25+ yr Java/JS dev
Linux novice - running Ubuntu (no windows/mac)
For legal repercussions, of course. As citizens we are under no obligation to pretend we didn’t see what we saw. Put me on a jury and show me that video and I’m done. I don’t know what else someone is going to spend time looking into. Maybe the bottom of a rocks glass. Due process in court, 100%, but unless that video is doctored, we have them dead to rights.
I have spent most of my career in consulting and contracting. You get exposure to a bunch of environments and leads and different ways of doing things. It has mostly been a boon to my career and knowledge. I recommend it for anything for whom west coast big tech isn’t in their future. It builds a solid foundation of knowledge — though often in the form of object lessons.
That said, they rarely invest in your education, the benefits are garbage, and management is often… uneven. Pay is decent but job security is utter shit.
Remote jobs can be conducive to travel domestically, but most positions I’ve had barred taking devices overseas. I wouldn’t recommend part time work unless you intend to put your career on hold while you finish school.
That said, I never got a 4-year degree so I can’t really comment on school. I wouldn’t recommend going my route. You need a lot of experience and big names under your belt before anyone will overlook lack of education — consulting is actually a good way to work for big companies that would never hire you based on resume. I was a rock star when I worked at automaker, but they auto-rejected my resume when one contact closed down and I tried to get direct hired. I got back in on another contract easy, though. Same story with home improvement store. But having those on my resume 100% helped me land my current role.
users are presented with a clear choice between two paths
There is a third path. Just stop being a user. Maybe that choice isn’t clear enough. Push notifications are fucking evil. I removed the app and use FB as a PWA about once every six months. I might use it more if it had content from my friends or anyone I gave a fuck about, but instead it’s all promotions and suggestions.
Without the little red number creating FOMO on my phone, I have no impulse to check it. Yet I check Lemmy several times a day. I check Bluesky every couple of days. Because every time I open them, someone I want to hear from is posting something I want to see. You should try that, Zuck.
I’m going to say the same thing I do every time Congress investigates the most obvious shit. We all fucking saw it with our own eyes. There’s nothing to investigate and nothing to cover up. There it is like a big pile of shit for everyone to see and smell. Do something about it or just shut the fuck up and stop pretending it’s anything but giving evil a pass.
Frankly that’s why I think it’s important for AI centrists to occupy these roles rather than those who are all in. I’m excited about AI and happy to apply it where it makes sense and also very aware of its limitations. And in the part of my role that is encouraging AI adoption, critical thinking is one of the things I try my hardest to communicate.
My leadership is targeting 40-60% efficiency gains. I’m targeting 5-10% with an upward trajectory as we identify the kinds of tasks it is specifically good at within this environment. I expressed mild skepticism about that target to my direct manager during my interview (and he agreed) but also a willingness to do my best and a proven track record of using AI successfully.
I would suggest someone like yourself is perhaps well-suited to that particular duty — though whether the hiring manager sees it that way is another issue.
Not sure I like that this headline / research seems to frame the issue as a PR problem. I don’t want to be filled with a bunch of AI slop to try to convince me that AI is not a threat to my job. I think overall I have a pretty balanced view of AI — though how many of us realize when we are unhinged — but I think it’ll eventually settle into a tool which increases efficiency, slightly reduces jobs in certain sectors just like the farm combine did, and not a lot will change overall.
The thing negatively influencing my faith in democracy is so many of the people of the world voting for right-wing and autocratic parties. I feel like democracy has failed us in that respect. On the other hand I don’t know of a better solution. AI isn’t really involved there.
I wonder if there isn’t a more fundamental connection between people who observe the direction of the world and those who see that corporations are falling over themselves to eliminate workers and are deeply worried that they just might succeed to the detriment of all.
Like AI, blockchain is a solution in search of a problem. Both have their uses but are generally part of overcomplicated, expensive solutions which are better done with more traditional techniques.
I read I think just last week but for sure in the last month that someone has created an AI card that lowers power usage by 90%. (I know that’s really vague and leaves a lot of questions.) It seems likely that AI-specific hardware and graphics hardware will diverge — I hope.
The future looks to involve a mixture of AI and traditional development. There are things I do with AI that I could never touch the speed of with traditional development. But the vast majority of dev work is just traditional methods with maybe an AI rubber duck and then review before opening the PR to catch the dumb mistakes we all make sometimes. There is a massive difference between a one-off maintenance script or functional skeleton and enterprise code that has been fucked up for 15 years and the AI is never going to understand why you can’t just do the normal best practice thing.
A good developer will be familiar enough with AI to know the difference, but it’ll be a tool they use a couple times a month (highly dependent on the job) in big ways and maybe daily in insignificant ways if they choose.
