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

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.

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

It's all bash scripts

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.

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

1. True security cannot rely on code correctness but only on reliable 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.

4. Ads are an attack, aimed at your brain. They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49282599, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269

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.

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

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)