devdude1337

I start to think most people in Software don’t care at all. Before LLMs they were forced to at least pretend and they had been guarded by more and more style guiding, architecture, frameworks and agile ceremony.

I care alot about software and code. I write without AI, code and prose. Yet I would say it is useful for context sensitive search and autocomplete on steroids. I wonder why it should be more? It’s the intellisense I always wanted - just not worth a trillion I'd say.

And another point: if your coworkers do their job exclusively by vibing, then where’s the point of producing software? Your competitors can recreate it easily. There’s no value in AI generated artifacts and so there’s no value in operating the AI.

Just write the damn code

It doesn’t make any sense. If you can build a business purely with LLMs, then it’s even easier to copy it. Producing much output fast was never valuable, but those Valley guys seem to run around like headless chicken on crack (wait does crack even work without having a head?)

Why would anyone want to do that? Why not automate these tasks and let Claude handle everything on its own?

If the maintenance and implementation can be done by an LLM, I see no logical reason to keep a human employed for lower work.

There is much beauty in the C-code of the compiler.

don'hurt me…

Most job postings are fake / ghost jobs. Some are used for companies to evaluate the talent pool and find the lowest possible wages. Others are made to collect and even sell your data. You can identify those by their vague generic description of responsibilities/tasks and an absurd amount of requirements.

I'm not kidding - I am a freelancer and got unwanted calls from an accounting service company. Thanks to the german data regulations they had to tell me where they got my contact data from and it was a broker which got the data directly from a freelancer project platform.

There are still plenty of job opportunities out there, but lots of HR teams are overwhelmed by the amount of candidates received from the job platforms and recruiters. Besides the global economy cooling, we also see job platforms becoming more and more useless for candidates and employers at the same time.

My suggestion is to go the conventional way of application: as a freelancer that means acquisition by cold/warm calling and as a job seeker I recommend researching companies and contacting the people there responsible for staff - team managers, internal recruiters, CTOs or even the CEO

For any production ready software you plan a budget around the cost of a new car. Mostly even a lot more.

Just finishing a software project takes at least 80% of time and money besides the other 80% already done. Sounds funny, but I want to make it clear that effort and time of projects are almost always extremely underestimated.

If you need funding, the best and most reliable way is to have a customer willing to pay for development. In your case try to use contacts to hospitals and simply ask them if they are interested. When you hit a spot (and the right person) you might be surprised how easy money comes when someone needs or wants something…

It depends on many factors. No policy fits every team or situation. If feedback times - weather due to pipeline or personal/reviews - are long, I would also push larger PRs. Also reviews rarely really improve anything besides bikeshedding stuff like style or whatever the reviewer might find more pleasant in terms of overall structure. If reviews were done right you’d have to deep dive into the problem the requester tried to solve and understand his concepts and ideas of the solution. To do so, I do important reviews (which are super rare) in pair programming style with the requester. I suggest you should do the same especially if lot of code is changed or added. I assume you have proper testing in place. Looking at tests can help a lot to understand production code

The author seems to try to enforce programming constraints in order to fix one problem they identified, to fix all related problems that may occur in future.

It is obvious that he doesn’t have experience with long living systems, behause this approach leads to inflexible software. For example: sometimes memoization of react hook returns is sometimes good, but never always. He also values processes much over individuals - well we had a manifesto against such views…

Future proofing, assembly-line mentality, knows-it-all thinking - I feel sorry for those he manages and the company when they’ll become unable to add features at all.

You can try voluntary work. Working in animal shelters, or as you mentioned red cross / caritas could offer such opportunities. See, whatever you do, it will teach you required skills for any job and build up reputation. And it changes your perspective: jobs are not there to help you, it’s the other way around - what can you do to help the employer, the society, etc.? When you understand this, you will develop self esteem and find a direction in which you can go and develop yourself and a career.

When I did game dev I often went for an even driven approach or messaging based systems combined with oop and state machines to prevent eventual consistency locally. It works great in that domain, albeit not being the most performant solution.

In web or business systems it works well for some(!) parts. You just shouldn’t do everything that way - but often people get too exited about a solution and then they tend to overdo it and apply it everywhere, even when not appropriate.

