I have some "internal" web apps that I use for myself, and while I do use Remix which is a framework that allows me to use React, I just use SSR and HTML default form controls as interpreted by the browsers, minimal client side processing and almost no styling.
I love it so much compared to the "modern" cruft. It's responsive by default because I don't really style it. It has a high signal to noise ratio.
I wouldn't change it for the world, but I've been told multiple times I'm very much in the minority.
Last I applied to a job posted on Who's Hiring, they had me fill a self recorded video interview on some platform. And do some coding exercise with screen sharing. Then send it to them. I've never gotten any sort of reply back, positive or negative. Felt like a clown. Won't be using that again.
It takes trending news from whatever country (currently Romania + Denmark due to personal reasons) and gives me a summary. It's based on what people actually search for. It works with all countries, but I unceremoniously commented out all of them except those two because of rate limits. Currently spending $0 on it.
It also posts a summary of the summaries on my Matrix instance every evening at 22:00 local time.
Disclaimer: nothing substantial, just a bit of trauma dump
I've been a developer for more than a decade. Body-shops. Founding engineer. Chief Technology Officer. After every job in my life I took 6 - 12 months off.
Usually my desire for programming comes back somewhere around the 5th month mark. I'm in such a 'holiday' now, and just passed the 12 month mark. I don't feel that desire coming back anymore.
I've been blessed to have a friend that had a gig where I can do some ETL and cover my monthly expenses, but whenever I start looking for new jobs, reading the ads, all those keywords, all those bullshit descriptions of what they expect, I'm starting to develop a physical repulsion.
I've done a couple of interviews, and the HR discussions and then the technical interviews have left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. I'm afraid I'll hiss in the next zoom call. And it's not even for not getting accepted, as I got an offer from all the talks. But the whole industry gives me a bad taste right now. Everything just feels futile and fluffed up. My last interview was for a hair & beauty appointment app start-up where they acted like they cure cancer.
I'd like to be my old self, but I'm afraid I might not get that part back. I took a look at 'regular' jobs and the idea of being a truck driver lit up something in me that programming hasn't in a very long time. Even being a shop clerk makes me dream more than wrangling code.
I realize this is childish, and that the grass is always greener on the other side. I know that there are challenges in every profession and that I have a comfortable home office and get paid a shit ton of money for what I do and this is better than 99% of the planet.
I just hope to be able to get back on track mentally and not feel like this.
I always suspected I had a doppelgänger but this proves it. Aside from the 6-12 breaks between each job I could have sworn this post was my own. I’m on the tail end of a sabbatical that is running far into overtime for the same reason - for the past year+ I’ve waited for the energy and desire to return as I expected it surely would.
But no. Nothing. Reading a job req still induces a wince. Reading the fluff from and about companies sends me recoiling. These things were never pleasant but they were tolerable. Now, the limbo bar has been set too low and it’s getting harder to compel my body to contort enough to slip under.
I’m pretty sure there is an eventual return somewhere ahead and the scariest thought is that I’ll get back and swirl back down to life as it was before. The past year+ becomes a puff of a memory. The good news (!) is that knowing you feel this way is critical knowledge. With that understanding we can rearrange our values and tackle the feeling constructively.
> But no. Nothing. Reading a job req still induces a wince. Reading the fluff from and about companies sends me recoiling. These things were never pleasant but they were tolerable. Now, the limbo bar has been set too low and it’s getting harder to compel my body to contort enough to slip under.
What infuriates me about this process is this experience.
For a time, I worked as a consultant doing cloud-related development, with many F500 companies (non-FAANG ones)
Generally, the staff on these projects were ok to mediocre in terms of skill. I KNOW I'm more competent than the median in those orgs at those companies, and yet if I apply for those exact jobs, my resume disappears into a black hole.
This isn't a testament to my skill, rather how poorly staffed major companies are. I don't mean "they don't know some nerd sniped trivia" either, I mean don't use version control, codebases full of dead commented code, hardcoded credentials, individuals with 0 troubleshooting ability or initiative, etc etc
This is spooky similar to how things have been for me. Also 6-12 month breaks, also the itch to start doing something at about 6 month mark. I’m about to take another one of my breaks and too think this time will be different. I get paid an eye watering amount of money, and I don’t want it anyway. Instead of taking up truck driving (which will get old in a week), I’m thinking of taking up sailing.
