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RE:

1. I did consulting for a bit, $500/hr haha I was so reluctant to do it. I do admit that SV was just pouring way too much money back then. The good old days. I don't live in the US, and remote opportunities have been vanishing quite quickly. In the US I would have no doubt I'd get crazy good offers, I have lots of people who respect me there. My friend and I even got offered high positions at Youtube way back when.

2. I quit 3 years ago and have done a lot of artisanal code. Lots of fun. But next year I'll need to figure out stuff, hence why I accepted this small contract (ends next month) and thinking if it's time to move on.

BTW I have a family to feed and my son eats like a husky even though he's only 45 pounds, so there's that. My daughter is a big fan of Argentinean shrimp and caviar. You get the point.

Hitting you an email

also people have no clue how to know what is good or bad.

It's like if I asked an LLM to produce a contract for a a new hire

(my friend the one I mentioned, did that BTW LOL)

Yeah, okay, it might be good, probably very good, in fact might be GREAT.

But I just have no clue

my uncle is 70+ years old and he's one of those haha

I saw him starting at a monitor at midnight, back all hunched up and thought "nope, not what I envision"

yeah, I've seen plenty of people like us.

What I'm sad about is when others call us out for being a ludite or so.

But now I understand that these people don't understand that some of us just love programming.

I mean if I say I love gardening, nobody is going to tell me "Oh you're a stupid ludite, just buy a tractor and glyphosate"

Or when I mention my love for long walks in nature, imagine somebody telling you "that's so inefficient why don't you buy a segway, you'll be able to explore 10x the number of places without wasting any effort and time"

Thanks for the recommendation, I in fact couldn't sleep past 5am today and woke up to check an SQLite presentation on that channel. Pure gold!

I think that's how it is, we just gotta fine-tune the algorithms on our favor. I'm doing it slowly with Youtube (I'm into rock climbing recently, and it's been a fun ride on YT). My Twitter feed can actually be pretty amazing, even my IG one. I don't check them much often any more but they're still pretty good. No BS.

The trick is not to fall for the stupid videos with millions of views. I just recently learned about Mukbang or something like that (a weird trend where people binge eat on YT). Crazy

Hey beej71, I'm 41 and I love advice from people with more life experience than me.

I also love teaching (not particularly great at it, but not the worst) and taught SALSA dancing for a few years. The money was okayish (enough for myself but not to feed my children) but I LOVED being around ppl.

I wasn't talented in dancing but my talent in programming really made me happy (and well paid), so that kind of sucks. Definitely same as you, I'd even say programming can be my 90% of joy and effort (in a bad way sometimes, but I manage to talk myself into dialing it down)

I can't imagine the hell teachers are going through, especially coding, with AI.

Luckily I have a lot of weird interests and some can pay well (for example, I've had a decent success teaching people how to lose weight doing intermittent fasting, imagine the randomness of my interests)

What is your next plan?

I wasn't joking on becoming a yoga teacher, as cliché as it sounds, because I did it and quite successfully so (I was young, handsome, and single back then, and my classes were PACKED. I'm still handsome but the other two are gone. People paid cash so I had a lot of bills in my home lol)

good you realized that, but you do mention an interesting approach:

Most of my friends would use cheat codes to beat games.

Me and my brother (who's a crazy amazing artist btw) would instead figure out how to get good enough in a game to not lose a single life.

Contra, Ninja Gaiden, Mario.

I could see that the amount of fulfillment we got was 100 times more than my friends who played the game like that and didn't struggle.

One thorn?

I already lived under a cave but did you see the amount of money and hype pushed into AI? Just look at YC, 90% AI, just like it was crypto back then.

Jensen Huang saying we have AGI.

One thorn I can handle. A field full of slugs and nettles with billions of dollars to burn I'm not so sure

Hey great for you!

I've been on a 3 year sabbatical, and I spend most summers in the countryside with my kids, grilling meat, planting berries, going in nature for hours-long walks.

It's really a great life ain't it?

So you're planning to go back for work? I'm unfortunately on my last 12-months or so of runway so time to figure out stuff.

EXACTLY! The dopamine we get from doing stuff with mostly our own hands is unbelievable. But social media, junk food, and adult content should have taught us that cheap dopamine is addictive and dangerous.

Most of us will learn the hard way (or never learn)

because some of us have some dignity (and savings) left. That's really just what it is. If I lie to my wife I can't sleep at night.

I almost sold my soul to the devil doing AI assisted coding review for top dollar. That night I almost cried in my sleep

Damn, would love to work somewhere where no LLMs are needed. I have a friend working for Nintendo stuff (I think he does something for their secondary software, IE sales) and he is not allowed to use LLMs. Happiest man on earth.

If I were in the States, where I have connections, people would hire me easily. But for my wife and kids, it's not really possible to emmigrate.

Remote is crazy. I heard from a friend who got 100s of applications on a remote job on a single day.

I used to think there'd be space for unfuckers. Now I'm doubftul.

Yeah I could do management and all that crap but I was Eng Manager for 5 months and hated it.

Some of us are like huskies, we need to run on the Siberian Permafrost in order to thrive, else we get depressed.

That's me.

if I got $1 for every time me or anyone I know prompted AI, got the wrong answer, and people claimed "you need good practices / get better at prompting" I'd be a millionaire

The problem is these companies literally say "NO NEED TO LEARN ANYTHING JUST VIBE". Ton of ads on social media and YT claiming that.

