- The point 2 is an important one, I used RSS for years but had to stop using it as I was way too anxious trying to read everything.
I started using again, but I have a few rules: all the feeds only refresh once week; and any news feed (like hackers news) that generates too much content is purged also once a week, so I only have the latest one week articles.
In my mind, my RSS feed for me is like an old school weekly magazine. This solve the FOMO feeling of missing something interesting, but I don’t feel like I need to read something as soon as is published.
- The lack of devs that understand the domain knowledge and the codebase will be the main issue.
I would say that the current capabilities of genAI is like a junior dev, sometimes even a mid-level. But one main difference is that a dev is slowly learning and improving and at some point will become a senior dev and also domain specialist.
If there is a codebase created by genAI, then it’s equivalent as if all devs left the company, so no one knows why some piece of code was created in a certain way, if it was part of the business logic or some implementation detail
- Minor annoyance, but just a few limitations and restrictions, after all you need a smartphone and internet connection.
So.. when paying in a store, you need to open your banking app in your smartphone, and if you’re in an area with bad cellular connection (inside a few buildings or in a countryside), you need to connect to the store wifi. Only then you can scan the store QR code and make the payment.
So a single payment can easily take a few minutes, as opposed to a contactless card payment which takes a few seconds.
My main issue with pix is the even more reliance on a smartphone for our day to day life.
- When people say that Google Search is broken because the internet changed and it’s not google fault, I point them to YouTube search.
With YouTube, Google has full control of the platform and its data, there is no excuse for why the search is so useless.
I bet there is some product owner in Google that did some A/B test and took as “proof” that adding random recommendation in the search results increases engagement, and then got a promotion and a raise because of that.
- I don’t think this is the correct comparison.
The iphone doesn’t just die after 5 years.
I still have a 10 year iPhone 6 and a 8 years old iPhone 7 both still working just fine.
Apple stopped releasing OS upgrades with NEW features, but they are still releasing security updates. (In this aspect it’s better than most (all?) modern TVs.
Those iphone are still working the same way as when they were released. The only issue is that some apps doesn’t works anymore.
So part of the blame is on app developers.
Sure, maybe the app needs some feature which the old phone doesn’t have, but more likely is that the company just can’t bother to maintain their app in older OS versions.
- Great post. I was also raised by the internet.
I have loving parents, but grew up poor in a developing country, surrounded by people that only care about football and soap opera.
If it wasn’t the internet and forums like slashdot or Hackers News, I would probably fall to conformity and the nerd in me would had died out.
Instead, my computer hobby became a really profitable job and now I’m living in a first world country and working on some really interesting things.
- I requested deletion of all my data to 23andme, but they said they keep “Genetic Information”. Does that mean 23andme still has my “SNPs”? (I’m based in Europe)
Message I received by email:
> 23andMe and the contracted genotyping laboratory will retain your Genetic Information, date of birth, and sex as required for compliance with legal obligations, pursuant to the federal Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 and California laboratory regulations.
> 23andMe will retain limited information related to your deletion request, such as your email address and Account Deletion Request Identifier, as necessary to fulfill your request, for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims, and as otherwise permitted or required by applicable law.
- The modern immigration is a lot different than in the past. Amsterdam, London or New York offered no support to immigrants, more like the opposite, where immigrants worked themselves to death in factories, plantation, mining, etc.
And modern immigration can split between legal immigrants with skilled professionals and illegal immigrants.
Europe is receiving a lot of ilegal economic immigrants with low education, doesn’t know german/french/italian/dutch or barely know English, and many are religious fundamentalist. What kind of innovation do you expect from them?
I don’t understand why Europe keeps accepting ilegal immigrants.
- > I personally have known several people. They are not narcissists. They are literally 100x talent.
I guess this can varies per company. It’s not difficult to be a super star in a dinosaur company. After all, “In The Land of The Blind, The One Eyed Man is King.”
This is really common in many European companies. Most developers are doing the bare minimum and it’s common for the department to be carryover by a single guy that is passionate by software development.
My understanding is that people don’t put any effort because of a mix of factors: no technical career; low salaries; no financial reward for putting extra effort; management is mostly non technical and don’t value developers; companies can’t increase salary for a single individual in the same role because of unions or country laws; people can’t be easily fired; etc.
- You can easily put money in your pension and avoid the tax.
So if you’re making 125k and put 25k in your pension, you will only pay taxes on 100k.
Take advantage of tax wrappers and UK tax is kind of okay when comparing with other countries.
- > capable of running all games
My solution for this is to have 2 computers.
I have a macbook as main computer, with all my documents, study, etc.
And I have a desktop computer with Windows for gaming only. I treat this pc as a console, it’s only for gaming. Any OS annoyance is similar as a xbox/ps5 annoyance, but it’s still more flexible than a console.
- My comment was about entry level programming job.
AI/automation will help more seniors developer to a point that most basic tasks can be done instantly and you don’t need to ask a junior dev to do it.
- > makes programming harder, not easier
That’s exactly my point. The current scenario where someone can just go into a 3 months javascript bootcamp won’t be enough.
In my team, there is a grad dev doing bare minimum work. He has no initiative and struggles to understand basic requirements. I need to break down the task so much that I’m almost doing the work. In a few years, with better tooling/copilot/gpt, I will be able to just “finish” the job myself, and this kind of dev is made redundant.
Maybe this kind of dev is not common in FANG, but I met several, from small to big companies, in my over 10 years software engineer career.
- > Most people I've worked with go home and watch football after 5pm.
Unfortunately, the job market is getting more and more competitive.
Software engineers had easy in the last 10 years due to high demand, but things are changing now IMO.
Automation and AI will make most basic programming jobs redundant. Combine with saturation of entry level programmer. Everyone will need to push harder to differentiate from others. Race to the bottom..
