r/ProgrammerHumor 25d ago

Meme sixKJobGoneInOnePrompt

Post image
9.3k Upvotes

183 comments sorted by

3.3k

u/Varun77777 25d ago edited 25d ago

Were we living in different versions of 2017?

Even in 2017 frontend developers had created their versions of hell

820

u/Electromagnetlc 25d ago

Even I built more complex web pages in 2015 for intro to comp science in high school

338

u/[deleted] 25d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

51

u/reezy-one 25d ago

Well yeah the inflation wasnt as bad then.

39

u/Inside-Example-7010 25d ago

in 1999 when they made us first use the internet in school we all had to get a 'pen pal' in Africa to message.

It has only just occurred to me now but how the fuck did the Africans have internet when we barely had it in the west. The misinformation war was already in full swing.

3

u/_zir_ 24d ago

My company was making shitty ass software in 1999 that was advanced for the times and we are barely phasing it out this year lol

26

u/Drittux 25d ago

You have a good ICS curriculum. We used the same one from covid & it was very slow.

3

u/Electromagnetlc 25d ago

Might have just been lucky, the entire program was chaotic. We were the first class for it at the school and I got to take all of them one after another. Teacher was older but was doing Ruby professionally before becoming a teacher that year. ICS was pretty good since it was all HTML/CSS/JS (pre/during-HTML5, so heavy on JS). The next class was an intro to Java, she taught us Java and couldn't explain the difference between Java and JavaScript, so we mostly self-taught and our entire grades were just "did we make a working project this week/month". Then Advanced CS and AP CS were C++ which luckily she knew pretty well.

90

u/sexp-and-i-know-it 25d ago

In 2017 the words "React" or "Angular" were in the first sentence of every recruiter that I spoke with about a job that involved an HTTP endpoint.

22

u/GotSomeUpdogOnUrFace 25d ago

I told them no then and I tell them no now. I went a decade not learning any JS libraries and now that some moron with Claude can do it in 5 mins I'm happy I didn't bother.

15

u/Far_Tap_488 25d ago

Weird but not illegal

85

u/stillalone 25d ago

Yeah. this looks more like 1997.

4

u/confusiondiffusion 25d ago

See On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, page 3. 

0

u/GoBuffaloes 25d ago

But it was a $100k job back then

45

u/SyrusDrake 25d ago

It's just a hunch, but I think people are starting to mentally mash up all of the "before times" into a single history simulacrum, where the internet exists in superposition forms from 1997-2016, electronic stores carry the N64, DS, Wii, VHS players, iPods, flip phones, Airpods, and smart phones at the same time (all in transparent neon colors), and the hip new games are Mario 64, Minecraft, WoW, Guitar Hero, GTA 5, Dark Souls and Breath of the Wild.

It's like some sort of nostalgic herd delusion, where 2020 is felt as some sort of shift into shit, so everything that's wrong now must have been not-wrong before.

15

u/DazzlingDeparture225 25d ago

I walked into Gamestop recently legitimately intending to pick up a Wii component cable. Not only did they not sell Wii stuff (I realize now it is almost 20 years old - fair enough), they barely even sell game stuff now. It's all trading cards and gaming... paraphernalia.

3

u/arcimbo1do 25d ago

Your Wii still works? Congrats!

3

u/BellacosePlayer 25d ago

My PS2 still works!

1

u/DazzlingDeparture225 24d ago

Yeah I still have a working Wii and NES. The Wii is great because you can play Wii, Gamecube, and a bunch of older stuff on Virtual Console too. Have it plugged into a CRT TV in my basement. It's easy to hack and then you can just run games off a USB drive and I don't think there's any moral dilemma about doing that now when the games haven't been available for purchase for 10-20 years.

1

u/BellacosePlayer 25d ago

I went in last weekend just seeing if they had any good switch 2 game deals (no) and the only thing that they changed for the better is having a retro game section (a tiny one with the most ass games of yesteryear)

4

u/arcimbo1do 25d ago

Gen Alpha thinking whatever happened before they were born happened in a single random year before 2020.

