I’ve been a happy paying JetBrains customer for 10+ years. This year I decided not to renew. It’s just not worth it anymore. I don’t spend as much time as i used to in an IDE. And their AI offerings are not so great. I gave Junie a solid try, but it was always too far behind the competition. I gave Air a solid try, but it was full of bugs. I wish them the best, and I hope they can find a solid product again in this new era.

Sir, I’m 40 and I’m already at the stage of not wanting to do any programming. I used to love this stuff. But after watching all my favourite companies and CEOs turn to greedy villains… I’m just done. How do I survive another 35 years doing this stuff?

Good news! According to some, we don’t have more than 3.5 years in the career path, so that’s 10x less time you have to survive.

I hope they're wrong, I need to squeeze out 6 years for this career. Fortunately I work for a big stodgy old company whose idea of fast tech adoption is measured in years anyway.

Are they hiring and are they ok with remote ;)

Yes but they need people who can hang on to an HN account for longer than a day.

Oh never mind then; too needy and clingy

Now _that's_ the kind of 10x engineering I can get behind!

Go work for companies you like. There are plenty of good people out there making useful software. Or make your own opensource software and put your effort where your heart is.

It’s easy in our industry to burn out doing commercial work with no soul. But it’s not the only kind of work out there.

I worked for a large unethical company in the US that worked to emulate big tech, and took a page out of Jack Welch's playbook (stack ranking etc). I was miserable working there and thinking of changing careers.

I ended up moving to New Zealand and working for a small civil engineering firm that has developers to write internal tools that are used by the engineering team to process their data. The technology I'm working with is a lot more dated, the development processes aren't sophisticated (there are 0 meetings and no attempt at project management) and I took a real pay cut, but I genuinely feel that the software I'm working with is beneficial and has a net positive impact on the world, no matter how small. There is also no on call and I work exactly 37.5 hours a week, on top of all of the workplace culture differences in NZ.

I switched into medical 4 years ago because my top priority was making something that directly improves peoples lives. Early in my career it wasn’t so much of a concern. Now it’s a must. There are many companies like this. Highly recommended if you have the desire

That's amazing, happy to read comments like this on HN. NZ is on the bucket list!

on top of all of the workplace culture differences in NZ.

Not sure if I parsed it right, what did you mean? I am a Florida man, by choice but we'll see :)

There are a ton of ways, big and small, where the work environment is much more relaxed and chill. For example, sick leave and vacation are separate. Recently I had scheduled to take vacation on a Thursday to go skiing, and then I had a cold and had to take Wednesday off (after my coworkers glared at me for sneezing all day). I figured that my boss would expect me to work that Thursday since I hadn't accrued sick leave yet. Instead, his reply to my slack message letting him know I'd be out sick was "hope you feel better so you can ski tomorrow."

People take a lot more vacation and leave, the office shuts entirely for 2 weeks around Christmas, and deliverable deadlines are more flexible.

Sounds miserable.

Where do we sign up?

They've always been greedy villains.

Nah, this is a really dangerous narrative. Shareholder primacy is a pretty recent concept (a fundamentally anti-American one) that has recently gone metastatic and is now completely self-referential.

We've Goodharted the entire premise of the profit-seeking corporation and now openly say that Goodharting it is actually the point. Maybe it should be called Meta-goodharting or something.

Edit: Since large numbers of 1) historically illiterate and 2) "ideas don't matter" type people tend to congregate on HN, it's worth saying explicitly that the takeover of shareholder primacy is empirically visible in all sorts of corporate behaviors.

John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the other robber barons of the Gilded Age have a hearty chuckle and say hi.

If you think Rockefeller (especially) is an example of unalloyed greed, you unfortunately land in category (1) mentioned above.

The problem is not wealth. The problem is not producing massive value and capturing a portion of it.

The problem is thinking that the system-level goal of capitalism is to extract wealth rather than to produce it and distribute it. Of the men you listed, only Vanderbilt supports your argument.

I would be fascinated to hear what value you think JP Morgan created rather than moved around. His company continues to do so long after his death.

If you don't think underwriting and lending (and extended universe of financial services) are legitimate forms of value creation, I'm afraid that a hackernews comment thread won't be up to the task of demonstrating otherwise.

