Also somewhere in the middle:

"There's been no report of this for a while so we're marking it resolved."

You have imposter syndrome so bad you don't even think you're a real imposter!

Wait until this guy finds out that Elon doesn't actually build the cars

5 years ago everything was moving to TypeScript. Now everything has moved. Developers are still catching up, but it will be one-way traffic from here.

I'm guessing your manager thinks TypeScript is like CoffeeScript. It is not like CoffeeScript.

Also, TypeScript is only the beginning. In the halls of the tech giants most devs view TypeScript as a sticking plaster until things can be moved to webassembly. It will be a long time until that makes any dent in JS, but it will also be one-way traffic when it does.

I mean, let's be real, Rust is really called out because it causes high drama between C devs and Rust advocates, which drives engagement.

It's probably all kicking off in about 10 different comment sections right now

Three things off the top of my head:

• Unionisation
• Way more stuff publicly funded with no profit motive
• Severe sanctions on US tech giants all around the world, with countries building up their own workforce and tech infrastructure. No more east india company bullshit.

“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” said Google spokesperson Alex García-Kummert. “To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Through this, we’re simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers”

There was this incredible management consultant in france in the 18th century. Name eludes me, but if he was still around Google could hire him and start finding some far more convincing efficiencies.

The guy was especially good at aligning resources to remove layers

eh, more like self-important plumbers

Counter-point: Atom is terrible. Its electron competitors are terrible. Big IDEs are terrible. Simple text editors are terrible.

If you are under 50 and chose to learn vim or emacs, there is a 100% chance that you were also forced to learn latin at school and honestly it's not your fault that you turned out this way.

These are all the options. Sometimes all the options are terrible.

I use a Tokonami KX450, which is not the newest but it's the most widely available military-grade model that the average silicon shop is able to customise.

With that in mind you'll want a uranium microreactor to really get that turbo button cranking out the keycodes (the french stuff is cheapest but ukrainian kit is worth the extra), as well as a mercury cooling solution and ideally a set of maglev keys for all the most common letters (NOT backspace; frankly you should remove that key entirely to avoid habits that damage your WPM).

Assuming you've got a solid pair of high-torque power gloves that should get you up to at least 20000 WPM, which admittedly won't cut it if you're trying to keep all the NPM dependencies up to date in a modern bank's transaction processing software, but it's probably enough if you're just doing a bit of data analysis in python.

How did they ask all these random people and not bother to ask a single software engineer?

"Hi is this excuse real, or is it just a sign of an inappropriate relationship between the local council and a dodgy software company that pays more dividends than developers? Oh it's the latter? Okay, thanks."

Even following the guidelines, modern C++ is just a huge pile of half-finished ideas. It goes pretty well for the first few hundred lines of code, and then you hit a very basic problem where the solution is "yes this will work great in C++26, if the proposal doesn't get delayed again".

I'm still confused by this not being cross-platform. It's made in Rust; basically every graphics library is cross platform out of the box, and so is all the file IO stuff. There will be some specialist OS api stuff in places but surely it can't be much.

For once this comment isn't even snark. I acknowledge my ignorance and wonder if someone could explain why the cost is bigger than I think?

Perhaps it's setting up CI and packaging for other platforms? Maybe they want human QA on every release? Maybe the APIs for slick OS integration are more complicated than I realise? (e.g. putting UI in the taskbar)

They are not stupid at all. Their interests are in conflict with the interests of tech workers and they are winning effortlessly, over and over again.

The big tech companies are all owned by the same people. If these layoffs cause google to lose market share to another company, it's fine because they own that company too.

What matters is coordinating regular layoffs across the whole industry to reduce labour costs. It's the same principle as a strike: if the whole industry does layoffs, workers gradually have to accept lower salaries. In other words, the employers are unionised and the employees are not.

This process will probably continue for the next 20 years, until tech workers have low salaries and no job security. It has happened to countless industries before, and I doubt we are special.

I'm sure the next big industries will be technology-focused, but that's not the same as "tech". They won't involve people being paid $200k to write websites in ruby.

It's very common. I'd bet most software projects still fail. I once met a guy who'd been a gamedev for over 10 years at some big companies, and every game he ever worked on got cancelled.

Sometimes these long, poorly managed projects do succeed though. Usually because they launch a beta or get publicly scheduled for release, and the sudden reality check causes someone senior to trim the scope down dramatically.

It might be worth sticking around if you think you're learning things, but impose some personal limits. Don't kill yourself trying to meet some idiot's impossible schedule. Work your contracted hours and no more. Be blunt and unashamed about how long tasks really take. Share your concerns when the month's schedule looks unrealistic, referring back to previous tasks that overran. This is how you learn to one day become a lead who doesn't run shitty projects like the one you're on.

SIGH. Capitalism is a fringe conspiracy theory. Next you'll be claiming that billionaires earn their money through "capital gains" instead of salary, or that every corporation answers to a shadowy cabal of "shareholders" who only care about profit.

Well you won't fool me. Unlike you, I have educated myself by reading newspapers.

Damn, this is a really good write-up.

I came to most of the same conclusions. I really like Rust, I'm glad it exists, I'm amazed by the people who designed it. It is not very good for creative work at all.

Honestly the "rewrite it in rust" meme is actually the use case where it shines: when all the requirements are 100% clear up front, and you just need to make a new version of some software that is much faster and more reliable. That is not what game development is like.

The specifics of C's design could barely be less important. In the 70s it was one of countless ALGOL derivatives churned out on-demand to support R&D projects like Unix.

Unix succeeded, but it could have been written in any of these languages. The C design process was governed by the difficulty of compiler implementation; everyone was copying ALGOL 68 but some of the features took too long to implement. If Dennis Ritchie had an extra free weekend in 1972, C might have a module system. But he didn't, so it doesn't.

Why would you discourage interesting, original journalism over such an obtuse nitpick?

They are clearly criticising the same capitalist structures that you are. They single out the tech industry because the article is about the misuse of tech, not because they think rank and file tech workers are deviants.

Frankly it comes off as fragile and dismissive, and if that's what we're doing we could have just stayed on reddit.

Literally any logic programming language