How did we come to this?
How did a country that once dreamed of freedom, innovation, and human potential end up here —
in offices we don’t want to return to,
doing work that drains more than it gives,
under leaders who measure our worth by output, not humanity?
Is this what we were building toward —
a world where leaving becomes the only act of resistance left,
where silence fills the space of those who walked away,
and those who remain carry twice the burden?
Is there still a place for meaning in all of this —
or are we simply cogs in a machine that forgot why it was built in the first place.
This (in the specific) is the result of decades of tech workers saying "Unions? That's for blue collar workers. Also, they're corrupt. Also, I'm the Bestest Negotiator Evar, so I can definitely get myself better compensation just by using my leet negotiation skillz than I could ever get as part of a weak-ass collective bargaining agreement! That stuff's for girls, not alpha—no, wait, sigma—males like me!"
In general, it's the result of the closely-related broader trends of the gutting of unions nationwide, and a devastatingly permissive attitude toward consolidations, which leave all our industries with increasingly few, but increasingly large, companies, who are thus able to exercise disproportionate control over the expectations around work, and the conditions of workers.
This is then exacerbated by a resurgence of the American individualist attitude, which says that the most important thing is to work hard so you can get yourself a prestigious title and a fat paycheck—and ignore all the other stuff that's going on; only focus on your career ladder.
Using Rust is a political solution to deskill a generation of coders to replace higher-cost labor with lower
The push for Rust isn't just a technical decision - it's a calculated economic strategy. By forcing rewrites of stable systems in a new language, companies effectively reset the clock on developer experience and expertise.
When a C/C++ codebase with 30 years of institutional knowledge gets rewritten in Rust, senior developers with decades of experience suddenly compete on more equal footing with juniors who just graduated. Your 15 years of C++ optimization knowledge? Now worth less than a 22-year-old's six months of Rust bootcamp training.
This isn't about memory safety - it's about labor costs. Companies call it "modernization" while quietly erasing the premium they'd otherwise pay for experience. The technical arguments serve as perfect cover for what's really happening: deliberately manufacturing a scenario where they can replace $250K senior engineers with $80K juniors.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who's watched other industries. Create artificial obsolescence of existing skills, then exploit the resulting chaos to reset salary expectations and eliminate the leverage that comes with specialized knowledge.
This is why language transitions always seem to coincide with hiring freezes and "restructuring." It's never been about technical superiority - it's about breaking labor's bargaining power.
It's more like replacing 4 C++ software people with 1-2 Rust people, because there's half as much work when you aren't constantly coding foot guns.
The rest really is tin foil hat stuff. I'll believe it if I see it, until then its hard to see Rust as a deskilling. The language requires a different skill is all.
That's an interesting conspiracy theory I haven't heard before. However, I doubt the investment into rewriting large projects makes any financial sense even if the goal is to kick out the experts. Rewrites take years, even if the junior does it for cheaper, and migrations are an existential business risk.
If those 15 years of C++ optimization don't provide an advantage over what a 22 year old with half a year of bootcamp can provide for a quarter of the price, then maybe it really is time to stop doing things in C++.
The unfortunate truth of programming as a profession is that you need to move with the times. If C++ is on its way out (which I highly doubt), it's time to learn Rust. Most Visual Basic programmers moved on, as did most Fortran programmers, and many C++ programmers when Java hit the scene.
When you're making this about labour's bargaining power, you're assuming that young labour is a threat to experience labour. Perhaps that's the case to some extent, as the shortage of people with programming skills that has led to the ridiculously high wages for the software industry is slowly evaporating, but gatekeeping the industry isn't some kind of pro-labour move, it's just selfish.
# Why No One Touched This Post on Economic Insecurity in Aging America
I just read a sobering TIME article about America's aging workers who can't afford to retire. It profiles 69-year-old Walter Carpenter, working physical jobs despite peripheral neuropathy, bad knees and hips - one of the growing percentage of Americans 65+ still in the workforce (19% today vs 10% forty years ago).
Here's what's interesting: This shouldn't be partisan. The systematic dismantling of retirement security (shifting from pensions to 401(k)s, stagnant wages, rising costs) has created a reality where people work 55 years and still can't stop. As someone who's 59 and facing this reality myself, it's deeply personal.
