> I don't understand what problem AI is supposed to solve in software development.
When Russians invaded Germany during WWII, some of them (who had never seen a toilet) thought that toilets were advanced potato washing machines, and were rightfully pissed when their potatoes were flushed away and didn't come back.
Sounds like you're feeling a similar frustration with your problem.
I love this paragrpah and I think it provides an interesting insight:
> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.
Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.
I think Office Space summed up the problem nicely:
"Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.
Bob Porter: Don't... don't care?
Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.
Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?
Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses.
Bob Slydell: Eight?
Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired."
Most companies only care about the next quarter, or next investor call. Quality be damned, cut corners, work late. It's a never-ending series of death marches.
Solution: go independent, work on your own ideas, and sell them to consumers. That might be your own start-up, but for me it was to become an indie game developer.
One of my games, YOYOZO, was featured in Ars Technica's "Best Video Games of 2023" so I feel my decision was the right one.
I personally view video games as the penultimate story telling medium humanity has devised.
Sure, gameplay and mechanics and all this other stuff is cool, but the ability to tell a story where you ARE the main character, you have control over their actions and you are in a sequence as it unfolds is breathtaking.
VR games in some instances doubly so. Playing Half Life Alyx was almost a spiritual experience, I can close my eyes and remember the alleyways of the city.
The industry is fundamentally about converting conscious thought into capital as efficiently as possible. So that it's bad for your mind makes sense to me.
In the great web tradition of harvesting the vast body of other people's work in the large[1] and shoving it through huge amounts of computation to wring out a nickel's worth of value that will eventually manifest in some good-paying SWE jobs, a rich executive class, and a whole lot of shareholder value and inevitably mutate in another goddamn ad-serving platform.
[1] Ha, the poor millions of dumb minions who put their work on the web thinking it might be fun for others or garner themselves a small following, they didn't check the terms of the EULA!
We had our first kid when I was about 37, and our second when I was about 43.
The part that's harder is that particularly with #2, I'm just a bit more tired, and he needs a lot of energy. It's not drastic, but I notice it.
The part that's emotionally harder is that I'm sad I won't be there when my kids are approximately my age. I'd love to be around longer to help if they have kids, etc., but statistically, I don't think it's too likely. I lost my own mom two years ago and that was very hard. Barring some advances in health care, my kids are likely to lose me in their 30s-40s as well. Losing a parent is never easy, but I think it would be easier a little later. My kids only have one grandparent left and I wish they still had two.
The part that's easier is exactly what you note: Life is pretty stable. We're financially sound. We've had years of growth and therapy to learn to communicate well and have a healthy relationship with each other and our kids. We can afford to support our kids well, be that with high quality daycare when they were young, or an emergency mid-year school shift (that was interesting), or medically, or whatnot.
Lots of tradeoffs. I plan to make the most of my time with them while they're still young. There's no clear answer on the balance other than doing one's best.
Your last sentence sums it all up for me. Having come into Google through acquisition (and product then killed off) maybe biased me, but still. That's how I see it.
I worked at Google for 10 years and didn't have more than a few minutes of job satisfaction and jumped from team to team hoping to eventually find a place where I could fit in and maybe get promotion. But I never went for promotion ever. The whole process looked meant to demoralize. I was clearly not a "culture fit" -- as they call it -- but somehow I soldiered on and nobody cared.
Until eventually, after 10 years of L4, it became clear me I had wasted 10 years of potential career progression because the money was (at least) twice as good as what I would have gotten in a smaller local company where I would have more impact and creative input. The rest of the industry was off doing other stuff, and my friends moving into lead and management jobs, while I putzed around moving protobufs (with just the right comments, indentation and stylistic flourishes) around Google's walled garden. Any interesting work was snatched up by others faster than you could get it.
Promotion level at Google is only loosely corelated with programming or engineering talent. It's a measure of political skill and motivation, and your ability or desire to thrive in a large organization.
Don't get me wrong, the money was excellent and my priority was feeding my family. But it wasn't "retire early" money, not without a lot of severe financial discipline and restraint anyways.
Google got lucky 15 years ago and managed to turn on an absolutely massive firehose of money in ads. Now Google hoovers up as much talent as they can in hopes that they'll strike it lucky and turn on a second or third revenue faucet. But spoiler alert: they never will. So they have to settle for attempting to starve potential competition of talent.
If by "everyone" you mean "people I see on the internet", you're only seeing them because they desperately want / need you to see them, and your perception of their accomplishments is their currency.
If you mean people you encounter in real life (and they aren't inner-circle), they likely are just saying something, ANYTHING, to either just make conversation or give themselves confirmation that they exist and that they're valid. We're human, after all.