Theres a reason American capital markets and tech go hand in hand after all. Just read the recent Mistral thread about the lack of capital in Europe and why Mistral seems largely third rate in the AI frontiers.

... Aren't we back to a definition, then, that includes tech companies adding value too? All the free services I use every day I would consider value for me. Instant free search, fast home delivery, insightful educational content (90s educational TV had no competition over modern educational YouTube). Etc etc. I see fewer ads than I did in the 90s, too.

I certainly didn't argue that tech companies don't add value.

Rockefeller, the “competition is sin” guy, sure that has nothing to do with greed. His philanthropy had a positive impact but he was still an unethical business person hellbent on stopping anyone else from making money on his turf

At least we got some nice museums and libraries out of them.

Enshittification says hi

Could you elaborate? Goodharting what metric exactly and how was that different earlier?

Isn't the distribution of shares among the population instead of just a few private investors a good thing? Democratizing in a sense, everybody can participate? (If only wealth was distributed more evenly. But that's a different problem it seems.)

I highly recommend Incorruptible by Eric Reis - it makes it clear that shareholder primacy is a relatively recent phenomena, but capital and markets have been corrupting businesses for a long, long time.

He did an AMA here recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477135

There are several business philosophies a person (or a culture) can pick from. The dominant philosophy in the US today is "shareholder primacy" where business leaders believe their only dictum is to maximize shareholder value. This is so pervasive that many Americans (businesspeople and non-) think that it's baked into what it means to be a profit-seeking business, but it is not.

Shareholder primacy took off after Milton Friedman advocated for it 1962. The philosophy that it supplanted (in the US) was "stakeholder capitalism" where businesses explicitly sought to be positive contributors to a much more comprehensive set of stakeholders: their shareholders, their managers, their employees, their customers, their suppliers, and their communities (non-exhaustive).

The central conceit of capitalism is that you can co-opt the individual's greed and, properly constrained by laws and guided by markets, you can reward them for doing things of value for their community.

The question then is what philosophy do you build around that central greed-of-the-individual. Do you temper it with expectations of taking care of people other than oneself? Or do you fan it and unbridle it by saying, "actually, greed isn't the evil that we must co-opt to pro-social ends, greed is actually the pro-social end itself?"

It turns out that if you do the latter, business managers, shareholders, and regulators can collude to create extremely positive outcomes for each other at the expense of other stakeholders. You can save money by dumping your waste product into rivers, you can arbitrage labor away to infinitely far away lands, you can buy politicians, etc. etc.

How might regulators behave differently in a world where people believe a corporation ought to take care of its entire community, versus a world where the literal only purpose of a corporation is to enrich its shareholders? Quite different, probably!

Then all of this stacks on top of the natural "capital flows to capital" dynamic in capitalism which I'd argue is insufficiently mitigated, and you just get this ridiculous feedback loop that piles more resources and positive outcomes into a narrower set of people, while offloading more negative outcomes onto everyone else.

Obviously opting into a different business philosophy doesn't preclude negative outcomes, but I think that more budding business leaders could, should, and would essentially have their careers strangled earlier on if they exhibited antisocial traits if we had a business culture that didn't pretend like this was literally an asset.

Re your second question:

Assuming that shareholder primacy is the only philosophy we could pick from, then yes a market with many public shareholders is better than the alternative. But 1) not everyone is invested in public markets, 2) not all companies are available to purchase in public markets, 3) public markets are demonstrably not good at solving certain types of problems – especially problems that occur over extended time horizons or are easy to externalize off the balance sheet, and most importantly 4) costs-benefits are not zero-sum. You can't generally undo the harms of Company A by investing in its competitor Company B. It would be best if both companies' management felt they had an obligation not to harm their communities even if it could further enrich their shareholders to do so. It would be even better if investors in general felt both companies should have an obligation to take care of their communities or employees, and so companies lived in fear of divestment if they chose to violate their communities.

But in a culture that has opted into shareholder primacy, all feedback signals in this direction are removed. Regulators, investors, shareholders, employees, and the general public all pretty much believe that maximally externalizing harms and maximally capturing benefits is actually literally the way it's supposed to be.

Know any good books on this stuff ?

Stakeholder Capitalism sounds like a much longer term success vector for most companies.

Unfortunately no, though I'm sure they exist.

