searabbit

As someone somewhere between junior and intermediate developer, I will say vibe coding on my personal projects has accelerated my learning so much on the proper way to code things so much more than constantly bugging my seniors who don’t have time to properly review and critique my code (because surprise surprise! We’re understaffed). At least now I can ask Claude to explain its approach and fact check it myself, and the times I’ve had it run too loose, I’ve gotten practice debugging code I’m unfamiliar with since Claude eventually hits a point where it fucked something up and has no idea how to fix it. But obviously the caveat is you have to approach it as a learning tool not an automation tool.

If it’s my boss who wants to “jump on a call” every 5 minutes because they want me to do their job, or because they’re bored and just want a captive audience, I don’t really have a choice. Also, the junior who will need you to babysit them for an hour because they don’t know anything (not their fault but those calls suck too). And finally, the coworker who is quiet quitting and playing the “how long can I avoid getting fired while I look for a better job” game. I am “happy to jump on a call” with all those people to be forced to do their time sensitive tasks /s. If they were forced to write a coherent email, they might actually find it boring enough to do some of the work themselves.

Yes I’m thinking of at least 5 different people and I thankfully don’t work in that industry anymore.

I know I’m in the minority here, but I don’t blame AI for the conditions he’s describing at all. I’m a little jealous that as an older millennial, he got to experience the golden years of tech work where everyone was getting rich off work marketed as meaningful and socially progressive. Us younger folks that got into tech because of that era are kicking ourselves for not being born a decade or two earlier.

As a gen z-er, I’ve only experienced exploitation. Skeleton crews where you are saddled with way too much work at all times, and your seniors have no time to train you to do it properly, so you bury yourself in a cycle of burn out and tech debt. Oh, and our starting wages have likely not increased since OP graduated college. So my perspective is that work for large corporations is a joke, and no one actually cares about the output beyond how much money they can extract out of shittier (i.e., cheaper) work. This enshittification of the workplace is why people are using AI first and asking questions never. I don’t blame them. I’m using copilot for side projects and it’s 10x faster at coding than I am, although I agree with OP, the code can be sloppy and should absolutely require human supervision.

I think what he hasn’t quite arrived at as the logical conclusion of his laments is that tech workers need to unionize. It sucks because I do think people of his generation who benefited most from the tech boom would never consider that they would benefit from class consciousness (a lot of them aren’t just temporarily embarrassed millionaires, they are actually ashamed millionaires). But yeah, if he wants privacy protections in the workplace to be taken seriously, if he wants assurance that AI will not literally take his job because it was trained to do just that by his company, if he wants to find meaning in human connection, he’s looking for a union.

Probably not “we” unless you fall into the WEIRD demographic and don’t fully support leftists politics. At least thats my interpretation.

When participants learned the true prevalence of failures, they became less supportive of harsh punitive measures, such as strict disciplinary actions or mass incarceration, and more supportive of policy changes aimed at addressing underlying problems. In workplace and policy contexts, increased awareness of failure rates also reduced stigma and encouraged more supportive practices, such as extending parental leave.

One limitation is that the failure gap may depend on context and culture; because most participants came from Western, educated populations, it remains unclear whether the same pattern generalizes globally.