Always chose the golden middle path and apply patterns where they fit well.

I had a client that enforced writing every customer facing software in C++14. In 2024 they suddenly need to support various web technologies and modern web infrastructure. They still rely on their language limitations and don’t get stuff done any longer.

I advised to use Go and most developers were interested and even enthusiastic about it. We proved Go introduction by using it for simulators and testing. But finally the tech lead said "we will never ship anything different than C++ written applications".

My current client also works in embedded tech, but I proposed a polyglot approach and architecture. We ship apps in Go, Rust, C, C++ and even Fortran. Any developer can pick up any language as long as it compiles to Armhf. No one has a problem reading and at least maintaining any code.

There should only be technical limitations and constraints to force down your fellow developers.

Frameworks are a different topic. Web frameworks come and go, and most Angular shops I know became desperate legacy plumbing shops. Only use frameworks that you can replace easily or are willing and capable to maintain yourself.

I assume you mean information density? If so programming languages basic information density is set by their amount of keywords and symbols used for parsing. But there also is implicit density caused by every abstraction - therefor a Lisp can express extremely complex programs with only a few lines of code. This may also hold true for natural languages when using phrases or metaphors.

In Germany I often come across MEAN Stack: Mongo, Express, Angular and Node.JS. Also Java Spring, ASP.net and MySQL is still in use heavily here. Agencies and E-Commerce mostly have PHP backends and React frontends including Next.JS.

Hard to tell what the future holds, but those technologies will be around for longer. Adoption within the industry is much slower that you’d anticipate.

Personally I’d go with the GoX-Light-Stack (just made that up): Go + SQLite backend and HTMX frontend.

A decompressed 4k texture uses ~80-90MB of VRAM. Your development tools index millions of lines of code. Not sure what your terminal does tho. But finally it’s mostly the massive amount of data modern applications have to handle effectively that lead to large amounts of memory allocated.

Zod surely is slow. I never imagined it to be fast. It has multiple layers of abstraction and does lots of checks. A custom solution giving the same level of detailed type safety wouldn’t be fast either.

Software just got very complex. Data became larger. And sometimes you better don’t implement abstractions to reach at least some efficiency with all these petabytes of 8k cat pictures and tiktoks…

I would recommend to not use a framework at all. I usually maintain legacy projects and modernize them for my clients. Whatever you feel is the latest shiny thing will be the legacy horror of tomorrow.

If I’m free to decide the tech stack it is HTMX with a backend technology that suits the business case. For web related work I usually choose Node.js and fastify without template engine. It’s fast and easy going.

Never work for free! Either cash or equity. You should expect an equity relative to your amount of work multiplied by the median freelancer hourly rate in your region. For example: I put in 3 months of work, that should be at least 30.000$ of value. If the company is worth 100.000$ I expect 33% of shares in equity. Everything else is fraud.

In 2021 and 2022 companies hired developers in masses. Low interest rates and a boom mentality lead to an extraordinary number of projects being started even if not profitable.

In hindsight it was very similar to the dotcom boom.

Now as interest rates raise, all those funny projects get canceled therefor people getting laid off.

As a freelancer I have trouble now closing any contract.

However I also realized that it’s not every sector that is doomed. Only web seems dead right now. I changed my business model aiming for embedded and industry software, especially C++.

Hey friend ;)

Freelancer from Germany here. While I don’t know much about the markets outside of the EU I hope I might still have some helpful advice. First things first: make sure to have enough saved cash to endure at least 6 months without income. When money comes in, do keep these savings or refill them.

German projects usually are scheduled for 6 up to 12 months, and are mostly handed over by consultancy and personell agencies. So my direct clients are those agencies - whom I send my invoices to. Normally I become part of the developer team, like an employee but expectations are higher. Freelancers are not only seen as developers with short ramp up time, but experts who bring new knowledge into the companies. Often you’re expected to fulfill a certain goal, like introducing a new framework into their legacy codebase or implement a service or infrastructure. Also interim positions are given, like being the teams senior when the former one quit, until a new permanent can be found.

