I feel Your pain. And I have a advice: take a deep breath and leave. Because burn-out is real, because there is nothing that can compensate damages of Your mental health.
You are still a human. You are intelligent. Yes - you are, this is demonstrated by the ability to think critically and independence of your views. So - You are capable to adapt into new environment and into new tech. Search for anything and switch job. Don't wait for a toxic environment to destroy your confidence.
You don't have to quit to start looking for another job, just start looking. You have 10 years experience, how can you say that you have no marketable skills? You could network, go to events, get involved in your local dev communities, show someone else your enthusiasm.
Your company is laying people off because they need something to do. They’re goalless in the extreme and relying on big talk and big action about the latest fad. You don’t have leaders, you have owners.
You must look around and see the lack of men, and force yourself to become one.
> You must look around and see the lack of men, and force yourself to become one.
As a man I need you to expand on this because I'm trying to imagine what concrete actions you think "a man" would do in this circumstance, and of the things I've come up with the only one I think I'm allowed to say on this forum is "quit and find a new job."
What do you mean, allowed to say on this forum? Who is around to stop you from saying what you mean? Is this some kind of dramatic display of your secondary status? What responsibility for you are you asking me to take?
I think parent commenter is using "men" in a manner similar to mensch, as in "a person of integrity and honor" [1]. In other words, "look around and notice nobody is taking responsibility, and choose to be the person who lifts others up." Or something.
It's a weird way to phrase it, in my opinion, especially in this era where we are generally avoiding ambiguously gendered collective nouns... but I'm pretty sure that's the gist. Or, at least, it's how I read it.
"Men" is colloquially used here to mean "decent people", "strong people", "principled people", etc. It's a generic positive description ("Be a man", "Man up").
Younger generations might bristle at this use of the word, and that's fine, but try to give the benefit of the doubt (in fact, it's a rule on HN).
It means you need to become a good wage slave and do more work without increases in pay or equity. Why should you get the rewards of your boss when you are given the ownership of their workload?
Apparently equal in value according to some fools.
Look, it sucks and nothing I say will fix it, but know this: it's never been easier to spot people WHO ARE DOING THE ACTUAL WORK, and never so easy to spot the impostors who care most about looking productive.
The world is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
There are precious few of us left who even still know how to write in our own voice, who have a will to grow ourselves and faith left in human ability. I urge you beyond all urging not underestimate yourself, for you have never been more rare and valuable!!!
If the pay is OK and you're not being asked to do anything unethical, just ride it out. AI is the technology du-jour but one day it will just be a part of the landscape and its role will have stabilized. Certainly worth interviewing and seeing what else you might find, but pretty much every dev organization is in chaos right now.
Sometimes I wonder about even if you are the owners of such companies[0], then there would simply be issues arising in the near future about profitability at one or the other time.
The only thing that I can realistically think through is the fact that because such owners were able to get the personal income and expenses sorted out for a few years and maybe got a bigger house.
But if things change, which realistically speaking, it would. they might get so accustomed to the way of doing things and the shock would be too much in too short period of time.
It doesn't atleast in the moment, seem worth it to me to try to create or chase trends for investors or anything.
I also sympathize with the workers working in said companies like OP. Not sure what realistic solution is out there, the job-market is terrible at the moment for many people and IMO business-making is a hard thing to do and some of us might like to over-estimate ourselves in it too (& side note on under-estimating yourself too)
Accurate estimations of if you should do business or not seems to me to always contain some inaccuracies and you might have to decide your own decision in that and in that sense, job seems better.
You also can't go live without money if one has to exist within society.
I don't know if there is a catharsis to such problem. To me, it seems like an authenticity/trust issue on if you can trust the founders or not but trust by definition is a bit weird and immeasurable and it can always have blind-spots. Maybe the investors investing into such a company trusted the wrong guy but what if the company somehow sells to more people (Ahem SpaceX) and ends up making incredible amounts of money. You would never know and thus you have to just trust the system but the system doesn't work sometimes in a good fashion.
[0]: (We need a better term for such companies which are just trend-chasing and mostly are just built to impress investors rather than try to generate actual profits)
> I don't have any other marketable skills. My coding skills were barely marketable to begin with.
Hot take: moving is more about interview skills than coding skills. Whether you leave or not, start interviewing now. You might end up finding a better place sooner than you hoped.
