A couple of years ago I found some of the old journals I’d kept when I was a teenager. Some of the thoughts in it were innocuous and silly. Some of them were heavier – had a weight I still carry with me today – especially the passages I wrote when I was hospitalised for a summer.

None of it’s great writing. But all of it helped at the time. Taking thoughts and putting them down into writing helped clear them, structure them, and turned them into a foundation I could build on. It helped me deal with crises and changes.

The magic of writing is this ability to witness the thought process, where somebody has used the piecemeal of words and sentences to turn incoherence into structure.

Where once there was little more than anxiety and an idea, there was now understanding.

Even when it’s your own writing, the thoughts that prompted the writing are long gone – “the past is a foreign country” as another writer put it – and even with your vague recollections your position is that of the reader and no longer the same writer.

Writing is magic even when it’s bad. The process is thinking. It forces structure in place of the anxious jumble of your mind.

It helps others order their own minds by witnessing your thoughts captured in lines.

Machine writing does none of this. It’s ash – the burnt embers of dead thoughts. It captures nothing, structures nothing, orders nothing.

Human writing is as close to mind-reading as we can get. It’s weird, lossy, and simultaneously substantial and insubstantial.

It magic even when it’s bad because it helps you think.

It’s magic even when there’s nobody to read it; the life it gives to thoughts always helps the writer, even when they sit alone with it.

So, I’d just like to echo and extend what Andy Bell wrote on the Piccalilli blog:

This article is mainly addressed to fellow educators, but also to people that write on their personal blogs. You must keep going because people still need us. If we don’t, we lose.

If we stop, we lose

Writing is magic. It’s always been magic. The vikings thought bound language bound reality and reshaped it. It gives our thoughts shape.

Writing is always a gift. Bad or good writing. Sloppy or structured. Planned or improvised. It’s all magic.

Don’t let the mirage of generated, extruded, letterforms, hollow bubbles inflated by machines, take it away from you.

It’s a gift of magic you can give yourself.

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Overview #

• I’m launching a Premium Newsletter that runs in addition to the regular one. The launch price is €25 EUR for a year’s membership, which is a 50% discount off the annual price and a 70% discount off the monthly price. This Halloween launch sale lasts up to (and including) 1 November 2026.
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• If paying annually isn’t your thing monthly subscriptions are available through Patreon, where paid members will be able to access the premium newsletter as posts. Those do not have a launch discount, but there is a trial period.
• I’ve also opened a Liberapay profile for donations. For those of you who want to support the newsletter, podcast, and YouTube channel, but don’t want to buy anything. You’re buying the happy feeling of doing good.

Out of the ‘AI’ Crisis #

Many of us aren’t doing well, even as our bosses tell us things are great.

The “AI” bubble is hitting a lot of industries, and it’s disproportionally affecting those of us who work in these industries over our managers.

Professional educators, people like me who used to help train developers, have seen their businesses evaporate. Teachers, illustrators, voice actors, writers, and translators have all had their careers threatened or even destroyed by “AI” tools offered with predatory subsidies, built using their own work, used without permission by tech companies.

But it isn’t just the creative industries and education that are being hit. Software developers are among the worst affected groups.

Arguing whether the job losses we’re facing in software are down to “AI” replacement, poor free cash flow, or dysfunctional stock market dynamics is splitting hairs.

No matter which take you favour, it’s all down to the “AI” financial bubble one way or another.

You don’t have to look far online to see that many of us are in the middle of an identity crisis.

• Some of us feel complicit in the destruction being wrought by “AI”. Even if we haven’t directly participated, much of it is built on our shared work and sometimes years of contributions.
• Software development was unique. It has similarities with many jobs, but there really isn’t a job exactly like it.
• Tech jobs were supposed to be safe and, well, lucrative.
• Much like the creative and media industries, software development was a bit of a safe haven for those of us who don’t fit in a normal office job.
• Many of us genuinely thought we were helping build a better world.

Even as the noose seems to tighten around software development as an expertise and field of practice, the widespread destruction cause by Large Language Models and image generation models, means we aren’t getting much sympathy, if any.

Arguably the worst hit are those of us who worked on the fringes of tech – straddling the border between software and media or education. Both aspects of our job, both of our identities are in crises, and we have colleagues on either side of us that are frustrated and angry.

Very little of what we’re told by the industry itself makes sense.

Much of what the executive class are saying sounds outright bonkers.

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Make this make sense. #

One worldview shared by many designers and software developers is if I understand it, I can fix it.

If I figure out what makes it tick, what people want from it, how it hangs together as a structure, I’ll see the thing – that one thing – that I can pull out, repair, replace, and everything will be fine again.

Please, let it be just one thing.

It’s never just one thing. “AI” isn’t even just one thing, and it didn’t appear out of nowhere. The system that is tech, politics, and the economy together are what led us here.

But, because the whole is large, it contains multiple systems, each containing its own diversities. There are corners of the software or media industries that are less affected and might even offer ideas for how to go forward.

“AI” is not all encompassing. There are places to go.