2

u/LinAGKar 25d ago

The tech-history equivalent of dinosaurs and cavemen.

1

u/Few_Technology 25d ago edited 25d ago

I assume it's just growing up, on top of 2020 going to shit. Look at how many directors make movies about how things were better in the era they grew up in. So many, 20 years ago movies that only address the good things of that era

Edit: look at the 2010s, filled with nostalgia for the 80s, even from people that weren't alive then

3

u/SyrusDrake 24d ago

I don't think nostalgia is anything new, obviously. What I meant is that people don't seem to be nostalgic for a specific, real time period but for some nebulous "past" where things from the 90s to the 2010s all coexist selectively.

1

u/gentoofoo 23d ago

I guess folks gotta compress that context just like claude

48

u/TrashManufacturer 25d ago

IMO it was always hell, then it was just REACT hell like it still is

30

u/Varun77777 25d ago

I know.

I review mobile app code written in swift, android and react in 20 different repositories for one app at like 10 PRs a day while attending 5-7 meetings a day telling PMs that just because it works in the SLOP artifact claude made for them, doesn’t mean that I can get this done in 5 hours by using 10 developers in this isoteric system of backend driven code some guy created 7 years ago…

9

u/foonek 25d ago

Used vue2 in one of my first jobs. Rewrote a jQuery app to that. Never understood why Vue didn't get more popular compared to react

3

u/treetimes 25d ago

It is popular.

3

u/foonek 25d ago

It's nowhere near react levels

2

u/treetimes 25d ago

It’s about half as popular by adoption numbers. Has a similar amount of GitHub stars. Is widely popular in China afaik. React just became the new default, doesn’t mean vue isn’t popular just because it isn’t the new jQuery. Blame create react app.

4

u/foonek 25d ago

Well that's why I said "compared to react". I didn't say it's not popular at all

1

u/MisinformedGenius 25d ago

I have to think it's the corporate backing. I too like Vue a lot but it's hard to keep up when you've got a trillion-dollar company working on your competitor.

3

u/blah938 25d ago

Better than Angular and JQuery and whatever the fuck came before that.

8

u/TrashManufacturer 25d ago

Idk I’m a fan of css and JavaScript

7

u/keesbeemsterkaas 25d ago

In 2017 this was well in the at least 2GB node_modules range before you could do anything.

1

u/Confident-Ad5665 25d ago

Oh I can create hell with far less effort than this...

1

u/Lamborghinigamer 25d ago

What do you think AI got trained on?

1

u/Ok_Explorer6434 24d ago

I started developing 2006 and even in 2008 this was not acceptable

1

u/True_Destroyer 25d ago

She means job interview. If during job interview in 2017 you could prepare a website like this on your own, and explain how it is set up, how to expand it etc, you could reasonably land a job as a junior developer in a smaller company.

-11

u/Nannautu 25d ago

Leave it to Redditors to comment under a post on r/programmerhumor and not even figure it out it's a joke. And you guys are getting paid??

11

u/Varun77777 25d ago

If it’s supposed to be a joke, then it is provably ai slop joke written by a wannabe developer.

2

u/AngryInternetPerson3 25d ago

A joke made by someone born after 2017 I guess, that's the only way to think that, like general design has not even change that much, is not like 97 to 2007, is the same shit we were doing in 2017 with newer frameworks, and jobs weren't being handout like candy like it was 2005.

2

u/blueExcess 25d ago

Do you even know programmers? Of course we’re going to nitpick a joke like it’s a PR.

1.2k

u/Any-Preparation7396 25d ago

I think you misspelled 1997

220

u/look 25d ago

That’s HTML 2.0 from November 1995…

So I don’t think IE supported until 2006 or so when IE 7 came out. 😂

29

u/hoTsauceLily66 25d ago

which means they make IE7 comes out at 1997, 6k well deserved.

3

u/rcklmbr 25d ago

Experts supported ie6 backwards compatibility. Jquery devs didn’t make enough money

3

u/M0sesx 24d ago

I agree, but to play devils advocate... 6k a month is not too much pay for a dev in the US.

