At age 62, I'm wondering which mythical decade did not alienate software developers?

There was a brief ray of hope in the late 90s, with the startup gold-rush idea that we would all be millionaires soon. Then the I realized the founders had 4000x my equity those companies...

Developers used to be freer to choose their tools, organize their routines, decide the result of their work, acquire transferable knowledge, and had access to their tools without any link to any organization (though that one has been steadily improving instead of post-peak).

There is more to alienation than equity.

My 40 years of alienation was not about equity, I was pointing out that the optimistic "We are all going to be rich" vibe of the 90s was wishful thinking due to the massive inequality in the tech world.

Few teams other than green-field start-ups have flexibility regarding tools or technology. My first job was COBOL, 'nuff said about that. Even at start-ups the leads / architects choose most of the technology, and many of my ideas were shot down, such as using C++ in the late 90s, and using Scala in 2010.

People seem to think agile has increased alienation, when in fact the pre-agile world was also terrible. What matters is the quality of the team, not the methodology.

One comedy that did a good job of depicting programmers with no sense of hope circa 1999 was Office Space.

> But software development is different. There has been many decades where software developers suffered very little alienation. It only changed with the universal adoption of "corporate agile"

Lol are you really gonna go with "I'm a software developer, fuck all the restaurant workers, teachers, plumbers, janitors!"

This is why Marx's ideas failed in the West - toxic individualism - and flourished in the East.

Flourished, you say?

Great retort, I actually laughed out loud.

I don't know how delusional you have to be to look at the conditions behind the Iron Curtain, where nations had to build walls to keep their citizens from leaving and a meaningful number of people were willing to risk death to get out, and say they were flourishing, but I'm glad I don't have what it takes to get there.

> where nations had to build walls

Name the Eastern nations plural that built these walls please. As far as I am aware, the G in GDPR stands for Germany, a country/nation/state which is (and always has been) firmly Western. People on here have such an infantile recollection of actual history.

Anyway, leaving aside debates of where the prime meridian of West vs East falls, it should've been manifestly obvious that in 2025 I was talking about China...

Edit: DPRK counts I guess although I'm not sure how many people would call what they have over there "communism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Juche_Idea

You mentioned one, which is North Korea, and I'm sure you're going to concoct some story to deflect the fact that China only began moving towards any semblance of prosperity after ditching Mao's fundamentally flawed economic policies, so have at it.

> you're going to concoct some story to deflect

Yes surely I'm the one concocting things (rolls eyes)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Party

As Sartre said - it's pointless debating people like you because you're just amusing yourself and it's only my responsibility to use words responsibly.

You aren't nearly as informed or as smart as you think you are, and I'm sure I'm far from the first person to tell you this.

you're running based purely on vibes and I'm misinformed? Lol

There's no vibes here buddy.

You ran the usual leftist playbook of bobbing and weaving around the list of atrocities combined with a round or two of no true Scotsman. You skipped the attempts to change the subject with some whataboutisms for some reason, but that's fine.

You said people were flourishing in the East under the opposite of "toxic individualism", which would be the collectivism of the numerous failed attempts to implement socialism.

I pointed to the fact that those nations (past or present) do not allow their citizens to leave freely, including building physical barriers to prevent people from leaving, and you try to argue that I was only talking about the Berlin Wall and that East Germany, a vassal state of a USSR that generally isn't considered part of the traditional western world, is clearly part of the west. I'd say that's wrong, but it's far from the only example so it doesn't matter.

I did mention the iron curtain, but another primary example is North Korea, and you no true Scotsman that away and say you were obviously only talking about China.

The same China that doesn't allow citizens to leave freely, where millions died under idiotic leftist economic policies, and where the rise from abject poverty to a middle income nation is perfectly correlated with the rejection of the path to communism and the adoption of more liberal, individualistic economic policies, and is another great example of my point.

In short, see my comment above, get bent, and go troll elsewhere.

Surely Marx would disagree with such assessment and call it idealistic and not grounded in material reality?