amonith

Yeah but to reach that point you will probably need those "useless AI detectors" (as stated by the comment I was replying to). That was my point - we're not there yet therefore those tools can be useful.

Eh, eventually AI will write like humans but currently most of the time it's very much apparent what was written by AI. English is my second language so it's hard for me to pinpoint the exact reason why but I guess it's more about the tone and the actual content (a.k.a bullshit) rather than grammar / choice of words.

Most of the time AI slop reads like a soulless corporate ad. Probably because most of the content the AI was trained on was already SEO optimized bullshit mass produced on company blogs. I'd very much like a tool that would detect and filter out also those from "my internet".

> except a year down the line the app is a complicated piece of spaghetti you have to rewrite

Small correction from a software house perspective:

except a year down the line the app is a complicated piece of spaghetti THE CLIENT has to rewrite OR PAY YOU TO REWRITE

:D

And with this: > most of the components you can reuse would work OK as pure HTML components anyway

I unfortunately cannot agree. It is theoretically true from pure "it's possible" standpoint but it was not my experience in pre-jQuery times. The shit backend devs did with concatenating html + JS snippets as strings wrapped in various patterns like the builder to make it configurable was pure maintenance horror. I don't miss it at all.

Can't argue with that, because most public-facing "apps" are mostly read-only. However after a bunch of years working for a software house I can tell you that there are a lot of "non-user" reasons for choosing SPAs. The ecosystem of all SPAs offers unparalleled developer experience that allows you to create many complex apps really fast and reuse a shitload of components, interactions, animations and whatnot. With basically 0 effort you can also create mobile and desktop apps from the same code. And the talent pool for something like React is a lot bigger and a lot more "UI/UX-friendly" than in whatever "backend-tech" of your choice. I work in .NET and when we recruit devs a lot if not most of them straight up hate frontend or don't care about UI/UX at all so we kind of can't do shit with them alone anyway. It's easier and cheaper to recruit a bunch of React devs.

TL;DR: money math works in SPA's favor, users be damned

I feel insane reading that older systems felt faster/snappier. Especially before SSDs everything was super slow. You'd wait for a minute to boot the system, load up a game or anything other substantial. Then of course all of the app crashes, hang ups, blue screens, kernel panics or other mandatory restarts that basically are all gone now on every major OS that we're for some reason not counting. It's super stable and fast now.

Yeah read-heavy apps shouldn't be SPAs. There's just nothing useful to show or do in there without data. However if a native desktop version of reddit existed it would have exactly the same problem, so it isn't really a tech issue, they just picked the "wrong" approach (probably for DX + talent pool reasons).

Blame JS haters. With the resurgence of old school SSR approach like the one enabled with HTMX we will see more of that in the future. Some devs will do a lot not to touch the frontend.

But that's exactly the point of SPAs - they load once and run locally even when changing "pages", syncing just data. It's just like a normal desktop app embedded in the browser page. If they expose the PWA manifest they can also be installed so that they won't require the internet even for the initial load.

The old school MPAs were the ones that required the network for every single interaction.

Kind of same, except add a wife and a kid under way. There's plenty of us. Most people absolutely do not regularly "go out" if they work and have a family. We maintain the bare minimum social interaction because we have to but we'd happily skip it in a heartbeat.

As a man with a full time job (remote), a wife and a kid under way I cannot really fathom having energy for more social activities (except meeting some friends or family at most once a month, reluctantly). Am I a hikikomori? I kind of relate to them. My wife also doesn't meet anyone else ever. Now that I think of it - neither do our parents or most people living in their village. It's all work + church at most.

Maybe as humans we don't really need social interaction THAT much? I mean how do you explain people who seem to thrive living off-grid? We do need jobs and some basic communication skills for sure at least to maintain the current standard of living but maybe not for socializing. Some comments here kind of sound like "extrovert propaganda" - same people who cry for the return to office because they cannot imagine that people can live differently.

If you use an existing game engine all you need really is some decent Google-fu... I've been commissioned to create some non-public VR experiences for a couple of people and all I needed during development was some basic high-school vector math (like literally addition, multiplication, very occasionally a cross prodcut or a dot product which I googled by their purpose [e.g. "how to find a tangent to two vectors" or "how to check if a vector is aligned with other vector"]).

You do use that math constantly especially in shader tricks which do some visual magic based on angles between stuff but the difficulty is not in the math itself at all.

You can always just refuse. They will find somebody else for it if they need it (usually they don't, system outages/errors are opportunity cost most of the time, not actual emergencies) but they will most probably still keep you for your normal "day job". I never understood devs who took on-calls without very significant pay bumps. Imagine that in other industries except medical where human life is involved. The market is really not that bad, even now.