In the longer run you should specialize yourself. I don’t mean frameworks with that, but fields of industry. A jack-of-trades will receive fewer offers from my experience than a high value specialist (Cobol someone…?)

You need to develop a business mindset. A freelancer is a business, so all the same rules apply that apply to startups and larger cooperations.

Do not go cheap. When you start selling low, people expect low quality and then negotiations for discounts start and sooner or later you work extremely much for a terrible income. Check statistics about software business hourly rates in your area and place yourself around a sensible median.

Know yourself or get to know yourself better. What is your optimal work time? Do you like being in the office with the other members or are you comfortable at home?

Do not overwork yourself. A burn out can easily become an existential threat.

Learn to say no. Do not sign a project that doesn’t pay enough or bores you. Check your clients financial data beforehand when available.

Last but not least, try to keep in contact with the managers and coworkers you liked.

You can of course hire a contractor and tax them as usual business costs. But for a permanent position the employee needs a European Social ID, a Tax ID, health care account and a bank account. All this is needed before you can pay the employee’s first loan.

What makes you think that developers from Brazil, Vietnam, Canada, Egypt or the US would demand so much lower wages? I helped companies onboarding people from all over the globe, and every developer (at least those we met and signed) know their worth.

Many managers I got to know have a hard time expressing themselves in English properly.

They fear miscommunication and the administrative work connected to non-German employees.

Freelance developer from Germany here. There is a significant drop in projects and a slowdown in permanent offerings, but no layoff wave like in the US. Demand is still high but due to the current recession most companies delay hiring for now.

From my point of view there is also a skill-missmatch in Germany. While firms look for the usual most modern tech stacks, workforce is often conservative, staying years or even decades at one company with outdated technology. Hiring non-EU citizens is almost impossible because of the bureaucracy.

So, in Germany the situation is complicated and different from the US.

Does a 10x artist exist? Or a 10x football player? How about a 10x manager? While outstanding talent does exist, it is extremely rare and often can only thrive in specific environments. Also who is the average engineer? If you put the best frontend specialist into an oldschool legacy sql mainframe task, he’ll look like a moron (at least for a few months). If you can create and sustain a great environment and fitting - you may be able to find a rockstar. Now fairytales aside - what I experienced to exist is a 0.x engineer. A net-negative programmer. For most non-tech people they look like a 10x…

Automotive, industry - IoT, embedded stuff and machine control. Yet, web technologies are used more and more. Qt, for example, is slowly being replaced by web interfaces. CAN bus is getting replaced by MQTT as microcontrollers are becoming more powerful and regular web servers for integration.

Finally, while there are still places with low web usage, you need to get used to it

The phenomenon has a term: https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...

Without referring to the article, my advice is to set hard quality criteria for his work. Also you could insist on test coverage and write acceptance criteria for his tasks. However, I try to never judge anyone easily and I believe even the most stubborn person can be helped to improve. If you could show him what he lacks - in a nice way of course - you might be surprised how much people can improve and advance.

I view the "Beginner Expert" not as a failure of character but more like a long term depressive episode

Christmas 1992 - my parents gifted me the Nintendo Gameboy. One hour after playing Tetris I told my dad: that’s what I want to do when I’m grown up.

And now I’m a grown up L block. Mostly useful but often leaving gaps

Many people seem to think that developers need a lot of guidance, yet I’ve never seen someone proving that point. What would happen if the team was unmanaged? Let them do what they think is right to fulfill the businesses tasks. I doubt they’d only build things no one needs…

Companies do not have missions. They are mandated to earn money - a simple and clear goal. Everything else companies proclaim is what I like to call: social substitution currency. These are used to motivate employees to put more effort in their work than is required by terms of their contracts, and is also used as a marketing tool.

Now a full remote worker is much less influenced by peer pressure and thereby the substitution currency won’t work effectively. That’s one reason why CEOs want them back at the office

Scrum is advertised massively. There is certifications and consultancies all around the globe making money out of it. Marketing works, especially on people with a CXX title…

Kanban is simple. So simple that no one could justify taking large amounts of money to teach people how to use a list of tasks.