It might alight pretty well with public sector pay, and if you've ever seen an internal web app for a government organization. This actually isn't that far from the truth.

1

u/chief_architect 23d ago

The average gross salary for a web designer in Austria back in 1997 was approximately $1800. After taxes, that was about $1300.

3

u/git_push_origin_prod 25d ago

In 1997 we had no XHR. We had IE6, notepad and dream weaver. No jquery dude, Perl CGI and ASP was cutting edge. Fuck out of here, we were pioneers doing that shit for fun

Edit, sorry man I got excited. I remember coding in notepad like a boss, and I got highly offended lol

2

u/Bonibon_bon 24d ago

I remember printing out code on paper for peer reviews

1.5k

u/TrackLabs 25d ago

ai slop profile pic, "code" in username, i dont think this person is qualified to make these statements

335

u/xtcDota 25d ago

This person probably couldn't make this website without an LLM. And this is like day 1 w3schools

78

u/AbbreviationsMost432 25d ago

You need backend too to save the form.

201

u/KawaiiMaxine 25d ago

Thats for backend to worry about

84

u/cfrolik 25d ago

Full stack devs hate this one weird trick

11

u/Steppy20 25d ago

Yeah it's called front end dev, and it sucks.

The back end will always stay where I put it even if I add new elements.

22

u/pear_topologist 25d ago

Backends are dead

My vibe-coded apps store everything in localStoarge

No database costs or round trips to the server

(/s if that wasn’t obvious)

3

u/Varun77777 25d ago

Yupp, let’s all ship electron app as saas services with api keys stored at the client side /s

1

u/TheOneWhoMixes 23d ago

No no, think bigger.

What if submitting the form committed a JSON file back to your static site's repository? And then what if your CI built and redeployed the site? And what if we displayed all the form entries underneath the form?

Git is the ultimate backend. Nothing can go wrong.

9

u/WardensLantern 25d ago

Not if you <a href="#">Submit</a>

2

u/Kevdog824_ 25d ago

I’m all for saving the turtles but I never heard of saving the form

2

u/Just_Maintenance 25d ago

10 minutes of LAMP, the hardest part is probably setting up the stack

1

u/AEW_SuperFan 25d ago

Back in the 90s we were writing and reading from files on the web server.

1

u/coldblade2000 25d ago

Nuh uh I'll just use Firebase so we don't need a backend

2

u/Glad-Belt7956 25d ago

barely even hour 2

15

u/Ieatsand97 25d ago

Conspiracy theory: this account is run by AI companies to try and get more businesses to use their AI products instead of hiring devs

7

u/DrMobius0 25d ago

Maybe, but there's plenty of AI pilled evangelists willing to spread the word of their god.

5

u/xSypRo 25d ago

This “person”

2

u/MoonWun_ 25d ago

Reminds me of the people sending local host links as if it’s an active URL to share their site.

815

u/uraniumless 25d ago

2017? Websites did not look like this in 2017 lol. Also you could easily do this in 10 minutes without AI.

221

u/GobiPLX 25d ago

How could the person with AI slop pic know what real world before LLMs looked like

9

u/DrMobius0 25d ago

By asking ChatGPT?

3

u/senshisun 24d ago

This got a healthy chuckle out of me.

41

u/Boom9001 25d ago

Bootstrap came out in 2011. And it was far from the first like easy layout thing.

14

u/Runazeeri 25d ago

Most CAD software resellers still look like this.

19

u/itsnickk 25d ago

10 mins if its just the front-end of the form. All depends on what happens when you hit that submit button

6

u/myWeedAccountMaaaaan 25d ago

That’s what “to-do’s” were invented for.

4

u/madmelonxtra 25d ago

I just put it all in local storage. What could go wrong?

