stratigos

All of this and more entered my mind the very moment I learned that Microsoft had acquired GitHub.

I was just thinking it sounds like a very ambitious, engaged, and intelligent 24 year old (a kid).

Ive been working in AI for about a year, and Ive been working as a web developer for about 20 years. It appears to me that everyone that thinks AI is going to handle development for companies (in the reasonably near future) are also folks who have never had high level engineering responsibilities for a single project for a multi-year period. That is, theyve never been exposed to the realities of how nuanced managing a software product is at a technical level. The bots can barely write code-bootcamp level scripts. Im not confident that we will see AI solving the kinds of (coding) problems that engineering leaders are handling over multi-quarter projects.

This comes off like a study being published that shows tobacco is harmful to the lungs.

As someone who has worked in startup environments for 20 years, its rather offensive that anyone in 2024 would claim that employees arent taking risks.

In todays salary brackets, one could be comfortably making 220k as a staff dev some huge healthcare/pharma tech firm. One may also feel the job is boring, soulless, and mostly uncomfortable. Then one may choose to work at an exciting AI startup for ~160k, and suddenly find themselves way happier, growing more, and engaged. One just took ~60k worth of risk right there, not to mention that it could be come $0 tomorrow, and one likely now has crap healthcare benefits, given the startup status.

That 60k could be a million dollars in ~15 years if invested wisely.

The hype train strikes yet again! In fellow consultancy circles, we were giving talks on exactly this back in '17 and '18, but the hype train was too strong then. It was even harder to convince this same crowd that SPAs are usually a bad idea, and emerging technology like Hotwire or LiveView would soon eclipse the SPA-obsessed culture. GraphQL is immensely powerful and useful for its exact use case, and extremely burdensome and expensive for any other use case. If you dont already know that use case, YAGNI. The same can be said for any hype train. The problem with any kind of hype train in tech is everyone looks for reasons to use whatever the new hyped thing is, rarely does anyone determine if the new hyped thing actually fits their use case(s). This will continue so long as there is a dichotomy of culture between youths and those with lengthy experience. We old people will continue to point out exactly why this or that is pure hype, and will continue to be drowned out by the emotions that come along with participating in hype.

This reads like a junior developer's first foray into the concept of the test pyramid. Congrats, author has learned that there is a forest beyond the trees.

I would guess for the same reason the government consistently buys $1000 hammers and $5000 toilet seats - to mask some military operation theyd rather not publicly report on.

Were pro-right-tool-for-the-job. The US Stock market is already a free-money generating machine. We need more money in the US Stock Market, not in B.S. toys for contrarian criminals.

contrarianism is a very powerful and often understated force within human culture

Well, we all know a Gemini cant be trusted ;-)

Blue LEDs are the bane of my light-sensitive eyes' existence, and it pains me so to know they almost never existed at all. I keep a PC repair kit with me, even though I dont have a desktop computer, because I need to take all of my electronics apart and take these stupid blue LEDs out of them.

The response to seeing 10k lines of code in a PR is not to skim it, that is harming one's company. The response is to request the author to justify its size, and/or reject the PR and request that it be delivered in smaller sizes. If the author cannot, then the author needs their responsibilities reduced and to receive additional mentorship.

Skimming a PR is pure cognitive dissonance, dont do this and complain when your app turns into a dumpster fire.

China makes war through deception and gaslighting, not through tanks and bombs. They declared war on the entire world more than two decades ago.

please, just stop with Python already

Anytime people talk about failing western economies, I find it easy to make a "you should see the other guy!" argument. We dont have > 500 million people at risk of starving to death in the next 10-15 years, and were not at risk for total energy collapse. Were not trying to gaslight the world that we are not looting all of the fish in their seas due to impending food source collapse. Were in horrible shape but compared to most of the major economies of the world, were relatively o.k.

This does not mean things are o.k. in the USA, or that we dont need to fix things. Its just that were not the ones that truly need to panic, "collapse" in the West is different than in the old world, just like "poverty" in the USA is radically different than what it means on most of the world.

To accept any tenants of EA, one must first accept the cultural mythology of altruism in the first place. Can it be proven that altruism exists?

Is this article satire? Do people actually make naive assumptions that line-length limits in code relate to screen sizes?

thoughtbot, inc had been "leading this charge" for over a decade

The ability for the state to remotely kill your means of transportation, thus remotely controlling our freedom of movement, is a new dystopian level of government control.

Indeed, this is the reason they are forcing EVs onto us.

Interesting, as a user of Ubuntu for over a decade, I had nearly forgotten that Windows exists. I diddnt know anyone besides gamers used Windows these days.

Except for when those that live in some alternate reality demand that you also abide by their alternate reality or be punished.

If you dont believe Orthodox Privelege exists, work in San Francisco for a few years. Provided you are a critical thinker, it will become obvious that the culture is akin to excommunication for declaring the universe is not geocentric.

From what I gather, Unity has recently made moves to lose the trust of all of their customers, and there is a massive exodus towards other game dev software/frameworks/etc.

The article sounds like it was written by someone with minimal career experience. Its overwhelmingly naive, and Im sure the intended readership isnt any more or less naive than the author.

I wonder how many restaurants in NYC make it onto this list lol. Some of the best restaurants in the world only survive 2-3 years here. The number of RIPs is astounding.

"basically answering emails" is usually also done within a context of subject matter expertise and long term career experience. This is akin to saying "programmers just bang on a keyboard and clock out at the end of the day, easy!"

I agree, which is why Ive designed my own set of qualifications for a web developer to be considered senior, and they have integrity and can be reduced to scalar values if needed. Thousands of interviews have proven these qualifications to be successful at sourcing candidates that are true seniors and those that are not.

Most businesses dont need to care since they can find successful outcomes either way. That doesnt mean that qualifications (which can be turned into certifications just by having a recognizable name attached to one's firm) do not exist, that just means software is truly soft in that the consequences of being under-qualified are not at all as drastic as the consequences of being under-qualified to fix powerlines or design a nuclear reactor.

The main difference is that software engineering is extremely tolerant of poor engineering standards and practices, relative to "traditional" engineering disciplines.

This allows many organizations to utilize software engineering skills without having any particular mentality towards engineering itself. Some businesses can be arranged such that the software development practice is much like an assembly line, reducing developers to assembly line workers. Some businesses actually use engineering skills and have an engineering mindset.

The fact that businesses can find success while having terrible or no engineering practice is an example of where software engineering differs from any sort of engineering of physical things. Mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc engineering does not have such a tolerance, they simply exhibit failure if so.

I love Krita! ;-) Happy to send em $5