I look forward to the day that AI slop is embarrassing for executives. We're at an inflection point for the herd mentality moment where they're dreaming of mass layoffs. When AI proves incapable of delivering ROI the wave will roll back.
I've been doing full-stack Dev (mostly Django though I foolishly had a brief moment where I kinda thought Flask was okay then fell for the same dumb thing briefly with FastAPI) for 20+ years and don't feel marketable.
I went from jQuery to a brief dalliance with Angular to HTMX+_HyperScript. Everyone wants full stack Devs to use react and struggle eternally with insane dependency trees and challenging client side state management.
I like to build things that can be maintained in perpetuity by small teams.
I'm full stack for 19 years and I love React, and I've been laid off for 1.5 years now. This is a terrible job market right now.
That doesn't mean you don't have good skills, it just means that too many people have them. It happens from time to time in every industrial, for all skills.
Obviously, I don't have any good advice about how to deal with it.
Capitalism, socialism (what people refer to as communism), and then communism which will never exist because it always stops with the government stealing everything and not wanting to give up power to move on to communism.
What are other economic systems? Not saying there aren't any other ones, I just don't know.
I grew up in ESSR or as it was known locally ENSV. Replying to any criticism of capitalism with an immediate “so you want communism” without even a stopover in complaining about socialism is quite something.
Isn't there capitalism, socialism--which is what people are actually talking about when they talk about communism, and then communism which will never exist?
Not to sound like a hippie but we could just try to be a bit kinder to each other and not put money as the single most important thing above all else. You can run a business to make money AND do it in a way that leaves our world in a slightly better state than you found it.
It’s not a black and white choice of either we jump hardcore into capitalism or all the other way into socialism.
Similarly to OP I work at a company that has a certain set of core values and the moment they have changed irreversibly I am gone out the door.
Which is good, I can't figure out how anybody can see the government owning everything as a good thing for anyone.
If you just look at postal services across the world, as an example, or anything else run by government, they're 100 times less efficient then competitors and their workers always look like they're super-miserable. Imagine if that was the only option.
Well all the things OP complained about are inherently caused by capitalism but I think it’s probably possible to engage in capitalism in a way that is cognizant of those issues and actively trying to avoid them instead of treating them as eh that’s just how business is done
Then I'd suggest, in good faith, avoiding the "Ugh, capitalism" framing in the future. That just comes across as lazy, which doesn't help your point. As exemplified by the replies you got, all arguing about words.
I admit I could've probably used more words but when someone says "it's just business" that is a clear example of how the particular flavor of capitalism we live under has enabled and indeed encourages brushing away any moral and ethical qualms as "it's just business" and as you say, it was quite interesting to see how many people immediately jumped to dictionaries, communism, and whatever else the moment capitalism was criticized.
Capitalism is a moral framework as much as it is an economic system, especially in the US where it is deeply entangled in the Protestant work ethic and prosperity gospel ideals.
Is that in any dictionary, though? Capitalism means capitalism, free market with citizens owning companies.
If it's deeply entangled in the Protestant work ethic and prosperity gospel ideals in the U.S., then what's bad is the Protestant work ethic and prosperity gospel--whatever that might be.
Capitalism is what capitalism does. Name one "capitalist" economy strictly and exclusively defined by a "free market with citizens owning companies." None. There are no free markets. Governments always own some interest in companies, regulate and interfere in markets. Culture and morality always influence class and power hierarchies, and by extension economic systems. The real world is more complex than dictionary definitions allow.
I'm not following you. Capitalism just means free market. Private individuals own the companies instead of the government, and they do that with the main goal of making money.
I can't figure out why that must necessarily mean that those companies can't leave the world in a slightly better place. A LOT of them do, specially small businesses.
I've seen the destruction that socialist governments left even after decades and I went to Cuba and other socialist countries and the government treats them like literal slaves and life is shit over there, with no way out.
Anyways, I know of capitalism, socialism, and communism. I just wanted to see if you meant another form that I wasn't aware of.
Sure, as a theory capitalism is just a free market but I obviously mean capitalism as it exists today and shapes our entire world. And socialism has it's own can of worms, sure.
But what I was responding to in particular with my original comment was the parent commenters claim that "It’s just business" and that engaging in capitalism means you must inherently engage in the practices the OP was complaining about.
