I’m not hiring anymore, but when I was, all I wanted to find was someone that knew the fundamentals (and was a good ’attitude fit’ as per the similarly titled book). Sorry @wccrawford, I wish we could have more places that value slow, boring tech — aside from banking/insurance?
I have hung on to my job for many years now because of being in a similar situation in regards to trying to do the right thing and the fear of not being hire-able.
There is something wrong with the industry in chasing fads and group think. It has always been this way. Businesses chased Java in the late 90s, early 00s. They chased CORBA, WSDL, ESB, ERP and a host of other acronyms back in the day.
More recently, Data Lake, Big Data, Cloud Compute, AI.
Most of the executives I have met really have no clue. They just go with what is being promoted in the space because it offers a safety net. Look, we are "not behind the curve!". We are innovating along with the rest of the industry.
Interviews do not really test much for ability to think and reason. If you ran an entire ISP, if you figured out, on your own, without any help, how to shard databases, put in multiple layers of redundancy, caching... well, nobody cares now. You had to do it in AWS or Azure or whatever stack they have currently.
Sadly, I do not think it will ever be fixed. It is something intrinsic to human nature.
Yeah, I probably need to push this harder now. I did actually join 1 project recently and got to the point that I felt I could add 1 more common thing to my resume, and that felt good. (Getting something done felt good, too.)
But getting to the point that I feel confident in certain frameworks is going to be hard. I'll figure it out somehow, I'm sure.
This exactly, actual doers are most of the time not rewarded meanwhile the AWS senior sucking Jeffs wiener specialist gets a job doing nothing but generating costs and leave behind more shit after his 3 years moving the ladder up to some even bigger bs pretend consulting job at an even bigger company. It's the same bs mostly for developers. I rewrite their library from TS to Rust and it gains them 50x performance increases and saves them 5k+ a week over all their compute now but nobody gives a shit and I do not have a certification for that to show off on my LinkedIn. Meanwhile my PM did nothing got paid to do some shity certificate and then gets the credit and the certificate and pisses of to the next bigger fish collecting another 100k more meanwhile I get a 1k bonus and a pat on the shoulder. Corporate late stage capitalism is complete fucking bs and I think about becoming a PM as well now. I feel like a fool and betrayed. Meanwhile they constantly threaten our Team to lay it off or outsource it as they say we are to expensive in a first world country and they easily find as good people in India etc. What a time to be alive.
If you're willing and able to promote yourself internally, you can make people give a shit, or at least publicly claim they do. That's 260k+ per year, and even big businesses are going to care about that at some level, especially if it's something that can be replicated. Find 10 systems you can do that with, and it's 2.6m+ per year.
But, if you don't want to play the self-promotion game, yeah someone else is going to benefit from your work.
Try Rust? The system programming world isn't very bullshit-infested and Rust is trendy (which is good for a change), also employers can't realistically expect many years of Rust experience.
Need training and something to show? Contribute to some FOSS project.
That actually wasn't why I didn't write tests a lot of the time.
What stopped me was that after a year of writing tests, I was moved to a higher priority project, and the person who followed me didn't write tests.
So when I came back, many of the tests were broken. I had to fix all those in order to get new ones to not be a bother.
Repeat again, but this time I came back and the unit testing suite had fundamentally altered its nature. None of the tests worked and they all needed to be rewritten for a new paradigm.
I gave up on tests for that system at that point. It simply wasn't worthwhile. Management didn't care at all, despite how many times I told them how much more reliable it made that system, and it was the only system that survived the first giant penetration test with no problems.
That doesn't mean I quite testing. I still wrote tests whenever I thought it would help me with what I was currently working on. And that was quite often. But I absolutely didn't worry about old tests, and I didn't worry about making sure others could use my tests. They were never going to try.
The final straw, less than a year before I was laid off, was when they decided my "storybook" tests weren't worth keeping in the repo and deleted them. That made me realized exactly how much they valued unit tests.
