Most Software Dev Jobs Are Bullshit Jobs (opens in new tab)

This article assumes that every developer works for an SV-style start-up that requires 80 hour weeks building trivial things. I work in the medical industry, rarely work more than 40 hours a week, take six weeks of vacation a year, and can generally feel okay about my output actually helping people lead better lives.

Of course, yes, sometimes I do a lot of BS things at my job. However, as another comment has already noted, there are few jobs that include some sort of BS at some point. That is why it is called "work."

Software development has proven methods for organizing labor by labor instead of by the whims of the owning class. The most useful software in the world is developed by an ecosystem of communities that resembles anarchist, communist ideas of how society at large could operate. Because of the unique capital requirements for software development, cooperative firms are more viable than in any other industry. We could be doing our work in radically different ways.

Too bad most programmers are allergic to collective labor action.

This article says nothing about how software engineering is a "bullshit job". Her only point that comes close is that she once worked at a job where she was building a pointless website, but that only makes her job in that instance "bullshit".

Look all around you and you see almost endless ways that digital systems are transforming and running our lives, every single one of those needed to be engineered, designed and tested by someone, which could have been a software engineer. I think it wouldn't be an overstatement to stay without software engineers our modern life would be impossible.

I often hear complaining that they are going to leave software engineering because of a flawed list of problems, while the real problem lies in their perception of what the profession should be.

IMO software engineering is about solving challenging technical problems, and not necessarily what is created in the process. A lot of what a software engineer does is not apparent in the end result, but is absolutely necessary to get those programs, systems or applications running.

I think there are far worst professions out there, which in comparison achieve so little to SWE.

Working hours does not make any job a "bullshit" one, and the working hours and the pay grade of a SWE are obviously far better than most job. The parts of the article talks about SWE from a completely biased and personal view, which almost have no value to the reader.

I'm surprised that such article would even be by on HN's first page!

I have had about 10 jobs in my life. About half of them were specific to my career. I have found that I am happier building things that the author might consider "bullshit" (relative to my interests) compared to working on things that I am passionate about. When I have a job doing what I "love", someone inevitably takes a steaming shit on the thing I created and forces me to break it in some stupid way. I would rather do the things I love on my own time so that I don't have to compromise my work to keep food on the table.

Melissa McEwen is spot on. I have had 30h jobs software development jobs for the last 7 years. I make enough money as-is and see no reason to switch to 35h or 40h. I'd rather see my kids more. The only reason to work more would be do found a company again.

Btw I have 30 days of paid vacation per year (which is not unusual in Germany).

The author comes close to making the more obvious leap to "Most Jobs Are Bullshit" but for some reason doesn't quite make it there. But unless you'd like to forage for sustenance in the woods, I'm not sure we have much of an alternative... and at least some dev work is mildly interesting.

Something happened around the time computer programmers started calling themselves "engineers" -- they became self-important. And in doing so, convinced others that they are indispensable.

I tell people, if you don't have a flashing light and a siren, your job is not that important.

My employer tethers me to a work cell phone that I never ever use. Why? In case the web site goes down while I'm not at work. Except that the site is on an intranet. And the entire company is 9-5. If I'm not there, nobody else is there, either, to see if the site has crashed. But somewhere along the line, coding became more mission critical than it really is.

Most of her claims are true for all 40h full-time jobs, which is the majority of all jobs. In that logic, nobody would have kids.

But.. I totally struggle with keeping a life aside to 40-60h work aswell so I wont blame her - I feel the same.

In software it is more true than any other industry. The software we develop has the power to be leveraged across all industries. Much like the wheel, it should not be constantly re-invented.

I truly feel like most software development should be done via autonomous software partnerships not unlike law firms. There would be so much less waste, and I imagine it would be a huge boost to the economy. We don't need any more eye-grabbing, social-media-connected, neopet apps people. Software engineers are building useless and inane shit because that's how incentives work under capitalism. It's a shame.

The article barely touches on the bullshit factor. Sure every workplace has BS people have to deal with, that doesn't matter if it is a tech company.

I would venture a guess that the majority, perhaps vast majority (i.e. 75% or greater), of software development jobs are doing CRUD with data in a RDBMS. Even if you work on UI/front end, its still a CRUD app.

There's nothing wrong with that, just call it what it is. We (the majority) aren't progressing the science part of computer science in any way really. We are making some set of problems easier to be accomplished/solved. They may be data sets in interesting industries or enabling things like health care or medical research but CRUD apps aren't revolutionary.

If anything we are making things more complex with a glut of new shiny tools and abstractions that don't do things that much differently than 15 years ago. The sheer amount of dependencies some tool/frameworks require is mind boggling for basically sending text around over the internet and storing it on disk somewhere. Yes we all like to mock the way the web looked 15 years ago but is the tech underneath drastically different?

I feel like we tend to paint ourselves into a corner sometimes with the tech/tools and then end up remodeling the house to finish painting the room. That is definite BS.

This article brings up a common theme, people don't want to work 40 hour weeks. I see nothing wrong with that sentiment, but I also don't see any wrong with a 40 or 60 hour work week.

Every person on this planet needs to decide how they want to spend their time and the quality of life they want to have. If you want to work fewer hours you will have less money. It's pretty simple.

If you want to do that good for you.

I agree that the link with SWE is not so apparent, but there is and it's a subtle one:

as software engineering, we take pride in researching and leveraging the best and latest to solve our challenges. Time management included. And yet we systematically end up working in overburdened teams and overdue projects.

We surrounded ourselves of IDEs, instant messaging platforms, calendars with reminders, automation and all sort of stuff to be more productive.

And the agile methodologies! The holy Scrum/Kanban! How much time we dedicated to People Management, Release Management, Sprint Planning and the like.

Our schedules should be bulletproof.

And, yet, we work at least 50 hours per week with continuous surprises from the managerial perspective due to disorganization. And we tolerate all of this because we have been told it's heroic, instead of beheading the profitering gluttons that come up with the usual "goodmorning, this unannounced thing must be delivered tomorrow".

This is the bullshit. The cultural hysteria that sacrificing our health and free time is necessary due to some kind of higher purpose

To many people your job looks like BS, but it isn't because someone clearly values the fact that you are where you are and is willing to pay real money for it.

If you think your job is BS, then do yourself a favor and work hard towards moving to a job that you do not think is BS.

Other people's opinions are like the tides and the wind - sometimes they bode well and sometimes they don't.

I think if I had had an easy out I might have left the profession. But I didn't and so I've done a lot of somewhat scary but ultimately really rewarding things: took the hardest jobs I could get, then went out contracting, then founded a start up myself, then got into AI. My career has been fascinating and fun, with some genuine difficult patches. I'm grateful I didn't have a family farm to escape to.

So she wants people to work less and get paid more? To work on stupid things, that aren't critical? And someone is willing to pay a lot of money for you to do that?

Also, her idea that getting paid well means nothing because there are people who make more money left me scratching my head.

So sitting AND standing are both out. Now what? Walking desks? Neutral buoyancy fluid desks? Supine desks?

Is there not a little bit of irony in someone writing this and then posting it on Medium?

workers of the world unite!