Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years.
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@robpike This resonates so strongly with me and makes me so sad. I spent much of the last 30 years writing and education people on how to write code to do graphics, animation, physics simulations, games, etc. And I feel the same as you just described. "Ineffable sadness".
@robpike Also, my language of choice for doing all that stuff over the past 8-9 years has been Go. So thank you for that!
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Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I'm being charitable).
Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.
@robpike I trained as a Civ Eng and ended up in IT (only 35 years so far).
I'm having as much or way more fun nowadays than I did in the, say, noughties. Back then I worked at a SME that makes helicopters in the UK. PCs were all beige and ran Windows. We had VAXen and a mainframe for a bit of variety but that was it. My work PC did end up running Redhat and then Mandrake and then Gentoo but it was a bit complicated.
Nowadays, my wife has been rocking Arch for a good 10 years and she still calls it Facebook or the internet!
I've nearly migrated all my VMware customers to Proxmox. I run my own email systems on prem. I run DNS servers for my firm and our customers - DNSSEC (we'll be more careful than .de) and dynamic DNS and LUA courtesy of PowerDNS.
I have CAs, Ansible and all sorts of good stuff. Ooooh and IoT: Home Assistant and I have a 3D printer - sci-fi dreams for my 15 year old self
I still have my Commodore 64. It now has USB storage and a HDMI out to my telly.
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Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I'm being charitable).
Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.
@robpike Same here, buddy. This is sad.
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Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I'm being charitable).
Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.
it is tragic that venture capital nonsense has derailed one of the most useful technologies into a cesspit of false values and images. We can still get it back, though
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Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I'm being charitable).
Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.
@robpike Thank you for saying this out loud. Many of us deeply share the sentiment and feel powerless.
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@randomgeek @GeePawHill @robpike Definitely agree on the last 10-15 years. Honestly, I probably fell out of most of it about 10 years ago, but managed to carve out a little niche for myself doing some advanced CS topics for awhile. That's pretty much run it's course at this point though.
I loved the struggle of solving problems and challenging myself. Just not getting it with the current stuff. I dunno--maybe there's something there, but I don't care.
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Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I'm being charitable).
Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.
@robpike In 40 years you've seen a lot of computer technology "destroyed" and a lot of new stuff coming. That's still happening and will continue - mostly for the better.
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Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I'm being charitable).
Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.
@robpike Thank you.
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Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I'm being charitable).
Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.
@robpike
I'm having a little of that feeling also, from a similar experience. -
If the world survived Perl, VBA, CORBA, SGML/XML, and Code Generation from UML, it can survive this.
I sure hope our beloved industry survive this wave of self-destruction, mate.
The fundamental difference I observe, at least in my small corner of the world, is that modern AI seems to be eroding the professionalism of the very practitioners of AI. This wasn’t the case with prior technological hypes, from FRP and micro services, back through time, to FORTRAN and ENIAC.
In some ways, AI appears to be validating and encouraging unprofessionalism, the same way today’s political discourse on social media is validating and compounding ignorance.
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Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I'm being charitable).
Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.
Thank you, Rob Pike, for posting this.
I am in a different field, and of little importance in that field, so it is preposterous of me to comment here, forgive me. But I wish to express how much energy I gain from reading your post.
The wave of inauthenticity is all-encompassing. I spent some four decades as a university teacher, with immense pride, only to see the very notion of teaching and education destroyed before my eyes. My friends in other professions experience the same.
I still hope for reversal.
Your message is one of sadness and loss, but is also a sign of resistance. As one of the true pathbreakers and arbiters of good taste in your field and beyond, your voice gives strength to others who try to hold on to notions of authenticity, simplicity, elegance, humility.
We pray these professional values will survive the long winter we are currently experiencing.
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Given your experience, how does this compare for you to the dot com boom? To me it seems like a similar combination of investors not wanting to miss out and not really understanding the thing and marketing departments happy to agree to all requests resulting in a big bubble about to pop. I'm anticipating in five or ten years there will still be LLM tools helping in what manner they actually can, the same way we still use websites after the dotcom crash, but all of the shenanigans will have collapsed under the weight of their impossibility.
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I spent my time trying to make it better. Not just write code, but find better or at least different ways to do so. Simpler, cleaner, more general, more comprehensible.
What's happening today is a complete repudiation of everything I was trying to achieve.
@robpike Thank you.
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@thegarbagebird @robpike Even this is more rational than reality, in many cases. These people are quite often a sort of nouveau aristocracy; people lifted up only because of personal connections, with little regard for actual competencies.
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Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I'm being charitable).
Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.
@robpike I hit burnout a couple of years ago. Something changed in the way I viewed my career path. I couldn't take the corporate ladder climbing, so I climbed down and started watching this trainwreck from a distance. It really does make me sad watching the industry I worked hard within just to crumble under my feet. I do miss the work though. Perhaps someday I'll put my hat back in the ring. Until then, I guess I'll just take a bucket of popcorn and watch the madness unfold.
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Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I'm being charitable).
Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.
@robpike From The Practice of Programming to the Byte Order Fallacy, I have been sharing your writing with junior developers as I mentor them.
Lately I've been dealing with juniors that don't like to read, and I'm worried.
Last year, as I was getting close to retirement I was joking about being called back in to unf&$k systems that have been written or updated by AI - but now Im not sure I want to anymore.
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Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I'm being charitable).
Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.
@robpike yep same
Going to retire next year and not sad about it
The enshittification of the online world is fast making it useless -
@robpike not a complete repudiation. It might seem that way at the moment because the dumbest voices are the loudest ones
There are those of us who listened to what you said and understood it, who have taken it to heart and still try to put that philosophy into practice. I hope you know that and know that your work made a difference and is appreciated
Yeah, I’d second @fraggle
And for what it’s worth, experts continue to cringe at slop in their fields. It’s like an uncanny valley which only kicks in when you know a subject well enough to subconsciously feel that ‘that ain’t right’ tickle in your brain. Dilettantes (incl mgmt) love this crap.
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Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I'm being charitable).
Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.
@robpike tbf the industry has been destroying itself for more than 12 years counting back from 2022
the destruction was just mostly limited to websites back then
whereas the creative side has been going downhill since 2008 or so
it's been a slow death overall
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Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I'm being charitable).
Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.