But we do need to go out and look for our place in the big picture.

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Finding a future to believe in #

I can’t fix this. We can’t fix this. The world is too large to be “fixed” by individuals or even communities. Otherwise, the globe would be filled with harmoniously competing utopias.

We might not be able to fix everything, but we can make some things better, and those improvements can accumulate.

Damaged doesn’t mean worthless or doomed.

It’s just… not as good as it used to be, which is a feeling we can all relate to.

Our skills may feel useless where we are now, but that doesn’t mean they are useless.

We can act and mitigate, but we need to do it with understanding.

Academic understanding is useful, but we need people understanding – we need our problems seen and understood from our perspective.

And we need honesty.

None of this will work if we just pretend everything is fine, that nothing’s wrong. Avoidance works for temporary problems, but honesty is the only blade sharp enough for persistent wrongs.

Out of the ‘AI’ Crisis – Premium Newsletter #

I’m trying to figure out where I stand in the world, how my career and job has been affected. So, I began to research what others in my position are experiencing.

We are not doing okay, and many of us are feeling lost.

As I wrote above, I can’t fix things, but I can play a small part in helping us feel a little less lost, because that’s what I’ve been doing for myself – with my writing and my research – my entire life.

Even though there is never just that one thing to fix, figuring out how things work and how they connect does help us navigate them.

Sometimes it even lets us make things a little less awful.

That’s why I write the essays I write. That’s why I make the podcast and YouTube videos. That’s why I read and research. Understanding might not fix things completely, but it can partially mend them – make damaged things a little bit less damaged.

This work has always had to be subsidised by other paid work, whether through the sale of my ebooks or my freelance work.

But times are hard for us all at the moment. These days, the more I look for freelance work to pay the bills, the less time I have to for the newsletter or podcast.

What the newsletter offers #

This is why I’m launching Out of the ‘AI’ Crisis – Premium Newsletter. It’s a paid weekly (at least) exclusive newsletter that collects commentary and suggested reading that adds depth and detail to the regular newsletter and video commentary I do.

• It collects suggested reading culled from the links I’ve posted on social media that week.
• I’ll provide additional commentary and analysis on that reading.
• Semiregular extra essays or columns.

The money it earns directly funds my writing and videos.

I also want to offer a fair deal, which is why I’m launching this as a Halloween sale with substantial discounts. This discounted launch offer lasts until 1 November 2026.

There are three ways you can join:

The amount of work I can put into my writing is directly proportional to how well the premium newsletter sells. So, the better it does, the more I can add to the newsletter, podcast, and YouTube.

I really do need your support, so I would appreciate it a lot if you spread the word, and let people who might be interested know.

Developers have been promoted into incompetence #

• My Patreon
• The video version on Youtube.

With the age of “AI” and agents, software developers have been promoted into incompetence.

And it all comes down to comedy and satire.

Sort of.

That probably requires some explanation.

If you’re actually working in an industry – any industry – reading about management theory is often indistinguishable from reading comedy.

Not just because the reality of how you experience “management” is frequently absurd or grotesque, which the theories often fail to address, but also because the alternative to laughing at the mess, is to cry and despair.

When we – as people working in a deeply flawed industry – read about management theory and practice, most of us won’t recognise any of the “good” practices, but we will be intimately familiar with all the “bad” practices. We could even probably list a few more “bad” examples so awful that they have hitherto been unknown to science or sanity.

We’ve all had bad managers. Sometimes we’ve even been the bad manager.

Occasionally you do get a management book that leans into the inherent comedy of the farce that is the reality of the modern corporation.

Like the book Management of the Absurd by Richard Farson. It doesn’t take itself seriously, has a few useful pointers, and is appropriately mocking at times.

But comedy has also made genuine contributions to both the theory and practice of management.

One of those being The Peter Principle, which has its origin in a satirical book of the same name.

The principle it describes is that people tend to rise through organisations through promotions until they reach a level of respective incompetence.

What it means it that you or I might work, say at coding, at an organisation, and we get good at our entry-level job. Our skills get noticed so we get a promotion that involves more important coding. Same skills, just better and more important. It builds on our skills, which is recognised, so we continue to rise through promotion.

Until, that is, we get promoted to a manager position that doesn’t involve coding. This position instead involves a bunch of skills we haven’t practiced at all.

At this point, it’s entirely possible that we might be worse at the managerial job than we were in the entry-level job where we started.

And because we are now incompetent, we no longer get promotions. We’re stuck. Our career has reached a dead-end because we’ve been promoted into incompetence. We’ve become bad at our jobs through no fault of our own.

Why software industry career ladders have been different #

This has especially been a problem for software companies. The job of a software developer has traditionally been very different from that of a manager.

• Coding lends itself to a singular focus during each task. Management requires juggling tasks.
• That singular focus means coding is very light on the kind of monitoring work that can be a big part of management.
• Coding lends itself to unambiguous communication that deliberately strips nuance and ambiguity away. You mean just what you say and nothing else. Management communication is almost entirely nuance and ambiguity.
• Management is all about coordinating unruly “processes” to make sure the work they do is delivering value to the organisation. Busywork of no value is worse than idleness because idleness actually reduces delays and shortens task queues. You can’t react quickly to an unexpected need, if you’re occupied with busywork. But you can react immediately if you’re idle.

