The world was a better place when Nazi's were afraid that showing their true colors would get them killed.

Lol. Even among those less stupid, most didn't hire junior developers for the last three years, to hedge their bets.

Well, it's three years later, AI didn't solve shit, and we are facing an entire missing cohort of senior developers.

We've seen this before - back when web frameworks "made all of us obsolete" back in 2003.-

Here's what comes next:

Everyone who needs a senior developer gets to start bidding up the prices of the missing senior developers. Since there simply aren't enough to go around, the "find out" phase will be punctuated.

Losing bidders get to pay 4x rates for 1/3 the output from consulting companies.

Cheers!

Source: I was made obsolete by web frameworks so hard that I entered a delusion where working with web frameworks just let us produce bigger buggier websites even faster - and where the demand for web developers skyrocketed and I made some seriously respectable money while helping train up junior developers to help address the severe shortage.

TL;DR - Google makes (arguably insane) claim that it previously acted responsibly with regards to fingerprinting, and says they will begin acting irresponsibility with fingerprinting in February.

Practical take-aways you probably already knew:

• Today's Google may do or say anything to make an extra nickel.
• Today's Google, while it employs some excellent privacy minded engineers, has not demonstrated an organizational commitment to user privacy.
• It is probably wise to assume that the next serious data breach at Google will end marriages, get politicians arrested, get famous people canceled, fuel successful scammers, and have every other privacy impact you can imagine. We know the Google data pool is massive, and we have reason to believe it is incredibly personal. I'm aware that Google has anonymozation solutions in play, and I do not believe those solutions will be effective in a breach scenario.
• I believe that the average person will likely be better off ten years from now if they interact less with Google services.

If the courts let Disney get away with this, it will slightly erode my faith in non-guillotine resolutions to the current phase of bullshit like this.

As a huge Anime fan, with some catching up to do, I've blocked every anime adjacent community, because NSFW filtering isn't applied as strictly as I would prefer, on the Anime communities here.

I enjoy a good sexually charged image as much as the next person, perhaps more.

But I scroll Lemmy in front of my impressionable daughter sometimes.

I would like to catch up on Anime recommendations, here.

But, to me, it's just not worth the risk of suddenly needing to explain to my daughter why Faye Valentine's parents didn't love her enough to buy her full sets of clothing.

Tennant called transgender critics “a tiny bunch of little whinging f*ckers who are on the wrong side of history, and they’ll all go away soon.”

Is the real headline here. And good for him.

I'd rather not give what's her name any more attention over this crap.

Also, calling Tennant a "Harry Potter actor", while true, feels like a calculated insult to a man who has played Doctor Who, The Purple Man, and Crawley.

"asked if Neuralink would perform another surgery to fix or replace the implant, but the company declined"

Evidence whether the company saw them as a person, or felt any ethical obligation...

It's an interesting era when an organization can have a single user, and choose to leave that single user with 85% of the promised functionality no longer functional. But is happily pursuing it's second user.

For those also learning about Yuzu thanks only to Nintendo's lawsuit, let's save you a search:

https://yuzu-emu.org/downloads/

"he’d already aroused suspicion by interrupting a meandering discussion of principles with a straightforward plan of action."

I feel seen.

I could use some honest advice from experienced programmers and engineers.

Old person programmer checking in.

if you sat me down and asked me about algorithms or anything else I did to get my job in the first place I would be clueless.

Don't sweat it. No one knows how the fuck computers work.

Anyone who thinks they actually know, isnt educated enough to understand about the bits they don't understand.

I can solve problems and always get my work done, but I don't even know the language/framework I use daily well enough to explain what's going on, I can just do things.

Nice. You've got the important part. Ride that until the end.

I don't think I have imposter syndrome, I think I really might have let any skill I had atrophy.

It's not impostor syndrome when you're only 2 years into your career.

If you feel like you don't know jack shit compared to what I know, after decades... that's because you don't know jack shit compared to what I know. There's nothing wrong with that. Someday I'll be pissing myself in a nursing home run by automation you maintain. We all get our turn.

I'm the meantime, lucky for you, I can't be arsed to work more than 40 hours in a week, so there's plenty of work left to do while you learn.

And I'll retire soon, and I'l promise I'll do you a solid and leave decades of my own mistakes and missteps out there for you to earn $$$$ cleaning up after. You're welcome... I guess.

