was distractedly focused on one of the gardeners that Apple employs. This man was out in the center part of Apple Park trimming a plant or something similar.
It was clear that my friend was looking on somewhat enviously and when I asked, he admitted as much.
And I knew too immediately the draw. Before I was old enough for "gainful employment" there was a neighbor who hired my sister and I (I think I was 11, my sister 10) to ride along with him and his kids (our neighborhood friends) and help with his lawn services business.
I know. But this was the 1970's, a small working-class neighborhood in a Kansas suburb… And he paid us by the hour, helped load/unload the lawn mowers. We'd get a free lunch at a "Wiley's" fast-food hamburger joint.
But despite the physical labor of pushing a lawn mower all over someone's yard, there was a curious sense of satisfaction that came from having arrived at a tatty, overgrown lawn but then leaving it looking neat, tidy. It is the usual "sense of accomplishment" that physical labor often metes out that is often more elusive in the white-collar world.
To be sure there's no arguing about the differences in pay—I'm talking strictly about a sense of job satisfaction. (And, over the course of my three decade career as a programmer, the closest to that had been early on when I had full ownership of the code.)
I fear this will be horribly self-indulgent, but I'll share it anyway:
I'd always been a computer person, but it wasn't until I'd reached my thirties that I realized I could make a career out of that interest. The joy of programming still gets me out of bed in the morning and sends me skipping happily to my desk in my home office. What I do wouldn't impress anybody at a technical level. I'm not an innovator. The world of software and tech would not suffer if I had never existed. But I like the guy I work for. I like the people I work with. I write stuff that lots of people use. I do it well enough that I can feel decently good about it.
And I'm watching all of what I enjoy in software as a career and craft gradually disappear. Upper management are now all True Believer AI zealots who know, just know, that AI is the future and therefore ensure that it is also the present. They've caused nothing but organizational chaos, shoved out knowledgeable people, in some misguided effort to remake the company in their image, and replaced them with, to me, obvious bullshit artists.
Engineering time and effort that might a few years ago have produced value and good experiences for users now produce mediocre "MCPs," used only internally, that turn out even more mediocre code and tests that don't test anything.
I don't have nearly the chops or talent you and your peers have. I never could have run with you guys or made the mark on the world that you did. What I do, and the processes I follow, are probably the exact stuff that drove you to retirement. Still, I enjoy what I do and hate that it's being taken from me and replaced with something I hate, overseen, in my company's case, by vapor merchants pretending to be visionaries/cutting-edge 'thought leaders.'
I'm glad some of us got to build things when the inmates ran the asylum, and I regret the money and 'progress' that strangled the life and joy out of it for you.
Just an aside: I've really enjoyed everything you've posted on HN and look forward to your comments. Thanks, and cheers.