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dominotwtoday at 1:00 AM4 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

chasd00today at 1:54 AM

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.

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Chrisoakstoday at 1:55 AM

So what enables job security now?

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bluefirebrandtoday at 2:37 AM

> 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

locknitpickertoday at 5:08 AM

> 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.