I went from big tech to a team of four at a small org. To work uninhibited and with close to zero speed bumps from management has been life changing for me and my stress levels. We all have each other's backs and there is none of that "West Coast Nice" stuff going on.
I worked manufacturing in my younger days and also spent some time in the Marines, so I feel ya on the cushy tech jobs... But I'd just about rather go back to Iraq before I go back to corporate culture.
I volunteered down there for a week when that happened. I think the only thing we used our phones for was a picture here and there. Otherwise, complete darkness. Despite the obvious of it being a disaster zone and homes destroyed everywhere, it was a positive experience.
When I first heard of Starlink and the possibility to have internet everywhere, I was a little sad inside. It is now impossible to escape in this world, even in the most remote mountains on earth. People always look at me sideways when I say this, but I truly think the power/internet needs shutoff for 6 months to a year every so often to give us a little bit of a reset.
I would agree that the insights provided are little to none. I think this is some sort of fallacy that being being PR'd by tech bros with a lot of skin in the game attempting to come up with some kind of positive reason to sell to people. It's fairly easy to see right through it though.
Full disclosure, I've written performant market making algorithms for Polymarket. I'm actually a fan of these markets and enjoy the statistics and engineering challenges they present, but see it as a net negative on society. I'd gladly give up my PnL if it was a net positive on the American psych.
> One of my projects was a vibe-coded implementation of JavaScript in Python—a loose port of MicroQuickJS—which I called micro-javascript. You can try it out in your browser in this playground.
I'd like to remind everyone here that people on this forum used to actually code truly remarkable and pointless stuff like this, with zero LLMs, using nothing but their brains and motivation from who the heck knows where from.
I'm guessing the reason is probably the sex allegations. I don't see a graduating class that probably used an LLM for every single homework assignment boo'ing a speech because of AI alone. When it comes to sex allegations in the US, you are guilty until proven innocent, even more so as a powerful and/or rich individual. Of course shame on him if it's true, but in this day and age it doesn't matter whether it's true or not.
Wish I had you at my first engineering job at IBM. A couple senior devs there (not all) would get pissed when juniors tried asking them questions. Not only did it take a bit of courage to ask someone who had been there 20 years about something, but it was a 50/50 chance they were going to be an asshole to ya lol. Was a good learning experience for me - I go out of my way to mentor now.
Many things at my software engineering job are like this, which require constantly changing human institutional knowledge that is almost always undocumented, or changing so quickly that it isn't relevant anymore. By the time you decide to automate it, the process changes. Tribal knowledge used to be something I hated seeing senior engineers keeping to themselves, but now it seems like an asset.
Anecdote, a close family member of mine is a director of arts for a very large city in the US. They typically install/uninstall at night - she's told me this is especially important with cultural or otherwise edgy pieces.
LinkedIn was already bad enough, but now it's really bad. 98% of posts are LLM generated, and the few software engineering jobs posted are getting over 100 applicants in 30 minutes hah!
I worked manufacturing in my younger days and also spent some time in the Marines, so I feel ya on the cushy tech jobs... But I'd just about rather go back to Iraq before I go back to corporate culture.
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