After working for basically 25 years straight since high school, I’m really wanting to take an extended sabbatical from the software industry to do my own thing. I’m scared that the longer I stay out though, the harder it will be to reenter, because I already have the disgust you describe. My hope is that since I still love the actual technical work that I can eventually turn some little side project into a real product and carry that through for a while.
> But calling the EU not being democratic is going too far
I'm an EU citizen. I have minimal saying in who our commissioner is and what members of the cabinet get chosen.
I have a vote which I give to whatever party. After that, the vote for commissioner is secret; I have no idea who voted for what. After that, the negociations for the cabinet are secret; I have no idea what the criteria are and what the plans are.
I'm not putting us in the bucket of non-democracy just yet but I don't feel it's that far.
> I have minimal saying in who our commissioner is and what members of the cabinet get chosen.
We get to vote for our country representatives, who then vote for the MEPs. I don't think there is any EU-wide rule that prevents the MEP nomination process from being open - that'd be country-specific legislation.
I'm not talking about MEPs. The commissioner is not a country representative, I'm talking about the head of the European Commission, miss Ursula von der Leyen as it currently stands.
There is no rule preventing it from being open, there is also no rule forcing it to being open.
In a democracy is it possible for a government to commit illegal things and get away with it simply by ignoring the complaints, filed police charges etc?
In a democracy the government as well are supposed to be accountable by the rule of law. As they are not it is a failed democracy.
Are you aware of the history of the US Senate? It had exactly the same problem. Senators were appointed by the political elite of each state.
But, once one or two states decided to elect their senator, it was game over. The other states gave up, and now all the senators are elected.
It's true that both the commission and (perhaps even more powerful) the council of ministers are not democratic. But this is in the hands of each individual country to change. And it's national level politicians who are currently the obstacle. All find it easier to blame the EU than to take responsibility for change. But if one country takes action to increase , even a small one, the public in the others will realise they all can.
Is this not similar to ministerial roles and civil servant positions in most governments? You don't vote for the commissioners directly, but your elected representative (leader of your government) does, and that's your path to express preferences & drive accountability. If you don't like the selection, take it up with them.
In the UK for example, the people elect members of parliament as their representatives, but MPs choose their party leaders, and the governing party leadership chooses its ministers without any public consultation or debate. What's the difference?
A big difference is that in my neck of the woods, each party or coalition needs to come up with a governing document where they sort of tell you what their priorities are for the next 5 years.
In the EU we find about it after we vote, after they discuss in secrecy.
In the UK, politicians will often U-turn if they sense that a policy will make them unpopular and make the next election harder to fight. Governments can and do get punished on polling day every five years. Sunak paid for his unpopularity and the record of his government. Could any EU voters do anything about Ursula getting a second term? (and once again she was the only name on the ballot and then only just scraped through). The EU commission is not concerned with democratic accountability. Power is concentrated in the Commission and Council. There's a very weak link back to the electorate, but it's homeopathic democracy.
Again, this is not different to local democratic processes.
Voters typically cannot directly stop somebody being named leader of their party or given a specific role within government for multiple terms. If you dislike them, you pressure your elected representative to change that.
Almost all representative democracy is accountability through a representative, not directly through control of government internals & positions.
Again, my point was that even though we only have one direct representative, the governing party as a whole will be punished in the next election if they become deeply unpopular. If your rulemakers are immune to voter displeasure, it isn't a healthy democracy. You said "if you dislike them, you pressure your elected representative to change that". If as an EU citizen you are angry with the performance and direction of Ursula and the Commission, there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.
This is generally called "representative democracy" and is mostly what people talk about when they talk about "democracy" in public conversations. The alternative is "direct democracy" and while it exists (like in Switzerland), it isn't nearly as common, sadly.
This is not representative democracy. This is, at best, buffered representative democracy.
Arcane electoral rules make for weak representatives who gather power by making back room deals.
The real (but not constitutional) power lies in the commission that is appointed, not elected, and has been vacuuming power to itself in increasing amounts.
I grew up in a rather medium sized town in Eastern Europe.
