amonith

I wonder if that's actually a good idea. The best time to start learning a skill/trade (includes white collar stuff) seems to be when it's not YET in demand. For example, the worst time to start learning software development was at its covid peak in 2018/2019. If trades are going to be in huge demand now, a lot of people will start learning them and in 5 years of so we're back to square one with low pay and huge competition.

Then again it still probably is more useful than bachelor in hr. Trades are awesome "emergency" / "economy downturn" skills to have.

I don't think true US-like "salaried contracts" exist at all in EU. Speaking as a Polish contractor. There might be fixed-price short-term project-based contracts but it has nothing to do with employment and definitely it's not a monthly/yearly thing without any hour limit. At best you have something like "minimum X hours per week" but there's always "up to Y" and while those hours are technically "preordered" upfront, you are supposed to log them.

That being said lots of people still do unpaid overtime, but only because they're afraid about losing the job / care too much. Not because they actually legally have to. There are legal means to defend yourself from that.

If you do offer equity then that's a slightly different thing. That can be considered payment by those who are willing to take the risk. However, a lot of "startups" in EU do not offer such thing. They do standard employment with unpaid on-call. And those can f right off.

Outside of FAANGs, especially in lower cost of living countries (e.g. here in Poland) and high demand jobs (e.g. mid+ software engineers) employers compete for employees most of the time. The reason is simple: nobody's offering above market rates so you have dozens or hundreds of same-y softwarehouse-y companies to choose from. Most of my friends do not apply for jobs because they actually need them. They're looking around for something better while already working for someone.

What do you mean by the last sentence? Isn't it the opposite? People who could do art stuff won't be able to sustain themselves using those skills anymore because those will be devalued a lot.

Individuals are allowed to do that by law. Companies cannot do that to create commercial products. They need to obtain relevant permissions / licenses from the creators first.

"AI art is stealing" is an oversimplification of "companies are stealing unlicensed user generated content to create a commercial product" which is absolutely true. Nobody grants commercial use rights to their output by default, you have to ask for that.

Nobody cares that humans learn in principle the same way as AI. Law - which is meant to protect and help individuals to foster healthy competition & innovation without disrupting the social order + prevent monopolies - allows that. Large corporate entities should not be allowed to use that unlicensed content the same way. That's it. That's the whole point. Content was stolen to create commercial AI products.

Wow, that's insane. Here in Poland product descriptions are legally binding. You can straight up sue if you don't get what the description says in any online store. Pictures are optional though, those you could potentially generate, maybe, not a lawyer.

Not only there's a "trust-crisis" looming over the AI world (only tech bro enthusiasts seem to enjoy what AI is doing) it's straight up just a technical detail. Describing the technology the product runs on in the description rarely works because it almost never matters to the customer. For example "Cloud-based" could be good if the product is something for developers and they want to know how it's hosted and where the data is stored, but if a cinema or any kind of e-store or anybody else in the product description stated that they're running in the cloud... that would be quite stupid.

Same happens with the AI. I want to know if you're gonna solve my problem, not how. If AI won't do the job I want you to use something else.

To be honest never-ending myriad of "local" conflicts and long-term economy downturn stresses me much more than nuclear war. That would be over pretty quick...

I do now but the damage is done. I already know what's happening even without updates. Also I have <200km to war-torn Lviv, so... kind of concerns me.

It's based on a Stack Overflow user survey which is incredibly biased towards "enthusiastic junior" kind of developers. I mean "active user of Stack Overflow" (somebody who cares about some kind of survey on the website) is already a pretty strong filter. Also the further in career we progress the less SO we actively use.

Edit: It kind of also explains the high-percentage of unhappiness. The junior marked is especially screwed right now.

I'm not sure I've met anybody happy this year (I live in Poland but it's not because I live in Poland I swear :D). It's not just job uncertainty. Our whole world (that is "1st" and "2nd" world countries) is currently unstable. A literal war is brewing, currently with Russia, maybe with China, maybe the Middle East stuff will escalate. Those maybes are a big problem.

And let's not even start about the housing market and the possible future job market shift due to AI.

Almost none of it is due to the current local job stuff. That doesn't matter. It's all about how the future seems to look like.

Really interesting how this is viewed in different countries. How far does this go? Does this include Gacha game devs? How about people working on loot boxes in gaming (like finance/marketing people who come up with new boxes)? Or NFTs or crypto in general?

I wouldn't even thought to think about people coming from gambling companies differently.

Interesting topic because I wouldn't want to work with those 20% who reject people based on n-th level relationship to anything controversial. I get not wanting to deal with people who run these things but employees? Those "anti-political" places typically mean a specific side (depending on your country that may anti-right in western countries and anti-left in eastern).

When I worked in the office before 2019 we had all kinds of people there. It was kind of beautiful in a way. Straight up communists discussing stuff with conservatives without any heat. Isolation breeds extremism.

