Ask HN: Hey, you, tech worker–how are you feeling?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405490

by arm32 • 2 months ago

5 13 2 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

I feel like we're all in a bit of a dark place. You all okay? How are we feeling? Let's vent a little bit. What's on your mind right now?

yepyoukno2• 2 months ago

Feelings have so little to do with it.

Are you fulfilled?

Or are you wasting what calls to you as your natural destiny?

drakonka• 2 months ago

Both of those questions have everything to do with feelings, no?

yepyoukno2• 2 months ago

I’m not so sure.

Fulfillment has something to do with form to function, and feelings may be how one is self satisfied!

You can feel great about doing nothing, and feel like shoveling shit when doing what must be done.

I would rather shovel shit that is imperative than feel good about myself, though that’s just another form of self service as the arguments go!

verdverm• 2 months ago

Working to make things better is the best way I've found to have a positive frame in this dark world. (local indivisible.org and leveraging myself through ai)

ungreased0675• 2 months ago

I’m not in a dark place. Things are going pretty well in my little corner of the world.

jbdamask• 2 months ago

Feeling great. It’s never been faster to bring ideas to life. If anything, I need to look at nature more

priyanka-23• 2 months ago

With AI coming into picture, devs are more scared the way its getting handled by the industry rather actually getting scared by AI taking up jobs. Probably we have an year or two, need to find another job!

paulcole• 2 months ago

Why would we be in a dark place? There’s a new set of skills to learn and opportunity abounds.

markus_zhang• 2 months ago

Just waiting for retirement so that I can go back to my own projects. I just bought a lottery ticket!

slipknotfan• 2 months ago

slipknot

jf22• 2 months ago

I like AI tools. I'm bullish on AI tools. I'm productive with AI tools.

But...

At my job the prevailing sentiment is everything should be easy and fast with AI now so why bother doing anything that can't be done with AI.

Talking with customers can't be done with AI so we'll just ask Claude what our customers think.

Collaborating on a new product design together can't be done with AI so we'll just ask Claude to design it.

Strategy is hard so we'll just chat with Claude about what we should do and accept the output.

And so people generate a bland ticket with Claude and I'm asked to implement completely "souless" feature that is generic and boring and not important to anybody.

Oh and it should only take a few days because code is free now.

We ship it, nobody cares about it because the only thing that's put in any effort is an LLM, and move onto the next thing.

Before LLMs features had humans attached to them and working together to get them out the door meant something. Plus, a lot more effort went into to making sure it was the right feature and a good product because all the people involved wanted their name to be associated with success.

With LLMs nobody cares if the LLM was wrong, its the LLM that was wrong not Jacob or Jamie.

It's like we are producing empty shells of technology. The code is there and the feature is there, but nobody cares. Even the customers don't care because we ship a thing nobody wants and we tell people about it with bland generated marketing and announcement documentation.

And yeah. I'm super productive and shipping more and more and more and more features but I feel like I've done is ship skeletons of web apps when before I used to ship living breathing applications.

ventsys• 2 months ago

This is very similar to how I feel.

We get scolded for asking other people on our team questions sometimes, and get told "you should ask claude that", I don't even communicate with my team anymore, instead of asking someone with domain expertise about something specific I just ask claude now... I have no interest in my work whatsoever anymore, it used to be what I did night and day, happily.

Non-engineering higher ups use claude to do system design, use claude to write docs, throw together an MVP that is barely and often not at all functional. Then we have to actually make the mess work... of course, with more claude. I hate everything about it.

BuiltByElly• 2 months ago

Damn, that's sad!

This is a habit ("you should ask Claude that") that will greatly affect the quality of software in the long run.

Ask HN: Hey, you, tech worker–how are you feeling?

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