mattbrewsbytes

I have a CS degree and they taught class with Pascal, not exactly a marketable skill so I did tech support at first. Every day I still feel stupid about something, I think that just goes with the industry we're in. There is too much going on to be an expert in everything.

I also worked at a couple of F500 companies, they typically want people with Bachelors degrees at a minimum, mostly as a check-mark on their hiring list. If you're contracting with an agency/headhunter house then they may be the ones shortchanging you, not the company doing the contracting.

I think even if AI can help developer productivity, there are a lot of other elements to software delivery and speeding up developers isn't necessarily going to speed up overall project delivery. A hard question to answer then is, what is the ROI if an organization is spending $10k/month on AI tools but project deliveries are mostly the same as before?

If the AI tool companies increase their rates 2x, 5x, 10x, is it worth it? They aren't going to lower prices.

Consumer AI tool usage isn't going to get a lot of adopters that will pay, people outside of a work environment will see it as a fun toy, much like social media and will be fine with being served ads and letting their loss of privacy be the cost.

You asked for tools/methods.

> I've spent hours and hours unsubscribing, deleting, uninstalling, toggling settings,but then I find myself reinstalling, resubscribing

You already know the tools and methods. This is more of a psychology issue rather than technology. You need some sort of dopamine detox. I'm not a professional, there are probably professionals out there that can help but here's some random thoughts of what that might look like:

* Take a week off work and turn off all notifications. Tell work you are unavailable.

* Write anything important down on paper that happens in the next two weeks: birthdays, events, appointments, etc. so you don't miss them. A paper calendar planner works.

* Turn off the phone if you can. If you need it for travel - uninstall everything unnecessary and keep all the notifications off. Phone, maps, airline, Uber, SMS, web browser are really all you need. You could ditch the airline app and just get paper boarding passes.

* Do something, anything, that doesn't involve computers/phone and notifications.

Its more about being a servant leader and not a bottleneck than literally being "not needed". Its a mindset of wanting your team to be able to operate without having to check with you (the EM) on every little thing. I've also heard it called having IC's be a "manager of one" where they can independently work on things, get work finished, etc. without needing constant nagging.

A good manager I had once had the approach of setting guidelines and "just getting out of the way" and I try to follow that, it works well for most people.

I think a better analogy than building construction is cars. You need to do active maintenance and fix things on cars to keep them running, you may even change out a radio or wheels, etc. like minor feature development, but you're not likely to change out the design of the engine and transmission. You definitely don't need the design crew from the car manufacturer around, aka Product Mgmt, to do maintenance but you do need some semblance of a tech team or people that can do the tech work on contract.

At some point a tech product is "finished" as in a mature, stable product and adding new things to it isn't going to do 10x in revenue. Its probably really hard for the product and tech teams involved to admit though.

Some "yanks" align their identity with their vehicle. There are songs about trucks but yes a van or mini-van are more flexible.

There are many that buy trucks for off road capabilities but probably 70% or more of truck owners don't go off road more than once a year. Many pick up truck models, like stock versions with crew cabs, are too long and not equipped for serious off-road use. Shallow sand/snow they can handle but so can SUVs.

If its a 737 delivering pallets of dog food or humans in seats, the safety concerns are the same. They take off and land at the same airports and can collide with other airplanes. The stuff on the plane doesn't mean there are different safety checks.

Auto pilot can be used for nearly everything after take-off and before landing, so I think you'll need to define "AI" here. I see people using "AI" almost interchangeably these days for things that plain old computers have been doing for a while now. Auto-pilot is not AI, its just a set of instructions (aka programming) given to a computer.

Airports have designed approaches, large airports have multiple and there is a need for communication with other humans, reacting to dynamic environments including weather, other aircraft (both airborne and on taxiways) and having actual vision out the cockpit to see things.

The latest "tool" for me is just Apple Notes for me with a todo list of tasks on a page.