Management is all about maintaining a constant vigilance towards the bigger picture: the queues, the delays, where value is being created and destroyed, avoiding both over- and under-optimisation, and coordinating things that are unruly and chaotic.

And, normally, somebody who manages coders rarely codes themselves.

The two jobs are very different. Promoting a coder into a manager frequently means the company is losing a good coder and gaining a bad manager.

The consequences of gaining a bad manager are also quite different from what many imagine. The result of bad management isn’t that work won’t get done, it’s that the wrong work gets done – that everybody is running around, overworked and busy, but none of what gets done has any meaningful value to the company.

Busywork.

This is why many software companies have historically had a separate career ladder that doesn’t involve management. That way the company can give a talented software engineer a respectable career trajectory without losing access to their valuable skills.

“AI” and the changes it has brought to software, have together thrown all of that out the window.

The “agentic” decline #

With “AI”, the software development job involves:

• Constant monitoring of unruly and chaotic “agents”.
• That are coordinated using ambiguous and nuanced language that never seems to be completely “understood” by any of the participants.
• Constant juggling of a variety of tasks.
• And it no longer involves focused work but instead requires outlining, commanding, and specifying.

And, despite managing a lot of code, developers now rarely seem to code themselves.

Software developers is a field so universally recognised as being poor managers that many of the stiffest and most conservative organisations on the planet gave up and just gave them their own career ladder. And we, as a field, have all at once been promoted into management without any preparation or training.

Because the processes a developer is managing are nondeterministic and chaotic – more so than any human – this new management job is in many ways harder than that of a regular manager.

We’ve taken an entire industry that was so-so at its job – at best – and pushed it into outright incompetence.

The result is very similar to what happens when you have a bad manager.

• Busywork increases.
• Nobody has any visibility into where value is being created or destroyed.
• Pressure and stress increase because of the added uncertainty.
• More busywork means less slack in the organisation.
• This actually increases delays, lengthens task queues, and magnifies costs.
• Communication becomes harder.
• Concrete and actionable information becomes scarce.

And nobody has any time left to spare, to figure out what it is they’re doing wrong. Nothing improves.

Because – remember – the consequences of bad management isn’t that nothing gets done but that there’s too much of the wrong work getting done.

That’s not the worst part.

The worst part is that even though this new job many of us have landed in is similar to management, it still isn’t actual management. It’s a new thing made up of some of the worst parts of the managerial job.

The worst part is that it’s automation, and that comes with a bunch of fairly insidious downsides.

Deskilling from automation #

People have been studying the effects of automation for decades. One of the core ideas from that research is the paradox of automation.

Paradoxically, the human contribution tends to become more important the more reliable the automated part gets.

This means that better automation can lead to worse outcomes, because it shifts the work of the human from tasks they’re good at, to tasks they aren’t.

The 1983 paper that originally coined the paradox, Ironies of Automation by Lisanne Bainbridge covered a number of different “ironies” that each independently undermine the value of automation, but the irony that’s the most relevant to the software industry today has to do with the cognitive effects.

One of the concerns she raised all the way back in 1983 had to do with deskilling.

Quite a few of the skills we have are perishable. What that means is that once we stop practicing a skill, some of it begins to fade away. That’s why we talk about “being rusty” at something if we haven’t practiced in a while.

One of Lisanne Bainbridge’s observations was that cognitive skills that rely heavily on both memory and a coherent mental model of the job are more vulnerable to this decay than the skills that don’t.

Human memory relies on repetition and regularity and mental models need to be built and then maintained.

Once automation kicks in, that regularity, repetition, and maintenance disappears.

Memory and mental models are a major part of the programming skill set of a software developer.

It seems likely, to me at least, that the kind of automation presented by agents – where our existing triggers for reinforcing memory and building mental models now instead trigger external automated processes – will lead to the steady deskilling of the developers who rely on them.

This matters because many of the other parts of the new job that developers have – the monitoring and the reviewing, specifically – rely on us continuing to have those skills.

In addition to destroying value through busywork, poor coordination, delays, and longer queues, this new automation is also lowering quality in the long term by removing the skills we need to monitor that quality.

All this, while being charged by the token.

This should matter to us – the developers who are facing a changed industry – because this process is genuinely quite unpleasant to live through.

It takes away the enjoyment we had in the job. It adds stress. It increases the odds of burnout. All at a time when layoffs are still in fashion among the executive class and jobs are precarious.

There are a few things we can do about this. Not many and not all of them great. But we do have a couple of options.

What can you do? #

The most sensible “AI for software development” strategy over the past four years has always been the same: wait and see.

This has been the most sensible strategy, in general, for software firms over the decades.

This industry has a tendency to adopt innovations too quickly and recklessly, before their flaws come to light. Much of it flames out in crappy products.