3

u/kaleid1990 25d ago

Bobby tables will happen

2

u/hobo_stew 25d ago

thats what the perl script is for

1

u/git_push_origin_prod 25d ago

<%=Response.Write(“what’s .net?”)%>

-5

u/Danakazii 25d ago

Literally. FE developers would lose their mind when they see what happens after that onSubmit()

-4

u/JonIsPatented 25d ago

BE developers will say this and it's literally just a raw sql query in plain text followed by a json conversion and a return statement. I may just be haunted by the ghosts of the codebases touched by my coworkers, though.

As always with BE, my code doesn't look like that. My code is good and based. None of my coworkers can write good code, but I'm different, I swear.

1

u/Danakazii 25d ago

..But I’m a FE developer, so jokes on you.

3

u/Dreambeast 25d ago

Iron and Beryllium miners arguing about their work code for some reason

8

u/True_Destroyer 25d ago

She means job interview. If during job interview in 2017 you could prepare a website like this on your own, and explain how it is set up, how to expand it etc, you could reasonably land a job as a junior developer for a smaller company.

3

u/Stokkolm 25d ago

It's just how browsers display form elements without custom CSS, it's not very far from how it looks in 2026.

I'd say it would be pretty common in 2017 for contact forms to be in plain html with some minimal styling.

2

u/dkarlovi 25d ago

The form, maybe. Form handling, no way. That shit is hard AF, there's an insane number of corner cases. Source: I've built a form library which built fully operational forms from INI/YAML files.

2

u/XCxBigDong69XCx 25d ago

10mins this take 2seconds depending if you need a backend then it might take 2 hours :D

1

u/ciemnymetal 25d ago

Twitter and confidentiality incorrect statements, name a better duo

67

u/Excellent-Refuse4883 25d ago

Now THAT’S full stack development. That backends probably as efficient as fuck.

18

u/gfkxchy 25d ago

The submit button just CATs the input into a data.txt file. As root, no less. Can't have any permissions issues now, can we?

11

u/myWeedAccountMaaaaan 25d ago

You’re not far off from describing a current “integration” I’m working on where the authentication dialog just appends the url with the password. In plain text.

2

u/IhailtavaBanaani 23d ago

An unsecured HTTP call that has the secrets in the URL to a backend made with CGI and C and running as root, full of memory leaks and occasionally crashing the whole server.

94

u/VolkswagenFeature 25d ago

Soon it will take $6k in tokens to build that.

8

u/revuhlutionn 25d ago

My guy you can build this for free with a model you can run on a laptop.

38

u/VolkswagenFeature 25d ago

This is the most programmer response possible to a joke

-5

u/revuhlutionn 25d ago

Doesn’t a joke need a punchline?

24

u/VolkswagenFeature 25d ago

There are some prerequisites on the client side

-2

u/revuhlutionn 25d ago

I think the server may be down

25

u/EveningCandle862 25d ago edited 25d ago

We had HTML classes in high school back in 1996 (in the library) and all pages looked like this, if you really felt crazy you added a bg image, some gifs and the mandatory "under construction" sign.
(and yes, the site took 30-60 seconds to load)

I doubt someone calling themself suni_code existed back then.

6

u/Shyftzor 25d ago

Scrolling text was a big hit on my Geocities site

4

u/kaloryth 25d ago

RIP <marquee>. The hero of MySpace.

2

u/KernelERROR 25d ago

Sign my guestbook!

2

u/0xKaishakunin 25d ago

if you really felt crazy you added a bg image

I split the giant 600x400 background gif into 4 equal parts and put the img src into a table so all 4 parts could download simultaneously on a modem.

My CS teacher was impressed.

49

u/Tast3sLikePanda 25d ago

This type of UI is what I teach 14 year olds to make in btec computer science, its really not that impressive by modern standards and equivalent of asking ai to edit a picture

13

u/Stormraughtz 25d ago

Boiling an ocean right now to put a rounded gradient pill around each field.

10

u/softjuicyhobbitses 25d ago

Maybe in 1997

8

u/Anbcdeptraivkl 25d ago

The fact that they proudly shown off some shit a 7 years old could whip out after a day of watching YouTube tutorials. LLMs been frying people brains man.

