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There Is No Real ESC
Modern software engineering isn’t broken, it’s working exactly as designed to drain joy, waste talent, and reward the wrong people.
Before you scroll on without truly realising what you’re missing, such is life these days in the modern slop filled internet, thinking that this missive is one of those suggesting that you should join a startup and work 100 hour weeks whilst sleeping under your desk, or perhaps spend every non 9–5 hour grinding away to burnout on your own “disruptive” app (which is really just another wrapped call to the OpenAI API), I’d ask you to bear with me for a moment for I wish to give you a brief field report from inside the corporate grist mill of today.
Current level “AI”, of course, could never write such a long, voluminous, and run on paragraph as the one above. You’re safe. I’m real. Read on.
The actual process of writing code is creative, fun, and very satisfying. It’s about solving problems, inventing or tuning algorithms, and bringing something to notional life that makes a difference in the world¹.
What it’s not about is cranking out the same old slop, as that’s what the corporate world tends to do — minimal cost, minimal functionality, maximal profit.
It’s also not about identifying a genuine problem², dreaming up a wonderful, efficient, and ground breaking solution — only to…
