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Programmers are no longer needed! (europe.pub)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] 25 points 10 months ago (5 children)

The most consistent and highest paying jobs I've had are replacing or fixing legacy and garbage systems. I don't think the current gen llm's are anywhere close to being able to do those jobs, and is in fact causing those jobs to have more work the more insecure, inefficient trash they generate.

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  • [–] 26 points 10 months ago* (3 children)

    Fellow tech-trash-disposal-engineer here. I've made a killing on replacing corporate anti-patterns. My career features such hits and old-time classics like:

    • email as workflow
    • email as version control
    • email as project management
    • email as literally anything other than email
    • excel as an relational database
    • excel as project management
    • help, our wiki is out of control
    • U-drive as a multi-user collaboration solution
    • The CEO's nephew wrote this 8 years ago and we can't get rid of it

    In all of these cases, there were always better answers that maybe just cost a little bit more. AI will absolutely cause some players to train-wreck their business, all to save a buck, and we'll all be there to help clean up. Count on it.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    excel as an relational database

    That reminds me of a story. I used to do IT consulting, years ago. One client was running their 5 person real estate office off a low quality, consumer grade, box store HP desktop repurposed as a server. All collaboration was through their U drive, plus every profile had their desktop folder redirected there.

    The complaint was the classic "everything is slow", which turned out to be "opening my spreadsheet takes 10 minutes then it's slow". Yeah, because that poor little "server" had a single 100 Mb jack and the owner had a 1.5 GB excel spreadsheet project where he was trying to build a relational database and property valuation tool. Six fucking heavily cross referenced tabs, some with thousands of entries. He was so proud when I asked him to explain what was going on there. He fired me when I couldn't fix his issue without massive changes to either his excel abomination or hardware.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago

    Hey, kudos for finding multiple anti-patterns all in one place like that. I didn't even think about "underpowered desktop as company server" as another pattern, but here we are.

    Sorry you didn't get the contract, but that sounds like a blessing in disguise to be honest.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    It depends on the methodology. If you're trying to do a direct port. You're probably approaching it wrong.

    What matters to the business most is data, your business objects and business logic make the business money.

    If you focus on those parts and port portions at a time, you can substantially lower your tech debt and improve developer experiences, by generating greenfield code which you can verify, that follows modern best practices for your organization.

    One of the main reasons many users are complaining about quality of code edited my agents comes down to the current naive tooling. Most using sloppy find/replace techniques with regex and user tools. As AI tooling improves, we are seeing agents given more IDE-like tools with intimate knowledge of your codebase using things like code indexing and ASTs. Look into Serena, for example.

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