cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5196308
It’s scary that the Unity debacle is not just happening in games but a very real threat not just in digital and app space but in real life.
It can happen in medicine, housing, even the food we eat if the trend of subscriptions and lock ins continue.
Despite this, a global concerted effort towards Open Source tech is still not happening.
In Unity for example, there is a push to transition to Unreal but less so for Godot. We see this happening with reddit too. And soon maybe we’ll see it in real life. What’s stopping our hotels and landlords from charging us everytime we open doors.
We see this in the rampant mandatory tips. Where everyone is automatically charged per order.
It’s scary and frustrating at the same time that there may not be a clear remedy for this. As the world shifts to subscriptions and services, do we truly own anything anymore?
Most UBI solutions (which I very much support and voted for Yang in the primaries for…) tend to be built around the idea of providing cost of living for “free” but encouraging people to still suck capitalism good if they want more money on top of that. Which is “good” because it is how you get those rock star developers focused on major products.
But that more or less makes the same problem. Sure, there are going to be people who genuinely want for nothing more than three meals a day and spend the rest of their time doing hardcore development. But, even then, they likely are never going to be “challenged”. I’ve worked with some AMAZING developers over the years and have learned a lot from them. And I would hope they learned from me. Because, during a code review, you see how Nancy solved a problem and might try to incorporate that pattern into your own workflow and so forth.
But when you are more or less the sole “ninja” developer on a project and are mostly working with college kids who can remember what the various design patterns are called? You are likely not being challenged in the slightest and you “stagnate”.
And most people who live and breathe “awesome code” are doing so because it lets them do fun stuff on the weekend. Which, until we live in a post scarcity society, needs money/resources.
Hell, if I haven’t already pissed off more than enough people with this, I’ll add on that I have never met what I would consider a “good” software engineer who doesn’t “work for the weekend” as it were. Because if all you want to do with your entire life is code? You never stop iterating. You always want to make the code better and I need to regularly “check in” with you to make you push code to a repository or remove the WIP from your MR. Whereas the people who want to finish their job so they can go climbing or take a trip to the beach with their family or just blow money on hookers and blow? They are able to realize when something is “good enough for production” and they get a LOT more done.