The first step is to understand the UK is more or less a 3rd world country by US standards these days and if you want to find a job you'll need to accept a salary that's likely far below your expectations, and a lifestyle that far, far below your expectations as someone living in the US.
- Cut your salary expectations by half or more.
- Cut your take home pay expectations by 60-70% as the government will take a huge chunk of your income.
- Assume you will struggle to pay rent since 50%+ of your post-tax income will go to rent.
- Assume you'll struggle to heat your home because the UK has the highest energy costs in the world.
- Assume you won't be have access to healthcare unless on your deathbed and you won't be able to afford private because the above.
If you're happy with this lifestyle then you might be able to find a QA engineer job in the UK for £30,000. The job market here is horrendous though. A lot of people I know are looking for other ways to make a living or supplement their income such as by claiming they're disabled.
Sounds like you took programming to learn programming while the others took it for a certificate.
I had similar issues for different reasons at university. Some of the subjects I learnt were extremely boring to me and I just didn't focus on them, while others I obsessed about. I learnt the things I wanted to learn, but didn't get the grade I probably could have if that was what I was optimising for.
> Experience is still needed too. You can't just blindly trust AI outputs. So, my advice is to get experience in an old-fashioned CS program and by writing you own side projects, contributing to open source projects, etc.
The issue is you can't blindly trust humans either, and increasingly you're better off asking an AI than a human.
> 3) At this point, a lot of students have complex side-projects to a point where everyone's resume looks the same. It's harder to create a competitive edge.
This one of the things that breaks my heart personally.
I have personal projects I am so proud of that took me years to build or considerable effort to reading through papers and implementing by hand.
I used to show these in interviews with such pride, but now these are at best neutral to my application, but more likely a knock against me because they're so easy to vibe code.
I guess it would be like if you spent the last decade writing novels which you were really proud of and felt was part of the small contribution you've made humanity, then overnight people decided they were actually awful and of zero value.
Everything I ever wrote – all the SWE blog posts, tutorials, books, github repos. It's all useless now.
You put this well, now that you mention it, I sometimes find myself trying to defend my earlier work as "Pre-ChatGPT," as if that even matters. Relegating future such work to some sort of romanticized "artisanal craftsmanship" feels hollow. That being said, I'm more productive than ever and finally got projects that have stalled out going again, and these projects have made my own life easier as a result. More utility from the result than from having walked the journey perhaps.
They don't pride themselves on those values though. Claims of democracy, tolerance, freedom, and rule of law are selectively used as justifications for whatever crap Western governments want to do. If they actually believed in these things they would act differently.
> There are all these videos that are public, I'm allowed to watch them, but they were clearly not meant for me to watch.
I disagree. I think most people probably intended them to be public and thought it would be cool if people watched – that was the attitude back then. In the early stages of web 2.0 people who were online would share everything and anything. Social media was public by default and no one really had a problem with it.
It was in the years that followed the launch of the iphone and the mass-adoption of the internet that various incidents caused companies and people to realise they needed to be more careful about what was shared publicly online.
I think the appeal of these videos is that they're authentic and highlight something we've lost today, not that they're "voyeuristic".
Most videos people watch on YouTube today have high production value, even most TikTok creators which show up on the "For You" page are professional content creators. Additionally, this was back in an era where people didn't really care about their public/online persona, and act as such.
It's not just a time capsule... It an alternative reality where people are not overly self-conscious about their image and where the internet is full of real people sharing real and rather mediocre things that are happening in their life, rather than curated moments to serve the advertisement interests of corporations. And it's an alternative reality which existed just 15-20 years ago. These people are not that dissimilar from us, but live in a completely different, far more authentic world.
> Coding is not the bottleneck to produce a qualify product.
I've been saying this too. The 10x engineer stuff simply cannot make sense unless previously you were spending 90%+ of your day just writing coding and now that's dropped to single digits because AI can generate it. If you spent 20-30% of your day coding before and the rest thinking about the problem, thinking about good UX, etc, then AI coding assistances mathematically cannot make you a 10x engineer. At a push they might make you a 2x engineer.
Given this I think I realised something earlier about my own output... I'm probably just a unusually good coder. I've been doing this since I was a kid so writing and reading code is basically second nature to me. When I was a young teen I would literally take my laptop on holiday with me just so I could write code - I was just that kind of person.
So I've basically always been the strongest or one of the strongest coders on any team I've been on. I very rarely have to think about how to do something in code. It's hard to think back to a time when code was a significant bottleneck for me.
However, my output was never really faster than anyone else when it come to shipping, but the quality of my output has always been wayyy higher. And I think that was because I always spent a lot more time thinking and iterating to get the best result, while other people I work with spent far more time writing code and just trying to get something they could PR.
My problem now is that the people I work, some of whom can't even read code, are able to spit out thousands of lines of code a day. So this forcing me to cut corners just to keep up with the rest of the team.
6-12 months ago I'd get at least 2-3 calls a day from people on my team asking for help to write some code. Now they just ask the AI. I haven't had someone ask me a coding related question in months at this point.
I find this frustrating to be honest. I'm seeing bad decisions everywhere in the code. For example, often a change is hard because it's a bad idea. Perhaps a page on a website doesn't really look great on mobile or desktop. Previously you would have had to think about how you could come up with a good responsive design and implement the right breakpoints. But now people can just ask Claude Code to build a completely different page for mobile, so they do. For a human that would be a huge effort, even if someone who stupid enough to think that was a good idea they probably be forced to do something thats easier to maintain and implement, but an AI? Who cares. It works. The AI isn't going to tell you no.
I know the quality of code is dropping. I see the random bugs from people clearly not understanding what Claude is writing, but if they can just ask the AI to fix it, does it even matter?
> All of those things does boost my productivity I think, but maybe somewhere in the order of 10% all in.
I'm very much like you. AI doesn't really boost my productivity at all but that's because I care about what I build and don't find coding hard. So AI doesn't really offer me anything. All it's doing is making people who don't care what their building and don't care about the quality of their code more productive. And putting me under pressure to trade quality for velocity.
I know someone who has a friend that works at Anthropic. He says that it’s essentially 2 companies. 1 that vibe codes everything and merges without understanding, and one that spends all their time putting out the fires created by the first company.
I think we’re destined to be #2 for a while. If it gets too bad, my plan is to move into a part of the industry where quality and reliability are non-negotiable. Or start my own company and compete against established players for the smaller customer base that’s willing to pay for quality.
I go out of my way to pay for quality projects even if (and often because) they have fewer features. I think there are probably enough of us to support a lifestyle business in many niches.
I also suspect as vibe coding introduces more bugs (we’ve certainly seen this at my current company) the people willing to pay for alternatives will grow.
The first step is to understand the UK is more or less a 3rd world country by US standards these days and if you want to find a job you'll need to accept a salary that's likely far below your expectations, and a lifestyle that far, far below your expectations as someone living in the US.
- Cut your salary expectations by half or more.
- Cut your take home pay expectations by 60-70% as the government will take a huge chunk of your income.
- Assume you will struggle to pay rent since 50%+ of your post-tax income will go to rent.
- Assume you'll struggle to heat your home because the UK has the highest energy costs in the world.
- Assume you won't be have access to healthcare unless on your deathbed and you won't be able to afford private because the above.
If you're happy with this lifestyle then you might be able to find a QA engineer job in the UK for £30,000. The job market here is horrendous though. A lot of people I know are looking for other ways to make a living or supplement their income such as by claiming they're disabled.
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