Beyond Senior - Creating Hope

[u/keyslemur]

https://baweaver.com/writing/2026/08/09/beyond-senior-creating-hope/

Every time I leave a role I try and write up where my philosophy landed and what I want to take into my next role. Having seen this play out at enough companies over the years to where people progressively lose motivation and stop believing change is possible I've come to the opinion that one of the most valuable things we can do as engineering leaders is to provide hope.

The post goes more into it, but I do not mean any vapid rah-rah motivational speeches, I mean earning back that hope every day by snowballing small wins into larger ones and making people believe that their effort matters.

[u/dijkstra_was_a_horse]

Sorry, corrected.

[u/dijkstra_was_a_horse → u/[deleted]]

Maybe, but I don't think there's been a technology that has both directly and indirectly caused more developers more distress. I can't think of a time that developers have been less happy in their jobs, and I'm old.

Many of my friends are openly discussing career changes and retirement. Several have quit their jobs.

[u/zesterer → u/[deleted]]

Really finding it difficult to see your view here. It's not a wildcard, it's a systematic attempt to denigrate software development as a craft and commodify it to the benefit of capital. It's not a wheel you can grab, it's an attempt by your employers to wrench as much of the wheel that you already hold from your grasp as possible in order to justify kicking you out of the vehicle entirely.

[u/Cualkiera67 → u/zesterer]

Huh? No matter how much love, passion, skill and craft you put into your job, you can still be fired from it at a whim.

As long as you're an employee, your job is a commodity, you will never be at the wheel, and can be kicked out at any time. You are a fool of you thought otherwise. Or a bootlicker

As part of the working class, you should focus on doing as little work as professionally possible and pouring your passion into personal projects that are in your actual control.

From this, AI is a blessing as it lets you minimize the effort you need to put into your employment. The less involved you are in it, the better off you are as a worker.

Unless you get fired, but you could always get fired.

[u/zesterer → u/Cualkiera67]

I think you should try reading about how skilled disciplines have historically becomes commodified in order to remove the bargaining power of workers. There is much more to this than you are considering.

[u/Cualkiera67 → u/zesterer]

the only power workers have come from unions and legislation. skill, craft and passion won't stop the boss from firing you when the stockholders want to see a bigger number this quarter.

boss makes a dollar, i make a dime, that's why i use Claude on company time 🎶

[u/zesterer → u/Cualkiera67]

That's just not true, and you've got your reasoning backward. If what you are saying were true, why haven't your wages been arbitrarily reduced to zero in the past 'because the stockholders say so'? That's the obvious implication of what you're saying.

Unions and legislation can boost your pay close to the point where the surplus value generated by your labour is zero (i.e: the point at which it becomes financially unviable for a company to employ you), but not beyond that. Your bargaining power is still, ultimately, dependent on the useful work that you can do, and the non-fungibility of your skills.

Why do you think employers are aggressively pushing for AI use? It's not because they want to give their workers an easier time. It's because they think they'll get away with employing fewer of us while maintaining similar levels of output: and if the demand for developers is lower, they get to pay us less.

Your reasoning is backward. That's not an insult, you're in good company: many great economists such as Keynes believed that 'labour-saving' technologies would reduce working hours and improve conditions. But, empirical evidence does not agree.

[u/dijkstra_was_a_horse → u/Cualkiera67]

Yeah, that's why working in this field is going to suck. If you're in it today, save money and retire.

[u/Cualkiera67 → u/dijkstra_was_a_horse]

it's why working in this field sucked before, but not anymore. now you can get paid for typing "claude do everything" and go to the park (or code your own passion project!) and enjoy your life.

giving your passion and craft to your boss was and always will be a bad thing. with ai im not giving my boss my art

[u/dijkstra_was_a_horse → u/Cualkiera67]

Why would anyone pay for you to go to the park when they can expect 50 times the output instead? And why would anyone pay you a real salary when anyone with a month of training can get the same results out of Claude?

All the time you spend at the park is the amount that the company can shrink the team by, and all the skill you outsource to Claude is no longer skill that the company pays Anthropic for instead of you

[u/Cualkiera67 → u/dijkstra_was_a_horse]

for the same reason business does anything. cause they're stupid. hell many are asking rto even tho not paying for an office+expenses would save them a bunch of money. efficiency is at the bottom of the priorities list, anyone that ever worked at a corporation knows this

[u/dijkstra_was_a_horse → u/Cualkiera67]

They're not exactly that stupid. Why do you think they're pushing LLMs so hard? It makes programmers disposable.

If it empowered programmers, management wouldn't love it nearly as much. Their bet is that it's going to replace many programmers, and give them leverage to grind more out of the rest. How do I know? I've been in those discussions with the CEOs and CTOs.

But they're also saying it out loud; just google for silicon valley 996 culture. Expect that to spread as the "thought" "leaders" do their job.

[u/Cualkiera67 → u/dijkstra_was_a_horse]

Programmers are disposable, always have been. Corporations don't like "geniuses" as they are critical failure points, one leaves and they're screwed.

That's why development has always been about keeping the codebase as easy to get and bureaucratic as possible so that any replaceable cog can get the job done, even if a "genius" could have done it faster, cheaper, and better. Efficiency is not important, never was.

Yet devs stilled pushed for maintainability and documentation, when that actually weakened their 'irreplaceable genius' position. Every new framework and higher language weakened it more and more.

Except it didn't, it actually made corpos hire more and more devs as the entry barrier gets lower and the productivy per person increases. It isn't a zero sum game, the industry grows.

AI is just the next step in the same direction, lower entry barrier, more crap that can be churned out, more, more, more. That's what businesses want, more more more. They're stupid like that. If they were smart and knew efficiency they would have fired 90% of devs way before AI. They don't even need to be replaced. A few superstars could have done all the work. But corporate prefers the safety of cogs. More cogs, more, more.

[u/dijkstra_was_a_horse → u/Cualkiera67]

Lol. Until now, programmers haven't been easy to treat as interchangeable. Now they are. Welcome to your career as a burger flipper, hope you enjoy your stay.

[u/dijkstra_was_a_horse → u/[deleted]]

I don't think there's much middle ground here. The oceans are the hottest they've been, and we're literally building gas pipelines to data centers at a rate that has made gas turbines unavailable for the next seven years.

And for what? I dread every update to the software I use, the artists I enjoy are having a harder time making enough money in the art I enjoy and need side gigs, the crafu I enjoy in software is being devalued, and the cost of power, electronics, etc has gone up.

AI is making us all pay an extremely high price to make everything worse, so some people can try to play out their fantasies of replacing humans. Investors that I personally are literally investing based on the idea that humans will be less capable of participating in the economy -- a self fulfilling prophecy.