Then the same people who caused the problem make money again by fixing it.

It doesn’t matter whether it was NoSQL databases, GraphQL, or SOAP network protocols, it’s always been sensible to wait and see what the long term downside to a technology was before adopting. First mover advantage is non-existent when it comes to adopting new techniques or tools for making software.

So, the most sensible strategy is to wait and see. And the second most sensible one is to stop. Just pull back, regroup using regular software development approaches, and then wait and see.

If deskilling is really a thing, you’ll end up with an advantage over your competitors.

If agent-using developers really have been promoted into incompetence, you end up with an advantage.

If somebody discovers fixes to all of these downsides, you can adopt the fixed workflow without ever having experienced the downside yourself, and you end up with an advantage.

That obviously isn’t possible in an organisation that measures volume of work instead of the value of work. And it doesn’t help if your clients are organisations intent on shipping features instead of making good products or services.

In those cases, you need to find ways to maintain your skills and develop those new management-adjacent skills, if they are at all possible. And you need to do it at the same time as you’re working what is probably more than a full-time job.

This is obviously much harder than just doing the job as you’re told and letting both quality and your own skills degrade. And if your self-improvement is seen as taking time from your job of churning out slop, all you’ve accomplished is put your own job on the chopping block.

Good managers and executives with a focus on long-term growth wouldn’t put you in this spot.

So if this is happening to your workplace you already know that the people you’re working for are either themselves incompetent, or are letting their short-term greed harm the company they’re running.

A competent executive would not have created a system that promoted a big chunk of their workforce into incompetence.

This means that, if nothing else, you can take from all of this one hard fact:

Whatever happens next – to your employer, to the software, to the market – is not your fault.

That may not seem like a comforting thought today.

But there’s a good chance that thought might bring you some satisfaction – even joy – over the next two or three years, as events unfold in the industry.

Patreon #

I have a Patreon now.

If you want to support my work and want me to make more of these videos, essays, and podcast episodes, the best thing to do is to become a member of my Patreon.

But I’m also trying to provide a service with my Patreon. With the state of social media and search as it is, keeping up can get quite difficult. There’s so much noise and so little signal.

One of my strengths, because of my background and training, is that I’m quite good at researching and reading, so one of the things I’m offering to Patreon members are regular updates where I recommend things to read, with context and commentary.

I post these reading updates every other day or so, and I’ve got plans for more member-exclusive features, some of which I think might even be a bit exciting, but I’m obviously quite biased.

I’m also open to suggestions, so send your suggestions my way, either on Bluesky or Mastodon, but I’ll try and monitor the comments on YouTube as well.

1. I have a Patreon!
2. Video
3. Audio
4. The full essay

I have a Patreon! #

I’ve been writing since the 1900s (technically the late 90s, but still) on the web, about the web, and, over the past twenty years or so, about software development and publishing.

I’ve been here a while and am not going away.

But I’d like to write more, make more videos and podcasts, and specifically look at the problems we have who are now outsiders in our own industries, whether that’s in software development or in publishing.

For that, I’d like your help.

Hence, a Patreon.

It’s going to offer exclusive material, support tiers, and hopefully a few novel goodies that I’m working on at the moment.

Currently, it has two membership tiers:

1. Supporters, who get access to all the stuff. €7 / month.
2. Patrons, who get access but also mentions in the newsletter, podcast, and are listed at the end of the video. €25 / month.

Any support you can give is very much appreciated.

Video #

Audio #

This broken industry is too big of a problem for software developers to solve alone #

As I wrote in my last newsletter, software developers don’t seem to be doing well.

I can relate. I’ve been unlucky enough to work for dysfunctional software companies and startups in the past, and those dysfunctions have increasingly become the norm across the industry over the past few years.

The response was greater than I expected, both on the newsletter and elsewhere, so I wanted to pause and try to put those responses into context.

I had already written and recorded the next couple of videos and newsletters even before I uploaded the last one, but I’m postponing those, because I think it’s important to sometimes stop and listen instead of constantly lecturing at people.

Even though most of the responses were positive – at least, positive in the sense that they could relate to or recognised what many software developers seemed to be going through – some were less supportive.

This is the internet. Obviously some people are going to be annoying. Most of it you can ignore, but a few of them highlighted the big shift in attitudes towards tech that has been taking place over the past decade.

People aren’t on “our” side any more. Quite a few have gone from having largely positive feelings towards tech – considering it to be a force for progress – to thinking it’s an industry that’s ruining the world.

Tech is the new tobacco.

So, if we’re miserable, the attitude some have is that it’s our own fault for making the world we live in worse.

Or, that we deserve what’s happening to our field because we didn’t do enough to prevent bad things from happening.

Or, our work in the tech industry, no matter what it was we actually did, means we have it coming.

This is what falls out from the now relatively common public sentiment that tech is the new tobacco industry. How that framing has played out in media coverage and discourse, has quite correctly emphasised the abuses, the legal shenanigans, how tech is spending money to manipulate the public, and other strategies that the tech industry seems to have copied from big tobacco.