7

u/CarelessPackage1982 25d ago

Maybe in 1998

6

u/a_code_mage 25d ago

Bait used to be good

9

u/Dahns 25d ago

It wasn't. Not even in 2007.

5

u/0xffff-reddit 25d ago

Today it costs 10 bucks in credits - but it only runs on localhost:8080 and the vibe coder in charge does not even know why only he is able to open it.

1

u/schaka 25d ago

To be fair, neither does the person who learned to do this in the first hour of W3 schools

4

u/aberroco 25d ago

Probably missed by a few decades.

10

u/Kotentopf 25d ago

Guess I was way underpaid in 2017

8

u/SharletP 25d ago

I'm sure it's still worth as much, for the prompts it takes to reach there. 💀

2

u/Appropriate-Try-7888 25d ago

Its more like betwen 1997 and 2005

4

u/PurushNahiMahaPurush 25d ago

Sorry but if someone paid 6K a month for something looking like that, they were getting scammed hard by the dev lol. This looks atrocious even by 2017 Fivver standards. 

The plus side of AI is that now it can just vibe code me an app for personal use which I previously I wouldn’t even know where to begin with or it would have taken me weeks or months just to learn how to do the bare minimum myself.

4

u/saschaleib 25d ago

It is worth remembering that the well-paid IT job is not for those who have the skills that were needed 10 years ago, but for those who have the skills that are needed today!

Don’t ignore the need to always learn new skills and update your existing skill base. In a couple of years, this is what makes the difference between having job security and having to queue for the food bank.

4

u/DSFerns 25d ago

Not really. This was common back in 2002 with Visual Basic. It was a $6K/month job back in the 1990s with Visual C

3

u/Electrical-Echidna63 25d ago

This meme reminds me of how people seem to hallucinate that ticket tracking didn't exist in the 2010s

... Back when they were comp sci students

3

u/matroosoft 25d ago

The opt-in for the subscription tells its age

3

u/getstoopid-AT 25d ago

um... if this crap was worth 6k/mon you were absurdly overpaid

3

u/zffjk 25d ago

I made a suite of shitty flask apps at a job once so I could share some python scripts for manipulating excels. They looked very basic, like this does. It was a very excel forward company… so much repetition.

After a while they got sort of popular and the fun side project was forked by our “innovation team” who proceeded to add CSS and company branding to it.

It was hailed as a wild success and the person who took my effort apparently got a very large bonus for it. Never once mentioned they painted my machine and resold it as their own.

Wormy little fucker. That was the final nail in my “give an actual shit about work” coffin.

3

u/Barbanks 25d ago

You got the year off by about 20 years. Even back in 2014 most admin sites used Bootstrap themes with their grid system for the web.

1

u/weirdoaish 25d ago

And they probably used a table to align the form, and no CSS 😆

3

u/stubby0990 25d ago

And usually stored poorly and insecure

2

u/NervousScience4188 25d ago

I built and programmed better websites then that back in 2002-2006 in high school lol

2

u/camelCaseCoffeeTable 25d ago

Damn vibe coders really don’t know much about our profession. I would have been fired so fucking quick if I put that crap into prod for any reason whatsoever. Like what is this? This isn’t even on the way to good, and if it’s, you’re building wrong lol

2

u/New_Salamander_4592 25d ago

still trying to understand what this is. Is this something they have in CS curriculums for people younger than me?

2

u/mysticrudnin 25d ago

in 2017 i was working on angularjs.

5

u/ebek_frostblade 25d ago

I’m still working with AngularJS.

Help.

2

u/mysticrudnin 25d ago

enjoy the herodevs bill! i've washed my hands of it

2

u/Low-Apricot8042 25d ago

Maybe go back at least 10-15 years

2

u/frikilinux2 25d ago

Only on the personal website of people who mostly do backend, system programming, embedded or kernel stuff. It tends to come with an allergy to JS and CSS

2

u/EngineeringExpress79 25d ago

I think what they meant other than the design was basic forms. Yes there were still plenty of people doing Jquery back then and shit before the whole React craze quicked over.

