ironlake

I'm a senior developer. I'm OK at my job and plan to retire in the next 5-7 years. I focus on delivering quality software that meets the needs of the users that I serve. That's it.

Imposter syndrome is something you should talk about with your therapist. If you want a quick cure, talk to some CEO's in real life.

My day looks like moving software forward: conversations with peers, reading and writing documentation, testing UI, and writing code. (My team is using a lot of AI for code, but it hasn't sped up the delivery of software.) I don't manage humans. It's not something I believe developers should do.

Just because you can't remember the signature for a particular function call or the syntax for a particular language feature doesn't make you an imposter.

Seniors should be good at shipping software. Mid range developers are good at implementing sections of the software that may one day reach a user.

Should all developers have work that is above average quality?

It's OK to meet the standards of the job and not strive for greatness at your day job. The corporation you work for will not care.

IBM PCjr. Not exactly a regret. It was a family computer when I was a tween. They made the best decision they could based on the information available at the time. But it was not a great product.

> settled on racist teachers

If the population of gifted kids is statistically over-represented by white kids, then one of these must be true:

• The test doesn't measure giftedness, but rather level of education. So we would expect kids from worse schools to perform worse. This is institutional racism. The opportunity is not equal. • Gifted kids from minority communities don't have equal access to the test or the classes. This is institutional racism. The opportunity is not equal. • White kids are smarter. They all took the same test, white kids came out on top. This is a racist belief with a millennia of discredited science to back it up.

No racist teacher required.

Is this another fake like the Google bot that made reservations at a restaurant?

Forth. I learned it very late in my programming career which started with Java. It just feels like home in a way that no other language ever has.

Mostly useless tho

I worked for an international company with more than 100,000 employees. They basically never stopped doing layoffs. It was just background noise all the time. I got laid off after 5+ years, but I was ready to go.

Before that, I was laid off from a company that was rapidly going out of business, no surprise and I was ready to go.

As a data point, I've had 5 software development jobs in 25 years and have been laid off twice.

Sounds like you've had some bad luck, but I suspect things are getting worse.

My experience with over 25 years as a software developer is that the best way to optimize for salary is to switch companies every 3-7 years. There are risks. You either accept the risks or accept that you're not making as much as you could be.

I once worked for a company that had hired mostly people straight out of college. When the company faltered, they started looking for new jobs and were shocked at how much they were underpaid for their positions. But the company had a cool culture so it never occurred to them to test the market.

I almost never switch jobs for money, and for much of my career I've been underpaid. Which is OK. I have other priorities and accept it.

Even so, I'm on my 5th job in 25 years and my current position is the one I've held for the longest.

Both of my adult children have foregone career paths for menial jobs (retail worker and admin stuff). So far, they are both really happy. Living their lives without stress or overtime.

Blue collar work wears out the body. Are you going to be welding at 50? Working as a guide at 60? Tile workers in my family all stopped in their 40s because they could no longer do it.

I could quit my programming job and live on a lot less, as I have savings and already own most of the stuff I need, but health insurance is a problem. (And I like having money).

They did not announce they were working on affordable cars, or at least not a new model that would be more affordable than the models they have now.

Musk pushed all questions about new models to the Robotaxi event in August and the media filled in the blanks and ran with "new, cheaper model" putting words into Musk's mouth.

He did say they weren't going to build a new production line.

Thanks for that perspective. I haven't done any MacOS development.

I am an iOS developer and I haven't used ObjC in over five years. There probably isn't any reason to start a new app or library with anything other than Swift. So it's just going to depend on the legacy code base.

These numbers include upward revisions for past months.

You make a good point about these types of numbers. It's hard to get accurate and timely data in the field of economics, and headlines will never show the revisions, so the information we see will usually be the least accurate (assuming accuracy grows with time).

That said, these are good numbers and there's no reason to suspect they're not real.

The "ignorant hipster" comment is uncalled-for. There's nothing wrong with accessible tools.

But I agree with all your points.

With regard to point 4, if I download a desktop app for my Macbook and it's Electron, I see it as a sign of minimal commitment to user experience. They prioritized cost over my experience and I'm probably not going to choose that app unless there are no other options.

I do the same with iOS apps. If it's not native, I'll usually delete right away.