The most telling quote: "What will happen when, as a friend so aptly put it, I become 'too frail to work and too poor to live?'"
I suspect this post got no traction because:
1. It's uncomfortable - forces us to confront the human cost of our economic system
2. Doesn't fit neatly into tech-optimism or "just learn to code" narratives
3. Reveals the failure of the meritocracy myth many in tech believe in
4. Lacks an easy solution (auto-IRAs are mentioned but too late for current older workers)
5. Hits too close to home for many in their 40s/50s who fear the same fate
The discussion we're avoiding is: what happens when a lifetime of work doesn't guarantee basic security in old age? And what does that say about the system we've built?
This is OUTRAGEOUS! If China treated Uyghurs this way, we'd be howling about human rights abuses and demanding UN intervention! Windowless cells, denial of legal counsel, forced isolation, strip searches, suicide attempts - we'd call it exactly what it is: TORTURE. But when it happens on American soil? Suddenly the outrage disappears. The hypocrisy is absolutely SICKENING. How DARE we lecture other countries while locking migrants in cages until they're driven to swallow screws just to escape their misery? This isn't just wrong - it's a betrayal of everything America claims to stand for!
The Theranos Startup Model is just the capitalist equivalent of SSFP:
Instead of making useless shoes, they make useless software or fake hardware.
Instead of meeting state quotas, they hit VC funding goals.
Instead of the government propping them up, investors keep them afloat.
2. Theranos as a “Startup Shoe Factory”
Theranos is the perfect capitalist version of the Soviet Shoe Factory:
Soviet Model == Theranos Model (Capitalist Equivalent) Shoe factories produced small sizes to meet quotas. Theranos faked blood test results to meet investor expectations. Factories cut material costs and quality to meet output goals. Theranos lied about its technology because real innovation was too slow. Central planners rewarded metrics over reality. VC investors rewarded hype over real products.
Factories looked productive on paper, even if they made useless products. Theranos looked like a billion-dollar startup, even though it had no working product. The economy was distorted by planned quotas. The startup world is distorted by fake valuations and exit-driven funding.
Nah. Theranos was a fraud that survived for 15 years (fewer if you count their active period). "Capitalism" killed it off when the fraud became public and investors stopped giving them money.
Capitalism isn't magic, humans can still be fooled. The nice thing about capitalism is that I personally didn't have to give them money. Caveat investor.
They weren't operating as a fraud in the beginning. I'd give the benefit of the doubt that Holmes was just naive about the technical issues given her inexperience. They switched to fraud to buy time for the intended product.
Is it acceptable business practice (aka not fraud) to take money from people when an even laymen in the field can detect the level of lies. Rational human beings don't like being tricked, she was a magician of medicinal claims and knew the showmanship requirements.
Extraordinary claims require some kind of data and facts to back the claim, which there was none. There is no evidence to believe they could develop this technology, optimism yes, but evidence no. It was fraud from the start.
You do know the Soviet System also had money and had the equivalent of 'investors' giving said money to institutions. Money and markets is not what makes capitalsim unique. Hint, it's in the name.
This article is harmful and flawed in multiple critical ways:
Data and Analysis Problems:
Cherry-picks economic indicators while ignoring wealth inequality, racial disparities, and class divides
Uses averages instead of medians, masking extreme inequality
Overlooks crushing student/medical debt
Makes unsupported claims about Gen Z homeownership despite record unaffordability
Ignores gig economy instability and job insecurity
Misrepresents political behavior through oversimplified economic determinism
Healthcare Crisis Omissions:
US life expectancy declined while European peers improved
Ignores mental health crisis among American youth
Overlooks devastating impact of medical debt
Fails to acknowledge value of European universal healthcare
Disregards social determinants of health
Quality of Life Disparities:
Neglects European work-life balance benefits (paid leave, vacation)
Overlooks value of social safety nets
Ignores public transportation and urban planning benefits
Dismisses environmental health impacts
Fails to consider housing stability programs
Harmful Impact:
Perpetuates false narrative of American exceptionalism while ignoring systemic problems
Minimizes serious challenges facing young Americans
Discourages necessary policy reforms by suggesting everything is fine
Promotes dangerous misunderstanding of generational economic trends
Undermines push for better healthcare, worker protections, and social programs
Uses selective data to dismiss valid concerns about inequality and economic instability
Creates false division between European and American youth experiences
Distracts from urgent need to address climate change, healthcare access, and wealth concentration
The article's rosy portrayal of American Gen Z success does active harm by providing cover for continued inaction on critical social and economic problems while dismissing very real struggles facing young people today.