> They're taking away our perks bit by bit, like remote office and working without having to clock in and out.
So tired of elites complaining about totally normal working practices in every other workplace on earth. Oh no you have to come to the office and you have to clock in. Join the club with the rest of us. Your McDonald's fry cook has to come to work & clock in, so should you.
At a minimum any commute is extra unpaid time you have to spend for no benefit. For many people where I live, commutes can be an hour or more each way.
Full-time, white collar workers generally are not expected to "clock in" in the United States. It's why certain employees are legally exempt from overtime pay.
To ask exempt employees to clock in and out demonstrates that management doesn't trust its employees, which is a failure on the part of hiring/management, not the workers.
Might be needed if your salary expense has to be charged back to various internal accounts or to external clients. My first job was salaried, but I had to fill out a time sheet so clients could be billed.
If they're on Hacker News, there's a good chance they've never made less than a six figure salary in their entire life, which would certainly place them in the upper 5% of wealth globally. So while it isn't a certain bet it is a safe bet.
And if it doesn't apply to you, it doesn't apply to you. There are plenty of people here it does apply to.
Yeah... that's 1 in 20? The smart kid in the back of the class grew up? I'm not sure who you were expecting that person to become.
If the barrier to becoming an "elite" is that low and you still consider 6-figures a meaningful benchmark in a world that sells big macs for 10 bucks, are you also calling anyone running even a modestly successful small business "elite"?
I'm not even sure I'm engaging with a meaningful political statement here. The barriers to this level of "success" are more reliably psychological, not systemic. You're basically upset at anyone with a career. There are definitely things we need to do to help those struggling, but yelling here is slacktivism.
Yes. Having more wealth than the vast majority of people makes you an elite.
I don't know why you think making a 100k or higher salary is just "Big Mac money," but you're either larping or exactly the kind of out of touch I'm talking about.
> Ressentiment: A chronic, festering state of mind. It is a lasting mental attitude where the suppressed emotions of envy and spite continually replay in the mind, leading to a general, cynical worldview.
lol not even close. I have a positive outlook and think the world can be a better place. I just think that world will involve most people working together in workspaces and clocking in. There will always be some professions & situations where that's not the right call but I have no reason to believe SW dev will always be one of them.
I feel Your pain. And I have a advice: take a deep breath and leave. Because burn-out is real, because there is nothing that can compensate damages of Your mental health.
You are still a human. You are intelligent. Yes - you are, this is demonstrated by the ability to think critically and independence of your views. So - You are capable to adapt into new environment and into new tech. Search for anything and switch job. Don't wait for a toxic environment to destroy your confidence.
There's nothing but sand at the end of that road, start building something that you own.
fear is a reaction, courage is a choice.
You don't have to quit to start looking for another job, just start looking. You have 10 years experience, how can you say that you have no marketable skills? You could network, go to events, get involved in your local dev communities, show someone else your enthusiasm.
Your company is laying people off because they need something to do. They’re goalless in the extreme and relying on big talk and big action about the latest fad. You don’t have leaders, you have owners.
You must look around and see the lack of men, and force yourself to become one.
> You must look around and see the lack of men, and force yourself to become one.
As a man I need you to expand on this because I'm trying to imagine what concrete actions you think "a man" would do in this circumstance, and of the things I've come up with the only one I think I'm allowed to say on this forum is "quit and find a new job."
What do you mean, allowed to say on this forum? Who is around to stop you from saying what you mean? Is this some kind of dramatic display of your secondary status? What responsibility for you are you asking me to take?
> You must look around and see the lack of men, and force yourself to become one.
What exactly does this mean?
I think parent commenter is using "men" in a manner similar to mensch, as in "a person of integrity and honor" [1]. In other words, "look around and notice nobody is taking responsibility, and choose to be the person who lifts others up." Or something.
It's a weird way to phrase it, in my opinion, especially in this era where we are generally avoiding ambiguously gendered collective nouns... but I'm pretty sure that's the gist. Or, at least, it's how I read it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensch
"Men" is colloquially used here to mean "decent people", "strong people", "principled people", etc. It's a generic positive description ("Be a man", "Man up").
Younger generations might bristle at this use of the word, and that's fine, but try to give the benefit of the doubt (in fact, it's a rule on HN).
