From what I've noticed, white-collar work is mostly the cat turd dispenser feeling, retail is more an errand-boy feeling, and blue-collar work is more of a long-steady-single-turd-chew
One object level suggestion is you shouldn't be doing string formatting manipulation to construct valid YAML objects as part of your ops pipeline; instead, do it all with actual data structures and then just render the result. Yes, I know that Helm directly encourages text templating — it's bad and wrong.
Beyond that, this a too-long essay about a deeply poisonous and discouraging worldview. I regret having read it. At least it wasn't written by AI!
And, as with so many blatantly bad and wrong things in modern development, someone will show up just to scream at you confusedly if you as much as think of solving it somehow better (e.g. how you describe) because they have mastered the officially endorsed badwrong way (and even that with great difficulty) thus you'd be stealing their cat turds
> I’m no closer to anything resembling inner peace. I find I’ve grown to despise large swaths of the only thing I’ve ever been able to earn reliable income from. I tire of walking a path that has seemingly shifted beneath my feet to point toward a destination I no longer recognize. I’m embarrassed by the jerk my Younger Self used to be, and simultaneously ashamed of the energy I lost as I matured. I don’t really want to do most of what I have to do, while feeling a deep unsated need to achieve something that I have neither the stamina nor the freedom to pursue. At some point I’m going to reach down deep into the well of ambition to discover there ain’t nothing there to pull out anymore. And then?
What advice does one give when confronted with this?
Enjoyed reading the crude observation that we eat cat turds for work. I like the author who watches the graffiti on the train ride rather than a phone screen. Was the “Spirograph butthole”meant to be a reference to a React app default favicon?
Great read, putting into some beautiful prose undigested feelings that have been stewing in my stomach for a while. Maybe I should find a cabinet that's worth painting the back of to me
Anyone who read that: How do you justify the life spend once you see the scroll bar turning that small?
Like rolling a dice on wasting 30 minutes, but maybe maybe it’ll be interesting or mildly amusing, best case.
There’s just no way that use of time could be worth the squeeze when your takehome is $500/hr. 8% of your waking day spent reading an article. Come on?
> There’s this very real sense that I don’t… I don’t want to solve this problem. There is no intellectual reward at the end of this journey. It’s not interesting to me. This isn’t something that needs to be fixed, because it’s not a situation that ever should’ve been permitted to happen in the first place. This is just a bunch of contrived nonsense that I must work through because the broader situation dictates it. It doesn’t matter if the solution is good or elegant. It doesn’t matter if it barely works. It doesn’t matter if it causes another problem that I stub my toe on in three weeks. It’s just… what I have to do.
As a tech person, this is the essence. All we want to do is make an amazing fast/efficient/performant/cheap/insightful/optimized/smart/something-else thing.
But then we have to deal with organizations like governments, businesses, customers, and people like managers, co-workers, and clients. And ultimately, human irrationality of preferences.
It's why RMS and Edsger are so appealing to so many. The above makes one want to say screw this, I'm gonna do it my way and damn the consequences.
>I briefly try to think of which chucklefuck I could blame this design on, but truth be told I rubber-stamped enough questionable pull requests in my time here that a fair amount of this situation is a mess of my own damn making.
This one really rings true. Every individual change you don’t push back on makes things slowly, incrementally worse until you end up with a pile of garbage. But do you really want to block someone’s change because they wrote some awkward, hacky code? After all, they’ve solved some problem for the business and it might only take an hour to clean up later.
Later never comes. Hacks get built on top of other hacks and that one hour improvement would now be a week long refactor. No one can justify that.
After few rounds of this you start to become the type of person who blocks changes for code clarity and things others view as nitpicks. Now you’re the asshole stopping people from getting work done. You ask yourself if it’s really so bad to let it slide this one time.
I read to the end desperately hoping for the comforting reveal that the coworker’s meal was just a metaphor, but it never came. For those who haven’t read the article… it’s wonderful, but make sure to finish what you’re eating before you begin reading it. The imagery of that sugary altoid flavor is a bit of bait and switch.