But the other consequence of that shift in public sentiment is: if your industry gets the reputation of being like the tobacco industry, people stop having any sympathy for those of us working in that industry.

Nobody cares if a sales person in a tobacco company burns out from stress or pressure. If your job is selling opioids to college athletes – “but it’s legal! I’m only helping doctors decide on the correct treatment” – hearing that you’re suffering will only make people smile. Now, finally, a sign that the world is just place.

This is a little bit unfair to many of us for two reasons:

First, the industry wasn’t this bad when most senior people in the industry started. You don’t have to have gone into coding thirty years ago, like me, to have had reason to believe it was an industry with promise. The sentiment shift has been happening for a while, but it was a gradual one for a long time.

Second, quite a few of us have spent our careers avoiding the kind of work we felt was harmful to society. We’ve tried to do good and our careers and finances suffered for it.

Related to this is another idea that came up. Some people seemed convince that we who work in the industry could have prevented all of this, if we’d done this or that. Most of them mentioned unions. If we’d unionised years ago, none of this would have happened.

The problem is that this is almost certainly false.

Unions are largely absent from the software industry in the United States.

But software development is largely unionised in quite a few European countries. Those unions, many of them large and relatively influential, haven’t stopped the job from changing for the worse here in Europe in many of the same ways it’s been declining in the States.

Union participation in Iceland is well over 90% and is almost certainly higher than that in software. We’re still seeing lay-offs in software development, fewer opportunities for junior developers, a push towards using Large Language Models to make up for all those fired colleagues, and a collapse in college enrolments in computer science.

It’s hard to see how software developers and other employees could have prevented this change when it’s fundamentally driven by much greater forces in policy, economics, and deregulation. These are problems that can only be fixed through politics, not unionisation.

But even if we could have prevented it by forming unions in the States, that still doesn’t make it our responsibility to fix a toxic employer.

Think about it this way:

Imagine that a friend of yours is working retail. The manager is awful. The company has abusive policies. The retailer’s overall strategy is to treat employees as disposable and cheat the customers as much as they can get away with.

You’ve shopped there. You know what I’m talking about.

A labour union will absolutely help prevent the worst abuses your friend is facing. It’ll keep them safer while they’re working for the abusive retailer, and it might give them some leverage when dealing with their employer.

But the union won’t fix the retailer. It won’t make the manager less toxic and won’t stop them from micromanaging. It won’t prevent the retailer’s abusive tactics against their suppliers, which will come back and impact your friend. It won’t make the retailer less abusive towards the customers. It won’t prevent lies, monopolistic tactics, mismanagement, financial fraud, or the pervasive outright incompetence of much of the management. It won’t prevent middle-managers from resorting to superstitions or coercive manipulation.

It certainly won’t prevent them from hire a sociopath CEO.

A union can make a workplace safer, fairer, and more equitable. A large union can function as a political force that will help change society for the better. The big reason why Iceland is a largely progressive society despite having had very right-wing governments for most of the past four decades is at least partly thanks to our strong labour unions that advocate for their members.

But once you’re in the situation where deregulation, financial incentives, mismanagement, sociopathic managers, or owner politics have turned a particular workplace toxic, a union won’t suck out the toxins, and it won’t fix that broken employer.

It’s all well and good to talk about the industry as a whole and how it needs to be fixed, but individuals need to think about their own health and their own survival first before they can worry about saving the world.

Fundamentally, it isn’t the job of an employee to fix their employer. If your workplace is a broken mess and that’s causing you to suffer, the sensible thing is to try and look for an exit while you still have your health.

Because you can’t buy back your health once you’ve lost it.

Some of this is down to laziness – people scan the text and react to what they assume you wrote. Sometimes it’s an actual misunderstanding that’s either down to bad writing on your part or poor reading on theirs.

But more and more I’ve had to face the possibility that my thought processes are just substantively different from the way the majority approaches the world.

Occasionally, I get reactions from intelligent people who clearly read the text (or watched the video), understood it, but nonetheless decided to reply with what to me is a non-sequitur at best or wilful misrepresentation at worst.

It’s only when I started to seriously read up on autism that I began to realise that the issue probably comes down to different types of thinking, which isn’t a misunderstanding per se (though, that might be my literal-mindedness again).

I tend to think from the bottom-up. I gather facts, observations, ideas, and references and build up to the overall thought or idea, brick by brick, concept by concept. My understanding of pretty much anything, anywhere – work, theory, society, communications, culture – comes from this very labour-intensive process. And, yeah, that includes any form of social interaction, which is part of why I find it difficult and usually overwhelming.

But most other people seem to operate from the top-down: they seem to start with what’s supposed to be, or with the values they hold consciously or unconsciously, and then pick and choose the facts and observations that support that.

For example, there have been periods when – looking at the news and facts we had access to here in the West – it looked like Ukraine was having a hard time fighting off Russia’s invasion.

