Every now and then I enjoy the opportunity to build things without planning around them. No ceremony, no tickets - just pure code and building things people are interested in or are looking to solve problems.
I've been doing it nearly 20 years, and I'm very done with it. But I need to save for retirement and I don't have anything else I want to do more. So I'm just apathetically collecting a paycheck.
If you focus on the career part, you can increase your network and find a much less stressful position. Last two gigs I've had I wasn't even on call (lol, imagine!), and found remote work. So better opportunities are out there if you work at it.
I'm in the same boat, this is a requirement to save for retirement and there's very little else that can compete - despite the fact that inflation is outpacing nearly all the efforts I've made thus far to have a reasonable retirement.
Where are your retirement savings that inflation is outpacing it? If it's in 401k's or IRAs then shouldn't the stocks in that be keeping up with inflation (mine are). Even bonds should be outpacing inflation this year at least. And real estate has been insane the past 5 years and done so much better than inflation.
For what its worth, "I've been burned out for years but need to collect a paycheck... so I've been taking remote work" isn't a good reason for companies to prefer hiring remote. That's actually a perfect description of how the same individual might have worse differential performance while WFH. The reason for the preference to WFH is also the reason for businesses to prefer RTO.
What else have you done? Tech has been a godsend for me. When I started I had to wear a shirt and tie every day, and now there are a lot of WFH options out there.
I worked in an office 5 days a week, wearing a shirt and tie, for 20+ years of my career. My commute door-to-door was nearly an hour each way. Most of that by train fortunately. It was just normal.
"I worked in the mines / on the farm since I was 13, it was just normal" - until child labor laws protected the kids (mostly)
"I worked 12-16 hour days in the factory" - until a lot of people fought, incredibly hard, to push that number down.
People have learned in these last 4 years that they can work just fine AND have a life AND not have a commute and it can be many, many companies' "best years ever!".
Inertia is a sad, but common, excuse for bad practices.
Not trying to excuse it at all. You're completely right. But at the time, it was normal. Few people could even conceive that working from home could possibly work. I just mean it as an example that whatever people do, it seems normal if that's what everyone does. You see your dad go to work every morning, it's normal. You go to school every day, it's normal. It's only when something shakes that up that you get the idea that it might not be ideal.
WFH did not seem normal to most employees or employers until they were forced into it, and forced to make it work. I can't think of any other way we'd even be talking about it if the pandemic lockdowns hadn't happened.
> WFH did not seem normal to most employees or employers until they were forced into it...
True. To nearly every goddamn programmer in the world it was clear that the tech to make WFH work for programming jobs (and similar) had been in place since the mid 1990s, at the latest.
The fact that millions of people had to die in order for the suits to use the tech in place is heartbreaking.
It's also quite painful that the suits are trying to claw back the thing many of us been quietly screaming for for ~thirty years and that we've all proven over the past ~four years generally works really well.
True, while tech salaries may seem great, when you factor in inflation, well the earnings are not much. Needless to say people in the non-tech sectors have it terrible. The 'middle' class is a rapidly thinning.
The people at Google that thought killing Chromecast and replacing it with a $100 device certainly do not have the consumer in mind. This is entirely a political play within the company.
They said they sold 100 million Chromecasts, but do 100 million houses really have (or need, or want) home automation? I seriously doubt it.
Texas and Illinois. Both issued massive fines against Facebook for facial recognition, over a decade after FB first launched the feature. Segmentation is I guess usable to identify faces, so may seem too close to facial recognition to launch.
Basically the same issue the EU has with demos not launching there. You fine tech firms under vague laws often enough, and they stop doing business there.
Imagine actually thinking that you can search for something and you are always going to get a correct answer on the internet. At least with LLMs you can fine tune or at least pick different models you want to use and communicate at will with it. It's not 100% but the alternative is a crap ton of research and verification into topics I don't really have time for. Can't tell you how many times now it's been useful to use AI as a researcher aid in prototyping. It has vastly improved my iteration times, especially on things I normally would spend weeks on tutorials.
Normally when you search you can look at many different results. With "AI Search" you just have to trust the magic box, which you already know is wrong a lot of the time.
AlphaGeometry is a hyper-specific system trained to add auxiliary geometric objects, like extra lines, to existing Euclidean geometry configurations. These prompts are not even sensible inputs to AlphaGeometry.
* Get out on the water or underwater (if you dive)
* Find events to go to in your area (pick anything, doesn't matter, if it's going on try and go do it and try and do it with people)