slyzmud

The issue comes when you have 432 functionalities and have to add the 433 without interfering with the others. Or when you cant afford slightly wrong. Or when each functionality adds complexity at a higher rate than an engineer and over time the projects gets to an unmanageable size.

But that's not a problem on small projects. non-technical people only create software to scratch their needs, they will probably will need 20 or 30 features, never 432, making their system much easier to handle.

The problem with enterprise software is that it has to support a very large combination of features designed for different clients. That's why it gets so complex, but if the software has to support a single client is waaay easier.

I agree with you, 99% of the people work just to pay bills, but that doesn't make the other part false.

I'm a software engineer and love thinking about problems methodically. Every time I hear a someone saying that programmers are no longer required (even if I don't agree with that) if feels really bad, it's equivalent to saying that what I do best in life has no value anymore.

To put it on other words: I really like philosophy, but what value do they provide in modern world? Who pays for the work of a philosopher? I think people will start of thinking of programmers like that eventually.

I don't think that's a good analysis.

If the LLM is wrong and gives you a wrong medical diagnosis you end up hurting your health. If an LLM gives you a wrong debugging answer you've just lost 5 minutes.

Software engineering is the only knowledge work where mistakes are usually inexpensive except for data breaches. Outside for that nobody cares for bugs.

That's not true in most other knowledge jobs. If a lawyer uses AI and hallucinates something there is a legal problem. If someone vibecodes an app and crashes, it can be fixed with more AI and try again

I did it and he "fixed" it with AI, making him even more convinced of it.

I'm pretty sure something else must have broken but didn't see it immediately.

I guess eventually it will fall from its own weight but I'm surprised how far he was able to get.

I've working on a small side project with a non technical friend for a couple months. It's really small but we are selling it to some clients.

The other day my friend discovered lovable and vibe coded an entire app and he started feeling like I was scamming him. Why would I take weeks or months in building our app if he could do it on hours?

He might be stubborn but ended up blindly believing me, but I couldn't find a good way of explaining that a prototype wasn't a final product. It has lots of errors, doesn't consider edge cases and it's impossible to fix if something breaks. Of course what I said didn't mean much because he didn't understand what I was talking about.

How do you communicate this problem? That there's much more than what you see in a frontend? Seems really hard to explain to non technical people.

They'd prefer to believe that there's something special about their craft that means something produced by AI isn't good enough.

I know I can code and get better results than most people can with an LLM but I've came to realize that it doesn't matter and people just want to see results (even if they are kind of wrong).

In other words, with the website example, I've realized that even if the agency can do something 10x better, most people will choose to "buy" the AI website just because it's free or super cheap, and that makes me sad

I know you are joking but I'm sure that there is at least one director or VP inside GitHub pushing a new salvation project that must use AI to solve all the problems, when actually the most likely reason is engineers are drawing in tech debt.

And a thinkpad running Linux is just not doing it for me. I want my power efficient mac hardware.

Are you talking about the battery? I bought a T16 AMD a month ago with the 86Wh battery and it lasts between 8 and 12 hour depending on the usage. Not as much as a macbook but enough to not worry too much about it. New intel ones are supposed to be much better on power efficiency.

It's off course one level bellow on the mac on that regard (and others maybe too), but if you want to use linux I think the trade-off is worth it.

The two groups are very different but I notice another pattern: you have people who like coding and understanding details of what their are doing, are curious, what to learn about the why and think about edge cases; and there's another group of people who just want to code something, make a test pass, show a nice UI and that's it, but don't think much about edge cases or maintainability. The only thing they think is "delivering value" to customers.

Usually those two groups correlate very well with liking LLMs: some people will ask Claude to create a UI with React and see the mess it generated (even if it mostly works) and the edge cases it left out and comment in forums that LLMs don't work. The other group of people will see the UI working and call it a day without even noticing the subtleties.

Sadly the times where people joined software engineering for passion are way behind. People nowadays join just for the money or because it has lot of jobs available.

It is very easy to notice at work who actually likes building software and wants to make the best product and who is there for the money, wants to move on, hard code something and get away with the minimal amount of work, usually because they don't care much. That kind of people love vibe coding.

The actual report mentioned in the link

https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Bus...

