Post by @gregly@retro.pizza

2026-07-21 11:24 UTC

Nice to wake up to another post by a “real programmer” scoffing at senior devs who are using LLMs because we are mandated to do so lest we are fired for “not fitting into the company culture”. Just wait until you too have been completely burned out by decades of corporate bullshit, attempting to write elegant and legible code only to be essentially told you’re being too much of a perfectionist and should be banging out MVPs as fast as possible to meet unrealistic targets. Just wait until you’ve hit 45 and have officially aged out of the industry for all intents and purposes because HR is looking for the young, energetic, healthy, and exploitable. God, you’re so smarmy and sure of yourself, and you blame us for trying to survive and keep our families housed and fed instead of pointing the finger towards the industry that has been 95% utter bullshit and exploitation since its inception.

Replies (1)

@gregly@retro.pizza 2026-07-21 11:51

Almost all companies don’t give a shit about elegant and maintainable code. They don’t see coding as an art. They never have. They want to see fast results and they do not give a damn how that is accomplished. I cared about going back to clean up and refactor old code, taking the time to perform “janitorial work”, DRYing up code, stuff like that. My reward was being laid off after eight years. I wasn’t seen as important because my work wasn’t customer-facing… and also I was meddling in code that “just worked” and therefore wasn’t seen as needing any sort of maintenance. You think I’m proud of my skills atrophying, being unvalued by the corporate class that pays the bills? This industry taught me to essentially hate coding, or at least hate the sort of coding it demands of us. It taught me that speed will always be valued over quality, and then later when things break because of this, we’ll be blamed for the quality issues regardless. Unless you are _very_ lucky it’ll happen to you too.

Open ##5291779