amonith

I see your comment grayed out as if it was downvoted but this is 100% true and my colleagues share your sentiment. I still think writing is valuable (as is note-taking as a whole) for personal reasons but most people I know assume that most new professional content is LLM generated. Only if the writing is s*t we kind of believe that it was written by a human but that is also bad for obvious reasons.

The "continuous wars" is a weird comment. Unless you mean internet flame wars, because if "globalization" subsides real wars will happen more often. We kind of see it already as more and more people start leaning right heavily. Small communities breed radicalization.

They can have a positive impact, but only if you can choose one from a global network of said communities as an adult and you don't treat it very seriously (you leave when it becomes toxic). As a person born in a small village community... let's say I don't miss a single fucking thing.

Exactly, this is the "peaked in high school" stereotype and it's not good.

Isn't the point of the comment above to not even want to be up to date with every detail of people that are objectively not that important in your personal life? Not to decrease the social media usage because you feel you're up to date but to do it because it's unnatural and pointless?

Yeah SaaS is a different beast. Lots of areas worth hardening. Not really for customers but mainly for yourself. But desktop apps, mobile apps, self-hosted stuff, games, CLIs, libraries - you don't really have to worry about much.

If customers do mind then at best it's an opportunity cost (less people will buy). Shipping with bugs > not shipping, simple as.

It's a pity that heuristics are not mentioned in most language books or dictionaries. At least I wasn't taught any in school (10+ years ago). This should be next to the word definition.

I agree that they are very important but I still call it dumb in a "it's stupid that we have to do this because we suck as a human species" kind of way.

Why did you read that as 2 though? Is there a context clue I'm missing or is there some grammar rule I don't know of? Honest question, I'm Polish.

For me there's a huge gap between 1 and 2 so it might cause misunderstandings when used in a sentence. I despise a lot of things I fully understand and if I said I "appreciate" them - sounds weird.

"Appreciate" is a weird word. At least for me (not an English speaker) it has a positive connotation so with that in mind I sure hope nobody appreciates the importance of optics. The concept is dumb but it is important and we have to play the game to achieve anything.

Maybe because you care about what others think you actually tell yourself that you need to write and read more to become "better" (not necessarily than others, just "better" as a person because you feel inadequate) and your body tells you that it's not actually what you want?

The solution might be to use the internet less and enjoy the offline life some more, not to "overcome the hurdle".

> everyone keeps coming to you to name things

Nah, not really. Years ago when we worked in office and I was still a junior we did discuss naming things here and there but I didn't like those conversations. It's all just opinions and habits.

> you're in a pocket of devs with high verbal skills

I mean, we don't hire juniors so it's possible but doubt it.

> you're in an echo chamber where everyone is equally bad

Most probably but if no one is having problems with reading code then I'm not sure what bad even means. If it's in English and it describes what it does and does not use any tricks - it absolutely doesn't matter how exactly is it worded and structured. The examples from the article are especially bad. I've seen some code I'd consider bad in general but it was all about those library hacks (usually ORMs) I mentioned previously or about trying to fit a lot in a single LINQ statement (i'm a c# dev). The only time when I'd consider naming to be bad was were all variable and function names were in German.

> There's literally a programmer joke about how hard naming things is.

It's a joke because it's not that serious. It might be hard sometimes to come up with any name for a thing (especially for non-english speakers like me) and you plop down a "var x" or something even less mature and run which is funny. So it is hard but it's not a "real" problem.

We created precise artificial languages to avoid programming in natural languages which would absolutely suck due to never ending ambiguity. I hope that what you're hoping never happens :V It would mean the docs would have to turn into "legalese" written basically by "code lawyers" - incomprehensible for the rest of the team. They would have to write multiple paragraphs for simple things like a button on a page just so that AI makes precisely what people want - right placement, right color, right size, right action, right feedback. And they would have to invent a new system for writing references to previously defined things just to keep some maintainability. And so many more issues...

It could be "dangerous" even sometimes if you're not paying attention. In JS/TS "||" operator evaluates the right side when the left side is "falsy". "Falsy" doesn't mean only null/undefined, but also "", 0, NaN, and... well... false. So if you make a method like "isUserActive" or "getAccountBalance" and do a throw like that, you'll get an error for valid use cases.

After 10 years as a commercial dev I've noticed I don't really care about things like this. Not sure if it ever made a difference. The "local code" - as in anything within a function or often a single class (1-2k LoC is not really a problem) - is trivial to read in most languages. The most difficult thing to understand always was the domain or the infrastructure/library quirks - stuff that's never properly documented. (Hot take: might not be worth to document anyway as it takes longer to write and update such docs than to struggle with the code for a little bit).

Naming or visual code structure was never a problem in my career so far.

I'd say it depends more on "the production" than the human. There are legal means to hold all people accountable for their actions ("Gross neglience" and all that). So you can basically always trust that people will fix what they messed up given the possibility. So if you can afford for the production to be broken (e.g. the downtime will just annoy some people) you might as well allow your team to deploy straight to prod without audits. It's not that rare actually.

