>that's 20 hours you aren't spending building stuff or honing your skills
My problem is it always seems like I'm building skills to help some capitalist be more rich or make more money. If I want to build something to contribute to a community sans profit, there's the burdens of popularity if I'm successful.
I think people are afraid to admit that amusement is what brings them fulfillment. Having to work on something or build more skills sounds similar to a protestant work ethic to me, which was much more important when the essentials of living were not as assured as it is today (or you need to fit into certain social circles today).
I suppose it helps your personal character and having more things to talk about, but I don't know if worrying whether or not a majority of people I'd meet find me interesting because of my skill(s) is also a good selling point.
Word of mouth can still help you, but you at least need to find the community where people have the shared problem, so their recommendations have weight
Overcoming the initial "why should I even look at this" to me is the hardest part
Doesn't shock me considering the hard work -> nice life pipeline is in shambles in the US and it wouldn't surprise me if that's true for other countries too
And we also chose to extend the presence of gambling in society - quite literally with sports gambling - but also adjacently with crypto markets and stock market apps
Tech has always had advantages around being able to slack off if you were good since it was a white collar desk job, but you could justify that to yourself as a sort of implied retainer arrangement. So it wasn't directly grifting or stealing.
Some people get a taste of real money relatively easily (like a $200k+ salary for slacking off) and want more though, maybe because they're afraid that good situation can't last and they need maximum value extracted before they're "found out".
And we are just not seeing major downsides to grifting unless you run afoul of the law, which can be slow to prosecute if you are on a bleeding edge like AI (like it was for crypto).
You're not too pessimistic yet. Projects that devolved into spaghetti paid their engineers roughly the same as they will pay new ones. Looking at the incentives, it's hard to take on the burden of undoing technical debt if your salary isn't going to change much. Businesses take advantage of passions to fix things like technical debt because they know they don't have to pay too much extra for it.
I obviously can't speculate beyond what's in there about the author, but for me, living in a bog standard apartment and working remote to support kids isn't exactly blog-worthy content. I used to live in apartments, and most of the new construction in the US is very cookie-cutter and sometimes depressing.
So, here's what mine would be:
1) a challenging hobby that's useful and more engaging in off-hours than more computer hobbies. Building a livable van certainly seems more interesting than living in an apartment to me.
2) changing scenery at a whim, given the time investment to find a place
3) a van that you can resell or give to your kids
I'd still choose a detachable RV though since it's probably way more comfortable for the price. Sure, I lose out on some options to stay for the night, but that isn't an insurmountable challenge if you can plan and live in a van. Living full time in an RV might also not be blog-worthy though.
> but for me, living in a bog standard apartment and working remote to support kids isn't exactly blog-worthy content.
I think there are easier and far less restricting ways to have something to blog about.
> 3) a van that you can resell or give to your kids
A van that's been lived in for a few years probably won't have that much resale value and it's not exactly the best thing to inherit (his kids would probably either have their own van by the time they get the inheritance or have decided against that lifestyle).
I guess it's fun if you're content being a Nomad. But I'm with the grandparent, this lifestyle is probably just not for me.
>when i lived in a van i spent twice as much per month repairing it as i had on renting my san francisco apartment
I just straight-up do not believe that dollar amount, lol
You had to have bought a terrible van and went to a terrible mechanic that was maliciously breaking things so you'd come back for that to happen. Vans are work horses and usually simple compared to regular consumer vehicles.
i did buy a terrible van (a vanagon from 01983 whose new owner has dubbed her calypso and made her into a wonderful van; you can see her at vanagon meetups), and although some professional mechanics did make some mistakes that broke things worse, i'm pretty sure they weren't malicious. more important is that i was a terrible mechanic and didn't know how to recognize or manage when things were going wrong
simple, it certainly was. it was so simple it didn't have water cooling or an oil temperature gauge, and having to rebuild the engine twice in three months (due mostly to overheating) was a big part of why it was so expensive
looking at current vans, though, it seems like it would be easy to spend fifty or a hundred thousand dollars on a van that was still too small to stand up in? so i'm not sure my choice was obviously bad; i just lacked the knowledge to use the old van effectively
I've had good tickets where things were laid out like 1) here's the golden path, 2) here's where I want you to put everything, 3) here's how we handle expected errors, 4) here's all of the interactions the user should be able to do
I also have had bad tickets that define loose acceptance criteria and leave it up to the developer to decide the UX, edge cases, error handling, etc.
