This makes sense and here is slightly different perspective to this.
The company I was at had this haloed culture of promotions and I saw people sat on a certain IC level for over 5 years chasing the carrot. Some of them were close to a decade at the same level.
Now, this company had several sub-orgs and it was possible to switch positions to a different team or an entirely different sub-org altogether. And guess what ? No up-leveling and no salary hikes because the overall company doesn't allow the sub-orgs to compete with each other.
Fair enough. Makes sense. If they allowed it, it would be chaotic.
But for some reason, their is a culture of making employees compete with each other ! To the point that the apparent lowest performer will be asked to leave the company ! (There are other ramifications to this "system" but this is not the discussion for those)
The lesson I learnt was to chose your battles wisely and be prepared for interviews every single day... because in a way it indeed felt like everyday I was interviewing/competing for the job I already had... why not dial it up to eleven ?
Once you feel prepared, then actually simply start interviewing. This year I am targetting at least six (once every two months) solid interviews. The more multi-stage-loops the better because that gives me the chance to politely drop out of the process at any stage. The more leetcode hards the better because leetcode hards are set in a specific way and the interviewer has to be super smart to follow up with something novel.
This way, I think (correct me if I am wrong) I am implicitly up-skilling and getting better at my job AND in a state of preparedness to walk away if I felt I needed to.
Managers be managing and all that $h1t... they have their jobs to do, I have my life to deal with as well. I will control what I can control.
Do we (or someone better informed) understand the impact of re-shoring ?
In my mind, the reason (or the original intent) for off-shoring was to reduce costs to be able to sell more X (because cheaper is easier to sell) and selling more X means more profit and better market capitalisation (if the company selling X was public)
If re-shoring is adopted, my assumption/understanding is that X will retail at a higher price. Oversimplification maybe, but higher retail price means lower sales means lower profit (means lower stock price if the company selling X was public)
The solution to that would be higher/more automation i.e. less (or minimal) manufacturing related jobs I think ?
And now the situation would be that while there was capital-return-to-shore happening but went into automation and the jobs recovery was not what someone would have expected (both in terms of scale and skill)
But because the jobs were virtually re-shored the off shore labour market now suffers ?
And yet, they won't like it if aspiring SDEs use AI to "assist" when interviewing :D
Just yesterday had a coding interview (not any FAANG) and the interviewer wanted a screen share and also checked my IDE settings to make sure "AI" was turned off.
Not that I intended to or even intend to use LLM based tooling for interviews.
Although having said that, if I intended to, interviewers won't find out. Interviews should always be done in person. (That took a different tangent... sorry)
I think better to put that someone extra further up in the pipeline who knows how to prompt the LLM correctly so that it doesn't generate the fluff to begin with.
Or get software engineers to produce domain specific tooling rather than the domain relying on generic tooling which lead to such mistakes (although this is speculation.. but still to me it seems like the author of that article was using the vanilla ChatGPT client)
/s I am now thinking of setting up an "AI Consultancy" which will be able to provide both these resources to those seeking such services. I mean, why have only one of those when both are available.
Honest question... would you rather not have the "peace and quiet" and go at it all on your own not having to go through the motions of a "real job" ?
You bounce your ideas off someone clever enough only to see that idea being implemented before you had the chance to do it only after hearing that the idea was not good enough.
Your ideas, your solutions, your mistakes, your challenges, your problems, your ideas...
No manager one-on-ones, no a$$h0l3 back-biting coworkers, no one-pagers before meetings, no competing down-levels trying to find mistakes in your ideas, no lofty mentors making recommendations on how to improve your visibility.
If you have paying customers and are financially independent, just enjoy it.
At companies where decimation is a given... IME 3 or variations of 3 predominantly are already in play.
The most nefarious kind I saw was to use tenure capital towards influencing peers (above and below) into over-engineering complexity to improve longevity (or simply to flex on the basis of tenure) and this is a game-able closed loop. The longer one has been in a position is in a position to stay even longer via influence and no-one questions.
The up-levels explain this as "trust" which probably is slop/laziness or pure lack of time due to how busy the up-levels are managing up the chain (and working towards their own longevity)
The below-levels probably are afraid to question/oppose strongly due to obvious reasons. This becomes worse if the tenured person in question is already a "celebrated hero" or "10x-er".
