As an educator (UK) it's very hard to find people with experience to join us. The pay is SO crap and the workload is huge. Trying to teach complex, large systems is impossible, because we don't have them. We can't throw 1,000 files and 20,000 lines of code at a student and teach them how the system was engineered. We can show them toy systems.... which is fine if there is a work route that takes them and nutures them for 5 or so years. But without that pipeline, shrug not sure what we do about it
I don't know those people. I think averages that include London and other cities don't represent most of the country. Average salary for where I live is £10,000 less than the UK average (I just looked it up)
Other than london and a couple of other cities, most of the country was already ranked as most deprived in Europe.
Throw in Brexit, cost of living and most normal people are fucked.
I'm a lecturer (5 yrs) and I'm struggling to pay my bills. We've been out on strike and nothing happened. NHS is struggling. Pay rises are around 0% for most people I know. Food inflation is around 16%. Foodbanks are struggling to feed families.
Companies are making record profits, these are distributed as dividends to shareholders (the rich) who then go on to buy more shares or other assets (e.g. houses)
Where I live most houses are Air B&B for a lot of the year, this has destroyed most villages by the coast. House prices have doubled or more. So a lot of those families have moved into towns, forced to rent rather than buy. Tons of money that used to go into mortgages (investments) is now funnelled to rich people who own the housing stock.
There's a lot of crazy stuff going on. The UK has a shrinking middle class. The middle class used to drive the economy. The rich poor divide is breaking the country.
A better TAX system would fix most of the problems. But our government is not interested.
When ChatGPT first came out I was asking it to draw pictures of goblins and wizards using Python and Turtle - it's pretty bloody good at it. You can ask it to make the goblin angry or happy or whatever.
There is some sort of magic in which the LLM is imagining what a goblin looks like, then converts those thoughts to turtle commands and then finally adds python. It's quite impressive.
For example, the eyes, head, hair, horns etc are all in the correct place.... how? Using imagination?
We all (students and staff) use it a lot. It'll write lectures, help think up interesting worksheet ideas, help students code, help them think of things to write about, how to structure assignments.
I needed a lecture on regex, ChatGPT wrote it for my in 30 seconds. Then I asked it for some problems for the students to solve and it wrote those too.
It may not be relevant to you, but for some of us it is changing the way we work. That hasn't happened since the dawn of the internet, or social media, or mobile phones.
The next generation are using it, and using it a lot.
As someone who works in education, we education nurses, the public services (think police, fire, army etc) IT, coding, space tech, brickies, chefs, etc etc etc .... so many lecturers have an exit plan, or are already gone.
The very foundadtions of the country are being removed. How do you run an economy when there's no one educated enough to do it? Even if we drop 1% of the future leaders, business owners, start up founders, and whatever .... what is the UK then? I don't think we'll be fine, we're slowly sinking and everyone is banging pots for the NHS and saying 'keep calm!' and selling their houses to AirBNB lettting agents and NOT VOTING and we still have the most stupid voting system on planet earth so nothing can change.
I surf and kitesurf. I guess the hardest thing to describe about the sea is how violent it can be. Getting a wave on the head (a wave of decent size) is colossal. Every part of your body is attacked, board shorts ripped off, arms flung around, head whipped back, legs hit your chest or back.
Big waves are crazy powerful.
Then there's the speed, wizzing over choppy water on a board feels like driving over a very pot holed dirt road, the chops SLAM into the board over and over again. You lean on the rail to turn and the board may just drop away into a hole or get slammed up by chop.
And if you fall, you don't penetrate the water, you just skim over it like a flat stone (or a rag doll in the mouth of a dog, shaking it from side to side)
A different job? Go travelling for a while? Travelling is a lot of fun and makes you realize that life is short and that you should make the most of it.
I changed careers and found the change fun. I may go back to coding at some point, I kinda miss the that deep thinking it requires .... but I can do that in my spare time if I really need to.
Or, if you need the money, just phone it in for a while.