But saying so to my dad at the time made him outright angry. To him, by making a simple factual observation of that moment in time, I was effectively declaring support for Russia, which prompted a lengthy explanation that, no I wasn’t doing any such thing. Invasions bad.

Top-down thinking: Russia bad, therefore you look for facts that show that Ukraine might be doing well. Looking for other facts meant you didn’t believe in the “Russia bad” value.

(And, yes, I’m exaggerating to drive the point home.)

Bottom-up thinking: look at the facts and try and figure out what kind of big picture the facts, when taken together, show you. Sometimes things go well. Sometimes they don’t. Values don’t play a part.

Of course, it’s more of a spectrum than a dichotomy. Most things are. Training and education affects your thought processes. Your approach can vary depending on interests, subject matters, and energy levels. But people tend to lean more to one side than the other. I’m very much on the bottom-up end while it seems like the majority is top-down.

This explains why I’m so often accused of being pessimistic in something I wrote when I know for a fact the writing very much wasn’t pessimistic or optimistic. The text didn’t have much of a position on the future course of events at all. I’m perfectly capable of pessimism, but not in these cases.

It happens because, to many people, bad news is pessimism.

This feels like a bunch of hot nonsense to my extremely literal mind. It’s already happened, has systemic causes, and bad things with systemic causes are very hard to unwind. Describing the present can’t be pessimism. The pessimism-optimism axis points to the future not the present.

It’s like calling a report of an earthquake “pessimism”.

This may sound silly, but it is how many react. If you write a report about people who disregarded safety guidelines and built on a fault line, only to subsequently lose their homes in an earthquake, you will get replies like “well, I live on a fault line and I haven’t felt an earthquake yet.”

To them, your factual report of an earthquake elsewhere is pessimism as, when they hear the news filtered through their top-down, value-driven thinking, it sounds more like this:

“I like where I live and hope there won’t be an earthquake. But he’s talking about earthquakes elsewhere so is effectively saying that there will be an earthquake where I live. What a pessimist.”

Replace “earthquake” with “effects of climate change”, or “real estate bubble”, or “deteriorating work environment in the software industry” and I think I begin to understand why I keep getting what feels like very odd responses to what I write.

So…

“My job isn’t like that!”

I wasn’t writing about your job or your employer. Glad you’re in a good place, though. I was making an observation of what’s happening to many people in the industry, how their jobs are increasingly making them miserable, and pointing out that the sensible thing for an individual in that situation to do is to leave. You can’t feed your family if your health fails or burnout takes you out of the job market entirely.

As the airline employees say: “put your own oxygen mask on first before you help others.” Because if you’re unconscious, you can’t help others avoid suffocation.

The mismatch between my mode of thinking and that of much of the rest of the world has always been an issue. People keep hearing things I didn’t say, assume I have value positions I don’t, interpret my general observations as personal criticism of them, and read an emotional dimension in text where there isn’t one.

That last part is especially frustrating because I generally try to make the intended emotions of a text as explicit as I can in the writing without spelling them out directly. I use tone, vocabulary, and style to try and project annoyance, excitement, anger, joy, or sadness as appropriate, and much of the time people choose instead to make up an emotion out of their own biases instead of reading the text.

I could just litter the text with emoji, but that’d be just outright obnoxious and people manage to misinterpret those as well.

I’ve realised that I can’t fix this by adding more detail to what I write. More detail comes across to most people as rationalisation or excuses, and often makes them more sceptical, not less.

Even this, a short note where I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, trying to understand where people’s reactions come from, will probably be interpreted by some through a top-down value-centred lens.

“You’re being judgemental! My reaction to your writing is valid.”

Of course, it’s valid. I’m just saying that I have a hard time understanding it.

“Saying you don’t understand it is being judgemental.”

No, it’s factual. Don’t hear what I didn’t say. My mind works differently. When I say that I don’t understand something I mean exactly that. I don’t mean it as a roundabout way of saying “I don’t understand why you said that,” which is a completely different sentence and thought.

I’m a literal-minded, bottom-up thinker. I generally mean only what I say – except for the occasional very obvious literary or cultural reference that you might be missing, but that’s genuinely your fault, not mine. I can’t read Tolstoy for you.

I’m sincerely trying to understand why people react the way they do because I need to function in a world that for the most part thinks along very different lines than I do.

I do appreciate the effort that it takes to convey a reaction to me, and I’m always grateful for feedback. I’m thankful whenever people take the time to convey appreciation or criticism. It’s valuable to know that I’m not just throwing words into an unappreciative void.

But I often just don’t understand the responses.

Knowing what kind of thinking produced the response is helpful, but only up to a point. Sometimes the reaction comes from an expectation of a shared reality that doesn’t exist, so I just don’t have the context or information needed to understand where people are coming from.

Not without mind-reading, that is.

This is fine as long as people don’t expect me to reply to every response or come up with a witty comeback to every point.

As long as “I don’t know what they’re saying or why, but I’ll like it to show that I saw and appreciated it” remains a valid response, we’ll be fine.