It's the same reason you don't need to run a double blind study on whether seat belts work

Actually, seat belts are a weird example. After they were invented, there were more car crashes since people trusted they were protected. Without seat belts people were more cautious. They were a net positive of course, but some different situations/inventions/studies might have effects that are the opposite of what you would expect.

Actually my bank already requires me to use the phone app for any operation on the website. When I want to login from my laptop I need to use my phone with their app to approve the login, same for almost any operation.

Ah, and it can only be installed in one device at the same time :D Don't have your phone available? Bad luck for you

I don't know for freebsd but at least for Linux I started using the zig toolchain and it's wonderful. https://zig.news/kristoff/building-sqlite-with-cgo-for-every...

The worst offender to me is Google Maps. I'm a native Spanish speaker but set my phone to English because I hate app translations. The problem is when I want to read reviews it automatically translates them from Spanish (my native language) to English. It doesn't make any sense!

Could you share what metrics they optimistize or monitor? Or how do they improve their algorithms? I don't know how much you can tell but I always wanted to hear it from someone who has worked with them

Friendly tip: if timezones are an issue, try hiring in south America. We have the advantage of sharing 4 working hours with Europe and California. Also with similar salaries you will get more qualified candidates. You might be surprised with the amount of rust engineers you will find.

I can trust my bank + the government to keep my money safe.

That's not true everywhere. I live in Argentina and people prefer to have dollars in cash in their houses rather than leaving them in a bank. A few years ago, in 2001, the government took the dollars from the banks and gave them pesos for a lower value. Most banks went broke and people lost their savings and the ones that didn't, gave pesos to people making them lose 75% of their savings. I know similar things happened in other countries too.

Crypto kind of solves that issue. I know some people who prefer to save in DAIs than keep dollars in the bank.

Have you tried Youtube premium? We always say companies should move out of the ad revenue model and start charging for the services instead of pushing more ads. For me, paying Youtube premium has been a great decision.

Hey that sucks. Where do you live?

Most of the interesting positions I find hire only in the US but it's because they are for bigger companies (more than 500 employees). I will have to target smaller ones.

I'm still super curious. It's a well known company that is doing super well. I had the interview with some really smart people with amazing resumes. The low ball explanation makes sense. Maybe they were just testing me. I live in Argentina where 45k would be considered an ok salary. Lot of people work for less than that. But if you know your value and work with international companies you can get much more than that.

I'm definitely not going to take this offer below my current salary. No way. I might take it if there is a small difference with the other offer I have but I doubt they stretch so much.

Being a distributed company I did some research and found what their salaries are. They tend to pay around 120k~160k. I guess they are trying to offer me much less because of where I live. I never thought they would made such a low offer. According to them their offers are localized.

Honestly, it was a surprise to me when the recruiter told me the number in the meeting. My first thought was "this is a joke", so it was a little hard being calm.

I think they saw an average of salaries in Glassdoor. The problem is that in Argentina we have 60% inflation annually so information there gets old pretty quickly. Salaries grow 2x every 2 or 3 years. Maybe explaining that helps. I would like to know where they got their estimation for the salary.

Would you mind sharing which ones I could apply?

I live in Argentina. Making 90k is a lot, not many companies pay more. I'm probably the best paid among my friends in software engineering. Even though some things are cheap here, close to 60% go to taxes. Don't make me think much about that :(

That's a great strategy. I'm having the negotiation with the recruiter and I've just talked with the hiring manager for the behavioral interview, it went really well. I hope he might want me enough in the team to do something about.

I couldn't agree more with this. I'm currently working in a company that builds what could be considered a "boring" product. It's enterprise and thought for big companies. It doesn't have AI, blockchain or anything trendy. However, I love the work we are doing. Instead of using a lot of open-source tools, we develop our own. Even though I'm against this, it allowed me to learn a lot and got me some great experiences and learnings.

One piece of advice I can give is to try asking during interviews what are the most interesting projects the interviewers did and why. It will give you a rough idea about what they are doing and if you would enjoy working there.

Also, I don't think there is any correlation between career progression and interesting projects. You can grow working on interesting or boring projects. The important thing is what you learned and what you achieved.

Funny that the other day I discovered bandlab. It's not professional but for my hobby usage it's the best I've found