Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs
Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs
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Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
34 comments
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Full-stack and DevOps were enshittification events in my book.
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Devops for sure. (“Why have IT people when we can just make developers do it?” Fucking brilliant ☹️)
But why full stack? If you can develop a feature in a vertical slice across all layers that’s the kind of person you want to have on your team.
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Full stack cause most developers are shitty database architects. I've seen so many problems at this bedrock level.
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But why full stack?
Because there's so many of them, with more and more keep piling up fresh out of the coding bootcamp. Most of them don't even know what to do with life, know a bit of everything, but they're never good with anything really, so they are considered like worker ants. Not sure how it is in other parts of the world, but in Asian job market they're a dime a dozen.
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To me, a full stack developer is a few years short of architect. If you understand the full stack and all components and how they interact, then I want you on my team.
But I guess that term gets abused and thrown around a lot.
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Devops for sure. (“Why have IT people when we can just make developers do it?” Fucking brilliant ☹️)
I'm not sure if you're tracking Enterprise IT trends these days, but its evolving yet again with "Why have Devops people when we can just make the USERS do it?"
Suffice to say, those of us that know how to clean up messes (or realistically become Shadow IT) will have gainful employment for the foreseeable future.
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How will they make users do it?
Today for example our dev ops is in charge of deploying a new release of our service on our servers. We wouldn’t give customers that type of access.
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If your users are external to the org then this probably doesn't apply. However, if your users are internal, you give them a repo of their own and grant them access to publish to the pipeline.
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That’s interesting. I assume there is still some review and approval process this has to go through? So it basically means you are on call constantly for unscheduled deployments?
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Its not in place yet. I'm seeing it take shape. I don't see how it can be successful on its own and will either lead to user teams adding their own Shadow IT or the skeleton IT Operations group balloon into a giant Shared Services outfit.
However, I thought I'd mention it as its the same mindset that lead to Devops, which was just a business reaction to finding a way to hire and maintain fewer IT roles. Its interesting to see the IT roles being pushed directly onto the users now.
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34 comments