There’s an old saying here in Iceland: “Guð launar fyrir hrafninn”, which could be translated as “God pays the raven’s way”. Basically that feeding ravens will bring fortune.

You can subscribe to the audio-only podcast feed over on Apple’s Podcast app and other apps if audio is more your speed.

It’s also available as a raw podcast feed if you want to subscribe to it directly in the podcast app of your choice.

Video #

Audio #

Overview and references #

People in the software industry don’t seem to be doing too well at the moment. There has been a spate of “I’m leaving my tech job” videos – some because they’ve been laid off, some leaving preemptively – but the interesting action has been taking place in the comment sections, replies, and discussion forums. The replies are where it’s at. The videos themselves vary in quality.

• Software Engineer: I’m Tired of Pretending. (Over 3000 comments!)
• Software engineer driven to insanity from 2026 Job Market. (Almost 10 000 comments!)
• I’m out. Leaving tech behind forever. (1683 comments.)
• It was more fun before AI (1803 comments.)
• I was replaced by AI (1312 comments.)
• YouTube: AI has sucked all the fun out of programming (2132 comments.)
• Reddit: AI has sucked all the fun out of programming. (571 comments.)
• Reddit: I am done with this shit. (1100 comments.)
• I lost my UX career to AI (I’m done).
• Why I Quit my Job as a Software Engineer at Amazon
• Life As a Software Engineer Is Depressing In 2026.
• I Don’t Think I’ll Ever Enjoy “AI” Coding
• Are ALL Software Engineers Burning Out? Thanks to AI…

Facebook’s aborted “AI coder” transition: Mark Zuckerberg had a bold plan to replace Meta staff with AI. Here’s how it imploded.

The drop in new students in Computer Science in Iceland. (The drop was 30%, not 40% as I said in the video/podcast.) Nýnemum í tölvunarfræði og tengdum greinum fækkaði um þriðjung milli ára

Software developers are not doing well #

We’re not doing well in the software industry.

We’ve all sensed it. Things are a bit off.

It’s not just the “AI” financial bubble, or the debates that have been taking place – arguments, more properly – or the ongoing shift in public sentiment regarding the software industry.

I’m talking the fact that people who work in software – specifically developers and user experience designers – are not doing great.

I keep coming across videos of people talking about burning out, being unable to work, and in some cases fairly serious mental health issues. And, obviously, people are getting fired. But often in these videos, those who are doing videos and announcing they’ve been laid off mention that they were thinking about quitting anyway and are now planning on leaving tech entirely.

It’s not just senior people who might have memories and a fondness for how things used to be – stress mixed with nostalgia. It’s also students. I’ve found several videos of students who announced that they had switched majors, had been studying user experience design, but now decided to switch to something else.

With a few notable exceptions, these generally aren’t people who are against “AI” – or, at least, they weren’t against “AI” until very recently.

These aren’t people who disliked the technology from the start, who have had very severe criticisms about the way it’s made, the way it’s forced on people, or have severe doubts about the long-term benefits of applying this technology to our industry.

They seem to have all embraced “AI” at some point and assumed that what they were told was true, that this was the future. “This is where things are going.” This is what software development will be like, now and forever.

After all that, one of the reasons why quite a few of them are leaving, is that they believe this promise. When they’re told that this is the future of the industry, they accept that statement as true. They’ve tried it; understand it and think to themselves: “I see your point, but this isn’t fun any more. This isn’t enjoyable. This is bad for me.”

And decide to leave.

There are a number of systemic factors for why this is happening to them, for why the software industry is an increasingly inhospitable work environment.

What software developers are facing is a case of “incentives”.

Namely, managerial and executive incentives, specifically. The industry’s incentives for those who run the industry give them a strong motivation to try to undercut labour and their workforce at every turn.

And they have been giving it their honest best.

Facebook attempted, for example, to replace a number of their software developers directly with AI tools.

They had to dial that down because the technology simply isn’t capable of what they believed it could do.

But the intent has always been there to reduce the headcount of the industry. A number of incentives for managers and executives that are lined up to push them in that direction.

The fewer people you have working for you, the fewer stock options you have to pay out, the less resistance there will be to watering down the product, collaborating with the military-industrial complex, or helping authoritarian governments control and murder their citizens. Over the past two decades, one of the more effective forces for keeping tech companies in line have been the tech workers themselves who have tried resist corrupt and unethical behaviour. It hasn’t always worked. There wasn’t enough of it. But what little there was it added meaningful friction at several important moments in tech history.

The less influence and power the labour force has, the more power goes to the executive class and the bigger their share of the pie.

If they lay people off that means there are few people working in any given organization doing the same amount of work. That means more stress and more pressure.

As bad as the added workload and burnout is, that isn’t the only change to the job.

There’s also less novelty.

I’ve noticed that even though there’s an increasing number of apps or software being deployed, they’re all either the same “AI” products or “AI” features released everywhere. Or, they are agent-generated clones of existing software.

None of it is novel. It’s almost exclusively old ideas poured into new containers.

