One of the top stories on HN yesterday was about a company that paid 4-5 average people's wages per person for a team that sat on their butts 8 hours a day and wrote meeting scheduling software for a decade. This was done so they could then sell, not even the software, but... the right to their institutional knowledge for an additional few thousand years worth of average wages.
And of course they're permanently deleting the fruits of that decade's worth of work with 1 week's notice.
And this is the 2nd time the team's leaders have run this play, with the same buyer paying each time: seemingly they can just leave again and keep doing this ad nauseum. (Clockwise)
If you put the value we assign to software engineering in terms of other things it really doesn't make sense either. At least what these people did is something mechanically interesting, unique, and enduring vs the average CRUD app.
Fun article, and it hits on the main trick: buy old, used watches. eBay, watchuseek forums, wherever. You can get sweet old, mechanical watches for like $20-200 all day long. And they come in reasonable sizes, modern watches are almost always way too big IMO.
> I find it hard to empathise with people who can't get value out of AI. It feels like they must be in a completely different bubble to me.
I think it depends on why you do programming. I like programming for its own sake. I enjoy understanding a complex system, figuring out how to make change to it, how to express that change within the language and existing code structure, how to effectively test it, etc. I actively like doing these things. It's fun and that keeps me motivated.
With AI I just type in an English sentence, wait a few minutes, and it does the thing, and then I stare out the window and think about all the things I could be doing with my life that I enjoy more than what just happened. I find my productivity is way down this year since the AI push at work, because I'm just not motivated to work. This isn't the job I signed up for. It's boring now.
The money's nice, I guess. But the joy is gone. Maybe I should go find more joy in another career, even if it pays less.
Oh, I agree entirely. The new paradigm is entirely unsatisfying to me too. It's not the same work that I trained my entire life to get good at, and the new work is not as fun. I trained to get good at this work because I just loved it since I was first introduced to it at ~10. I would have, and was, doing it for free for years.
Unfortunately that doesn't change my outlook on where all this is headed.
Perhaps, then, you can actually empathize with people who don't get value from it :) I used to enjoy the work, now I don't, so I'm posting on HN and daydreaming about other careers, instead of doing something useful.
> I just struggle to see how people cannot use it to get more done.
To be blunt about it, there's a decent chance I'll be quitting this job later this year, largely because of the AI push. I just hate these tools and I do not want to work this way. Losing an employee is a pretty big cost to the company. I guess the AI stuff is probably worth it to them, but there's a downside to it, too.
Yeah I agree with you, and I think a lot of people feel the same. It's totally different now and it's not what I signed up for. Maybe I'll get used to it, idk.
Yeah, I got duped by this. Did a CS degree because that's what you're "supposed" to do to get a programming job, and it was almost all theoretical junk I had no interest in. I hated it. I think I learned useful things in like, two of my classes. I knew more about programming than all but one of my instructors. It was awful and going through that degree program is one of the biggest regrets in my life. But hey, I get to stick "CS Degree from University" as the very last line on my resumes, I guess. Woo.
I was directly told by senior staff at a large org I worked for that I'd be eligible for a managerial position-- the only thing I was missing was a degree. Unfortunately, getting a degree while working full time for the income I needed was impossible for me at the time.
My entire career would've been different if I had that "very last line on my resumes" and I'd be better off financially. I just couldn't pull it off. I hope yours pays you back eventually, it seems like you worked hard to get it.
For my career path specifically I don't think it has made a difference. I've only had two software jobs in my 17 year career, the first definitely didn't need a degree and I think my current one would've let me in without a degree as I was referred by an employee. I doubt my next job will still be in software, so I'll probably have gotten largely nothing out of the time & money I blew on getting that useless degree.
> Industry demands specifically university degrees to gatekeep positions.
At the time (mid-2000s), people who wanted to get programming positions got CS degrees, so that's what I did. I didn't expect it to teach me anything, it was just the path I was told I was expected to take. In retrospect I should have done literally anything else, but like that same post said:
> And then we leave teenagers to figure out the puzzle by themselves. I think it's a disservice to the youth.
I was a teenager. I made a bad call and wasted 4 years on a degree program I hated because everyone said a degree is required to get a good job, and the degree that programmers get is CS. Sucks.
So do you think most people get into tens of thousands of debt to be “a better citizen of the world” or to learn what they need to know for some company to allow them to exchange labor for money to support their addictions to food and shelter?
It... really isn't. Like you said, remote X was barely usable even over an entirely local network. Most applications these days are also not designed for it, using loads of bitmap graphics instead of efficient, low-level primitives. So you end up being just one tiny step away from simply streaming a video of your windows. We have better tools for doing things remotely these days, there's a reason approximately no one has used remote X after the mid-90s. It's a neat party trick, but I don't blame the Wayland authors for not wanting to support it.
> one tiny step away from simply streaming a video of your windows
In the 80s/90s this wasn't feasible due to network latency and bandwidth, but it's pretty common now to do exactly this, with VNC and other remote desktop protocols.