Seriously though, what are you doing? Every single example everywhere throughout the internet that tries to show how good AI is at programming shows so mindbogglingly simplistic examples that it's getting annoying. It sure is a great learning tool when you're trying to do something experimental in a new stack or completely new project, I'll give you that, but once you reach the skill level where someone would hire you to be an X developer (which most developers disagreeing with you are, mid+ developers of some stack X) the thing becomes a barely useful autocomplete. Maybe that's the problem? It's just not a tool for professional developers?

I'm not sure about the average but I have 0 data. We will see in the future because the generation currently entering the workforce still used computers a bit due to tablets and phones not being that powerful. It's all about peeps currently in school.

You need to spend time with computers to learn how to use them so if average PC usage drops I'd expect the average skill to drop as well.

Tbh, as a AI power user (dev) - what is there to learn? Maybe one day to figure out that you have to write prompts in a certain way but you don't have to learn that "before the job" in any shape or form. It's way more important to know what to ask about and if the AI is not hallucinating (so, the actual stuff those students learn currently) than any tools. It's pointless like wasting time teaching highschoolers how to fill tax forms.

There’s a high possibility that AI will have exactly the opposite effect on work productivity for young people, at least for this generation, because technology in companies around the world lags years or even decades behind for simple economic reasons.

In a similar way, the overuse of simplified touchscreen-based devices makes them unprepared for working with computers and other “old tech” permeating the modern office. Many of them do not even know what files are, and their tech skills make them almost completely unhireable.

ffmpeg should be config-based with verbose descriptive names for everything. It doesn't make sense in its CLI form. It's far from human-readable since a very long time.

I grew up on a farm in the 90's in Poland (In 89' Poland dissolved PPR/PRL - basically just got rid of communism so villages were quite poor) and I did have to work in the field as that was our main source of food (honestly probably a lot of that was because of the culture, not poverty - everyone grew their own stuff and our grandparents which lived through WW2 still remembered even worse times and did not trust the economy at all).

Honestly - it was not that bad. For your own sustenance (literally when you don't sell much) you do not need that much land and the work is not 24/7 every day. There are a couple of tough weeks in the year but much more downtime than you might realize (like, you barely need to do almost anything entire winter and most of the other seasons actually. 1-2h tops to feed the livestock and bring some wood/coal to the furnace). It would be a different story if farming was our business and we wanted to raise money for something significant - but if you don't have any ambitions like that - village life is pretty easy.

I guess it depends on the type of said office job, but currently I work as a senior dev contractor in the city and it's barely better, if it is at all (I still can't really make up my mind if I'm happier). All of my extra money goes to mortgage (I "own" an apartment, not a house) and after work I do the exact same things I did when I worked on the farm to unwind (read, play games, nap, listen to music) because that's all the energy I have. And then we need to add all of the extra stress and competitiveness that comes with this line of job, wile "on the farm" I was already "at the bottom" and didn't stress much. There are a lot of scenarios on the farm where something is very urgent sure but they are not really stressful. If some farmer says they are - he did not experience real stress (legal threats, danger of losing not only the source of food but entire house + going into debt, long economy downturns without hope of things getting better [as compared to temporary stuff like the weather destroying the current year's crops], lots of stuff).

I'm very surprised that there haven't been any very bloody mass revolts yet in countries with work culture like this. I think it's inevitable some day because it has happened in most European countries somewhere in their history. It's kinda proven to be basically the only way to make a meaningful change. As you say, it doesn't make sense to keep living like this. Even farming for food only and forgoing access to any modern world amenities is better than this.

Pretty turquoise, green even!

> DevOps was/is not just better tools, it's the same team that builds the software, operates the software (and underlying infrastructure)

Not happening in any of the companies I worked for as a contractor or subcontractor. In those companies at best dev teams have nowadays some additional capability to deploy to dev/test instantly (so they do their own CI/CD pipelines and manage dev infra via Terraform or whatever) but production is always handled by a "DevOps" team which does not touch the application code at all. This is especially visible in companies that outsource their development to software houses / individual contractors (B2B stuff, most of the folks I interact with).

According to conversion rates and engagement metrics of most apps I've seen (not even mentioning social media where 2-3% engagement is the norm) most users are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Unless said app is a work/hobby tool, but that shouldn't be really called engagement.

It's different when you show something to someone with intent. Of course they will pay attention. Especially your family, come on.

I'm talking about random day to day browsing when you stumble on something random on the internet.

There is no winning in life. And I'm doing fine tyvm ;)

On such a random internet doodad most users will pick a random answer period. To see what this thingy tries to do without wasting any time on it. I hope it doesn't try to do gather any meaningful data.

Personally I "tried" to answer truthfully at first and then went absolutely "ok f u, don't care no more" when it showed turquoise :D

I meant 2019 but admittedly I only know of the Polish market and choices most "normal" (statistically) people make - which is to study the thing at the university without getting any job experience in the meantime. Here bootcamps were something maybe 1-2% of people did.

So if you started in 2019 you'd be graduating right into the "layoff" market in which juniors have virtually no possibility to get hired.