> I personally have known several people. They are not narcissists. They are literally 100x talent.
I guess this can varies per company. It’s not difficult to be a super star in a dinosaur company. After all, “In The Land of The Blind, The One Eyed Man is King.”
This is really common in many European companies. Most developers are doing the bare minimum and it’s common for the department to be carryover by a single guy that is passionate by software development.
My understanding is that people don’t put any effort because of a mix of factors: no technical career; low salaries; no financial reward for putting extra effort; management is mostly non technical and don’t value developers; companies can’t increase salary for a single individual in the same role because of unions or country laws; people can’t be easily fired; etc.
> My understanding is that people don’t put any effort because of a mix of factors: no technical career; low salaries; no financial reward for putting extra effort; management is mostly non technical and don’t value developers; companies can’t increase salary for a single individual in the same role because of unions or country laws; people can’t be easily fired; etc.
Or they just plain don't care about software engineering and just do bare minimum for salary.
> It’s not difficult to be a super star in a dinosaur company.
It is extremely hard to be a superstar in a dinosaur company, if we are talking about software development.
The thing to consider is called "technical debt." You will not believe what can be accumulated through years if technical debt is not addressed. And usually it is not properly addressed, of course.
Absolutely. The 60% marginal rate will still kick in somewhere though, with the recent increase in annual pension allowance I guess it would be 160-185k, which would actually make it 65% as it'd be on top of the additional rate.
I have a macbook as main computer, with all my documents, study, etc.
And I have a desktop computer with Windows for gaming only. I treat this pc as a console, it’s only for gaming. Any OS annoyance is similar as a xbox/ps5 annoyance, but it’s still more flexible than a console.
I just use virtualized Windows from macOS to play games that don’t run on mac. Worst case scenario I have to dual boot into Windows.
There’s a weirdly long thread of dorky gaming infighting happening in the top comment where people don’t seem to know that you can just use Windows for a few games and otherwise use a main OS for the rest of your time.
This would be my setup if I cared for Windows gaming at all. As it is, I use a Switch for that outlet. Why do you need the PC to be "more flexible than a console" — are you talking about hardware upgrades? Are Xboxes not very upgradable?
Ah, true — if you're talking those kinds of games! It's a real shame consoles don't have better keyboard + mouse support. Then again, I guess game developers would be wary to rely on them since they wouldn't be guaranteed.
> Most people I've worked with go home and watch football after 5pm.
Unfortunately, the job market is getting more and more competitive.
Software engineers had easy in the last 10 years due to high demand, but things are changing now IMO.
Automation and AI will make most basic programming jobs redundant. Combine with saturation of entry level programmer. Everyone will need to push harder to differentiate from others. Race to the bottom..
>Automation and AI will make most basic programming jobs redundant
You are probably not an engineer, since you should understand GPT makes programming harder, not easier. You won't necessarily make something easier by making it more high-level. Following your logic, you could conclude introduction of C made Assembler engineers redundant or that introducing Python left C engineers without a job. This is not true, using GPT to code is leveraging a natural highest-level language for the job, which is certainly leading to trouble, because it's not the best tool for the job – people specifically invented new languages so it's easier to express the business algorithm, all the attempts to make coding look easier by making it more as natural language failed, and the thought of GPT would suddenly change something? It is naive and ignorant, doing code is a pure thought process and fingers have long learned to tap it out by heart with the usual syntax without falling for the trap of ambiguities and inconsistencies in natural language. You just can't build reliable things with the prose, you do it with stricter rules of expression in mind
I stepped into a project at work to help out knowing almost no typescript and wrote angular http routines that just worked in a few hours with chatGPT. first we started with any and then we built out an interface and it helped me use the map function in http to build out a result array without any intermediate array creation.
I 100% would not have written the code as well as it came out with gpt's help.