Dailies have the social contract of "you get to talk to the developers every morning, so shut-up the rest of the day", what on theory should be really great.
The only problem is that all the problem people never take the hint, and the well-behaved people tend to take it to an extreme. So on practice it both doesn't get rid of the interruptions, and delay everybody's work due to the latency you need for avoiding interruptions.
People have complained to my boss when I've said the standup was designed to be as short as possible, maybe 10 minutes max, because it was done standing up. It's not called the sitdown. But ours can run over an hour. It's agonizing sitting there for an hour waiting to hear my name among the 99% of noise entirely irrelevant to me.
> It's agonizing sitting there for an hour waiting to hear my name among the 99% of noise entirely irrelevant to me.
More than once I've been asked discretely by my PM if everything is OK with me, because half an hour down a team meeting whose contents is "99% of noise entirely irrelevant to me", I'm too exhausted trying to control my movements to keep my body from telegraphing the fact I'm bored out of my mind. Turns out, to an outside party, I start looking like I haven't slept the night, or am about to get a stroke, or something.
I've found that agile works if velocity is static and used for estimates ONLY and is flat over time. Once velocity is measured as an output metric and there is an attempt to improve it, you've just left agile and are now in a morass.
In the end, very simple Kanban is the way to go if your org can handle it.
Not sure if this is supposed to be sarcasm, but only from the direction of "lock the developers in a room and look what surfaces after half a year".
Picking what to work on for [time] without external additions is a pretty good improvement over getting new assignments daily.
Or maybe you're just doing it wrong, I'm not here to defend anything codified in Agile, I'm just saying that elements of what most people call scrum has been the best I've seen in over 20 years. Maybe I just missed the days of locking yourself in your single office.
I suspect it's more about the way many people experience "scrum".
The basic building blocks can actually work great, it's often how they are executed and how many places go very much micromanagement wrapped in agile's skin while also instituting lots and lots of meetings - total opposite of what both Agile and XP advocated.
Some of the best agile/scrum I ever worked under came from "Scrum master" who explicitly stated that one of his jobs was to see what approaches work and change what doesn't work for the team.
> "Scrum master" who explicitly stated that one of his jobs was to see what approaches work and change what doesn't work for the team.
Ironically, if I were to give one-sentence summary of what the idea behind Agile is, it would be exactly that: "see what approaches work and change what doesn't work for the team". Running through that feedback loop rapidly is the whole point of Agile, and the one thing that actually distinguishes it from typical management methods at the time (as opposed to silly comparisons with "waterfall" boogeyman that never even existed).
Everything else is process - the thing that's supposed to be sculpted. Focusing on that is committing the sin explicitly called out in the Manifesto - putting process over people.
> see what approaches work and change what doesn't work for the team.
unfortunately from my experience, "what works" can vary wildly from person to person. One person wants to be given a task and left alone to understand it and write some throwaway code as part of the understanding process. another person wants to bikeshed it to death first before letting you touch any code. so the first person has to hide the work on the prototype and pretend to come up with the insights for the first time during the bikeshedding session.
Scrum is a bit too proscriptive to allow for that. One of the things that "works" is killing sprints, for instance, but scrum isn't scrum without a sprint.
The problem is that those are a really vague and metaphorical 4-5 lines so it's hard to argue against somebody projecting whatever the hell meaning they want on to it.
I'd argue that "agile" where I have done it and it worked well is at its core about tightening up OODA loops - with code (refactoring+tests+iterative improvements), with customer interaction (frequent interaction/experiment driven tests), with team organization (retros, adapting team processes).
Feedback loops are, however, not mentioned once in the philosophy and neither are any concrete examples of "agile" or "not agile".
Agile as a concept will stop being broken when people stop saying "to me, agile means X". Which will probably never happen - I suspect people will just stop talking about it one day and start using different terms for all the concrete steps that are sometimes filed under "agile" but which actually work.
