n_time

I hear you. It's definitely important to be careful; less prestigious jobs can also just mean getting treated with less prestige AKA like shit.

I think this is more of an organisational thing, as well as likely your team within the organisation

There's a lot of programming gigs in the public sector or in larger boring organisations. They pay less but are also have lower expectations and more structure which are both great

No PTSD but dealing with burn out I needed to find something else, and that's what I tried. So far it's paying off.

I will but only if it's motivated by some moral/ethical calculus. If it's just a product I kind of like then I'm out of there

Could it be people are choosing over-engineered solutions because AWS has bad documentation and that's what the solutions architects tell them to do?

Could it be because microservices and so-called "server-less" have been sold as cost-saving measures that increase the business' flexibility and decrease capital investment?

When... in reality a single deployed Docker container is way more manageable than a distributed system constructed with "lambdas" and requires fewer engineers in the long run?

What I'm trying to say is that FAANG cargo-culting is only part of why developers choose to build solutions that scale larger than they need. Another large part is the cloud development ecosystem writ-large and the consulting culture that has built up around it.

You sound like a very competitive person. You might want to consider that a lot of software development is actually the navigation of socio-technical systems. Heavy emphasis on the socio. Your competitive drive isn't bad, but it might lead you to local optima in your career in the long-run.

How do you get things done in a larger organization? At AWS it's solved by having APIs and documentation for everything. This leads to a janky UI, a lot of redundancy in their systems, and a pretty bad work environment from what I hear.

In a lot of technical organizations, this problem is solved instead informally through relationships between members of the organization. You want to get something done outside of your constrained contexts? You'll probably need some relationships. Getting a lot of cards done is great, but if you're pushing too hard all the time you're going to sour those relationships.

What I'm saying boils down to this: being a developer in a large organization is about 1-3 parts coding to 7-9 parts communication and relationships. Further, if you spend time communicating you can often realize that the feature you're implementing was already implemented two years ago and there's just a regression that's caused the line of code to no longer be executed.

You can say fuck it to the communications with your peers if you'd like. However, keep in mind that most of your jobs as you become senior are going to come from referrals from former colleagues. Your boss right now isn't going to help you get your next job–the people sitting around you might.

Consider reading [non-violent communication](https://www.amazon.com/Nonviolent-Communication-Language-Lif...).

I stopped using Firefox because it was killing my battery life. Also because I noticed more and more websites stopped supporting it and I just kind of gave up. I'm using Safari these days and it's fine.

A large portion of this is due to the corporate enclosure of deep learning and machine learning that has occurred over the past 10 years. This, combined with the scale required for a lot of deep learning research, means that neither the code nor the resources required for reproduction are accessible outside of corporate labs.

You're being exploited. You've been worked to your limit. You probably share some blame in this but you're certainly not the one profiting from it so the key thing is you need to stop for a minute.

You need a break to re-evaluate. At least two weeks without work before you even bother trying to sort through important questions like who you are and what you want. Once you've relaxed, you can start to ask the heady, existential questions that it sounds like you've been putting off for a while.

Try asking for some extra vacation from your employers. If they won't give it to you, and you can afford it, ask for unpaid time off.

Rationality is a tool not a state of being.

Have you switched jobs on a while? It sounds a little like you’re also describing being deeply embedded in your organization and having social capital there.

I’d suggest switching jobs. You’ll lose the social capital and have new tech to learn. The stress and work of reaccumulating those should distract you for a hot minute

I think it's actually [Euro English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English)

1. I am cranky on Wednesdays. I'm sorry. I'll try to do better – but Thursday or Tuesday are probably better.

It's worth considering that the number of programmers/technologists working in an organisation serves a signal for the organisation as an financial instrument. An organisation wants to show growth in terms of revenue but also in terms of their capabilities, and frequently the "human capital" of the organisation is a metric that is reviewed here.

If you've been in a growing tech company you've probably seen this as colleagues being hire when you're not clear why, and the organisation actually preferring solutions that require many more employees.

