I am from Europe and I have worked with many Europeans, Americans and Asians. Quality of sub-contractor colleagues from India was, same as from anywhere else, directly proportional to what the company paid for them. Good pay = skilled and hard-working. Cheap labour = barely any skills and hardly working.
If no government bans it and mandates Linux kernel to be rewritten in Rust (and all higher language FFIs to be compatible with Rust rather than C), it's here to stay.
And what's the point of having Lisp if you can't use it? Unpopular opinion alert: Bigger companies want programmers to be replacible resources which means they need to have huge talent pools. If you choose your tech stack for the fact that you can retain your people for only 12 to 18 months, you can't effectively use any of the advantages Lips languages offer to you.
I think that many websites even nowadays don't need all that jazz and many would improve if less JavaScript was on them. How many times have you loaded a website only to watch a couple of JavaScript "spinners" for everything to load only to click somewhere and everything started again? MS Azure management is one of such sites.
SPA with real time updates, complex layouts to be mobile-friendly, real-time updates of many components, endless scrolling and PWA features would be a total PITA. Yes, I don't disagree.
The vast majority of web apps I have seen so far don't need to be like that.
I remember jQuery from it's heyday when we used it as a replacement for Mootools. Since many people are going from React to HTMX, maybe we've made a full circle and we'll see web using just plain jQuery as well?
Well, speaking of myself, I had always heard from managers that "people who work from home don't work", "it's more effective and efficient to be in the office", "you have to live the company culture" etc. But when we asked about a team-building event with colleagues from USA and India we were told "use modern technologies, it's equally effective". Something wasn't right, to say the least. Then COVID struck and the managers saw that the company didn't collapse. Au contraire, the efficiency of work teams were the same or even better. I also had to invest into modifications of my apartment to create a nice and efficient work environment, out of my pocket. So when my employer said "OK, COVID over, return to offices", I asked to remain full-time WFH. Denied. OK, found a new job. Luckily, there were other people who did the same so they now allow for full-time WFH.
These were my reasons. Since all that "be in office" was an utter load of shite and corpo toxicity (managers wanted to see you sitting at your desks or call for pointless meetings which could've been an e-mail), I am also extremely toxic about "return to office" unless it's guaranteed that the whole team is in the same office (which, in larger companies, doesn't happen).
If you, asim, want to work from the office and prefer real human contact (which, TBH, cannot be replaced by Teams, I agree with that - I spent my fair share of time away from my wife (luckily no kids at the time) and yes, a Skype call and couple of dungeon runs in World of Warcraft can't replace the experience of being at home :-D ) that's absolutely fine. I wish you find a workplace which suits you (that shouldn't be so hard these days). Do you really need a couple of weirdos on HN to assure you that you are correct? Guess what, speaking of the WFH, hybrid or "office" crowds, we all are! These are our preferences. Mine is different from yours. That's all. ;-)
I worked for a tech startup, well, quite a long time ago. All of us were in the same office. In case of some HR manager reads it: by "office" I mean "office". A room with doors, windows, a couple of desks each dedicated to one person. No open-plan, cubicles, "modern", "innovative" ... no shite like that. The whole team in the same office. In case of some HR manager reads it: by "whole team" I really mean "all developers and testers". It was also in a country with "strong lunch culture" (Czechia). Not as good as in let's say India but still - we all went to a pub mid-day for a lunch. I still miss those days.
When I moved to bigger companies, teams were larger, not necessarily in the same town. And we had colleagues spread across multiple timezones. And not only across EU (we have 3 but the vast majority of countries are in the same timezone as I am). We had colleagues in USA, Canada, EU, India. No difference whether I was in the office or at home.
You probably don't want to hear that but unless the whole team is in the same office I don't want to "return to office" because there is nothing for me in it. It's not worth the wasted time and fuel for commute.
I have a shit job (Python DevOps in tel. co. industry). No problem with that. Previous job was in applied research. Very interesting, unfortunately the work conditions and compensation were much worse than my present-day shitshow.
Life is not only about work, I have to work to be able to pay my mortgage and to enjoy other activities.
Having happy or unhappy life, for people in the IT industry, is mostly about their mindset.
LLMs like (Chat)GPT won't take your job. Software engineering is a creative job. Language models are not creative. Imagine that instead of using SQL to query a database of knowledge you use plain English. They can't create anything on their own. If they interpolate from their knowledge, it's usually fine. If they extrapolate, the outcome is shit. For instance, ChatGPT has enough knowledge (training data) about Python and Java. It can generate unit tests for Python and Java functions. I threw a less-known language, Common Lisp, the other day on it. It failed miserably (calling functions which didn't exist, calling with wrong number of parameters, it even imagined a mocking library which doesn't exist at all!). The more I know about machine learning and artificial intelligence (I study that stuff in a Ph.D. programme) the less I am worried. AI isn't dangerous. The only "intelligence" in AI is in its name. Nowadays machine learning really boils down to matrix multiplications (and set of (usually quite static) rules which can change the numbers in the matrices). People not understanding it and misusing it are. Does the vast majority corporate managers understand AI? We know the answer.
There is a ChatGPT craze right now but it will cool down eventually. It's not the first time this is happening. Google changed the way we search the internet, suddenly everything can be at your fingertips. Teachers didn't lose their jobs and people still go to school since you can't google things when you don't know the fundamentals of the topic. Chatbots changed the way we approach customer support. Support people didn't lose their jobs (at least entirely), since chatbots are subpar experience. If you are 20 years in, you can probably remember Visual Basic 6 - a tool which everybody can learn and write programs easily. We, software engineers, didn't lose our jobs.