Programming Still Sucks

Overall reaction to the essay

• Many commenters found the piece exceptionally well written, emotionally resonant, and unusually artful for tech writing.
• A minority argued it’s more of a personal rant or absurdist lens than an accurate depiction of “reality,” useful as expressive art but not journalism or general diagnosis.
• Several appreciated the explicit callback to the older “Programming Sucks” essay and saw this as a spiritual successor.

AI, greed, and job loss

• A central quoted idea: AI is not truly “taking jobs”; broader economic greed and cost-cutting are.
• Some agree, tying this to offshoring, shareholder primacy, and lack of accountability for harm.
• Others push back: say progress, not greed, ultimately automates jobs, and that overall tech jobs and opportunities are still strong.
• There is debate over whether recent layoffs and hiring freezes are genuinely AI-driven or just part of normal cycles.

Juniors, institutional knowledge, and “Sara’s USB stick”

• Strong concern that replacing junior hiring with AI or outsourcing destroys the apprenticeship pipeline and institutional memory.
• “Sara with the USB stick” becomes a symbol of deeply embedded, undocumented knowledge that keeps critical systems alive.
• Several commenters share real-world horror stories: undocumented legacy systems, single points of failure, untested backups, and brittle SME infrastructure.
• Others note that many juniors never become strong seniors, and organizations already function with widespread dysfunction.

Backups, resilience, and SME fragility

• Multiple comments dig into disaster recovery: offsite backups, tested restores, bare‑metal recovery, and the reality that many SMEs simply don’t have robust plans.
• Examples range from 9/11-era manual backup grabs to ransomware incidents forcing complete rebuilds.

Tech, society, and “destruction” narratives

• Some see the industry as actively harming society (social media, AI, exploitative labor chains), driven by profit incentives.
• Others argue this is exaggerated or ignores large quality-of-life gains; they attribute pessimism to age, disillusionment, or selection bias.
• There is recurring discussion of capitalism, greed, rent capture, and whether people are “owed” a decent living.

Careers, burnout, and joy of programming

• Many resonate with grief, cynicism, and burnout, especially about devalued software work and constant churn.
• Others insist programming itself remains joyful, especially in personal projects; the problem is the industry, not the craft.
• Several older developers say early decades were great and later became dominated by MBAs, mergers, and metrics.