Just try to take it all with a grain of salt. There's no "correct path" in life. You get to define what success and happiness means for you, and you'll also never find a shortage of people who will tell you you're wrong lol -- but the most-free people in the world are those who unapologetically just "are".
Be your authentic self, dude -- do nothing, do something, who gives a shit!
Life can't pass you by if you spend it truly enjoying whatever it is that gets you off (even if that's "nothing")
A lot of good comments here. I think there is a quote I learn from Thich Nhat Hanh that I wanted to share: "you could say you sacrifice a lot to be number one in your job, but it makes no sense to say you sacrifice a lot to be happy"
There you go.
This article brought back memories of my time working in Kindle.
Amazon has a culture of promotion focused “engineering”. This rings true across product management and software development.
Rather than solving real customer facing problems, many organizations including Kindle, emphasize “what do I need to do to get promoted?”
This is not only SDEs, but L7/Senior engineering managers and L8/directors, who latch onto a sales pitch and put all their eggs in one basket.
The template is like this:
> I’m going to build a new framework, platform, format, or some other “thing” that everyone should now use to solve {{problem}}. Then, I can claim a larger scope and significant impact, no matter how pointless, costly, or annoying this thing is to customers.
They write documents. These are narratives where they spend hours and hours reviewing and nit picking how “crisp” a sentence is, or how there are too many commas, or some other superfluous bullshit.
There’s an OP1 document, where an L7 writes a fancy narrative, justify more head count and growing their organization. It’s their ticket to a director promotion.
If you’re a developer, you flock to the same project. For L4s and L5s, it’s your ticket to the next level. For an L6, you spend your time selling the absolute hell out of this thing, going on a road show and pitching your idea to get buy in from other teams. You’re careful not to write much of the code and mainly come off as being the architect and consultant. This is your ticket to getting to the Principal level. If this is someone else’s idea, you’ll do whatever it takes to take credit when this succeeds but blame everyone else when it fails.
Best case, the thing you deliver gets you promoted. Then, you simply just move onto to another organization. You were in Kindle and this new piece of shit has made on call hell? Oh well, you already got your promotion. Now you can just move on to AWS (or find another team in any of Amazons legacy businesses where you can coast).
Kindle was an army of H1Bs with an extremely toxic culture. They refuse to hire or even interview white, black, or Hispanic candidates. You can pay H1Bs less, and they’re happy with it because they get to live in Redmond, WA instead of India.
I could go on and on, but I feel anxiety right now even thinking about my time working there. Absolute shithole.
Prime example of the 'I'm not a rent-seeker, I'm a disruptor' if anyone wants to know what it looks like.
It is a scam if you know you've been bombarding them with algo-targeted ads and have been subjecting them to the endless amount of influencer-porn these kids seemingly cannot do without anymore due to a horrible data driven diet that people who work for FAANG work on almost exclusively.
It's a scam, just admit it, we all know what it is: you're targeting people who cannot and will not be able to afford much, and make them think this is what is missing in their life so you can lock them in debt and keep the consumerist cycle going.
You're the 21st century perversion of a Marketing con-man, but unlike the 20th century version with all the glamour, sex and booze you guys play fortnite, watch furry porn and get doordash sent to you while you suck on a vape in your empty apartment.
The real question is: why do so many think you guys are anything remotely close to being successful? And why does tech seem to set such low standards for what can be construed as success?
Next we're going to hear about how Robinhood was the great emancipator of the Millennial and Gen Z, and not really just a front-running racket for hedgefunds, too.
Some food for thought, for the people interested in this:
Yes, there is a wholly different educational quality from one-on-one tutoring compared to mass produced standardized 20+ on 1 textbook curricular politicized 'education'.
However there are other areas that I suspect have a hand in any broad genius decline.
I would look to declining nutritional quality, for a number of reasons:
* All the money is in the worst shit. Math whizzes become quants, or help out big data. Artistic geniuses become marketing and advertising shitlords. Storytellers get churned up into the latest mega franchise, or become formulaic parodies of themselves to satisfy publishers.
* Lack of holistic thinking. Specialization is strongly emphasized in many ways.
* Fierce and relentless, scientifically designed, soul-crushing propaganda, twisting hearts and minds into a constant state of fear.
* Politicized and weaponized anti-intellectualism.
* Scientism
* Media priorities
All that said, I think figuring out how to make tutoring better and more wide-spread is our way out of a lot of this stuff... Which is probably why it will be viciously attacked by the usual profiteers and their paid defenders of the status quo.
When Russians invaded Germany during WWII, some of them (who had never seen a toilet) thought that toilets were advanced potato washing machines, and were rightfully pissed when their potatoes were flushed away and didn't come back.
Sounds like you're feeling a similar frustration with your problem.