Of course, GPT remains the best (after real human teacher) learning/discovery tool available nowadays, so it summarised (luckily for you, not hallucinated this time) some information together to get your job done. However, one could use his tooling documentation manuals to get the same job done in the same amount of time without prior knowledge? A senior engineer would just do it as fast as his fingers can type without the need to learn it prior. Oh, also he will be able to maintain it!
That’s exactly my point. The current scenario where someone can just go into a 3 months javascript bootcamp won’t be enough.
In my team, there is a grad dev doing bare minimum work. He has no initiative and struggles to understand basic requirements. I need to break down the task so much that I’m almost doing the work. In a few years, with better tooling/copilot/gpt, I will be able to just “finish” the job myself, and this kind of dev is made redundant.
Maybe this kind of dev is not common in FANG, but I met several, from small to big companies, in my over 10 years software engineer career.
>That’s exactly my point. The current scenario where someone can just go into a 3 months javascript bootcamp won’t be enough.
Realistically 3 months of any bootcamp was never enough.
>In my team, there is a grad dev doing bare minimum work. He has no initiative and struggles to understand basic requirements.
This kind of person has been around all over my 25+ year career, starting in the dot boom. "You should get into programming because of the money!" This is the result. With programming, you have to have an almost unhealthy obsession with it to be successful. These people get weeded out during the crashes, in which we are in the midst of.
Your case sounds like this - we have an engineer assigned to our team, we don't like his performance, and we can't do anything about it. Kind of a dead end which is bad for business. I prefer strong teams which were assembled by team leaders and members, not by business. I think the biggest problem in tech hiring is who makes the hire, it's pure luck if you don't have a ton of comprehension in the field and just assign someone as a business owner. The second biggest problem is that the wrong people don't get churned in the first few weeks So hire ONE senior engineer who will get stuff done in a way you like, – let him do the rest of the team hires, give him the responsibility to fire those who don't fit in the first few weeks. Voila, you have a self-sustained, well-communicating, and motivated team of people who get stuff done in a way you like.
I find it that the people who say "AI will replace developers" are the same ones that were thinking that CMSes will replace the need for developers, then no/low-code will replace the need for developers. But no, users are too stupid to handle stuff. Best case scenario developers will automate the easiest and time consuming things like UI creations and boilerplate using those tools. Most companies I know that use CMSes still have devs changing every single bit of the page because they either customized it so heavily or they simply implemented it wrong. I haven't seen a single successfully low-code company yet(though that just might be me). The same will happen with ChatGPT. It will become a tool, professionals still will be needed to use it properly.
Remember when "the cloud" was going to replace ops and on-prem and yet here was are 17 year since the release of AWS and we've only seen a 40% shift to the cloud and a massive need for ops people. Coders aren't going away they will just shift.
It's a race to the bottom in terms of work-life balance/compensation - ie everyone is putting in more effort to stay at the same level of employment until the industry bottoms out and people can't realistically work any harder for any less.
It sounds to me that you're just describing the supply-demand curve of employment, i.e. capitalism as prescribed. Are you suggesting an alternative approach?
My first two internships were at an insurance company. Everyone was busy. Not saying your job wasn't what it was but I can't say it's representative of everything outside Silicon Valley.
> Why do you think you need to achieve 4 or 5? Or even 3?
Because if you do a solid good job that's a 2, but a couple 2s fairly quickly gets you on the RIF train to getting fired. Which is nuts. So everyone has to outcompete their team trying to get those 3s. And the manager is put in the nasty position of having to rotate the 2s (which they must hand out since there's always quotas) among the team so that hopefully nobody gets RIFd while still meeting the quotas.
(Assuming a 5 point scale here, which is fairly common, but I've seen other scales but the same principles apply.)
My partner was a manager at the G of faang for many years and twice a year the whole month was blocked off for 60-80 hour weeks just to fill endless review paperwork. And their employees spend all of the six months between reviews scheming ways to fill that next round of paperwork. It's all a monumental waste of time, effort and cause of unnecessary stress for everyone.