Maybe. Was attempting to end this cliffhanger on a positive note without judgement.
He had the means so he paid off his mortgage, invested in another property, took care of college fund.
Decided he didn't want to spend rest of his days wringing his mind and drenching off energy into deciding and debating whether it is ok to call a lambda from another lambda (yes I have seen this in production and the more experienced engineer decided to do it because he had been there longer and decided that's what he wanted to do... don't ask me which company was this but it was a FAANG) or setup a step function to orchestrate the two lambda calls... or some such equivalent problem he might have come across in his SGI days.. and instead picked a job that required little amount of cognitive effort compared to what he would have done if he was still in the same line of work but still managed to support the rest of his life/needs/responsibilities.
Might as well have been an artist, construction worker or he might as well have done nothing, absolutely nothing, and it could have been everything that one would have thought it could have been.
I won't judge knowing what I know at my age. People do what they do.
Feel free to imagine what you would imagine this ex-SGI engineer's life to have been and make it negative if you want it to be. No one knows until OP throws in more details if they have any.
I had to hand down my iPad Pro 3rd Gen (the one with A12x Bionic chip) to my daughter for her school use.
I got myself a 13" iPad Air (M2 chip) this time and Apple Pencil Pro (from Apple Refurbished store). The larger screen size isn't that much of a botheration as I thought it might be. On the flip side, the screen size is a lot closer to an A4 sheet and writing on it feels much better. I use Paperlike screen cover and pencil tips too.
I don't have Netflix or YouTube installed on it.
I only use it for Apple Books, Kindle, Notes and now Preview app is there as well.
I might this time even use it as Sidekick and remote access IDEs running on my MBP but not sure if I want to do that yet on the iPad.
Curious about the mechanics here — when you say the model was ‘trained on our code base’, was that an actual fine-tune of the weights (e.g. LoRA/adapter or full SFT), or more of a retrieval/indexing setup where the model sees code snippets at inference? Always interested in how teams distinguish between the two.
> It doesn’t have to be nice or pretty EVEN if it’s NOT for you.
> There’s a lot of “theatre” in planning, writing endless tickets and refining them for WEEKS before actually starting to write code, in a way that’s actively harmful for building software.
I'd love to have a "high paying job" where I am allowed to start prototyping and modelling the problem and then iteratively keep on improving it into fully functional solution.
I won't deny that the snowballing of improvements and functional completeness manifests as acceleration of "delivery speed" and as a code-producing experience is extremely enjoyable. Depth-first traversal into curiosity driven problem solving is a very pleasurable activity.
However, IME in real world, someone up the chain is going to ask "when will you deliver this". I have ever only once been in a privileged enough a position in a job to say "I am on it and I will finish it when I finish it... and it will be really cool"
Planning and task breakdown, as a developer, is pretty much like my insurance policy. Because when someone up the chain (all the way down to my direct manager) comes asking "How much progress you have made ?" I can say (OR "present the data" as it is called in a certain company ?) "as per the agreed plan, out of the N things, I have done k (< N) things so far. However at this (k+1)th thing I am slowing down or blocked because during planning that-other-thing never got uncovered and we have scope-creep/external-dependency/cattle-in-the-middle-of-the-road issue". At which point a certain type of person will also go all the way to push the blame to another colleague to make themselves appear better hence eligible for promotion.
I would highly encourage everyone to participate in the "planning theatre" and play your "role".
OR, if possible start something of your own and do it the way you always wanted to do it.
Anyways, people choose to do what they choose to do (me included). I simply wanted to understand how I should react and adapt (if I do end up taking my next job in tech)
Any kind of brag is certainly not my personality. If I do something I simply do it and end up picking up the next thing. Turns out I need to "announce it and be happy about it" as well.
The difference is that in this case I will walk in knowing very well that I need to budget time/money/energy into marketing.
Was going through some YT videos from someone claiming to have spent several years in a FAANG and they also mentioned that even the job "turns out to be a marketing" effort in no small part.
I did have a mentor in the job who was encouraging me to "demo as frequently as possible" and that made sense.
What tripped (or triggered even) me was the constant "I am so good, this thing I did made me so happy and all of you must agree" behaviour by the minute... and that was somehow being encouraged. I don't get that...