Make Them Pay

"Claude, make it even better this time, but use 10 times more tokens than is needed"

NVidia Says, "Thank you!"

Also, I teach people how to code for their own enjoyment and personal expression, not just to get a job:

Milking them sounds good. But one has to know what toll such work takes on the mental health. Nothing comes free.

It only harms your mental health if you give a shit. Do your fun programming at home.

I've seen companies give code quality and especially maintenance attention short shrift for almost 20 years (before that I worked at university research centers). They never cared. But they will blame you if the shit hits the fan. Even if they never gave you time for maintenance

Exactly, so why do you keep giving them your best work? They don't want it.

Funny you mention that as I've been unemployed all summer and am working on an evolution sim to sell on Steam. I quit leading a team at a major insuretech company because for years they had refused to give us time to do necessary maintenance.

Our third party package dependencies were ten years old: total dependency hell problem borne of putting it off for so long. I was no longer to be the patsy "responsible" for this fecal time bomb carrying insurance policy info for millions of Americans.

This definitely seems like a good summer to not be desperately treading water at a shit company like that one. I'd rather dial back spending, drive Uber eventually maybe, and work on something cool.

"Nobody really gave a fuck about our profession"... Honed the craft for a big part of my life. Why? So that I can review 10 PRs of AI slop code a day now. But I'm smart. I make AI do it. Fuck it.

That's the way. They want AI, alrighty then, AI it is.

as Jim Keller in one interview said - if you need 1000 engineers then it is badly design system

I could probably agree with that. I've always said every 5 million line code base is actually a few smaller ones.

cope. AI coding will keep getting better and they will clean up old messy code either future models. i’m sorry but this is cringe nerd rage

I'm actually really hoping that's true. I think most programmers actually hate the job programming, so if AI gets good enough to make it easier then there's more time for us to make weird shit at home with our bare hands.

genuenly as an artist and a programmer this is just so fucking real dude, this part of "no one actually cares about the good stuff that you do" is true, it is in fact just true

I'm also an artist. What kind of art do you do? I'm primarily and oil and pastel painter but do charcoal drawing to study.

i have been learning digital art, like 100% digital even the fundamentals, it's an interesting experience, also your painting looks really cool

True. They don't care. But they are trying to spend a resource that isn't theirs: a developer's personal time. Devs who allow themselves to say yes to this demand will find themselves working nights and weekends to respond to incidents.

LOL, they have to do that now?!

You and I know it has become significantly worse. Almost no firm has a respectable uptime. If you want to sacrifice your personal life doing what you are told, fine. But don't tell impressionable engineers to follow suit.

Yep! I guess it's time that programmers start demanding overtime...and pay raises. Make them pay.

Just say no.

Hahaha, a programming saying, "No?" What fantasy land do you live in man? A world where programmers have backbone and love confrontation? Passive aggressive malicious compliance is more their speed.

If you can't even say, No. How the heck do you think you're going to get more money? You need to say no to even get to what you are advocating for.

Baby steps my friend. Baby steps. You can't rebuild Rome overnight.

This almost brings me to tears. Thanks for the words! As an educator for games programming I want to turn people into appreciators of the art, creativity and craft. I teach em not to use AI for learning and games and only use it when their future employer doesn’t give a single f.

Yep, in fact every time I rant about how bad CS education is I go, "Except games. I think those are taught right." Sadly, I think nobody who goes to college now wants that either. They just want jobs, not a future.

It’s not much but I still have some confidence .. especially because I know people out there who are looking for a deeper understanding and connection. And I’ll keep fighting for them and keep showing others that life is more than a job… Else we’ll lose everything.

Nice post zed. Fyi, you do have to de-stl yourself on those data structures in your bg. Try to do this graphics shit without maps and vectors, they will fuck up your perf and parallelism because of local allocations. Otherwise keep up the fun work. I respect it 👌

No it wont. This code is run one time. Total. It's also a learning project. Telling someone to obsess over performance while they're learning is why people don't learn things. Just let learners be. BUUUT, I'm curious, what would you use instead?

I'd second their advice... personally I always suggest learning graphics code with plain C. Because if you end up thinking you need something outside of C to write proper graphics code it's because you have a misunderstanding on how to write such code. That's not to obsess over performance it's to remove a whole layer of tangential complexity that doesn't help you understand the problem domain properly. You will churn more brain cycles with less return on that investment of time.

@lzsthw Exactly. Std will suck almost all your attention and you will not learn graphics, but just how to do more std. If you wanna be an std expert and solve absolutely nothing interesting then it's ok I guess.

@_rygo6 Wait, you weirdos think that using std::vector requires a PhD in C++? And you being too dumb to learn a simple dynamic array API is supposed to tell me that both of you know what you're talking about? LOL, ok guys. Thanks.

@kechogarcia You should learn how to understand specifically what other people say, and why, and how to have a dialogue with them, before you present yourself as someone others should learn from.

