Restoring Professional Pride in the Tech Sector
"Time to raise up folks! Stop letting the Execs bullying you… we can show them we have a backbone," said the latest comment on Stack(ed) Ranking/s at IBM amid PIP litigation.
I'm part of the generation that grew up or developed mentally in the 80s and 90s. Before I turned 18 or 'went to uni' the whole "tech industry" basically collapsed and it is about to happen again. I studied Computer Science or Software Engineering (overlapping degrees, similar syllabi), but my decision to study that - or apply to study that - predates the collapse. My wife had enrolled to study Computer Science about 3 years earlier than me; her father told her it would be the right thing to aim for because of constant growth in that sector (back then, around 1996/7).
Looking at comments from GAFAM and IBM employees, it's not hard to see some common denominators. Those people are fatigued, anxious (anxiety kills or seriously degrades one's health, both mental and physical), and dissatisfied with what they do. For instance, IBM compels qualified software engineers to use slop. For many of them this is not a choice (voluntary, willful, consensual) but a must. Imagine telling some skilled painter to start generating only "CG art" while calling it "AI" and insisting that the future of art is an objects blender that spits out combinations of inputs. That's not art, it's what many people call slop or "plagiarized information synthesis system" (P.I.S.S.) - an insult to one's professional integrity, expression, creativity etc.
Rejecting slop isn't being a Luddite; it's just another giant bubble, it is grossly overrated, and it harms actual creators by making cheap copycats of their work/s.
For programmers to regain their sense of professional pride we must all counter the PHBs (sorry, Dilbert terminology) who don't understand how slop works - including all the obvious risks associated with it - yet shove it down their staff's throats regardless.
I've never used LLMs myself, I honestly think Torvalds unwittingly made a laughing stock of himself (discrediting his code or coding abilities) earlier this month, and the only reason Linux Foundation staff promotes slop is bribes from Microsoft et al. █