AFAIK the go-to book on this history is "The Man Who Broke Capitalism" about Jack Welch. I haven't read it though so can't sign my name to it!

A few other threads that might be worth pulling on:

* Dee Hock, founder of Visa, advocated for stuff in this realm. Worth reading some of his writing.

* W Edwards Deming, oddly enough an American who is one of the father's of Japan's incredible manufacturing philosophy, believed in this more expansive idea of wholeness in industry ("Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge" is good)

* Progress & Poverty (the famous Land Value Tax book) oddly enough is what really made capitalism itself legible enough to me to realize the positive-sum nature of what well-designed capitalism can do

* Costco is probably the most obvious success case of a stakeholder-capitalist company succeeding in an ultra competitive market, even while being publicly traded. I'm sure there are phenomenal books on Costco but the Acquired podcast's episode is a fantastic primer.

* "How the Other Half Lives" by Jacob Riis is a snapshot of the precursor conditions that led to stakeholder capitalism. Basically industrialization threw huge numbers of people into conditions even more destitute than the perpetual battle with starvation that predated industrialization. Jacob Riis documented just how horrific this was and contributed to a wave of social, political, and philosophical reforms that culminated in the advent of stakeholder capitalism.

Quantity has a quality all its own

Spend less money, save more money, then retire. I'm retired at 42 and I hardly had a top shelf career, middle of the pack at best. Even if you're starting at zero you can do it in 10 years very easily, 5 if you haven't spent every dime up till now and you are aggressive.

Do you have kids?

The answer to this question seems obvious. There are no 42 year olds that retire by merely "saving and not over spending" when even one child is involved.

I used my words carefully when I said "retire by merely 'saving and not over spending'".

Your brother in law did not merely save and not over spend, he built a business and sold it for a large payout.

Nope. Before the kids we had an incredible savings rate. Sometimes around 80-90%.

Now our spending is much higher but the growth of our investments over the last 10 years has been incredible and outpaced that by a large margin.

For a while I thought some startup stock I had was going to fund a lavish retirement but then AI largely destroyed the value of those shares so we're just planning on the boring index funds.

I said “saving and not over spending”; do folks on HN really have trouble with reading and comprehension?

I said nothing of investments and growth.

My apologies, I thought it was obvious that if you saved 90% of your salary, you would, in fact, then invest it.

Ahh, I see what you mean. When I read the original comment it seemed like a regular save and spend less approach. If some saving in index funds was obvious, I am sorry for my assumption.

2 kids.

> Sir, I’m 40 and I’m already at the stage of not wanting to do any programming.

It's a shame you didn't come to this conclusion 10 years ago!

Holy batman, are you me?? I too am 40 and so sick of this industry after the masks came off and AI greed forced all CEOs and execs to salivate like hungry hyenas.

Find a hobby that doesn’t involve computers. It’s the only thing that will keep you sane in these trying times.

Switch the work mindset off, turn your nose up at technology and go touch grass. I wouldn’t be recommending if it didn’t work for me.

If nothing else it helps reframe your perspective on the world which technology companies as of late have been trying to distort to enrich the dozen or so people at the helm to their own benefit..

I have come to the conclusion recently after trying to use computers as a hobby for years. Hobby coding, games, shows … anything with a screen just doesn’t provide the relief I need. Just takes a lot of time and leaves with a feeling of exhaustion

Oh how the middle class hates having to share with the poor.

We don’t mind the rich flying private jets, but for the love of god don’t put a poor person next to us on a plane.

This but unironically.

The rich smell better than I do. I can learn from them.

Dammit, I don’t think this is going to be as popular as the Steam Deck at this price. I hope they don’t shelf it and I can buy this in a few years for a reasonable price once the big AI labs go bankrupt.

Really cool. Good move on writing your own stack. I was weighing using ros2 or building our own, but ended up going the ros2 route to “save time”. We are working with autonomous mobility robots in nature, so we figured the ecosystem around ros2 would be worth the compromise. It was not. All the time we saved setting things up initially, we are paying for now.

There should exist a minimal, clear, robotics library like what you’ve built. The Flask of the robotics world.

Yeah I tried to use ROS / Gazebo about 10 years ago (it was still ROS 1) and getting it set up was an immense pain. I remember that creating new modules required writing CMake files. Maybe this is better now, but I decided to skip that.