I'm giggling a little, imagining a company run almost entirely by raccoons... and the OP sitting there as the sole human, lamenting the lack of men.
Raccoons at least have some sort of intelligence. Leeches are a better animal comparison IMO
It means you need to become a good wage slave and do more work without increases in pay or equity. Why should you get the rewards of your boss when you are given the ownership of their workload?
Apparently equal in value according to some fools.
Look, it sucks and nothing I say will fix it, but know this: it's never been easier to spot people WHO ARE DOING THE ACTUAL WORK, and never so easy to spot the impostors who care most about looking productive.
The world is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
There are precious few of us left who even still know how to write in our own voice, who have a will to grow ourselves and faith left in human ability. I urge you beyond all urging not underestimate yourself, for you have never been more rare and valuable!!!
How do you know your skills aren't marketable if you don't go out and market them? Go apply around. You don't necessarily need to leave to do it.
Your company never had humanity. Thinking it did is mistake number 1.
If the pay is OK and you're not being asked to do anything unethical, just ride it out. AI is the technology du-jour but one day it will just be a part of the landscape and its role will have stabilized. Certainly worth interviewing and seeing what else you might find, but pretty much every dev organization is in chaos right now.
Anywhere! Just leave! :)
Unionize.
Sometimes I wonder about even if you are the owners of such companies[0], then there would simply be issues arising in the near future about profitability at one or the other time.
The only thing that I can realistically think through is the fact that because such owners were able to get the personal income and expenses sorted out for a few years and maybe got a bigger house.
But if things change, which realistically speaking, it would. they might get so accustomed to the way of doing things and the shock would be too much in too short period of time.
It doesn't atleast in the moment, seem worth it to me to try to create or chase trends for investors or anything.
I also sympathize with the workers working in said companies like OP. Not sure what realistic solution is out there, the job-market is terrible at the moment for many people and IMO business-making is a hard thing to do and some of us might like to over-estimate ourselves in it too (& side note on under-estimating yourself too)
Accurate estimations of if you should do business or not seems to me to always contain some inaccuracies and you might have to decide your own decision in that and in that sense, job seems better.
You also can't go live without money if one has to exist within society.
I don't know if there is a catharsis to such problem. To me, it seems like an authenticity/trust issue on if you can trust the founders or not but trust by definition is a bit weird and immeasurable and it can always have blind-spots. Maybe the investors investing into such a company trusted the wrong guy but what if the company somehow sells to more people (Ahem SpaceX) and ends up making incredible amounts of money. You would never know and thus you have to just trust the system but the system doesn't work sometimes in a good fashion.
[0]: (We need a better term for such companies which are just trend-chasing and mostly are just built to impress investors rather than try to generate actual profits)
> I don't have any other marketable skills. My coding skills were barely marketable to begin with.
Hot take: moving is more about interview skills than coding skills. Whether you leave or not, start interviewing now. You might end up finding a better place sooner than you hoped.
Yes, it's about how you think about yourself. Identity matters just as much as experience, sometimes moreso.
I look forward to the day that AI slop is embarrassing for executives. We're at an inflection point for the herd mentality moment where they're dreaming of mass layoffs. When AI proves incapable of delivering ROI the wave will roll back.
If you have been coding for 8 years and don't have marketable skills you are either naive/insecure or doing something very very wrong.
In either case, this job is clearly not healthy for you in several different ways
I've been doing full-stack Dev (mostly Django though I foolishly had a brief moment where I kinda thought Flask was okay then fell for the same dumb thing briefly with FastAPI) for 20+ years and don't feel marketable.
I went from jQuery to a brief dalliance with Angular to HTMX+_HyperScript. Everyone wants full stack Devs to use react and struggle eternally with insane dependency trees and challenging client side state management.
I like to build things that can be maintained in perpetuity by small teams.
So I'm not very marketable.
I'm full stack for 19 years and I love React, and I've been laid off for 1.5 years now. This is a terrible job market right now.
That doesn't mean you don't have good skills, it just means that too many people have them. It happens from time to time in every industrial, for all skills.
Obviously, I don't have any good advice about how to deal with it.
You mean you haven't been working for 1 1/2 years? How do you buy food?
Presumably they haven't been living paycheck to paycheck for the past 19. It's not that difficult for a SWE in North America.