One of the problem we have as software developers, and I definitely count myself as somebody with this problem, is that we are a novelty-seeking group.

These changes mean we’re doing more with less time, probably less reward as well, and the job itself is less interesting.

It’s also the nature of the agent automation to feel more like delegation to a clueless junior developer than automation, and that changes your relationship to the work.

In woodworking, the power tools didn’t reduce the woodworker’s emotional investment in what they made. The worker still felt like they’d made that thing out of wood themselves.

Some woodworkers might still use hand tools for a variety of reasons – some of them romantic, some of them, you know, just because it’s more fun.

But having a table saw doesn’t make you feel like you’ve asked somebody else to make the shelf, or table, or chair.

The nature of automation with Large Language Model tools feels substantially different from prior attempts at automation in coding. It’s an abstraction that feels like a delegation, not an automation, and separates you from the output.

That has an effect of making you feel less invested in the output and that takes away much the joy of coding. The flow state is also gone, the sort of focused state of mind that you get into when you’re really deep into solving a problem.

On top of the changes to the job itself, the industry itself has changed as well.

There is more uncertainty. People know there are layoffs every quarter. They know they’re probably next on the block. Or, if they aren’t, they’ll be on the block next quarter instead. They know the reasons for dismissal are going to be arbitrary. They know they generally aren’t going to be able to do anything to improve their odds.

And if they talk about how bad all of this makes them feel, the “AI” true believers will turn around and say that it’s a skill issue. It’s your fault.

There’s a lot of stress, and worry, and pressure in the industry that wasn’t there before.

I suspect that everybody’s suffering. Some are just better at pretending.

This makes people want to get ahead of the lay-offs and quit. Especially those who have some savings.

But even that lines up with the incentives of the executives who are running these companies. People who quit don’t get a nice severance package. People who quit might not be fully vested.

And even if you have savings, you can’t time your quitting based on your finances if you have to get out to preserve your mental health.

Once you’re gone, the company can hire somebody to replace you out of the vast pool of now unemployed software developers at what will probably be lower pay.

Executive incentives are aligned to perpetuate the situation and even to make it worse. From the perspective of the executives who are running a software company, this perpetually precarious situation for their employees makes up for their inability to replace software developers completely with “AI”.

Instead of being able to outsource all your software development to an “AI”, they can effectively semi-outsource it to “AI” and have the automated shitstorm managed by a group of people in a perpetually vulnerable state, who are unable to ask for a higher pay, unable to negotiate for a better position, and unable to say no to unreasonable demands.

It lets management lower costs and strengthens their bargaining position versus the labour class that they’re dominating.

This isn’t a situation that will fix itself when the “AI” financial bubble collapses.

The bubble will pop. It’s much too big to be sustainable.

But that won’t fix software industry employment because the Large Language Models don’t really need to work that well for this process. They only need to sort of work.

As long as you can find more overworked software developers, and push them hard until they burn out trying to maintain a minimum standard of quality, you can keep the “AI”-driven labour alienation going. They can use cheaper Chinese models. Or, if they switch to local models, they can make owning a high-end laptop a job requirement.

“You need to spend $5000 USD on a laptop before you apply for this job. That filters out the ‘AI’-generated resumes, you see.”

Why take on the massive costs of RAM when you can use that cost to lower developer pay by proxy?

The overall dynamic doesn’t change once the costs increase for the hosted models. Those models will just get more stagnant; they might not get updated as often; the training data will be stale; the code it generates will be perpetually on the verge of outdated; and they’ll be run with more errors.

Management won’t care.

The work of making up for that is going to be pushed on the developer adding to their load and pressure.

My worry, based on the research I’ve been doing and looking at the systemic incentives of the companies in the software industry, is that this is probably about as good as it’s going to get for a software developer at a large company in the tech industry.

This misery, this pressure, the overwork, the underpayment, the detachment from the work – this is probably what making mainstream software is going to feel like from now on.

It doesn’t surprise me that the people within the software industry who seem to be spotting the issue and leaving preemptively seem to be user experience designers.

Designers have slightly more training in looking at the system within which the user operates, and it doesn’t take that much of a shift in framing for them to understand where they stand themselves.

But software developers are coming to this conclusion as well, especially students. There was a new story recently here in Iceland that year-on-year, sign-ups for computer science at the universities here in Iceland had declined on the order of 30% decreases every year.

And Iceland doesn’t seem to be alone in this.

People are realising that this is a bad career to be in and an industry that’s hostile to its workers.

I suspect many more people over the next few years are going to be having identity crises on top of the career issues.

“Who am I if I’m not in tech? If I’m not a software developer?”

Because if you’ve built your entire identity around software and tech, around being a programmer, around being a tech person who works to enable “progress” and drive the world to the future, you’re going to have a bad time after being pushed out of that role and seeing your former industry studiously dismantle everything you thought you were building.

I don’t know what we can do, except understand and accept that this is happening.

It’s a horrible thought, but you can’t deal with change if you stay in denial.

I think it might be time – if you’re working in software – to think about a possible future outside the tech industry proper.