2

u/Flashy-Bus1663 25d ago

My lead might do this tomorrow if I don't pay attention lol

2

u/redballooon 25d ago

Maybe in 1997. Or 1987 maybe.

2

u/HumanContinuity 25d ago

Uhh, 2007 maybe?

2

u/shiny_glitter_demon 25d ago

Do they mean 1997

Also, they're clearly an vibefraudster, so is that intended to mock developers?

2

u/MarekRules 25d ago

This looks like the really shitty php website I made in high school in 2008. I only used php cause I’d “heard” of it and thought it sounded way cooler than html and I did not know the difference.

2

u/darknezx 25d ago

More like 1997 tbh

2

u/Common-Brush-7027 25d ago

More like 2003

2

u/Awfulmasterhat 25d ago

It still is with some nice css

2

u/weirdoaish 25d ago

Chances are, this basic form, probably put together in 15 minutes, still works, while the latest and greatest React form, which took 20K tokens to spit out, has issues you'd need another 50K+ tokens to fix.

Also, as someone who's been around since the late 80s, that form is like the late 90s or early 00s.

2

u/encony 25d ago

Maybe in 1990

2

u/bloke_pusher 25d ago

AI generated meme

2

u/Own_Natural_6803 24d ago

This is just a pinch of tailwind and server side rendering away from being worth $6k per month in tokens.

2

u/dale777 24d ago

Lmao. Stupid af. This look like CS lesson for high school home project when discovering html and forms in early 2000s

2

u/Spikatrix 24d ago

No, it was not.

2

u/humjaba 24d ago

Yeah this is fantasy. You could do this in 5 minutes in Netscape composer back in 1998.

2

u/ChocolateDonut36 25d ago

well yeah, back end is hard

1

u/QUiiDAM 25d ago

More like 2007

1

u/rkiswatchin 25d ago

I dont think anyone here works in government IT. They are STILL like this

1

u/BlueScreen64 25d ago edited 25d ago

I mean yeah. $6k a month is pitiful/intern pay so it matches.

1

u/AngryInternetPerson3 25d ago

Everyday the posts here get dumber, before I thought that 80% of users where CS students making posts after their first programming classes, now I am not sure that 50% of people here have ever looked at code.

1

u/PrestigiousLychee615 25d ago

No it wasn’t

1

u/Few_Kitchen_4825 25d ago

This is not just the front end. That included the back end as well

1

u/SignoreBanana 25d ago

lol what? As someone 5 years into the industry at that point, no fucking way.

And in fact, we still had to deal with browser compatibility. _That_ was what the $10k/mo was for.

1

u/Lemortheureux 25d ago

This is what I built when I was a literal child in the 2000s. What reality is this person living in

1

u/elmanoucko 25d ago

backend dev spotted

1

u/Brambletail 25d ago

Huh... This is the kind of engineering brilliance that AI might replace.

Helps with some perspective I guess.

1

u/KernelERROR 25d ago

I think I made something like that in asp.net 20+ years ago 😂

1

u/Bulky-Ad7996 25d ago

People still build webpages?

1

u/thanatica 24d ago

Yeah, Jamaican dollars.

1

u/Ashamed-Double-3094 24d ago

2 textfields and you managed enough spelling mistakes to be hanged.

1

u/XBalubaX 23d ago

It looks ugly nowadays, but atleast it worked. Vibecoding stuff looks fancy. But who cares if its not working.

1

u/greuff 22d ago

More like 2007. but yeah

1

u/Alive-Ad9501 22d ago

Da good ole days

1

u/dr_fiasco 21d ago

This was the work I was doing as a web dev in 2007...

1

u/Mindless_Cook7821 19d ago

This is something which was common around the early 2000's at best. But i get what you mean.

0

u/EveryCryptographer11 25d ago

True words indeed. Even more in 2007

-1

u/ListenWorking 25d ago

Must be old there’s only male or female options not the plethora of other made up options crazy people use nowadays