I'm about 10 years in doing business software development commercially and I always simply refused.

It's so so different where I live (Poland). It's still super common here to pair up in high school or university where you are basically still a bunch of nobodies and stay together through the fire and flames™ unless literal abuse is involved or the very basics of personality don't match. Material status or ambition is almost never a factor even among couples of top performers I know. We were kind of raised to expect various big changes in life. Career interest changes, economical downturns, wars. You just... cannot rely on such things at all so it doesn't make sense to care much about that.

> so everyone from my wife to my best friends may disappear if I'm not performing at those levels

Excuse me, what the flask. You don't have a wife and friends then at all. You've built a non-profit organization, not a family.

> look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer

What kind of nature are you even watching? It's the sickly bottom 1% that's suffering which is an unfortunate reality, not the 90%. You completely inverted that.

Not only that, members of the same intelligent species usually help weaker members of their "packs". And people are supposed to be even better than that.

The complains come from how fake it is. Companies force "corporate fun" where there is none. They try to influence your personal life. They want you to dedicate your entire life to the company and they want you to treat coworkers as family while laying off underperformers of ever increasing KPIs. Sometimes not even underperformers.

THAT'S soullessness and that "mandatory" team-building exercise of book reading is actually an example of that because when layoffs come the company won't care about any of that.

It's much better to work for a company that allows you to do the job (preferably remote) and f off asap, enabling you to forge real relationships out of work in an area you actually plan to live.

God I love remote contracts...

I don't think it's denial. I think most people simply do not care that much about life in general. Or maybe rather: most do not care that much about the continuation of the current form of civilization. Or even maybe risky: most want society to collapse eventually (not during our lifetime, because the transition would definitely suck, but eventually).

Disagree. I rarely remember what lib has the class/function/whatever I need. Doesn't help that some libs often use "proprietary" names (e.g. "Uno", "Avalonia", "Rotativa"). I often don't even write "imports" myself. I use stuff in code and let my IDE autoimport stuff.

This! It's not even about the family. I think it just gets boring and unnecessarily exhausting after 10+ years so it transforms to trips, mid-day visits at home and various shared hobbies (like you meet with your friends to go bouldering Saturday morning, idk).

Not OP, but most of the people I know above 30 don't "go out" on weekday evenings nor regular weekends tbh. Even people without kids. Various trips and meets in friends' houses during the day (usually Sunday) is the main form of socializing.

Another would be DXWND which is amazing :) It has a ton of options that not only fix various issues with old games but you even have additional features like an ability to run games that never had that support in windowed mode.

already a thing in Poland:

https://www.pracuj.pl/praca/prompt-engineer-warszawa-czernia...

Tbh it was always not that great with "too much experience". I feel that the best response rate is on that sweet spot of around ~5 years, probably because you already know enough but are still relatively cheap for the employer.

I imagine that with that much exp and FAANGs on resume you are still negotiating FAANG salary, which are kind of the outliers of the industry.

Idk, the dev market in my country (Poland) stills seems to be in a good shape, but we're earning pennies comparatively (50k USD would be a top 1% senior position) so not sure if that's actually better. I might get a stable salary and lots of companies to choose from if there's anything I don't like, but you can beat my earnings with a 3-month side gig, so... :D

Even if someone created a design that solves "the problem", there are probably thousands of subjects/situations where that design needs to be actually applied. No single software scales infinitely and is infinitely customizable. Some software even is customizable too much and that becomes its own problem.

We need a lot of "bricklayers" that don't care about the problem but can be elastically moved around between projects to implement the ever increasing backlog of "solutions". Entire companies are created that solve that exact problem.

> a lot of folks are perfectly competent developers but can't move forward and eventually get replaced by younger/cheaper developers because they are basically doing the same thing for the past 10 years

I'd argue that they are replaced (if they are, because I'm not sure, there are not a lot of old folk because IT industry is pretty young, I already worked with a few 50+ mid devs and the pay is kinda reverse, because old folk already have homes and don't need to pay off huge mortgages) not because they didn't get promoted (mid dev -> product owner / domain expert) but because they stopped upgrading the skills relevant to their current job.

So in terms of the example presented by the author it would be developers that are no longer even hyped about languages/tools. And in our imaginary "tiling specialist" it would be a guy that didn't care that the current fad is some kind of funky pattern + new material of tiles and still wanted to lay old ceramic square tiles for his entire life.

I'm still not convinced that there is a scenario where you __have to__ care about "the domain" / "the problem being solved" / "the bigger picture" that much. You can, it will improve some aspects of your career, but you don't have to and it would degrade other aspects of said career (we all have about 16h max productive hours daily, and I'm being generous).