I also agree on the need for a simple, easy, extensible open source framework. LeRobot IMO is some of this but also contains the dataset + ML code. I think Flask is nice because it's so singularly focused on just one thing with extensibility if you need extras.

So I really like the idea. But being an OSS maintainer these days seems... intense.

I too read the book in my younger years, and it helped me a lot with making friends and my career. However, the book itself is filled with some terrible advice for communicating with people. I realized that as an older person. But as a young person it filled me much needed confidence. Like many of these books, the actual advice is crap, but I think it gives people the confidence they need to change something in their lives they are not happy with.

I highly recommend the podcast: If Books Could Kill. They have an episode on this book.

As someone who has listened to this If Books Could Kill episode and read the actual book, I think the podcast is mostly looking for problems where there aren't any. Despite the book's sleazy title ("influence people") it's mostly just basic, innocent social advice.

The core advice of the book is to smile, flatter, avoid all criticism, and feign “genuine” interest. People can sense this performance from a mile away. It is a dated, salesy, conflict-averse (to the point of dishonesty) way of communicating. It is too surface-level to address real, sustained relationships.

If you set a breakpoint inside any engine method in the Sources tab and then do something like:

this.state.treasureEffects.cannonCooldownS = 0

Then you can easily cheat.

Is there any way around this?

Really cool! I love well created web games.

I guess you can describe me as anti-AI. I use AI everyday to write code. I can’t deny that it makes me more efficient. And there’s pressure from the people that pay my bills to produce more and more with it. But I still hate it. I hate the code it writes. I hate what is turning my job into. I hate the main companies behind it. I hate all the resources being poured into it. I hate that most of the real profit and benefits from it will just go on to make more delusional tech billionaires the likes of Zuckerberg and Musk instead of actually being distributed somewhat fairly amongst all of us.

But yeah, I can vibe code the same crappy app as millions of other engineers in a weekend. And we will all pay Apple $99 a year to upload the same crappy app to the App Store hoping to catch some of that AI-wave money.

I’ve noticed a lot of fear mongering with screens and kids. So called “experts” have taken a few correlational studies and concluded that screen time is the devil. Instagram is full of these podcast clips of experts warning parents of the terrible effects of screen time. However, if you actually read any of these papers, they make it quite clear that is impossible to fully separate screen effects from family environment, and effect sizes are often modest.

Giving your 2 year old an iPad with YouTube everyday for 2 hours is obviously going to be bad for them. That’s a terrible extreme. But 20 minutes of Bluey here and there throughout the week is not gonna mess anybody up.

So while I’m glad people are more aware of the negative effects of screen time, I also hate how extreme it has become. Parents, specially new parents are so susceptible to this kind of fear mongering.

Obviously, it is common sense.

But here is the thing: lots of parents (or people in general) are not able to use common sense and they need to be told absolute statements, because they will break them anyway, just like speed limits. So if you told them "absolutely 0 screen time" they will give them anyway some here and there screen time - which is fine. If the "expert" writing books, speaking on podcast or showing up in reels tells you "ah it's fine, here and there is fine, just use common sense" you will have an army of parents thinking that 2 hours YT for a toddler is "here and there" because "hey, it's not 6 hours a day like my neighbor!"

Yup, the advice is geared towards being very conservative, rather than lenient. An example I like to give people is that here in Wisconsin, drinking culture is huge. A friend of mine's father had pancreatic cancer and went to see his doc and wasn't given too much time to live. He was a big fan of having a nice glass of scotch with his fish fry, so he asked if it was still okay to have it, especially with how much time he was given. The doctor was like: "I have to tell you no, it's not okay. But the reason why is because if I tell my other patients that they can have a drink on "special occasions", well, suddenly, Monday becomes a special occasion, and Tuesday becomes a special occasion, and you see where this is going."

I don't think when people say "terror of screen time" they mean 20 minutes of Bluey here and there.

20 minutes of screen time daily is extreme parenting effort. That’s olympic level. I would say the new normal is 20 minutes after each meal.

I'm lucky enough to be able to send my child to day care where he doesn't get any screen time (obviously), so typically his only time he gets to watch something is when we are out and about, and even then we have a rule of timers before he can watch, or if we are at a tap house or something, we've made him actually have to sit and talk to people/friends, ask them how they are doing, introduce himself, etc. Once he does that, he can choose a Pixar movie of his choice or a live concert video to watch.

