alt Hacker NewsI 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.
I have to call you out a bit on the: "I don't have nearly the chops or talent you and your peers have".
Trust me, when I started at Apple in 1995 I was way in over my head. Or so I thought.
After a couple months on the job I asked a coworker down the hall (who seemed particularly chill—Hi, Brian!), "How long until I feel like I know what I'm doing?"
"6 months."
I liked the unambiguity of his answer even if it seemed kind of off the cuff.
He was more or less right. It was somewhere about 6 months that I more or less knew what I was headed in each morning to work to accomplish. And I felt like I, with a little help perhaps, could even contribute in a small way.
Still, I was always surrounded by some of the most amazing programmers I had ever met. One guy (hi, Cam!) could walk through a "backtrace" in machine code, look at the registers, addresses and data on the stack, and then declare, "You're accessing memory after you've already released it. Do you know what could be 24 bytes in size?"
And who was I? Some kid from Kansas with no degree in software engineering.
It may have in fact taken closer to two decades before I was able to shake off the imposter syndrome. At some point I had to admit that I wasn't so dense to have not learned anything in my 20+ years of coding. I was still not on Cameron's level, never will be, but I might have made up for that shortcoming by leaning into being prolific, coding two or three prototypes quickly in order to finally determine The Best Path.
Just from your comment I would be willing to bet your enthusiasm alone would make you a valuable asset.
That is kind of how it worked: there were some people that could hold multiple threads in their head and rattle off a semaphore strategy that was performant, skirt a deadlock.
There was the "math guy". We all knew who they were and would cycle by their office when we were wrestling with matrix inversions and the order of transforms.
And there were people that you could rely upon to take perhaps the most dreaded task of a project and work diligently at it. Trust me, no one split hairs over whether that individual could disassemble PPC code just by looking at it. The team appreciated the "tanks" that could do some of the drudge-work. (I was from time to time that person.)
I don't need to belabor a point, you get it, it took all types. It took me some time to see that though, and longer still to see where I fit in as well.