The big obvious one is web-based tooling. Your information & settings are stored on a server and you use a web browser to view it via whatever device you're on. For more locally based workflows, we have networked filesystem protocols, automatic syncing between systems, that kind of thing. It's not a 1-1 equivalent of running a remote program and viewing it locally obviously, but it gets the same job done, in a much more useful & flexible manner than X forwarding did.
For example, the remote mail client usecase I was replying to is simply done with a webmail client today.
I don't really feel like web interfaces or syncing are really a substitute tbh, and I'm not sure how they're more flexible. ssh -> run -> gui opens, and the program itself doesn't need to be designed differently to work
> and I'm not sure how they're more flexible. ssh -> run -> gui opens
But this doesn't work on your phone, or on a Windows or macOS device, right? That's what I meant by flexible, X forwarding fits a pretty narrow set of usecases, while on the other hand keeping programs on the clients and data centrally located on a server allows for a whole lot more options for how to interface with that data.
(To be clear, nothing wrong with X forwarding! It's a cool tech and I'm glad you have a use for it! I'm just arguing that it's fine for Wayland to not try to support that kind of thing, because we've got other ways of working remotely now.)
Phone I didn't know, but the sibling comment interests me. Windows, it works fine on local WSL but for remote yes you do have to have something like mobaxterm running. Not a big deal to me. Mac, I thought it just worked? It used to at least for me, but the last mac I owned was on snow leopard, so I wouldn't be surprised if they decided it wasn't the Mac Way to do things.
Most recently I used X forwarding to manage some LVM disks. I usually like using cli, but for me it's just easier to deal with disks with a GUI. Shy of setting up a full remote desktop, which I've had a lot of trouble with getting to work reliably, what's a better option here for an arbitrary disk program?
X servers are available for phones, Windows, and macOS. X interfaces not designed for phones can be difficult to use on phones. But web interfaces not designed for phones can be difficult to use on phones.
There is not a web tool for every use. And web tools are not better for every use.
I think about how we could've paid for two brand new, gigawatt-scale nuclear power plants for the same amount of money as Elon Musk flushed down the toilet to try to shut down a website he didn't like. Extreme wealth is a mental illness, and wealth caps are healthcare.
He’s not “doing something with his insane wealth”. He’s wealthy because he’s doing something. The moment he announces he’s stepping back and going to be boring he loses half his wealth or more.
God does not come down from the heavens and bestow money that one spends on what one chooses. People value his companies because he’s there. TSLA will instantly collapse in valuation if he exits.
At this point I wish he had shut it down. Instead he turned into a mouthpiece for the right and duped his followers into thinking he’s “liberated” the site and made it into some bastion of free speech.
If you can guarantee two brand new gigawatt scale nuclear power plants for $44b then you can raise that money easily. The problem isn’t the access to money that prevents it. It’s that the the number of NRC approved reactors built since it came into existence is countable on your fingers.
I’m not even kidding. If you can pass the regulation, environmental, land permits, local opposition etc. you will be a hundred millionaire maybe a billionaire.
This is just patently false. There are many companies and workers that have the knowledge required to pass NRC approvals. The NRC are not some NIMBY gatekeepers for the nuclear industry they do care about safety and the have a vested interest in getting reactors approved and under construction
There are just not that many people building nuclear reactors because it's very a expensive process and other investment vehicles are way more ludicrous
Also bonus addendum I just realized, the NRC has a plain writing plan
"We will also use plain writing for all notices that inform you of meetings and significant actions. We will even use plain writing for specialized technical publications, but we will consider the needs and subject matter expertise of our intended audience. In addition, we will use plain writing to develop licenses, license amendments, and guidance documents. Such documents are primarily intended for our licensees, who are technically proficient in nuclear matters. Nonetheless, we believe that these documents must be clear, concise, and well-organized because they explain how to comply with NRC requirements. In cases where these documents must necessarily be written in considerable technical detail, we will develop a brief executive summary to make the content accessible and easy for you to understand."
So, if you can read and understand plain English how about you go make yourself a couple billion dollars.
I fail to see how British sarcasm qualifies as a personal attack. Specifically in reference to plain English that is the specification of the NRC as cited
I'm a fan of British wit, but these things don't necessarily translate across contexts. On a broad and shallow internet forum like HN, a line like "if you can read and understand plain English how about you go make yourself a couple billion dollars" pattern-matches to boxed wine sarcasm, not ripping port sarcasm.
I hate WFH, personally. My company is actually closing the office I work out of due to lack of use, so I'm in the opposite scenario from "forced-RTO", I'm being moved to "forced-WFH." It's the right call objectively, the office is genuinely very empty, but I'm a bit annoyed about it. I'm actually going to be paying to rent a desk out of a coworking facility so I don't have to WFH. If this situation sucks, there's a real chance I'll be changing jobs later this year because of this.
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