A tech leader’s essay argues greed, not AI, gutted engineering: abolishing apprenticeship, signing layoff lists, and leaving institutional knowledge on a USB stick.
Key Takeaways
Junior engineers were eliminated for output savings, but their real value was becoming seniors who know where the bodies are buried.
The essay introduces Sara, a mid-50s engineer keeping a 2016 cron job alive via a USB stick recovered from her deceased mentor Ben. She runs payroll.
Goodhart’s Law already ate velocity metrics, story points, and DORA metrics; adding AI tooling faster than judgment accelerates the same failure mode.
Leaders signed layoff lists because the alternative was losing the mortgage, the visa, the school fees. The essay names this explicitly, not as excuse but as indictment.
The pipeline that produces Sara is gone. When she leaves, no replacement is hirable because the apprenticeship machine was dismantled three years prior.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters responded primarily to the writing quality and emotional resonance, treating it as a spiritual successor to Peter Welch’s classic “Programming Sucks” essay.
The USB stick / Sara scenario prompted a practical thread: the “two is one and one is none” principle applies, and the real risk is SMEs with no documented recovery path if that single node fails.
One commenter argues the essay’s deeper shift is permanent: knowing syntax “somewhat” is now sufficient because AI levels the spec-and-syntax advantage programmers once held exclusively.
Notable Comments
@TacticalCoder: Flags the reboot problem – how does an SME whose payroll depends on Sara’s USB stick recover if the server literally burns down?
@ksd482: “Coding by hand has become unnecessary” – argues the edge from knowing Java lambdas or streams detail is gone, threshold is now approximate syntax knowledge.