Since I was maybe 5 or 6, my daily scheduled involved waking up, going outside with a gang of people of various ages (honestly it was all the way to college level at some points, they were the actual adults in the "room") and just having fun the entire day.
Around mid-day, if we were near our communist blocks you might hear our parents shout from the windows that it's time to eat, we'd sprint up and eat real fast and then go back down to continue mucking about.
We explored old forts, jumped with our bikes in the river, played hide & seek, climbed all sorts of buildings and trees etc. We sometimes hurt ourselves but were back on the street in record time.
The article reminded me of this, and I think it was an awesome way to grow up. And to link it back to the article. I don't get the diverse conclusion. I don't resonate with it at all. We were all relatively poor, of the same race and had very similar upbringings and possible futures. We were similar in more ways than different, and that was great.
> I don't get the diverse conclusion. I don't resonate with it at all. We were all relatively poor, of the same race and had very similar upbringings and possible futures. We were similar in more ways than different, and that was great.
You’re not wrong that you likely didn’t have much diversity where you grew up. My parents are Ukrainian and Belarusian and I grew up in Brighton Beach, so I get it.
But: the diversity I got from living in NYC was insane. By the time I got to junior high I had met every race and ethnicity, eaten nearly every possible cuisine, learned a bunch about every religion, and so on.
Contrast that with my wife who grew up in Columbus, GA, where they had one “ethnic” restaurant and it was the “Chinese” spot, and you can imagine there were a massive amount of differences growing up. I didn’t have to learn about other cultures when I got older; I had grown up immersed in them, and it made it so much easier to find common ground with literally anyone.
> I'm already seeing lot of developer jobs especially front-end, testing roles being replaced entirely.
Can you give me some public examples if it's so prevalent? I play around with the AI Dev tools and I can't see them being a feasible replacement for a human yet.
I also have friends that are copywriters, illustrators, photographers and they're pretty much the same as they always have been with another tool under their belt. So if you could also substantiate this claim I'd be curious.
but if you think these new generation of AI tools are some innocent augmentative processes you are gravely mistaken. What you describe are the previous generation of AI tools which were using you as training. What you will see come out next year will be a truly reckoning force.
Surely the company you worked for can't be the only one replacing people with these tools. What about the companies that actually have thousands of devs on their payroll?
> What you describe are the previous generation of AI tools which were using you as training
Do these new generation AI tools have names, mentions, parent companies? Or is everything in this shadow realm covered by NDA and I, as a mere mortal, cannot access?
The last wave of companies trying to save money on programming labor was outsourcing the jobs to India.
Deisteve appears to be claiming that LLM-based techniques for automating programming will be cheap and effective enough that even that kind of outsourcing will be unprofitable by comparison.
Then I find this to be a totally unnecessary addition to a claim that they've replaced frontenders and testers with LLM. Of course no one is safe if they've actually achieved that (with no proof given) so obviously Indian programmers are not safe. Neither are east european ones, Indonesian ones, or American ones for that matter. For the (unsubstantiated) claim that actual humans have been replaced.
It's like Tesla creating a full self driving car (level 5) and ending the promotional video with "Not even rickshaw drivers are safe". Just fluff.
You are in Europe so you may not be aware of the situation in North America especially Canada and the government mandated surge of migrants from India and the tensions it has created.
> Neither are east european ones, Indonesian ones, or American ones for that matter. For the (unsubstantiated) claim that actual humans have been replaced.
The representation of Indonesian workers here is nil. Eastern European migrants are also unable to compete with the suppressed wages that Indian migrants can fill. It's an overwhelming motif playing out across all industries.
You can take a look at the scale of the exploitation of Indian migrant labour for reference:
You answer this to me, but then you also answer 'correct' to the post I am replying to that mentions outsourcing, which is a totally different beast than Indian immigrants.
This discussion is also away from my initial intent which was to find out any sort of source, whether it be a press release, a research paper, anything related to your claim of frontenders and testers being replaced.
I would still appreciate such an answer. Though I expect I'll be disappointed.
Seems to me precisely those jobs will be more at risk than others.
If something is simple enough to be semi-automated by writing scripts for low-trained humans, it's more likely to be simple enough to be fully automated by LLM "AI" than more complex jobs would be.