There's also just the factor that – today at least – technology management have a lot of social power within their organisations. Most managers wants to grow their little fiefdom – which usually means more headcount.

Anywho, I guess I'm just saying there's a lot of factors completely unrelated to automation that incentivize hiring more programmers. Many of these factors are not rational for the organistions themselves – managers growing their headcount to the limit their structure will allow. Some of them are though! I.E. company as a financial instrument rather than as a business.

The model of a business selling something and optimizing process for maximum profits is in there for sure, but from my experience there's a lot of other factors that end up building a very incoherent whole.

Free markets and network effects leads to the accumulation of wealth and power by the few. Piketty did the hard work of documenting this. Getting away from theory and into business strategy, network effects are an often discussed strategy in start-up culture to become a "unicorn". What is a unicorn? Usually the winner of a battle to seize a market leveraging "disruption" brought on by new technology.

A truly decentralized, unregulated network will therefore lead to more power being seized by fewer. That is, a decentralized financial network will tend to lead towards the centralization of the value represented within that network. Without the ability for democracy to step in and regulate that network.

Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are an inherently anti-government project, through placing all governments in a single authoritarian perspective and insisting that they must be decentralized; "crypto" is fundamentally anti-democratic. Throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Thank goodness it's decentralized and there are no single points of failure.

If you don't have a system that enforces private ownership then who cares what a blockchain says?

Screenshots NFT

Wish there was more philosophy of science and exploration into what "technology" means in CS programs. Maybe get undergrads to read Crime and Punishment by Foucault. Not saying he's the be-all end-all but just that perspective of seeing technology as subjective and situated in historical contexts.

Technology in CS ends up instead being taught to be magical progress fuel that brings us towards the inevitable future rather than tools built by people with access to capital in order to achieve specific ends

They should probably talk to someone who knows something about ergonomics–the way his neck was craning to look at those vertical "screens" looked painful

Do American corporations even pay taxes?

Also it's jarring reading early 00s Adbusters-style Gen-X prose after all these years

I love his web design

That Vigilante ad gives me serious Jennifer Government vibes

this is correct

The console for Google Cloud Platform is also down.

If they have to worry about what latest moral crusade will try to get you kicked off the cloud platform, they will be a lot more reticent about migrating to cloud.

Equating climate change activism with all other forms of social justice is a common trend I see. They seem so different to me–the difference between empirical reality and ideology. While the outcomes of climate change will be ideological–save climate refugees or preserve competitive advantage and wealth–the immediate concern of attempting to mitigate the impacts of climate change are relatively rational.

if you were a fossil fuel or car company that makes gas burning vehicles

Have you tried putting on your role-playing hats and empathising with some of the points being made on the environmentalist side?

My point was that these services are using technical terminology to soften and obscure the stratifying of spaces based on power/money. You've responded by softening the terminology again.

I see others pointing out in sub-threads that these services are better than buses because there are "no hobos, gangstas, creeps, drunkards or other people creating a nuisance for fellow travellers".

Should I break down those labels and across which lines they are dividing society? :)

These policies of "harassment complaint", reputation, and recourse systems seem to me a bit like "you will be safe from the unwashed masses".

Paid service apartheid?

Facebook has over 2 billion users. If they want to stay relevant in the global scheme would be taking a risk by giving preferential treatment to American authorities. Especially given Germany's power in the EU and the rising European hostility towards digital platforms.

There's a lot of folks to advertise to on this side of the pond, and we're having elections to ;)

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

The success of many companies, and probably all of the unicorns, has nothing to do with technology

Have you considered broadening your personal definition of technology past computing and engineering?

From Wikipedia:

Technology can be the knowledge of techniques, processes, etc. or it can be embedded in machines, computers, devices and factories, which can be operated by individuals without detailed knowledge of the workings of such things.

Technology is the creation of systems. Those systems run as much on the users of that technology, and the members of the organisation supporting it, as they do inside of microprocessors.