The Real Crisis in Programming: When Greed Trumps Craftsmanship

The tech community has been abuzz with discussions about AI's impact on programming jobs, but a recent article from pckt.blog offers a contrarian perspective that deserves attention. Rather than blaming AI for job displacement, the author suggests we're witnessing a different crisis entirely—one rooted in greed and the systematic devaluation of craftsmanship.

The article opens with a familiar scenario: a programmer at a social gathering fielding questions from non-tech acquaintances about whether AI will take their jobs. This exchange reflects a broader cultural narrative positioning AI as an existential threat to programming. Yet the author argues this framing misses the point entirely.

"Working in tech always sucked, and never really was what they thought it was," the author writes, challenging romanticized notions of programming as a clean, logical profession where perfect plans yield perfect software. The reality, they suggest, is far more chaotic—a "burning ship" metaphor captures the feeling of navigating software projects without proper guidance, documentation, or understanding.

The ship captain analogy serves as an extended metaphor for the state of software development. New leaders find themselves thrust into projects with incomplete systems, broken processes, and unclear objectives. Team members either glitch with unhelpful automated responses or exist in states of exhaustion, unable to provide meaningful guidance. The "navigator" turns out to be a broken doll that catches fire—a stark image of how many organizations have replaced human judgment with flawed metrics and automated solutions.

The most compelling section addresses how decisions get made in tech organizations. The author describes a board meeting where the CFO presents a spreadsheet, the CEO returns from an offsite inspired by an AI demo, and suddenly thirty percent of engineering positions need to be eliminated by Q2. What follows is a series of rationalizations that lead to cutting junior positions—the very apprenticeship roles that cultivate senior talent.

"You signed the list," the author writes directly to fellow tech leaders. "You went home. You drank a little more than usual. You went to sleep. You knew." This passage captures the moral compromise many tech professionals feel when forced to implement decisions they know will harm long-term quality.

The article introduces "Sara" as a symbol of the institutional knowledge being systematically eliminated. A mid-50s employee working below decks, maintaining a critical cron job since 2016 that nobody fully understands. She represents the tacit knowledge, tribal lore, and experience that keeps systems running—knowledge that doesn't appear in documentation or get captured in metrics.

"She is the shape of what you cannot touch," the author writes. "She is every piece of institutional knowledge your transformation just deleted, walking around in a fifty-five-year-old body."

The argument that greed—not AI—is the real problem resonates with many in the tech community who've witnessed how productivity metrics, DORA measurements, and shareholder value have increasingly overshadowed technical excellence and sustainable development practices.

The article concludes with a powerful distinction: AI didn't take programming jobs; greed did. The same forces that moved manufacturing overseas and exploited resources in developing nations have simply found a new mask in the form of technological displacement narratives.

This perspective offers a valuable counterpoint to the dominant AI discourse. While AI undoubtedly changes how we program, the article suggests the more profound crisis is how the industry continues to devalue the human elements that make software development work at all—the mentorship, the institutional memory, the craftsmanship.

For those interested in reading the full piece, it was originally published on pckt.blog. The article joins a growing conversation about the future of programming, one that questions whether the current trajectory truly serves the needs of developers, users, or the craft itself.