It's true that it would close doors but man until the market takes that choice away from me I don't want to open those, and I say that as a guy who never worked with any of this even indirectly. And to be fair - not having experience with those things also closes doors, just different ones.

All startups are probably way more risky. Law works against gambling. Entire market works against startups.

Gambling itself is sketchy but legally hired employees especially developer-level have to be somehow protected from the decisions of the business, no? Unless you're worried about the crime itself (as in somebody might threaten you personally and send you to a hospital kind of thing) and not prosecution.

Maybe it's a country thing but here in Poland no one would care. Various forms of gambling are legal under supervision of authorities so legal companies exist around that.

Unlike porn it wouldn't really be an embarrassing topic on an interview. Lots of interesting technical stuff to deal with in such a job.

Then what is? I know the higher ups / owners have to deal with some straight up mafia shit or money laundering but a gambling company doesn't really look bad on a CV the way porn industry or even a government job (at least here in Poland) does.

Ironically probably porn is the most unsexy on a CV.

Why would gambling be high risk for employees? Unless you compare it to some cushy govt job it isn't really more "layoff-prone" than others.

Fun fact from Poland: Here a real "Professional State Licensed Engineer" degree (anything outside IT) is absolutely NOT worth it because the market for most jobs is local. Only Software "Enginneering" (with or without degree, doesn't matter) is.

I do have a masters degree in computer science (software engineering specialization) and since I'm working as a contractor from the start nobody ever saw it or wanted to see it.

Not an impossible problem only in theory. It's currently practically impossible and will take at least a year to solve if anybody starts to work on this at all.

Since my current project does involve wrangling AI to do stuff - forcing it to output a consistent, complete, large JSON with an exact specific format is very difficult and takes a lot of time (you won't be able to draw Blueprints line by line to show to the user that AI is processing). Definitely no autocomplete-like experiences maybe ever.

For example, look at the text representation of these 6 (!) nodes:

https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/yl8hd3-8/

It's enormous.

And the second even bigger problem: On forums and basically everywhere all users share screenshots with descriptions. There's not enough training data for anything meaningful.

I tried to force copilot/gpt to output even a small sample of copy-pastable blueprint and it just can't.

Worry not we started to outsource to India as well... My wife's company (low code domain-specific software creators) laid off 80% of their workforce and contracted a smaller amount of people from India.

It's not going well but I bet it's gonna take at least a year before anyone notices.

Idk, maybe it's not the exact book definition but I always thought about how well I'm paid in terms of the purchasing power, not the arbitrary value, and especially not by comparison with others (strictly speaking, because costs of living are kind of that, isn't it?).

The software jobs slowly go into the direction of not being worth the effort (I don't really believe that we will reach that point but that's the current direction).

> Two uneducated polish factory workers today won’t be able to buy your parents’ house either.

Of course - because from my point of view factory jobs are currently paid terrible. They used to be paid better (worth the effort due to being able to buy more).

Salaries are not going down but costs of living skyrocketed. I am in the top 3% earning bracket as a dev in my country (Poland), I live in a relatively cheap area (south-east) and when I reached my 30s I could afford to buy just a ~100sqm city apartment which cost exactly 5x of my parents 200+sqm house which they bought without mortgage as factory workers without higher education.

And each year I can afford less and less with my relatively huge salary.

And AI - which kind of changed the game in the recent years. A "blueprints copilot" akin to Github Copilot will be very difficult to create because there's no "blueprints text" to train an AI on. Nowadays in my hobby pet projects I find it easier to write C++ with copilot than Blueprints.

It absolutely does, I don't quite get comments here. All VR games use normal assets with all their normal (map) shenanigans. It works the same as on desktop. Sure if you look at something super close the "illusion" breaks, but it has nothing to do with VR, same thing happens in flat screen games.

Maybe people mistakenly think that most standalone Quest games don't have those maps because they don't work? Well it's not the case. The standalone games (especially on Q2 vs Q3) have just very low performance budget. You strip out what you can to make your game render in 90 fps for each eye (each eye uses a different camera perspective so each frame scene has to be rendered twice).

Taran (ex LTT member) has an excellent video on it as he unfortunately experiences negative side effects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQDAXSbwhR0

Edit: I misremembered, he got PRK, but he does talk about consequences of both methods.

I think we have a misunderstanding - I don't mind if I'm reading AI generated content as long as it doesn't look like "the typical AI content" (or SEO slop). In my point of view companies/writers might use AI detectors to continue improving the quality of their content (even if it's written by hand, those false positives might be a good thing). We're not there yet because I still see and read a lot of AI/SEO slop.

I agree with you that the "portion of written content online that’s AI generated with no obvious tells" is "small yet growing". That's exactly the thing - it's still too small to "be there yet" :)