Like I never heard a programmer bemoan that they do all this work and it just vanishes into a void where nobody interacts with it
Where I work, there are at least 5 legacy systems that have been “finished” but abandoned before being used at all because of internal politics, as in, the fucker that moved heaven and hell to make the system NOW got fired the day after it was ready and the area that was supposed to use it didn’t want to.
Right but there was still the need in the moment to get it made, and presumably the programmer could tell it was functioning when they were testing it, and if they were let go and the system was abandoned, that kind of proves that they were necessary to make the system work.
That’s different to having a job as a box ticker, where you write reports all day that don’t ever get read, and you know they don’t get read, and you’re paid to do it anyway.
I think a lot of those jobs could be replaced with AI without anybody noticing right away. Although losing that expertise probably will have long term effects. I’m not saying they’re useless, I’m saying they know as they work that it won’t be paid attention to. That’s what I meant.
