What's a Dirty Secret No One Wants to Admit in the Tech Industry?

Question

What&rsquo;s a Dirty Secret No One Wants To Admit In The Tech/Software Industry?Industry as a whole or within software engineering.

bezko · Accepted Answer

It's all bash scripts

FrankWilhoit · Answer

The business customers don't understand the concept of a dangling else.

ashleyn · Answer

120 hours of leetcode prep to get a job centering divs with claude

potamic · Answer

That most people could care less about tech and are just in it for the grift.

cratermoon · Answer

The average programmer is an illusion. Most programmers working in software, and I&rsquo;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.

fsflover · Answer

1. True security cannot rely on code correctness but only on compartmentalization. Qubes OS does this right.
2. Your phone is an entire computer, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47367568
3. Intel ME / AMD PSP is a computer inside your computer that obeys someone else, not you.

toomuchtodo · Answer

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."
Choose Boring Technology (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289512 - August 2026 (245 comments)
In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39440179 - February 2024 (436 comments)

bob1029 · Answer

Virtually no one in tech seems interested in doing what Jobs suggested despite the level of success he delivered.
Telling an average developer to work backward from the customer will generally be met with a foul mood. Especially when that constraint suggests that the currently preferred technical ideology or tribe is no longer suitable.
The whole thing is one big ego trip most of the time.

colesantiago · Answer

The same programmers that shame others for using AI tools like Codex, Claude are also secretly using it themselves.
Whether at work or personal projects or anything else.
Nobody wants to admit it, but they are using AI.

What's a Dirty Secret No One Wants to Admit in the Tech Industry?

What’s a Dirty Secret No One Wants To Admit In The Tech/Software Industry?Industry as a whole or within software engineering.

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

That most people could care less about tech and are just in it for the grift.

1. True security cannot rely on code correctness but only on compartmentalization. Qubes OS does this right.2. Your phone is an entire computer, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=473675683. Intel ME / AMD PSP is a computer inside your computer that obeys someone else, not you.

The same programmers that shame others for using AI tools like Codex, Claude are also secretly using it themselves.Whether at work or personal projects or anything else.Nobody wants to admit it, but they are using AI.

What’s a Dirty Secret No One Wants To Admit In The Tech/Software Industry?
Industry as a whole or within software engineering.

1. True security cannot rely on code correctness but only on compartmentalization. Qubes OS does this right.
2. Your phone is an entire computer, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47367568
3. Intel ME / AMD PSP is a computer inside your computer that obeys someone else, not you.

The same programmers that shame others for using AI tools like Codex, Claude are also secretly using it themselves.
Whether at work or personal projects or anything else.
Nobody wants to admit it, but they are using AI.