Yes, I guess investments, etc., but 1.5 years is a long time.
I don't think I could go more than 2-3 months. Maybe I should start saving some money.
Write a script that tidies up and fixes everything in a repo.
Dude. You are marketable as fuck.
Don’t live in the hype. Not everyone is drinking the ai cool-aid bottoms up.
What do you mean by fastapi being a mistake ?
[dead]
It’s just business.
If you’re new to it, it might be a shock.
If it’s not to your taste you might look for work in an industry that matches your values such as social services or environment.
That's no panacea. I worked for a social service non-profit for years. Yes, some stuff was better, there were still tons of issues.
No, it’s capitalism. You don’t have to do business in a specific industry to do it in a humane manner.
"Humane" treatment of workers under socialism is far worse.
Repeatedly, around the world.
No, this time will not be different.
The problem is the existence of money and hierarchy to reinforce class strata
You haven't lived in a communist country nor visited any communist country, I see...
It's too bad those are the only two sides to the binary of political ideology!
What are other economic systems..?
You haven't ever studied logic, I see. Look up "false dichotomy" to start with.
I'm a high school dropout.
What are other economic systems..? Nobody seems to be able to answer, I would be happy to look them up to learn more about them.
You haven't looked up what "capitalism" or "communism" is nor considered the possibility of other alternative economic systems, I see...
I have. What are other options?
Capitalism, socialism (what people refer to as communism), and then communism which will never exist because it always stops with the government stealing everything and not wanting to give up power to move on to communism.
What are other economic systems? Not saying there aren't any other ones, I just don't know.
No, it's communism when you hurt a capitalists feeling. That has always been the definition, especially when it comes to enforcement.
I grew up in ESSR or as it was known locally ENSV. Replying to any criticism of capitalism with an immediate “so you want communism” without even a stopover in complaining about socialism is quite something.
What do you want, then?
Isn't there capitalism, socialism--which is what people are actually talking about when they talk about communism, and then communism which will never exist?
What were you referring to?
Not to sound like a hippie but we could just try to be a bit kinder to each other and not put money as the single most important thing above all else. You can run a business to make money AND do it in a way that leaves our world in a slightly better state than you found it.
It’s not a black and white choice of either we jump hardcore into capitalism or all the other way into socialism.
Similarly to OP I work at a company that has a certain set of core values and the moment they have changed irreversibly I am gone out the door.
So you're talking about a set of values, not the economic system. The "capitalism" mention was bit of a non-sequitur, then.
Yes, exactly.
Which is good, I can't figure out how anybody can see the government owning everything as a good thing for anyone.
If you just look at postal services across the world, as an example, or anything else run by government, they're 100 times less efficient then competitors and their workers always look like they're super-miserable. Imagine if that was the only option.
Less efficient or less profitable? Also I'm gonna need to see some references for those claims in your last paragraph.
Funnily enough it's the couriers working for the private companies that I see looking more and more dead inside recently.
So, yknow, anecdote for an anecdote.
Well all the things OP complained about are inherently caused by capitalism but I think it’s probably possible to engage in capitalism in a way that is cognizant of those issues and actively trying to avoid them instead of treating them as eh that’s just how business is done
Then I'd suggest, in good faith, avoiding the "Ugh, capitalism" framing in the future. That just comes across as lazy, which doesn't help your point. As exemplified by the replies you got, all arguing about words.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/ugh-capitalism
I admit I could've probably used more words but when someone says "it's just business" that is a clear example of how the particular flavor of capitalism we live under has enabled and indeed encourages brushing away any moral and ethical qualms as "it's just business" and as you say, it was quite interesting to see how many people immediately jumped to dictionaries, communism, and whatever else the moment capitalism was criticized.
Capitalism is a moral framework as much as it is an economic system, especially in the US where it is deeply entangled in the Protestant work ethic and prosperity gospel ideals.
Is that in any dictionary, though? Capitalism means capitalism, free market with citizens owning companies.
If it's deeply entangled in the Protestant work ethic and prosperity gospel ideals in the U.S., then what's bad is the Protestant work ethic and prosperity gospel--whatever that might be.