That's a bit misleading. agilemanifesto.org also hosts a (still short, but way more concrete) Twelve Principles of Agile Software: https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
(Also worth noting that scrum and most of the best known agile methodologies predate the manifesto; the manifesto was formed from guiding principles of those methodologies, not the other way around: https://agilemanifesto.org/history.html)
It is the pseudoscience of Taylorism and 'Scientific management', not the manifesto, which is really just a repackaged form of modern organization theory.
How unsurprising, than, that every little town and village has their own folk religion built around those 4-5 sentences. No wonder this topic is a holy war.
The Wall Street Journal's framing exemplifies how establishment media obscures systematic dismantling of public goods while blaming individuals. Their narrative of "outsized expectations" conveniently ignores that their editorial page championed policies creating this crisis: deregulation, union-busting, and tax cuts that gutted public investment.
The "conventional path to adulthood" they reference required massive public investment - the GI Bill, FHA loans, strong labor protections - which WSJ consistently opposed. Now they blame millennials for failing to thrive in the hostile economic environment their ideology created.
The article's focus on individual choices ("high expectations," "choosing less traditional paths") deflects from the core issue: the deliberate dismantling of public goods and social safety nets that made the postwar prosperity possible. When 30-somethings say "instructions don't work anymore," they're describing the collapse of institutional supports, not personal failure.
The WSJ's perspective represents the interests that profited from privatizing public goods while downloading risk onto individuals. Their "tough economic luck" framing obscures how these outcomes were policy choices, not accidents.
"When he couldn’t put his double major in English and history to use"
"I’m sick of partying. I did that already."
whether or not you are right about the impact of policy choices, you still can't ignore personal responsibility as well. if you party your way through school to get a useless degree, then double down for a law degree you don't (or can't) use for unspecified reasons, i don't see how any policy is going to have a different outcome.
the idea that if all you did was get a college degree, didn't matter in what, and you were on "easy street" hasn't been true for at least 30 years before he graduated, probably never was.
If about ~30% of people are experiencing the same problem, I'd say ignoring the "personal responsibility" part of the equation is valid. At some point of progress, we did something wrong, but not a single country can figure out what that wrong thing was, and how we can revert it.
Frankly, I think these opinion-lite pieces come from the problem how we have moved on from having unified culture and trend setters. Everyone has so many options, possible hobbies, interests and etc. to explore that conventionalism is frowned upon. Even if individualism has been promoted in North America for the past century, there was still things most people agreed on. We just don't have that over here anymore. And nowadays, almost nowhere. Committing to something or someone results in bigger opportunity losses than ever before, so ever chasing the dopamine rush from trying new things is more acceptable than ever.
I don't even know if it's right or wrong. I'm morally conflicted when I think about it. Same as having multiple kids, these topics will only come up more and more as literally every country is diving further into plummeting fertility rates.
When housing became a vehicle for investment instead of a place to live, it all fell apart. The only way forward is to discourage multiple property ownership through very draconian measures.
If you fix housing, you fix commitment, increase birth rates, and improve general happiness.
Housing is definitely in a very tough spot and causes a lot of issues among mostly young people.
I do agree that it would fix a few problems, but I don't think the birth rates will meaningfully increase. It would have a bump, but overall that ship has sailed, people just don't want to have a lot of kids (if any) in today's world.
Housing hasn’t been the biggest problem in Japan since 2000s. Like it is, but not the biggest one. Yet the birth rates have never increased after the initial bump.
People, especially women, have other things they can spend time on instead of giving birth to 3+ kids.
Japan is an ethnostate with unique problems and situations that no other country shares.
I agree with you that other factors, such as cheap international travel and constant bombardment of people's highlights on social media, make it less attractive to invest in having a family.
Still, housing is a huge problem for Western Mediterranean Europe (Spain, Portugal, and Italy) and most of Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Colombia).
Really harsh calling it a useless degree (even though I don’t disagree) but expectations should be in order. Hell, even Harvard MBA is 200k+ in the hole, so without a plan afterwards it may not be the best choice.
If he wanted to work in academia I think it’s a very reasonable choice.