As to the topic… the slop washing and compounding effort it creates is awful. At work we use Gemini as part of Google Workspace. I wish Google would have an enterprise option “share all prompts” for full prompt transparency between everyone in the organization. I believe this will go a long way toward solving the root problem, which is one of disrespect and laziness. If I can see your prompt history, maybe you’ll think twice before asking me to review the slop it produced.
People are looking for meaning in the wrong places - it’s not a huge surprise, it’s something secularism has largely failed at.
There are places you can work that are more meaningful or where there is a culture of cutting down on bullshit. Elon Musk is famously good at running places that do both.
More people would benefit from getting married and having kids - a lot of (Judeo-Christian) religion’s cultural ideas were good even if its empirical claims are wrong. Religion is in some ways a battle tested cultural technology, throwing it away will have unintended consequences for most people.
Alex Karp touches on some of these ideas indirectly in The Technological Republic which is worth reading anyway for other reasons. A lot of people in the west today grow up without a cultural core and end up aloof believing in nothing, or worse substituting some bullshit political ideology as a poor substitute religion.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 71.1 ms ] threadBeyond that, this a too-long essay about a deeply poisonous and discouraging worldview. I regret having read it. At least it wasn't written by AI!
And, as with so many blatantly bad and wrong things in modern development, someone will show up just to scream at you confusedly if you as much as think of solving it somehow better (e.g. how you describe) because they have mastered the officially endorsed badwrong way (and even that with great difficulty) thus you'd be stealing their cat turds
>I regret having read it.
It makes me happy that you do!
What advice does one give when confronted with this?
>Look at me now, having to Google how to read a text file line-by-line in Python despite having done it a hundred times at this point
Like rolling a dice on wasting 30 minutes, but maybe maybe it’ll be interesting or mildly amusing, best case.
There’s just no way that use of time could be worth the squeeze when your takehome is $500/hr. 8% of your waking day spent reading an article. Come on?
My type of humor, cathartic read
Shout out to fellow frontend devs. Rough times.
the rest of me says wow, this was a well written story
As a tech person, this is the essence. All we want to do is make an amazing fast/efficient/performant/cheap/insightful/optimized/smart/something-else thing.
But then we have to deal with organizations like governments, businesses, customers, and people like managers, co-workers, and clients. And ultimately, human irrationality of preferences.
It's why RMS and Edsger are so appealing to so many. The above makes one want to say screw this, I'm gonna do it my way and damn the consequences.
This one really rings true. Every individual change you don’t push back on makes things slowly, incrementally worse until you end up with a pile of garbage. But do you really want to block someone’s change because they wrote some awkward, hacky code? After all, they’ve solved some problem for the business and it might only take an hour to clean up later.
Later never comes. Hacks get built on top of other hacks and that one hour improvement would now be a week long refactor. No one can justify that.
After few rounds of this you start to become the type of person who blocks changes for code clarity and things others view as nitpicks. Now you’re the asshole stopping people from getting work done. You ask yourself if it’s really so bad to let it slide this one time.
Repeat.
As to the topic… the slop washing and compounding effort it creates is awful. At work we use Gemini as part of Google Workspace. I wish Google would have an enterprise option “share all prompts” for full prompt transparency between everyone in the organization. I believe this will go a long way toward solving the root problem, which is one of disrespect and laziness. If I can see your prompt history, maybe you’ll think twice before asking me to review the slop it produced.
There are places you can work that are more meaningful or where there is a culture of cutting down on bullshit. Elon Musk is famously good at running places that do both.
More people would benefit from getting married and having kids - a lot of (Judeo-Christian) religion’s cultural ideas were good even if its empirical claims are wrong. Religion is in some ways a battle tested cultural technology, throwing it away will have unintended consequences for most people.
Alex Karp touches on some of these ideas indirectly in The Technological Republic which is worth reading anyway for other reasons. A lot of people in the west today grow up without a cultural core and end up aloof believing in nothing, or worse substituting some bullshit political ideology as a poor substitute religion.