Not directly related, but an anecdote: well before AI, I was talking to a Portfolio Solutions …

> Lesson: people with grave incompetence at programming feel completely competent to judge what programming is and should be. As an employee at a company with a similar attitude, I cannot agree more with this.

My own tangential gripe (a bit related to yours though): the factory work began when Agile crept into the workplace. Additionally, lint, unit tests, code reviews... all this crap just piled on making programming worse still. It stopped being fun to code around that point. Too many i's to dot to make management happy.

It doesn't help that most "tech visionaries" or people considered tech bros these days more often come from accounting or legal background than anything technical. They are widely perceived as authorities but come without the expertise. This is why it's so perplexing for the techies when the industry gets caught up in some ridiculous hype cycle apparently neglecting the physical realities.

I used to work in aerospace R&D. The number of times I heard some variant of “it’s just software” to disregard a safety critical concern was mind boggling. My favorite is a high-level person equating it to writing directions on a napkin.

Hubris and fragile egos run amok A burning need to dominate in a misguided attempt to fill the gaping void inside Broken and hurting people spreading their pain as they flail blindly for relief Our world creaks, cracks splintering out like spider thread The foundations tremble