Ask HN: What's a Dirty Secret No One Wants to Admit in the Tech Industry?
I'm curious about the unspoken truths in the tech and software industry. What are the dirty secrets that people are reluctant to admit, whether about the industry as a whole or within software engineering?
Those that shame others for using AI tools like Codex, Claude are secretly using it themselves. Whether at work or for personal projects. Nobody wants to admit it, but they are using it.
It's all bash scripts
The business customers don't understand the concept of a dangling else.
120 hours of leetcode prep to get a job centering divs with claude
The average programmer is an illusion. Most programmers working in software, and I’m including not just the tech industry specifically, but all companies that employ or contact for programming are not very good. The relatively few who are outstanding skew the average. You know the joke about Bill Gates walks into a bar? Most programmers were already doing what vibe programmers do with AI now, just more manually.
Most of the work is meaningless and some form of theater, lots of folks are chasing total comp and resume driven development. Many metrics measured are orthogonal to success, and the work that matters to success is hard to measure at all. Complexity for complexity's sake. "Just one more framework|technology|abstraction bro."