To be fair though, moving personal to institutional knowledge was always a challenge and rarely works really well. While I value apprenticeship a lot (I do science in Central Europe where that is pivotal) I wonder whether it is also a way to move personal knowledge from person to person without ever becoming institutional knowledge. Management didn’t just bury the legacy of Ben, they missed making sure that Ben and Sarah were leaving a manual which cannot burn. We know similar problems because we, as in the scientific endeavour, keep telling people that doing core developments and writing papers about it on half-year contracts in different institutions half a globe apart for a decade is about excellence and learning to become senior rather than a lack of commitment. And we have done so for a long time. But at least juniors, dreaming of becoming a sailor on the research vessel, keep coming.

And after watching ML is exacerbating existing problems in other fields for some years, we start (!) debating whether it might be slowly replacing us, too. But rather than challenging LLMs writing papers so that other LLMs can summarize them for us, we are still thinking about the next paper and how it will be cited most because that is how it always was and will always be.

So it is not just about greed. It is the idea of ever performing better to death and the way we define success. The same reason we self-optimize and love that fitness watch and the paid subscription so much because it helps us building habits and being strong and fit and better rested so that we can work even better. In the end, we must acknowledge that we have been part of it all along and the rest is a mirror of what societies’ rules have become.

This reads awfully familiar. Recently a colleague retired. The company knew about that in advance and did: Nothing. No handover prepared. No knowledge transfer planned. Nothing. Poof, 30 years of institutional knowledge gone. No problem, we have AI.

For some reason managers now vibecode greenfield projects and ask experienced engineers to fix their mess. I asked for functional documentation. What did you feed the prompt? What gap tries this project to fill? What are the use cases? What exactly are you going to deploy? They don’t know. They tried retrofitting that info through AI but didn’t even bother to read the results, nevermind validating them against the actual behavior of the application. Because, render me surprised, this requires domain knowledge and getting your hands dirty.

So I dug through the generated code and found 200 issues. Invited them to a presentation where I tried explaining that we’re looking at 2-4 years of worth of backlog. Those are only technical ones. Of course they had already pitched the idea of going live within two months to the C-suite. Great, now please define a feature set as MVP and I’ll see how to patch it up so it won’t blow up in your face. Maintainance of a product that large will provide enough work for a team of 6 engineers working fulltime on it.

They were not having any of that and instead started challenging my estimates. You must deliver one fixed issue per day - through AI. We will retrofit the docs to figure out what the application does - through AI. Why did you not create the functional docs through AI during the review. AI here, AI there. Let’s skip code reviews with AI. AI is the solution. Let’s onboard more engineers through AI. Let’s use math to make that number friendly: 200 issues / 3 engineers = 67 days until all issues are fixed. Problem solved.

That thing that I became captain of. Is it even a ship? I can’t tell anymore.

It’s weird that the mass layoffs are happening during the bubble inflation this time now. That “techno-feudalism” idea really seems like where the world is heading. Doesn’t matter if the products and services work or not, they still make money from the irrational stock market hype, lock-in and rent extraction, and governments.

Crporate programming sucks and will always suck. Your team leads, managers, CTOs, and CEOs all lose the plot as soon as they are promoted (if they ever were). Unrealistic deadlines, little to no understanding of the craft/job/whatever, unrealistic expectations, unwillingness to listen to the experts, no progress or too much process, and so on.

I enjoy myself much more when writing my own stuff. No deadlines, sometimes not even a plan. Just jumping from task to task; whatever seems fun at the time. I might work on the same project for months, sometimes for days, sometimes not at all as I take a break and just touch grass or play games. But at work… No such luck. Just have to trudge through the crap.

We need to tax wealth and introduce UBI. Fuck corporate work.