- > Because if you do a solid good job that's a 2, but a couple 2s fairly quickly gets you on the RIF train to getting fired.
This definitely seems bad, but it’s not common in every tech company. Maybe is something in your company or city/country?
I worked in a few countries and I’m UK at the moment. Large corporations do have performance reviews, but there is no expectations that everyone needs to over achieve.
If your job is burning you out, maybe is worth it to look around for a new one. Is the high salary of FANG worth it? “Boring companies” can still pay good enough and have really interesting tech challenges.
> None of this nonsense exists in other industries, at least as far as I know from talking about it with my circle of connections in other professions such as law, medicine, accounting.
Maybe not in the same way, but they still have their own struggles to progress in their careers. The main difference is that the tech industry doesn’t have labor regulations and every company needs to do their career progression.
However, Law can be as bad on that, lawyers need to grind for years before getting seniority and higher salaries.
Medicine and accounting is extremely government regulated and you need to get specific certification to pass to the next role. So there is a lot of pressure to get those.
- Why do you think you need to achieve 4 or 5? Or even 3?
Salary in tech are so high that even with a mediocre bonus, it’s still a good life.
For the last two years, I aimed for just meet expectations. Easy job, no stress, just taking some time to relax.
Last few months, I decided to continue progressing in my career so I started taking more responsibilities.
The point is that work is not linear, it’s fine to relax a bit or even downgrade your role.
- This varies a lot depending on where you live and your routine. If you’re middle class, lives in a nice neighbourhood and go out into posh areas, the risk is really really low.
This is why this Tinder scam is extra dangerous, as it’s baiting men to go alone to a non public location to meet an unknown woman.
- True, as a man, I want love, belonging, family, etc.
But many women, specially in their early 20s, have completely unrealistic and entitled mentality. They don’t offer love and support, but only drama e constant criticism. Going to a prostitute is simpler while you can’t find a real partner.
- Latency nowadays isn’t bad or even noticeable.
I worked for a company during Covid where I had to remotely connect to a Windows machine, and from there, connect to a Linux machine.
The only issue I had was keyboard mapping, specially because I was using a macbook. I had to remap a few keys, but even then, a few hotkeys didn’t work.
It’s not perfect, but it’s getting better and I can see many companies will force us all to this in 10 years time.
- This makes sense, but this should had ask the account password to confirm, which Jeff’s daughter may know and typed.
IMO, The main issue in here is BigTech obsession with a single login. One single credentials give you access to everything, from entertainment to professional services.
People do share their credentials with family, specially if involves subscription and payment. BigTech try so hard to push for not sharing, but they fail to understand (or don’t care) that most people, specially non American, don’t have the budget to subscribe multiple time. Family accounts are non existent, lacking management options, and also more expensive.
- > I don't like all of it, but it gives one coherent top-to-bottom model.
Completely agree. Bob Martin “Clean” has some really good recommendations, and some subjective advices. Normally the dev team can use this mental model as baseline and agree on which of the subjective advice to follow.
I just had an issue related to this recently, one of the senior software engineer in my team was previously a university professor with no software engineering experience. Every code review is an endless discussion, as he don’t agree with most of Martin “clean” code. So his code not only has several bad smells, but it feels like a completely different dialect. It forced us to have really basic discussions about code practices, even when to use comments (the professor likes to comment almost every line of code).
- > I call them “twitchy smart”,
I call them “cowboy developers“, and product owners and non tech manager sometime call them “10x developers” because they can delivery anything quickly.
In my experience, they are the worst people to work with.
- James’s mistake was to want to discuss taboo topics in _public_ and in a _working environment_.
One of the best pg articles imo:
- I guess it’s different use case.
With my work laptop, I shutdown by 5pm, as I don’t mind booting and opening everything in the next day.
But for my personal laptop, there isn’t a defined use time. Sometimes I just want to check something for 15 minutes, so 2 minutes to boot and open apps is way to long. I don’t want to keep the laptop fully running the whole day while I’m not using it, it should just go into a power saving mode. And I would expect for the laptop to hold the battery and state meanwhile.
- Same. Amazon is just another ebay at this point.
Both have everything you can ever want and more, but way to much hassle to know if what I buying is legit and if it’s from a legit seller.
Amazon used to be my first option for years and now is my last.
- IMO, overemployment discussion in IT is related to what is the expectations for a software engineer vs a programmer; and full time vs freelancing.
I expected for a senior software engineer to not only know the tech stack, but to have initiative, ownership, mentoring, and be able to understand and translate business requirements to tech solutions. Coding is just a small part of the role.
However, many software engineers behave as a 'programmer' only, the senior title is just to show that they have a bit more experience with the tech. They only do something if a Jira is assign to them, and many time they don't understand or question the jira. So it's obvious that they will have a lot of free time.
For me, if someone wants to do many jobs, they should be looking into freelancing. Where the client don't care on how you work, just that the agreed work is delivered.
- I once read that Sweden has a “huge” subletting blackmarket because of the strict rent control, maybe OP friend was subletting?
- In my case it really helped me too.
When using the Apple Watch, I can happily keep my iPhone in my bedroom the whole day. I don’t feel the need to get my phone cause my watch will notify any calendar appointment or important messages (I block or mute most apps/messages).
Before that, I was always with my phone and was always checking it all the time. Either because I got a notification, was worried I missed a notification, was just bored, or just trying to procrastinate others activities.
The Apple Watch is fortunately still really limit device. I think of it as an old dumb phone. So there isn’t much you can do in it. There isn’t even a whatsapp app for example. So it doesn’t grab my attention for long.
This could be significant improvement if Apple let us choose the transparency percentage.