None of this nonsense exists in other industries, at least as far as I know from talking about it with my circle of connections in other professions such as law, medicine, accounting.
> Because if you do a solid good job that's a 2, but a couple 2s fairly quickly gets you on the RIF train to getting fired.
This definitely seems bad, but it’s not common in every tech company. Maybe is something in your company or city/country?
I worked in a few countries and I’m UK at the moment. Large corporations do have performance reviews, but there is no expectations that everyone needs to over achieve.
If your job is burning you out, maybe is worth it to look around for a new one. Is the high salary of FANG worth it? “Boring companies” can still pay good enough and have really interesting tech challenges.
> None of this nonsense exists in other industries, at least as far as I know from talking about it with my circle of connections in other professions such as law, medicine, accounting.
Maybe not in the same way, but they still have their own struggles to progress in their careers. The main difference is that the tech industry doesn’t have labor regulations and every company needs to do their career progression.
However, Law can be as bad on that, lawyers need to grind for years before getting seniority and higher salaries.
Medicine and accounting is extremely government regulated and you need to get specific certification to pass to the next role. So there is a lot of pressure to get those.
This varies a lot depending on where you live and your routine. If you’re middle class, lives in a nice neighbourhood and go out into posh areas, the risk is really really low.
This is why this Tinder scam is extra dangerous, as it’s baiting men to go alone to a non public location to meet an unknown woman.
True, as a man, I want love, belonging, family, etc.
But many women, specially in their early 20s, have completely unrealistic and entitled mentality. They don’t offer love and support, but only drama e constant criticism. Going to a prostitute is simpler while you can’t find a real partner.
I worked for a company during Covid where I had to remotely connect to a Windows machine, and from there, connect to a Linux machine.
The only issue I had was keyboard mapping, specially because I was using a macbook. I had to remap a few keys, but even then, a few hotkeys didn’t work.
It’s not perfect, but it’s getting better and I can see many companies will force us all to this in 10 years time.
This makes sense, but this should had ask the account password to confirm, which Jeff’s daughter may know and typed.
IMO, The main issue in here is BigTech obsession with a single login. One single credentials give you access to everything, from entertainment to professional services.
People do share their credentials with family, specially if involves subscription and payment. BigTech try so hard to push for not sharing, but they fail to understand (or don’t care) that most people, specially non American, don’t have the budget to subscribe multiple time. Family accounts are non existent, lacking management options, and also more expensive.
It would be interesting if there were auth standards related to linking family accounts or different identities. OIDC tries to extend OAuth to human identity characteristics but doesn’t quite get there. Maybe you could hack it in with custom claims, but first class support for codifying relations between users would be neat, instead of having every auth provider roll their own half broken implementation.
> I don't like all of it, but it gives one coherent top-to-bottom model.
Completely agree. Bob Martin “Clean” has some really good recommendations, and some subjective advices. Normally the dev team can use this mental model as baseline and agree on which of the subjective advice to follow.
I just had an issue related to this recently, one of the senior software engineer in my team was previously a university professor with no software engineering experience. Every code review is an endless discussion, as he don’t agree with most of Martin “clean” code. So his code not only has several bad smells, but it feels like a completely different dialect. It forced us to have really basic discussions about code practices, even when to use comments (the professor likes to comment almost every line of code).
I guess this can varies per company. It’s not difficult to be a super star in a dinosaur company. After all, “In The Land of The Blind, The One Eyed Man is King.”
This is really common in many European companies. Most developers are doing the bare minimum and it’s common for the department to be carryover by a single guy that is passionate by software development.
My understanding is that people don’t put any effort because of a mix of factors: no technical career; low salaries; no financial reward for putting extra effort; management is mostly non technical and don’t value developers; companies can’t increase salary for a single individual in the same role because of unions or country laws; people can’t be easily fired; etc.