It does make you wonder, since you spend so much time in the corporate grist mill, what would happen if you died there and, more to the point, how long would it be before someone noticed?
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Org charts exist only to comfort people who don't actually work. The rest of us learned long ago to ignore that particular pyramid of doom and the rank chasers who dwell within it.
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"AI", or rather LLMs, have destroyed SaaS.
Let's take a look at the layers, who's going extinct first, and who's going to actually survive.
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Why ever finish anything when you can keep billing your unfortunate customers forever?
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Dealing with the dissonance, and the surreal, in the Grand Game of Software Engineering.
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Visited the office for the first time in months.
The fridge has six unopened cartons of oat milk and one ravaged carton of actual milk. HR is running a herbal tea shop nobody asked for. I stole the CEO's Financial Times on the way out.
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It's been years since I put anything up in the iOS App Store but I finally broke the habit.
If you like retro CRTs and travel, for your sins, on Irish Rail then I have something you can waste 99c on.
No ads, subs, or similar garbage.
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You exhaust yourself getting an actual job offer, but then inevitably become a contestant in a beauty parade - trying to get a department to like you, and take you on.
Welcome to Big Corporate. Farewell to self-respect.
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When a CTO happens upon something "agentic" you just know that the org chart is due a thin out, as everyone is fair game for an automated copy/pasting LLM.
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HR thinks leverage is a disciplinary offence.
Developers know it’s survival.
This is about INT, WIS, and quietly knowing how the business actually works, without getting promoted, noticed, or escorted out carrying a cardboard box.
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Although the top answer is usually "as far away as possible", it's a little bit more subtle than you think - especially if you're playing the long game in the corporate hell that is modern software engineering.
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The continual destruction of attention span through videos, "shorts", and now most of what passes for "AI" is gradually destroying deep work too, especially in software engineering, and it's a very bad thing.
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Individualism vs. Collectivism, another disturbing cognitive dissonance to add to the already growing collection when you're a software engineer in the Grand Game.
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Sure, you'll get replaced if what you're doing can be easily automated and requires little to no technical skill.
I guess that's middle-management gone then. Result.
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Despite the astronomical number of downsides to open offices, they still live on, even with zero upsides whatsoever other than offering management endless surveillence opportunities on the worker cogs.
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Remember when you were at the end of an interview and someone "shows you around the office".
That's your "corporate chaperone" and they're probably hiding a lot from you.
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Lying at interview has become so normalised, never mind the faux enthusiasm thing, that it's just commonplace... making many interviews meaningless beauty contest charades.
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A means to an end, a way of reassuring your fragile ego, a measure of self worth? Or, perhaps, just nothing at all.
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Forcing technical types to do managerial grunt work is not only a waste of talent, but also an assault on the sanity. Do you own PowerPoints, come on.
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Admittedly if you work in the corporate dystopia, you probably had your Christmas "Party" in November (when it was cheapest for HR). But, if not, there are a few tips as to how to make the best of the experience.
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What if AI was lurking already in your agile tool, your Jira stack, your backlog of overwhelming complexity...
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Agentic AI is just handing over the copy/pasting to an unsupervised machine, a new label on the snake oil bottle, and just a monetisation strategy for the slop machine. Let's see some innovation instead.
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It's important to remember that the company handbook, the corporate rules and regulations, apply to everyone equally, all of the time.
Except when they don't.
Like when management breaks the rules.
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Management are annoying at the best of times, and incompetent pretty all of the time.
But, their behaviour during the Christmas period, well, it has to be witnessed to be believed. Witnessed, preferably, from a distance.
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Sometimes you get caught up in solving a problem in your 9-5 day job, toiling away in the corporate dystopia. Unfortunately, you have to make sure someone notices, blow your own trumpet, and we all hate doing it.
Free to read.
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Meetings are mostly soporific corporate theatre, but occasionally a manager will accidentally say something concrete - an actual decision, commitment, budget number, milestone, or headcount.
It's up to you to make sure someone witnesses the event...
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Studying to be a software engineering?
In the corporate grist mill of the modern Grand Game, you'll find that most of the time you're just box ticking someone else's SMART goals and rarely writing software.
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The faux-enthusiasm spouted by HR, especially at this time of year, about Christmas ("Holiday") events is surreal, unbelievable, and must surely be driven by amphetamines.
Like much mandatory fun, it's also hugely underwhelming if you give in and attend.
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