That isn't to say they had no tests. There was a suite of tests written by the boss that we were required to run. They were all run against live or dev servers with a browser-control framework, and they were shaky for years. But they were required, so they were actually kept working. Nobody wrote new tests for it until something failed and caused a problem, though.
tl;dr - There are a lot of reasons that people choose not to write tests, and not just for job security.
I think there's a difference between the government doing it and the newspaper.
The newspaper can cherry pick who they post about, and spin it however they want. The government should be posting all of them in the same way, with just the facts.
To do that, they'd have to admit what they're doing out loud, and then they'd have public sentiment against them. It'd ruin what they have.
Instead, they'll wait for the revolt, and then sell the upgrade. Then they look like heroes for doing what people are asking for, instead of villains that cause the situation in the first place. They'll spin it as offering affordable TVs to those can't afford them without the advertisements, and no-ad TVs for those who are willing to pay the extra.
I 100% think that every programmer is responsible for the code they submit for PR, whether they used AI or not. Whether they used Google/StackExchange/etc or not.
They are responsible for it.
However, here's a different situation:
If the company you're working for requires you to use LLMs to code, I think it's 100% defensible to say "Oh, the AI did that" when there's a problem because the company required its usage. You would have done it better if the company hadn't forced you to cut corners.
> You would have done it better if the company hadn't forced you to cut corners.
I assume (hope to god) you're being hyperbolic, but I feel it important to point out to everyone who doesn't get it. This is just the CS version of "just following orders". And deserves the exact same amount of respect and fairness.
The company can't be mad that they both require me to use AI to save time and that I do it.
Cleaning up after AI can easily take longer than it takes to just it right the first time myself.
I'm not saying that this is going to be a daily occurrence, and I do find that AI is great at speeding up some tasks. But it absolutely will cause errors. If they expect it to save time, they're going to have to accept an increased error rate.
Especially of hard-to-find/predict/test bugs.
If they don't require it, and I use it to lower my workload, then it's on me, not them.
The "magic" of why AI is trusted over humans is that so many humans are terrible at their jobs that people default to not trusting someone who is telling them something they don't want to hear.
The AI always tells them what they want to hear, and so they trust it. It's not magic.
Is there any empirical evidence that librarians are terrible at their jobs?
The reason is not the supposed fallibility of humans but rather the supposed infallibility of technology. Nontechnical people don't know how the technology works, don't know how the sausage is made, and they mistakenly assume it can't go wrong, just like a calculator can't go wrong.
Also, people are not good at revising their beliefs. A lot depends on what they hear first, and they usually hear from the internet before they hear from an expert, because it's easier and faster to consult the former. It's embarrassing to admit to yourself that you were suckered into believing something false, so the emotional coping mechanism is to get angry at the person who contradicts your beliefs, which preserves your self-respect.
A lot of the bad actors are scanning prices on them and selling them. Deface the title page and inside covers and they will be fine to read but worth almost nothing at sale. A stamp saying "Taken from the Little Free Library of X. Share and enjoy. Please report sellers." would do the job.
I think I'm going to get my wife a stamp that says some thing like that. I'll probably note that if it was sold, it was stolen, but not put any personal details on it. It's not like I could really do anything about it anyhow, and people would be mad if I told them that when they reported it.
I was thinking more like "of XYZ town" than anything about you personally. And since most of these are getting sold online, you want the duped buyers to report the sellers to the site where the books were listed. A bunch of one-star reviews for selling LFL books will tank someone out of abebooks or similar pretty fast.
You might even put a stamp on a sheet of paper with a note that it's in every book in the library to discourage the thieves from looking in the first place.
FROM THE LITTLE FREE LIBRARY OF SPRINGFIELD
ENJOY IT AND PASS IT ON
ANYONE WHO SELLS IT IS A THIEF
ONE-STAR REVIEW THEM WITH WHY
ON THE SITE WHERE YOU BOUGHT IT
Where I live actually has the opposite; there are ~6 within a mile, and they're usually completely full. People are always dumping huge collections into them, to where I never even have the chance to give back myself.
I don't know what makes it different here. But it is possible for them to work without safeguards.
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