I used to enjoy programming as a hobby in my spare time, but in two years I've opened the IDE on my personal machine no more than twice.

This is very normal. Welcome to the big leagues. If you do something you love for your job, eventually it's still just a job.

People talk about all the side projects they have, but I have none. I feel too stressed out from the job to do any programming outside of work, even though I love it.

This is very normal for your current stage of your career.

If you stick with it, it gets better when you get to someday become a self-important slob like me who only works on really interesting problems.

And how do I only work on really interesting problems? I make my boss hire a few junior developers and I delegate all the boring stuff to them.

It's a pretty sweet deal for at least one of us. (Who for, varies by the day, really.)

I feel like I can't level up from a Junior to Senior because I either don't have the headspace or the will to do so.

I guarantee that you've learned way more than you think. If you stick with it, you'll have a random moment sometime soon when someone else just can't wrap their head around a concept you take for granted.

It doesn't help that the job I've had has taught me very little and my dev team has been a shitshow from the beginning.

That sucks, sorry. There are more shitty developer teams than good ones. If you stick with it, and do some strategic job hopping, you can find the good ones.

This is a tough time to switch jobs in tech, I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to mess with it.

At the moment I have an offer on the table to do a job that isn't engineering (but still tech) and it surprisingly pays more.

Hell yes! Fuck your current employer for underpaying you!

And you already admitted your current team is shit.

Go take that money!

but I fear I might go down this route and never be able to come back to engineering. Not that I'm sure I want to.

Your developer skills won't vanish. Trust your future self.

If someone asks why you spent time as a non-developer "those assholes weren't paying a fair wage" is a fine answer.

It might sound defeatist but I don't think I'll ever be a top 5% or even 25% engineer.

As a top 5% engineer (with a trophy for humility), it's not all they promised.

It turns out there's still plenty I don't know, and I spend much more of my time confused and frustrated than I did before. The cool part is that I'm now confused and frustrated by really interesting problems.

I could be average with a lot of work, but not great.

I pay top dollar for average programmers. I'm not hiring right now, but let's stay in touch.

There's a lot of coders out there without the self awareness to realize what they don't know. Those programmers never get any better, and never reach average.

(Contrasted with myself, who, as I said, have several awards for excessive humility in spite of my undeniable genius. /s)

I could potentially be great in the new field I'm being recruited for, but that's also hard to say without being in the job.

Go find out!

Beware though, when they find out you can code, they will find a way to add that to your job duties.

I know that some people just aren't cut out for being engineers.

True. Some people's ego or laziness blinds them to what they need to learn.

I have a huge ego, and I am deeply lazy, but I occasionally put both in check for just long enough to learn.

Maybe I have the aptitude but not the mentality to do this for 30+ years.

Take it a year at a time. Once in awhile, take out some cash and spread it on the ground and sort of roll in it.

Hopefully you've noticed, but while this job is usually a pain in the ass, it also pays really fucking well.

I want to know if that's what it sounds like to people who've seen that before.

I've had this conversation with all of my very top people, if that's any consolation.

If you were in my position, would you walk away and just be a hobbyist programmer or stick it out and hope to be a mediocre engineer one day?

If you told my younger self how much money I could make as a mediocre engineer, I would be all over that deal.

I would've agonized about the trade-off if I knew I would stop loving my hobby, but taken comfort that I would later love it again.

Everything happens in seasons. Some seasons I code for fun. Some I don't.

A cool side effect of being paid to code is that when I do find the mind space to hobby code, I am a fucking badass hobby coder.

I think you should take this job because your current employer is running a shitty team, and underpaying you. Then take another programming job later when the next opportunity arrives (and it will..it really will.)

Incidentally... https://mastodon.social/@elonjet is still going strong.

We do this every 15 years. For anyone less than 15 years into their career, welcome to the party.

Let's see if I can save you some energy:

• Yes, it made my job massively easier.
• No, it didn't replace me.
• Yes, it allowed a bunch of new people to also do the job I do. Welcome newbies!
• No, my salary didn't go down, relative to inflation.

It turns out that the last mile to a successful product delivery is still really fucking hard, and this magic bullet tool also didn't solve that.

Now... Am I talking about...?

• AI?
• Web frameworks?
• English like programming language syntax?
• A compiler with built-in type checking?
• All of the above.

Edit: Formatting for readability.