Capitalism is what capitalism does. Name one "capitalist" economy strictly and exclusively defined by a "free market with citizens owning companies." None. There are no free markets. Governments always own some interest in companies, regulate and interfere in markets. Culture and morality always influence class and power hierarchies, and by extension economic systems. The real world is more complex than dictionary definitions allow.
I'm not following you. Capitalism just means free market. Private individuals own the companies instead of the government, and they do that with the main goal of making money.
I can't figure out why that must necessarily mean that those companies can't leave the world in a slightly better place. A LOT of them do, specially small businesses.
I've seen the destruction that socialist governments left even after decades and I went to Cuba and other socialist countries and the government treats them like literal slaves and life is shit over there, with no way out.
Anyways, I know of capitalism, socialism, and communism. I just wanted to see if you meant another form that I wasn't aware of.
Sure, as a theory capitalism is just a free market but I obviously mean capitalism as it exists today and shapes our entire world. And socialism has it's own can of worms, sure.
But what I was responding to in particular with my original comment was the parent commenters claim that "It’s just business" and that engaging in capitalism means you must inherently engage in the practices the OP was complaining about.
They didn't mention capitalism, "it's just business" just means that's how it goes.
If the government owned the company OP works at, it would still be "just business" according to the commenter.
Sure, because that's not all it means. "It's just business" is the excuse people tell themselves to justify the things they do.
> They're taking away our perks bit by bit, like remote office and working without having to clock in and out.
So tired of elites complaining about totally normal working practices in every other workplace on earth. Oh no you have to come to the office and you have to clock in. Join the club with the rest of us. Your McDonald's fry cook has to come to work & clock in, so should you.
I think we should improve working conditions for everyone, not make them worse for everyone.
How is being asked to show up and clock in making things worse?
At a minimum any commute is extra unpaid time you have to spend for no benefit. For many people where I live, commutes can be an hour or more each way.
Full-time, white collar workers generally are not expected to "clock in" in the United States. It's why certain employees are legally exempt from overtime pay.
To ask exempt employees to clock in and out demonstrates that management doesn't trust its employees, which is a failure on the part of hiring/management, not the workers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
This is the poison that kills entire societies.
Yeah, the other complaints are valid but complaining about punching in? I don't see how that's an issue.
Clocking in and out serves little purpose if you're salaried.
Might be needed if your salary expense has to be charged back to various internal accounts or to external clients. My first job was salaried, but I had to fill out a time sheet so clients could be billed.
Filling out a time sheet and clocking in and out are two different things.
I have to fill in a time sheet, but I never ever clock in and out.
If someone clocks in and out, they don't need a timesheet. It's automatically recorded.
A remote worker who hates McDonald's in 2026 is an "elite"?
If they're on Hacker News, there's a good chance they've never made less than a six figure salary in their entire life, which would certainly place them in the upper 5% of wealth globally. So while it isn't a certain bet it is a safe bet.
And if it doesn't apply to you, it doesn't apply to you. There are plenty of people here it does apply to.
Yeah... that's 1 in 20? The smart kid in the back of the class grew up? I'm not sure who you were expecting that person to become.
If the barrier to becoming an "elite" is that low and you still consider 6-figures a meaningful benchmark in a world that sells big macs for 10 bucks, are you also calling anyone running even a modestly successful small business "elite"?
I'm not even sure I'm engaging with a meaningful political statement here. The barriers to this level of "success" are more reliably psychological, not systemic. You're basically upset at anyone with a career. There are definitely things we need to do to help those struggling, but yelling here is slacktivism.
Yes. Having more wealth than the vast majority of people makes you an elite.
I don't know why you think making a 100k or higher salary is just "Big Mac money," but you're either larping or exactly the kind of out of touch I'm talking about.
> Your McDonald's fry cook has to come to work & clock in, so should you.
Haha fuck you, no. That's your choice, don't put it on the rest of us.
Ressentiment is a deep-seated state of impotence and people like you aren't even worth a shred of pity.
> Ressentiment: A chronic, festering state of mind. It is a lasting mental attitude where the suppressed emotions of envy and spite continually replay in the mind, leading to a general, cynical worldview.
lol not even close. I have a positive outlook and think the world can be a better place. I just think that world will involve most people working together in workspaces and clocking in. There will always be some professions & situations where that's not the right call but I have no reason to believe SW dev will always be one of them.
These are just category errors masquerading as morality.