Companies want a staff prepared for that state, not dragging their heels because they refuse to learn. I’ve been at this for thirty year’s and I’ve had to adapt to a number of changes I didn’t like. But like a lot of job skills we’ve had to develop over the years — such as devops — it’ll be something that you engage for specific purposes, not the whole job.
Even when the AI bubble does burst, AI won’t go away entirely. OpenAI isn’t the only provider and local AI is continuing to close the gap in terms of capability and hardware. In that environment, it may become even more important to know when the tool is a good fit and when it isn’t.
There are cases of “architecture by happenstance” where a rewrite is your only path forward ultimately. Developer understanding of the specific business needs often evolves over time and poor choices were made in the beginning. You can rearchitect it in place over 5 years or you can do it in six months. It helps to have a leader with a strong vision and sense of where things went wrong the last time, though. If it’s just a bunch of “this app sucks. We need to rewrite it in .Net/NodeJS/etc.” then you’re doomed to fail in all the same ways.
I took place in bailed on a Java -> .Net migration where they were literally copying and changing syntax. It could’ve been a singular opportunity to fix a bunch of things, but was instead a waste of money and probably 60 developer years. I wonder if they ever finished…
This is a “big part” of my job. In five months what I’ve accomplished is adding AI usage to jira along with a way to indicate how many story points it wound up saving or costing. Let’s see how this plays out.
If AI collapses as many expect it to, this job will still be there without that requirement.
Deleted it. My wife then naturally sent me a DM of a thing asking if I could build it cheaper. Reinstalled to see the video, then deleted again.
There are a lot of content creators there I enjoyed but c’est la vie.
I worked for a series of such companies when I contracted for the DoD. They basically get points towards winning contracts for being owned by veterans, women, and minorities. After like 3 years they lose all of those benefits, go out of business, and reform under a new configuration, hiring back the same set of contractors that worked for the first company. Minus sub-standard performers.
My observation is those companies are owned, controlled, and financed by white men with token minority leadership.
I never observed any fraud. One of the companies did have an open vacation policy which I guess might feel sketchy but it was mostly about not having to pay anyone out for vacation when they were done. I didn’t observe anyone taking excessive vacations (though we had folks who saved vacation days for years under different contracts to go back to India for a month so I’m not sure how that played out).
So not only does this not resolve any fraud, it barely counts as DEI. This is someone trying to kill something they don’t even understand is already part of their own stacked deck. I will be shocked if this actually happens because I think someone will pull him aside and explain the program is nothing but optics.
Caveat: this is just my experience with about 3 different contracting companies while working one job for about 5 years, which is a very narrow perspective of the system as a whole.
Agreed. I’m a technical lead at a startup. You know that guy in Office Space whose job it is to basically ferry messages between the engineers and the customer? I feel like that is my job. I attend meetings and pass along messages because they are in a different time zone.
I:
Some of it is because I’m relatively new, but mostly my job is filling in for my boss in meetings because he’s spread so thin so he can focus on strategic stuff. I feel like my job is just to have 30 years of experience so people take things seriously when I say them. There are people who will ignore a request if it comes from my team, but are super helpful when I ask. There is clearly value to me being here, but I had envisioned something different with mentoring and doling out technical wisdom like “this doesn’t adhere to SOLID principles” or “the best practice here is to do this.”
The thing I’ve spent the most time doing developing a system where all the little shit I’m responsible for doesn’t fall through the cracks — mine or someone else’s.
Looks like he wants mom and dad to know his virility. It’s either, “you’re gonna have so many grandkids,” or, “this will be great cover for us to get together and bang.”
Something something breaking a few eggs.
It’s snowing. Not as cold as it was yesterday. The sidewalk and driveway will need to be snowblown, but I don’t even know where I have a winter coat — my fifteen year old tends to borrow them and lose them in her room. It’s warmer than it was yesterday which is good because we had some pipes freeze — nothing frozen today.
I don’t work Sundays barring some kind of emergency, but I work from home so this won’t change that picture at all unless we lose power or internet. Kids are in online school so this is just going to be normal life. But then also this is Michigan and five inches of snow isn’t exactly unprecedented. We normally get this once or twice a year, although the last several years have been pretty mild.
I’m with you in missing the days when this was exciting. Snowmen and snowball fights and days off of school were kinda awesome.
I just used memtest, but I ran multiple full passes over night. Flaky memory won’t always be caught by a single pass, but in my case it was really bad.
Maybe do a ram test. I had weird crash issues on Linux that I didn’t experience in windows for whatever reason. Turned out after a lot of blaming Linux, I had a stick of ram that was trash. I pulled out and now I have 16GB and no crashes instead of 32GB with weird crashes and inexplicable behavior mostly when I browse or game.
I’d probably just keep feeling stuff with my hands. I think using a cloaca for that would be rather crass.