Kind of same really. For the past 8 years I've been just "a senior developer". Commercially I've created some CRUD document-processing systems with .NET + web stuff, I've created some apps for smart barcode scanners for warehouses, I've done some touch-only "pretty" apps for corporate reception desks, I've done some mobile apps based on GPS-tracking and QR-sharing, I've done some database-only solutions too (SSIS-based migrations between systems) and many more (desktops, games even).

In my private time I'm having fun with procedural graphics and game-like apps.

Can't say that I'm a domain expert in any of these, but I'm in top 1% earning bracket in Poland (mostly because the general pay in PL is shit and IT is one of the few jobs with "globalized" salary) and that's all I need in life. This approach also has some not often discussed advantages. Like I don't ever worry about job security as there's hundreds of those "CRUD"-making companies all over the world. I've actually went full contractor mode (not paid by the hour, but by completing "specs" (sometimes modules, sometimes entire projects)) in 2019 and I'm booked fully this year (signed contracts by both sides) :V

I think that's a bit outside of the topic, because we're now discussing a case of "only passion, 0 knowledge" which was not the point. The author of the article thinks that not looking at the bigger picture (or the upper "decision level" if you will) is inherently wrong. My point is that enjoying the process and not caring about the product is more than enough realistically.

So assume a worker that perfectly knows and likes their job, but doesn't care about the process "above" him. If you enjoy the process of tiling and you have some experience with tiling, you don't have to care about what kind of building/room you are working on. Somebody designed the room, somebody picked the right materials, somebody probably bought them and it's in the spec/design. You can just "tile away" and make a career out of it.

Similarly in software, if you care only about programming and languages and whatnot and not the product - it's all you need with the right team/org. You won't be a product owner and you wont advance to "decision-making" levels in the company, but if you don't want to why would you need to.

In this scenario he'd just be told exactly which nails to pound and his work would be inspected. This is a very good example actually, construction work is a really popular summer gig for students in my country (Poland). They know nothing and don't care about the domain (building houses), they just follow supervisors and the designs. You can't give them an entire house to build, but they are very useful and cheap members of the crew.

They'll never be architects (they don't want to), but they'll earn enough to buy whatever students want and they'll always find some work no matter what is being built and where.

Good advice to advance your career, but I'd say there's nothing wrong with being passionate/excited about the craft and not the result. Newbies should just be aware that this can affect their career (they will have better job security as they won't be picky about the domain, but they will probably earn less as they won't ever be domain experts).

There are endless examples from other "industries". There are people that love painting, but never care who sees their work. They love the creative process. There are people that love carpentry, but hate doing utilitarian furniture that sells well. They love how zen manual labor can be and that the result is physical.

It's not "wrong-way-aroundness", it's just a different goal.

> With 3D games you can forget about it; the effort and skill level is too high for volunteers to make it happen.

Not necessarily true. I can churn out game-ready 3D assets pretty quickly and I can't draw anything 2D at all. There's a lot of tools for 3D modelling and texturing that can provide some sort of automation to a degree (e.g. Houdini or even Blender's geometry nodes for procedural stuff [landscapes, mechanical stuff], Substance Designer for procedural materials, Mixamo for premade animations for virtually any scenario that you can simply attach to your models etc.). AFAIK there's nothing like that for 2D.

2D, while maybe fun to draw on a piece of paper, requires a lot of painful manual labor when working with games, e.g. you need to draw all animation frames separately instead of simply keyframing some skeleton as in 3D. Just imagine the process of changing a simple thing like a piece of clothing on a character.

The general average salary is low everywhere as most jobs don't require any kind of "higher" education, so of course devs earn more. I'm earning 4-5x of Poland's average but that's meaningless. I sure as heck don't earn more than an average UK dev, because I've worked with some of them and I know their rates.

I'm just a full-stack .NET + React developer working in a mid-sized city as a contractor (but that's complicated, because in Poland most companies basically evade taxes by hiring via contracts with the same benefits and responsibilities as regular employees). I work up to 40hrs a week just like a normal employee.

Just take a look at one of the many job boards and search for "devops" or my role which is ".net full-stack": https://nofluffjobs.com/pl

Most oscillate around 20k PLN gross, which is definitely a lot more than 1700 EUR. Some rates given by devs in this thread are shocking and something isn't right. 1700 EUR net (i hope net) would be 8k PLN which is about what my car mechanic friend without a degree earns in my city... and what I earned 1 year after my degree. It's perfectly fine to begin with, but we're talking about 10+ years of experience and that's baffling.