Let me guess, because I don't respect your "authority" you're going to claim that I'm not able to teach someone else and next you'll threaten to tell everyone to not buy my courses. So, to you, the best way to "have a dialogue with" someone is to threaten to destroy their life when they disagree with you? Alright, let me cook up a little video going through your git repo of failed forks and shitty vibe coded projects to make sure I have ammunition to take you out too. Let's see who's got more authority.

good advice. if all they want is slop, then the customer (boss) is always right. your job is not your identity.

Mic dropped so hard it made an earthquake at HQs of AI startups that made their entire purpose as removing humans from the equation. Thank you for understanding.

I think that strategy was really stupid too. At some point all those programmers that AI companies fired are going to be in positions to choose the tools.

vibe coding is a ghetto

And that’s kids why we can’t have nice things

But this is again, the vicious circle closing in. We're not getting out of it if we keep on "making them pay". They won't understand, we will keep on doing what they want. Everyone is unhappy with their work. We cannot be software engineers like we used to be, they do not have results. Not saying in the past, we had a better results. Mistakes weren't as fast and as obvious as they're now. Overall, software engineering is in a regress. It's a recession.

I'm late to the profession but I've been just doing that recently. The irony is the company I work for started complaining about the token budgets now but get this, a coworker who's on a few teams so some of his work can't use copilot, so he's flagged for lack of use. LOL

Yep, can't win so why play?

what hurts me is that there’s also other developers don’t care about the code and/or quality of software, if it works that’s it

do you have any quick "past the basics" programming advice? I did your "c the hard way" some years back, and I've almost completed C Programming: A Modern Approach are there books that go beyond this, or do I just need to start getting out there and building?

Actually I'm releasing a first draft of "From Impostor to Programmer" that covers a lot of that, but I'd say maybe it's time to stop relying on books. What kind of projects have you been making? If none then start off by making copies of basic command line tools, and move on to making your own. Also go check out Raylib or SDL3 and make some little games. Gamedev is probably the one place you can learn a ton of highly techincal information while also being word and having fun.

I've been doing the projects in the textbook, then spicing them up (building menus, enhancing logic, etc). Today it was my own version of fgetc/fputc I'm a devops engineer for a software company, but our C code is wizard-level kernel stuff, so hard to start making PRs thanks!

If your goal is to get into kernel hacking then go through this: Now my info may be out-dated, but this book takes you through making an OS called MINIX. It's probably an older type of OS but doing that should teach you how to make one. It'll be _hard_ but if you take it slow it should be approachable. Also, if you google around there's some free resources like: and The key is to start small, get something to boot, and slowly evolve it. WORST, thing you can do though is try to read all of this, study, then try to use it. Learn as you go is better.

I recently built Gentoo to learn how linux is actually built on C, I wanted to get to the point where I could understand the C Standard as I needed to read from it, and basics like algorithms, SIMD, modular arithmetic I'll definitely pick some smaller projects and get started!

It's the difference between a company where programming is a cost center and where it is the product. If programming is just done as a need to help the main business you're never gonna have people that care about code quality.

What about teammates? Who are fellow engineers as well.

Yeah, the second they were told to "USE MORE TOKENS" they jumped right on it and never looked back. They don't care either.

This shits been creeping in on work so much and its really fucking depressing. I've been coding 30 years, and claude cant do what I do. But its really good at replacing what our juniors do. But I've got 10 years tops left on my career. If we replace our juniors, who replaces me?

lol. That’s exactly what I ended up doing when I was contracting - the big unfuck. And boy was it lucrative. Endless work. So to that guy - yeah - vibe code away. You’re creating a highly lucrative “unfuck” consultancy job for yourself in the future. Make. Them. Pay.

Read the code? If you were good at building software, you wouldn’t have to. The tools exist.

a good way to demotivate yourself completely and still lose that bullshit job eventually

But, you do anyway. The _second_ these companies need a stock bump they fire the programmers. If we're doing our jobs right then most things are automated so they can get away with it. Your good behavior isn't rewarded, so demand more pay and stop giving a shit.

What a sad existence to do this job.

i couldnt agree more. Unfortunately, linkedin ate their brain

Pretty good reason to move to warehouse and game development.

I have this belief that the future of programming is AI slop at work, game dev at home.

Yeah.. But I don't want to break my neck and back sitting 8h in the cubicle and then waste those precious sitting hours. You cannot sit 16h per day.

The solution is to measure quality and govern agentic sw. engineering at scale. We are using the to guide organizations towards digital excellence.

Yeah.

you see my colleague solved it: he vibe reviews code its when not giving a fuck reaches zen levels 🤔

@GeoffreyHuntley And when you’re done making them pay and you wanna get back to working on a maintainable codebase, holler at me because it’s getting harder to find people that still remember how to think for themselves.

jealous!

reminds me the classic “Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things”

man... i needed to hear it! you are my new hero