Its a struggle for me to get any momentum going on personal projects. I think its because I'm a person that is externally motivated - like I know I get paid, promotions potentially, etc. via my employment. When it comes to personal projects I can't get going. I only mention this because I would also change out what/how I use to manage the work thinking that would change and I'd get more done, its never worked. Things I've used along the way: trello, wiki, pen and paper, various apps like todoist, etc.

> That type of content drives brand and product hype via views/engagement

Product hype might be hard with developer/tech types of tools. Devs have very good BS radar and "hype" is sometimes all there is in a lot of content. I see and hear a lot of the "build in public" being promoted as the way to do things with the "build an audience" mantra.

There is a huge hurdle to produce good video content, it takes a lot of time to record, edit and publish quality videos. Publishing quality videos can help get traction/views/subscribers but that doesn't mean it will translate into paying customers either. Do people really want to watch software developers code or talk about it? There has to be other ways to market a product.

The rolling timeline seems like a good approach to not have free users take a ton of storage but I would think even allowing free users to post video/images content at all is going to consume a lot of storage. It might be worth thinking through ideas on how to encourage users to get their network to sign up.

It’s fundamentally not viable in the sense of mass adoption. Security conscious and tech nerds (like HN audience) might do it but mass adoption, aka crossing the chasm from early adopters and onwards, isn’t feasible because all the aunts, uncles and grandma’s out there aren’t going to pay for it or switch.

If those user types haven’t moved en masse off twitter to <insert some replacement> then what would compel people to move, and pay for something they don’t pay for with money?

If by existing relationships you mean only like 2 degrees of separation then its implied that there is no global posting, no viral capability and probably no businesses or politicians on it (all amazing features I would love). Basically a family and friends network. A huge difficulty would be how to price it, one time fee for a family tree? The largest costs are going to be bandwidth and storage. If you go no video/images then what pulls people in?

Company structure might be key too. If it’s built as employee owned and operated with a small profit goal, it might take longer to grow but odds are enshitification or corrupt management can be avoided.

Some honest, maybe hard to hear feedback: as a solo developer with no customers and no traffic you probably shouldn’t be doing anything with cloud services. Cloud providers have many scalable services that mostly come down to them being paid by traffic costs or CPU/RAM costs and they don’t care what you’re doing, if you have 0 customers or 1000, if its “dev” or “production” - its all production to them.

I’ve seen runaway cloud costs at my employer a few times, with a few different services and it took a fair amount of time to figure out the monitoring/alerting. They may change their service agreements or pricing structure in hard to decipher ToS, etc. If the cloud provider won’t refund or credit a company that has a representative, they aren’t going to pay any attention to a solo dev or small team.

I would build locally on your laptop and start with a $5/month VM until you get a paying customer and know what size your system needs.

How is this any bigger than Disney and all the media channels they own?

Can you elaborate more on your last sentence and running VMs? How does 32GB set aside for VMs and GPU accelerated let you run native Windows? Is there special/newer VM software that is used? Is it still virtualbox?

Outside of docker containers for servers and work I haven't delved into VMs on PCs in a while but this sounds compelling to run linux and windows at once from the same hardware instead of a dual boot.

There is something to be said about what the ROI is for normal (i.e. non AI/tech) companies using AI. AI can help automate things, robots have been replacing manufacturing jobs for decades but there is an ROI on that which I think is easier to see and count, less humans in the factory, etc. There seems to be a lot of exaggerated things being said these days with AI and the AI companies have only begun to raise rates, they won't go down.

The AI bubble will burst when normal companies start to not realize their revenue/profit goals and have to answer investor relations calls about that.

> feeling trapped and bound to the golden handcuffs to try and survive this expensive world while being forced to work on things I have little care for

I consider this just work. I've worked my entire career for other people, in corporate settings, doing the work they want me to do for a paycheck. I enjoy some aspects of my job, enjoy working with many of the people but when it comes down to it, I'm just a worker bee. Many people in many industries do this. I think social media and the tech culture of "passion" and "save the X" mission statements probably contribute some to thoughts that if you don't have those things that its bad or depressing. Work for humans hasn't changed much in a long time, you're usually working for someone on things they prioritize. The fact that you have "golden handcuffs" means you at least have the perspective that you're better off than most. If someone (or combined with a partner) makes $200k gross they are in the top 1% globally of earners, probably top 5% in the US.

