A lot, most of the people actually who got into software for the past decade or so seem to have been motivated by money. They'd just as easily became doctors or lawyers. And it shows, a lot of software now is just some grey corporate kafkaesque mess.
FWIW this happened during the dot com boom and a lot of them scurried off during the dot com bust. The amount of US salary one can pull with no formal education needed is the driver for this cycle.
My preference in hiring is people that are drawn to computing naturally, they will be there for the long haul.
The people responsible for all the packages on npm, pip, cargo, Conan really really love writing lots of lines of code to solve every imaginable tiny problem. So they are out there.
I got into programming before the past decade and initially it was the lure of a good career i.e. money. But when attended my first class, I instantly knew that this was it. Sometimes the path isn't pretty but it can lead to beautiful places.
I'm not sure it's just the money. You can still do those other things and make good money.
I think a lot of people are drawn into the industry these days from various online communities because you can enforce your particular viewpoint of social order in a small niche and basically be mini-tyrants. This is very western-world specific, but looking at the "communities" around Ruby, Node, Rust, Nix, etc, it looks fairly clear.
I put communities in quotes because I'm referring to those communities within the community that tend to label themselves as the whole community, write petitions to remove undesirables, etc.
The ability to create a space entirely of likeminded individuals that purges undesirables is highly attractive to certain kinds of people. Saw this happening on forums and bbs first decades ago and now it's the governance body of everything.
It's happened in tabletop gaming too -- one local game group I was a part of got co-opted by a guy just through starting a discord and hosting events. Suddenly a very apolitical community started being dominated by tankie politics and banning of members for wrongthink. We were just trying to game with some minis up till then. I got fed up and quit once the guy running the discord started ranting about how everyone in America should be forcibly relocated to cities and reeducated in more progressive values. I'm just trying to point plastic lasers at people and roll dice, my guy.
Anything gets old. I feel like a lot of the problems my friends and I have with software work comes down to having to wrangle the same sort of nonsense week in, week out.
Alienation of the workers and all that. Profitable but psychologically damaging. We thrive when we get to be whole persons.
It's not profitable and we should stop saying that. The issue is that there's just not enough quality out there so companies accept less quality and have to start managing for it.
If they could hire fewer people who crank awesome shit out they would.
> If they could hire fewer people who crank awesome shit out they would.
I don’t know this is true. My personal experience across a dozen jobs is that the only metric that really matters is “how low can you go?” Cost is the thing to minimize and quality is the absolute first thing to be considered optional and to be cut to fulfill the cost objective. Closely followed by “how fast can you go?” Not a pleasant way to work.
AI is just a way to market software. In the 70s and 80s we had "expert systems". Knowledge packed into software. Now when you buy hardware such as the new 3d xray systems for airports it can use high and low energy xray and density data to guess the substance of objects. This is an expert system, but it's trivialized to the point where it's not labelled as something special, it's just a feature.
This is a natural process. Hype up new stuff as "intelligent", "expert", "AI". Down the line it will be just another piece of software functionality. Doesn't mean anything special.
Right now "generative AI" is being heavily subsidized to gain market share. All these prompts generating text and image cost A LOT of money in training, inference, etc. If we were charged the real cost, it wouldn't seem like such a magical thing.
Cool stuff but I found hard to have to waddle through all the cutesy story telling (techie? really?) to get to the point. Poetic wordplay based on meaning vs sound is quite interesting but not that deep.
People are perfectly capable of being self indulgent, asocial and neglect their health outside and develop perfect eyesight. I really don't see how the moral judgement is relevant here.
Cool trick for knowing when to use whom: if it can be replaced by he/she/they, it should be who. If it can be replaced by him/her/them, it should be whom. In this case, "whom spend more time outside", could not be written "them spend more time outside" but could be written "they spend more time outside" thus it should be "who spend more time outside".
It's slavery economics all over again. The geopolitics will shift to controlling select consumer markets and the best geography for keeping production and logistics costs low since globally there will be overproduction and underconsumption. Mercantilism in other words.
> However for me, the most helpful by a mile was psilocybin. That whole "this too shall pass" thing is a real thing.
Also for me two big things. I have over a decade and a half of experience with LSD and psilocybin and it has in my view the role of what ecstatic religious experiences had in the past. I can't really bring myself to believe in any doctrine deeply enough to experience that anymore but psychedelics are very similar in terms of insight, epiphanies and catharsis.
> I also just do some weird silly dancing around my kitchen to music
I've come to see this in my life as a sign I'm happy more than a cause. When I'm depressed I don't much listen to music or dance, and the opposite is also true.