Like my mom doesn't even know what a PC, a Macbook or a Linux computer is and we're telling her she can make apps?

It's like the casino, crypto gambling, or eating junk food. We're wired for that short-term gains and few of us can escape it. I understand that, just sad that the casino slot machine had to hit our craft.

Yep agree.

As much as I like to put power in the individual, this has become a huge nightmare for those of us who were kind of decent programming.

This was NOT the case 5 years ago. At all.

I actually quit bigger companies and SV contracts because the amount of hype was way overblown. Nothing could not be AI, really. Think about how crazy it is that Jensen Huang is saying "AGI is here", seriously. I first thought malice, now I think it's just plain religious Zeal.

We're not a company, it's just me and my pal. I keep 50% of the product and profits and he pays me to do that (because I have way more expertise than him)

curious question where you work, the AI craze is not happening?

what does "verify the data on disk" even mean? I guess without knowing what the project is it's weird to think testing it + checking some files is enough, at least for me

I literally was earning 5x times more working for contracts and companies but got super sick of it, I was happy to work with one single guy (who PROMISED to keep AI at bay, it was our original part of the deal) for a huge paycut

Well that didn't last long. The temptation was too big for him too

Haha this is such a funny argument really.

My guy in fact started by blaming himself for prompting wrong, and yesterday he was "upset" that his friend Claudio missed some important documentation details (three API keys were needed and one I had no idea where to get, not mentioned once at all)

This is the thing that people just simply don't see.

And for those who say "well why code and use your brain?", may I remind them that cities where people do a lot of walking are so much enjoyable, better for people mentally and physically than places where people use the "efficient and smart way" of transportation, that being a car.

I remember my cousins in the States picking me up by car and walking their dog by car, inside a gated community that was very enjoyable to walk. Pathetic to see.

(BTW both my cousins are severly overweight, 200+ pounds)

problem is I can't, because the BE is not doing what the FE team needs it to do.

The FE team consists of me btw.

social media in an excellent example, alcohol, or even marihuana where it's pretty much legal to consume in my home country and a total pain in the ass for those of us who hate the smell.

Sucks that my children have to smell it, really different from my chilhood.

I don't know almost anyone who preferred having a childhood today (with so much social media and doomscrolling) as compared to the 80's and 90's, when it was just kids playing hide and seek outdoor, a few Michael Jackson home-recorded cassettes, and of course Sonic 2.

no worries, a lot of these assumptions exist mostly in my head as a frustrated dev.

and yeah luckily I ended up quitting just right when coding was getting easy with LLMs and even back then (3 years ago) I remember our PMs and bosses saying "look why does it take you a week? I did in in two hours!"

Got riddance to get out of those jobs, BUT I do agree that paying customers != shipping software. Getting paid customers is a great skill and it's the skill my friend has (he's an A class marketer, and not in a fishy or scammy way). The guy just understands marketting. That's why I'm working with him.

exactly how I feel. I mean let's face it, we were overpaid and underworked because we were considered magicians, but the magic is gone.

What I fear is that it's impossible for the untrained to see the difference between a highly-technical developer and the vibe-coder.

Software is so buggy nowadays (just look at Facebook, or Facebook Ads. Crazy) I wonder what's going to happen in the long run.

I was banking on the opportunities it will create but nah, have you tried debugging AI-generated codes of thousands of lines where the original dev doesn't exist? It's a mess I don't wanna clean up.

Thanks for your input. I find testing (especially FE, where a single change can ripple through the whole chain) is actually a great way to use LLMs

It's sad because I've known this guy for 20 years and since the beginning he had a tendency towards "work smarter, not harder", a good motto at the time you're 20 but I often saw it crippling him in the long run, while having short-term gains.

Long-term, funny enough, he said he wanted back into this project because he was very unsatisfied with "easy money" (we both got into SEO at the right time and made a ton of easy money) and wants something stimulating for his brain.

In the meantime I had kids, worked my ass off to get the health and fitness level I want (he also wants it... alas nothing changes).

I'm kind of quite committed to this and we're maybe 30% away from finishing, but I almost debate sometimes if I should just do the FE vibe-coded and let him see that it won't be as good as I can manually do it (FE is hard in the end). Just get it out of the door, keep the customers that we have and let it kind of die down.

That's the thing, that's how he started, but knowing his personality, I knew the temptation would be too high. I warned him.

Then yesterday when I started asking him questions about how certain stuff worked, he had absolutely no clue.

He didn't even read the docs summarizing what the PR did.

In his mind AI is just assisting him. It's just like the alcoholic saying "one more drink won't harm me, I can quit any time".

haha seriously? Damn I really gotta buckle up

yeah that's exactly my worry. I'm sure there could be some opportunities if I were in the US but I'm neither a citizen nor a resident. I've worked remotely my whole life and not looking to relocate.

used to respect my skills, since we started this project before AI, but as I told him in the beginning, the more he asks a sycophantic AI stuff, while asking me less, the less he will respect my opinion. It's just the nature of things.

You like those who agree with you more than those who disagree, but real-life learning doesn't come from everyone telling you you are correct all the time.

I believe we're at the point of no return where he didn't ask me a single question before sending a 5K LOC PR