And even with all that, I still feel guilty due to the reddit mob telling me it's going to destroy his brain.

Yeah I think even 2 hours is an underestimate these days.

According to a few viral Instagram posts it is.

2 hours? you don't know how bad it is out there my friend.

I am conflicted (I am a parent).

First there is the challenge where "sceen time" is a statement that bundles together a whole bunch of different behavior, that affects children differently.

My kids when they watch tv they completely disconnect: I have to pause the tv to ask if they want to eat something or they won't hear me, so of course we drastically limit that one (I didn't have that problem, is that because I watched way more tv than them?)

At the same time, I don't let my kids play any videogame on a tablet or phone because I am a gamer and I recognize that quality of games on phones is terrible, it's an attention grab (there are exceptions).

I do let my kids play videogames quite freely though (nintendo switch, sometimes steam games). The difference in engagement is enormous: they play together, they roll on each other and make jokes and afterwards they create something with their toys that's similar to something they liked in the videogame.

Yesterday my daughter got a new videogame (the new yoshi): she played way more than any other day in her life, but she was DEEPLY invested in it, loving every minute,you could see passion. I sat near her, working from my laptop, she cuddled against me and proceeded to tell me everything she was discovering and her thought process to solve some of the more complex levels. These are the situations that I don't understand: how can that be bad? I did not stop her, I let her play as much as she wanted. It doesn't happen often and it's so rare to see her finding the right videogame (looks like puzzle is her genre!)

What's the difference between doing that for a book you love and a videogame you love?

Screens aren't inherently bad. It's about the quality. I think your instincts are 100% spot on, keep trusting them.

But quality/distractions aside, there are other dimensions to consider. For example, reading does take more effort than most videogames, and that's brain exercise that will make a difference in aggregate (the assumption being that books and videogames are both entertainment, they compete against each other to some degree, and doing a lot of one means you'll do less of the other). So in short, playing videogames a lot isn't bad in itself, depends on the videogames. But on the other hand books have additional positive sideffects on top of the primary effect which is entertainment.

They definitely compete, but reading is somewhat of a "poor hobby" from the social aspect (reading out loud takes away from the experience), but the imagination part of reading is way more than you do in videogames.

At the same time, the "puzzle solving" skill you do in videogames is way more than you'd do in a book, so there is that.

I played Blue Prince with my wife and daughter recently, I think I have 40 pages of notebook written down, along with spy-like photos of everything relevant in the game: that was very intense from the brain perspective.

But I do see your point. However, I second guess myself constantly, it's really hard, especially because I did go through some form of game addiction and my way out was going very deep until I realized I wasn't even having fun (yes, mmorpg are similar to free-to-play games: compete for your attention). I push strongly for single-player pay-once videogames, especially indie games, on consoles and PC. Split-screen coop games without online component are great too, or where the online component is a way to "split screen with people not in your home".

Anyway, thank you for the message, gave me some relief I'm not ruining my kids life, lol.

> However, if you actually read any of these papers, they make it quite clear that is impossible to fully separate screen effects from family environment, and effect sizes are often modest.

The "does smoking caused cancer" question took about 20 years to be settled, I believe between 1950 and 70 or something like that. And yet, a lot of people already knew already in the 20s that smoking does all sort of weird things to your throat. So the common sense take got to the right answer much faster than scientists.

Likewise with screens. Common sense tells us that 1) we FEEL the distractions and the addictions, common sense says that children will too, 2) we KNOW that the companies building these products have an interested in distracting us, common sense says that they will act on it.

But then we have takes like "akshually if you read the papers".

Lots of kids aren't spending 2 hours a day on a tablet/phone, they spend every waking minute on a tablet/phone. When you see someone walking and scrolling on their phone, you can already tell that they do not turn it off, ever.

"That's how I was raised, and I turned out TV!"

- Homer Simpson

better be safe than sorry

I don't think screen free kids won't miss anything by not watching Bluey for 20 mins, OTOH not so great parents will keep pushing those 20 mins further and further with worse and worse content, so I guess it's just easier to say any screen time is bad since the border between reasonable/good screen time and bad screen time is very small.

Screen Time isn't the Devil - but it represents the hellish front-line in the algorithmically driven war for your attention.