I like building things in software and have found building physical things enjoyable as well, lots of problem solving and usually a finished project that you can look at. Try taking up a hobby or spending time outside of work on things you enjoy.

AI tools are super helpful if you know what they are good for and where the limits are currently. If you work at a place where your expected "time" is constant, aka has a good work/life balance, then its important to be more productive because your competitors will certainly be.

There are parts of the SDLC that cannot be made more productive with AI - all the human parts, communication about changes, testing often involves manual work, etc. So if you have management that just thinks a blanket X% more productivity is achievable across the board, find someplace else to work, its about as smart as a RTO mandate because they like seeing butts in seats.

Cloud is not losing ground but also Cloud computing is also not suitable for every business problem. Its killer feature for businesses with fluctuating usage profiles and "busy" seasons. Think like a tax related application for businesses, in the US, they have to file quarterly and annual. There are probably busy seasons where there would likely be more activity so a cloud compute environment where you can scale up to handle the load with a couple commands is ideal and then scale it down (and lower your costs) during slow times.

Indie hackers and small < 10 people startups don't need cloud. However its easier to get moving and scale up and you can just tie in all sorts of other services to make your life easier. If you're on-prem or managing VMs you need to figure out a lot of infrastructure things, networking, security, logging, failover, etc.

Then there is transferring risk. If you host your own infrastructure and you have an outage unrelated to HW or data center, that is entirely on you and to be honest will probably happen more frequently than using cloud. When your cloud provider is down, if its a household name, everyone already knows because everything else they use is probably having issues too. Much easier explanation to customers, they likely won't leave over a cloud outage.

I think this is the key thought process for purchasers of software/SaaS. For comparison, an average daily meal expense of $30/person for business travel exceeds the pricing of a lot of SaaS offerings. SaaS is so simple and the cost level doesn't require RFPs, lawyers and accountants. It would have to be really compelling and niche to warrant custom install software these days (to OP, many retail POS systems are old school textUI too).

In the pre-SaaS times, a software business would have to somehow guess/calculate the lifetime value of a customer and bake that into the price of the software when it was buy once. Custom software also was often charged in $/seat, required IT people to do updates and that style of software often requires sales people and convincing CxO's to do purchases. SaaS can just be a CC swipe and expense report.

I think creative types feel compelled to do new things that buck trends and are just different for the sake of being different. If you watch any amount of home renovation competition shows, there's always designers that pick some really odd/different elements. It might look good on TV and get people to watch but its a tiny minority that really wants a black wall in their living room.

Its much easier to do web design this way, its just software.

I'm not knocking it, it must suck to be a designer and end up having to do the same corporate looking stuff day after day.

I've heard the business term as a "reciprocal agreement" a common behavior of large companies would be to award a large contract for IT services to a 3rd party and then that company would assist in getting a market foothold in their home country, like India.

Use it as a way to differentiate yourself. One methodology I've seen used with installed apps is major upgrades require a financial renewal but those can be spaced out every couple years. I love it when I find an iOS app that is paid, without ads, without in-app purchases.

You just need to plan how that business model works and know that you won't have recurring revenue. Maybe that means you build companion apps, offer an optional subscription tier (often its cloud storage/device sharing based) or something like that.

I've thought of doing a subscription like service but its use case is more of a once-in-a-while style so an option there would be pay-per use instead of a subscription.

If you look back at the dot com era, hardware companies did survive but weren't the financial "winners". Cisco is an example and a good comparison is Amazon - their bread and butter now is ecommerce, they dominate it and that was borne out of that bubble.

Alphabet also has massive market share with YouTube, solid cloud offerings, Waymo which already has driverless/unsupervised robot taxis and their old standby search which is morphing more into more AI answers when you throw questions in your browser.