The former removes a lot of burden of decision from the developer. It feels like the author of the ticket is showing ownership. I can mostly worry about how to implement it and not worry if my decision is going to negatively affect users that I'll get blowback from.
The latter feels like they are letting an assumed-to-be-smart person make more decisions on the product and that they're closer to an ideas person hitting you up to make their latest world-changing startup idea.
With the latter, the developer is taking on more responsibilities and accountability. They need to be good at development and also good at understanding the users and the product and UX. That's two roles in one if they're good at both responsibilities (they probably aren't), but the compensation is likely only around 1 job.
And now that developers are also mixing with operations/cloud management responsibilities, you now have a lot of groups of people hitching their wagons to what the developers do or think is best. Everyone is here to support developers so developers are now making a bunch of decisions in areas they aren't experts at.
Following tickets (almost) blindly should be an advantage. At no point should I get a ticket and have to ask the question "will users actually want this?" because someone else should be answering that and not a developer. Being able to deliver a ticket that a developer can follow (almost) blindly means that thought and care are going into the decisions about how to deliver something. It ultimately means developers can make decisions in the areas they are experts at, and other staff can make decisions on things they are experts in.
Edit: definitely not disagreeing with your post, just some thoughts on the issue
The "bad" tickets is where you actually bring value though.
The "good" tickets can be given to junior dev/low cost contractor/ChatGPT.
Whenever I read things like this I feel like a lot of developers don't understand what their job actually is. It's not just translating tickets to code.
If the people whose job it is to keep in contact with the customer and collect requirements don't know either, developer's guess is as good as theirs. Otherwise, individual developers may not be the best persons to decide all the details. You risk wasting time by doing the wrong thing either way.
If you have the option to extract rents by forming a cartel (without legal punishment), you'll do it regardless of the underlying value of the asset you're trying to control because it's free money (assuming you can trust the other members of the cartel)
I could deal with the hype cycles better if the industry had more solid foundations on the basic stuff like CRUD apps and websites. We're still pretty lousy at it.
It feels like a sinking ship but we all know it's not going anywhere because humanity now depends too much upon getting messages anywhere in the world on the order of seconds.
Maybe having a bunch of hype cycles is normal and we're meant to dig through the bullshit for gold. Kind of resembles prompting AI over and over until you get a good response. It would be nice if the industry admitted that instead of trying to pretend every hype cycle is a guaranteed existence-changer. It changes your mindset and mental fortitude if you know you're going to be dealing with bullshit instead of being lied to and finding it out once you've accepted the job.
Also, don't forget a trend that was apparently so bullshit that people don't even mention it next to blockchain: VR/AR.
Half of them would look like job hoppers with such short tenures on their resume. Some of them have simultaneous executive positions at other companies.
If you want some evidence of short-term thinking not being a meme, it's probably that.
My problem is it always seems like I'm building skills to help some capitalist be more rich or make more money. If I want to build something to contribute to a community sans profit, there's the burdens of popularity if I'm successful.
I think people are afraid to admit that amusement is what brings them fulfillment. Having to work on something or build more skills sounds similar to a protestant work ethic to me, which was much more important when the essentials of living were not as assured as it is today (or you need to fit into certain social circles today).
I suppose it helps your personal character and having more things to talk about, but I don't know if worrying whether or not a majority of people I'd meet find me interesting because of my skill(s) is also a good selling point.