In the books, each civilization can have a hiding gene and/or an exterminating gene. At the beginning of the story, humanity has neither. The idea is that civilizations without the hiding gene won't last long. So it's not rational for a civilization to become "Space Hitler", there are other options, they can hide.

I found the hypothesis to be convincing in the story. By the time you figure out if a civilization is friendly, they may have advanced to the point where they could destroy you. Everyone has to hide. Not everyone has to exterminate.

Clearly, having discovered no other civilizations in the universe, we don't have enough information, so it's all guesswork and fantasy.

Chess is immensely more popular since Deep Blue beat Kasparov.

As an individual contributor software engineer, I've worked with offshore developers before and always found the experience unproductive. The problem is always management tells me to help them so they can learn. I don't mind being in a mentor role, but I'm not interested in mentoring a temp contract worker.

Google is a global company. They make money from developing countries, they should have employees in those countries as well. Or else the money flows only back to California.

But they don't want employees in Bangalore. They want indentured servants and poverty wages. 25 years ago, I was told there would be no software developers in America, and yet the number has gone up every year.

I think many companies are anticipating a significant downturn in the economy and are trying to get ahead of it. Layoffs help stock prices almost immediately and management get bonuses for increasing the bottom line.

Workers are defenseless. Save your money in case you're laid off. Work less if they keep you on.

Let management be rewarded by nothing more than short term monetary gain. Don't give them extra productivity.

I miss the chaos of Obj-C. Swift makes way too much sense.

Fair use also implies you legally acquired the content to begin with. They trained the data on pirated collections of text. If they had bought a copy of each magazine or book – just one copy – then maybe it's fair use. They couldn't even be bothered to do that.

It's a 50% rise in vacancy rate, which is literally not nothing.

It has impacted the market for office building construction. Offices are starting to feel like malls: they exist and serve a function, but aren't strictly necessary.

Son of a Senator hires grandson of a Federal Judge and they are the best investment duo in history. I bet the key to his success is on the bookshelf.

Meta can afford to keep Threads on life support forever. I use Threads daily and it's active and informative for me. It's not as good as Twitter, but much better than X for my uses.

The Twitter diaspora will never be as consolidated or powerful as they were on the platform they emigrated from.

LLMs might hit a wall. Any technology could hit a wall. ChatGPT could be the next Segway. But, like the Segway, LLMs are useful now. I think the impact of "stuff like ChatGPT" on software engineering will equal the impact of the compiler in that eventually no one will consider writing software without a "stuff like ChatGPT" in the tool chain, in the same way that no one works without a compiler now. LLMs are useful now and they've only existed for a few years.

But that's just my opinion and no one knows the future. If you read papers on arxiv.org, progress is being made. Papers are being written, low-hanging fruit consumed. So we're going to try because PhDs are there for the taking on the academic side, and generational wealth is there for the taking on the business side.

E. F. Codd invented the relational database and won the Turing Award. Larry Ellison founded Oracle to sell relational databases and that worked out well for him, too.

There's plenty of motivation to go around.

And the compilers. Do software engineers even write code anymore? It all gets compiled so why do we pay these people so much?

>best scenario would be to get completely removed from their lists

I don't think there is any action a consumer can take to reduce the number of calls or get removed from a company's lists. There is no incentive for the company and the person who calls is as much a victim of capitalism in that moment as you are. Just two people wasting each other's time as a result of the operation of a corporate machine.

I have started answering the phone with, "Thanks for calling the Labor Organizing Hotline, how can we help you unionize your workplace today?"

The hope is that it results in some self-reflection for the caller, though it hasn't reduced the number of calls.

I'm 52 and recovering from chicken wings I ate last Friday. Fiber, some gut-health tea, and my daily Activa should get me back to full recuperation within a few days. In the meantime, bidet has been a lifesaver.

Talking about UBI is like talking about a space elevator. The hypotheticals might be entertaining, but it's not something we're likely to see in our lifetimes.

UBI should lift everyone about the poverty level so no one would "grow up poor", except as a relative measurement. You can still get a job so your standard of living is higher. No one is forced to stay poor.

Children might not like growing up with parents who refuse to work, but I suspect that they will appreciate the financial security. It's the fundamental promise of a society.