Alphabet's P/E ratio is lower than the S&P 500's. Some may argue the S&P is mostly being held up by Tech and AI related companies so stock in Alphabet could be seen as undervalued and NVDIA as overvalued.

Hardware almost always ends up getting commoditized so investing in hardware companies for the long haul does carry maybe more risk than mainly software companies.

I guess I'm in the minority. I set aside some monthly budget for guilt-free spending (ala Ramit Sethi approach) and $70 for a game that I play for 20 hours or more of entertainment is a no-brainer to me. Back in the day that would be like $3.50 an hour at an arcade (or less if more than 20 hours). 14 quarters per hour, I think I averaged way more than that back then.

Then there are subscriptions like PS+ for Playstation that is about $15/mo and I get 3 games that I mostly add to my library and hardly play.

If I play half a game and get distracted or bored, I just stop. If I'm not naturally pulled back in, I don't care. The whole "guilt free spending" budget concept really shifted my perspective from wanting to "get my money's worth" to more "its spent, I had fun, what's next/interesting now?" approach.

The chance at making FU money is what would be worth it.

It doesn't sound too appealing if its 40-50% more total comp and 100% more work/stress and less time for myself plus random things like losing funding or startup goes bust and can't make payroll, etc.

I have no experience with any of this but thinking thru the other side, if I'm an IT helpdesk person getting an account reset/unlock request, I have no means to validate any identity paperwork anyone sends in. My response would be a curt email accd to policy and move on to the next IT ticket.

I think the legal path is your best bet unless you know someone higher up. A legal path could bypass all the offshore IT helpdesk staff (making assumptions, MSFT is a giant mega-corp).

> If you have a C-suite that makes decisions based on golf games, this advice is not for you. You have a different set of problems.

Another way to look at it is that your role isn't in the decision making circle, even if you are on a project that is supposed to help make a decision. I was in this role evaluating vendors solutions, in hindsight I can see how I conflated the involvement in the evaluation process with the decision making, those aren't the same.

Think of it like buying a car. You could be on the project to evaluate car companies, features, test drive them and document findings but just because you did all of that doesn't mean you're a decision maker and shouldn't have any emotional attachment to whatever the decision ends up being. Yes if they make a decision with bad trade-offs, like a car with a lot of issues, you may be dealing with those and it may suck but that's your role.

I think part of politics around technical decisions is recognizing if your role has any attributes of being involved with the decision making or if your input is just one of many, potentially minor, inputs.

I stop when I find a solution to the problem. Most of the time the learning happens along the way, not necessarily in the solution itself but all the things you try and iterate on your journey to the solution.

Everything changes in tech by the minute ... but also nothing changes. For web applications it has been HTML, CSS and JS for nearly 30 years. XMLHttpRequest/AJAX came out 25+ years ago. There have been many improvements along the way, like applying design patterns instead of cgi-bin directories with scripts that had a +x modifier on them in the file system. But the base technologies have not changed all that much. We still submit HTML form's with input fields to a back-end server that handles that data. We're still rendering HTML and using CSS to style it. Gone are custom UI toolkits like Flash or Java Applets. Maybe WASM is something to look into but it feels like its not mainstream to me.

If you don't want to get left behind, learn the basic building blocks at a deep level, they don't change much.

A lot of the world's problems are people problems. Like the kind of problem that deals with the soft squishy bits of humans as a species - hunger, healthcare, etc. Its hard for me to imagine software solving those types of problems. Maybe software can help, but ultimately software is not going to solve them by itself.

I used to do Java about a decade ago and because it was in a corporate environment, add about 5+ years of using outdated Java on top of that. Web applications are what I do, have been doing for 25 years and I use Ruby/Rails now.

I do want to do something meaningful/professional with Go but haven't gotten around to trying it out. I also sort of feel most programming language additions aren't game changers these days. Much like smart phones, the killer feature days are over, small incremental additions are nice.

The killer feature to me is using AI for tedious tasks or syntax I don't remember and in that respect I do wonder if Java would be easier to deal with than what I remember.