Now I am micromanaging a LLM that gets to do the fun parts. I have become the middle management I always hated.

Worker's rights are vastly better in Germany than the US but that is a very low bar to set.

If you work at at a company with strong union presence and Betriebsrat, yes, you will have a good life. That is not the reality for most people though. If you work for a smaller company in some low skilled job, your life will be vastly different.

Social security and worker's right have constantly been attacked politically in the last decades and are chipped away piece by piece. The public health care system has be systematically and purposely weakened to the point that it is close to collapse.

Germany is still one of the better countries to live and work in but not as great as it used to be. But that is true for most countries thanks to the rise of neoliberalism.

Political off-topic:

That is happening in New Zealand too, but the question is, what is the underlying cause?

Is it because New Zealand is slowly going broke: failure to increase export earnings due to business owners incentives, structural issues with NZ economy, whatever?

Is it because capitalism keeps taking more and workers get less?

Is it because NZ society is mimicking American business selfish „ethics“?

On reflection, I don't think it is politics nor capitalism . . . I believe it is due to demographics here: it appears that New Zealand cannot afford the expectations set in the past for healthcare and superannuation and worker's rights. Smart capable young NZers emmigrate (mostly to Australia but diaspora to everywhere).

It is natural to want to blame the political system, but I believe that demographics cause the same economic pressures, regardless of politics. There needs to be enough workers to tax to pay for the people not working (retirees, sick, unemployed). It is better to think of in terms of hours worked rather than money (same hours are required regardless of political system).

I visited Cuba and investigated for myself the gap between truth and propoganda. NZ is doing vastly better with capitalism (capitalism causes serious problems, but authoritarian lefty countries have far worse unescapable problems for individuals).

Note that the NZ "right" government is still very "left" compared with say the US. Also note that apparently the current US policy is "PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44210019

Disclosure: I'm a white welloff software WEIRDo dude, but I give careful attention to the problems of others (working-class peers, poorly retirees). I predict future struggles for myself even though I'm well off - and the median person will have it much harder than I.

* aside:: tried to do 66 99 „quotes” but can't get the closing to to look like 99s on iPhone

You might have ADHD.

And is is very important to know whether you have it or not because all that advice for neurotypical people will not work for you then. In fact it will harm you. It will make you feel as a failure.

You need to figure out how your brain works and only then you will finally manage to make lasting changes.

In approx 7 years I went through working at all the top software companies in my country, but what really fixed my problems was moving on to being a researcher at the university. I’m now paid less than half from before, but it’s still enough, and I couldn’t be happier.

Getting to work on what I think is actually important and interesting every day is what helped. I also seem happier than the younger researchers who didn’t work at companies first, who don’t know how good they have it.

(I’m always curious to learn other potential diagnostic markers for adhd)

For some people struggling with chronic lifelong procrastination, the oft-repeated advice from the author such as "Action leads to motivation, not the other way around." ... and similar variants such as, "Screw motivation, what you need is discipline!" ... and other related big picture ideas such as Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams' "Systems instead of Goals" -- all do not work.

And adding extra rhetorical embellishments to the advice such as using the phrase "it's simple [...]", and using the word "[...] just [...]" as in:

- "Stopping procrastination isn't that hard to solve. It's simple. Just chop up the task into much smaller subtasks and just start on that tiny subtask. That will give you momentum to finish it."

... also doesn't work. Some procrastinators just procrastinate the initiation of starting that tiny subtask! For the few that actually do try to start with that first step, they'll quickly lose steam because of boredom/distraction/whatever and the overall task remains unfinished.

A lot of books and blogs about time management repeat the same advice that many procrastinators have all heard before and it doesn't work. The procrastinators understand the logic of the advice but it doesn't matter because there are psychological roadblocks that prevent them from following it.

EDIT reply to: >That doesn't mean the advice is bad,

I'm not saying the advice is wrong. Instead, I'm saying that some well-meaning people who give that repeated advice seem surprised that it doesn't work on some people. Because the advice givers believed "Action Precedes Motivation" worked on themselves, they automatically assume that imparting those same words to other procrastinators will also work. It often doesn't. The meta-analysis of that advice and why it sometimes doesn't work is not done because the people giving that advice are the ones who used that technique successfully. This creates a self-confirmation bias.

Being overwhelmed with simple task is typical ADHD behavior.

Lots of people with untreated ADHD develop depression as well. It is not either/or. Not to mention that there is a overlap in symptoms as well.

A diagnosis for ADHD will make sure that there no other physical or mental things present that could explain the symptoms instead. The will try to exclude anything else that could explain your struggles. They check for stuff like depression.

On the other hand, a depression diagnosis is just given out like candy. I never understood that.

Why wouldn't you ask WHY someone is depressed in the first place? I don't mean to invalidate people that are depressed. Sometimes that is just what is going on but it still vexes me because so many neurodivergent people will get diagnosis like "depression" because health care providers refuse to look further into it.

It is such an uphill battle get diagnosed with ADHD.

Turns out, unmedicated ADHD, procrastination, and depression are all comorbid

I'm in the process of doing this myself, and after 8 months, with many setbacks, I kinda have a base system I'm following that's significantly improving my quality of life and ability to keep up with everyday tasks. And it's still a struggle, but it's getting easier.

I'm writing a blog post about it currently, which will be more structured. It's about how I used my software dev skills to think about and tackle my ADHD(and other issues). Not about writing actual software(although software is involved), but imagining the brain exhibiting ADHD is a software system , identifying the "bugs", and combining concepts from software dev and behavioral/cognitive psychology to fix, or at least mitigate them.

This blog post could be finished two days from now, two years from now, or never. ADHD is still hard to live with, and I'm still quite dysfunctional. I guess if I do finish it, it'll be worth reading since I'll be on to something...

isn't the problem here that the answer is very individual. for me for example some of the above things do work, and some don't. some of the time. it's like it depends and there is no clear answer even just for myself. knowing whether i had ADHD would not make any difference. i'd still not know what works.

for example i have seen tasks lists recommended as one way to deal with ADHD. because the lists help focus. isn't breaking things down into small steps the same thing? others here with ADHD also claim that specific suggestions work for them. so this isn't clear cut, and it doesn't make sense to just dismiss the suggestions.

you are right, there is more than just getting started. boredom and distractions are a problem too. but they are also a problem for "normal" people.

seems to me that the only thing we can do is to list a number of possible approaches, and let everyone pick what works best for them.

so back to the original question: what does work for people with ADHD?

Medication.

Not for everyone with ADHD. Only for 70% but that is still pretty good.

Besides that, again understanding how their brains work.

Neurotypical people don't have executive dysfunction. If they have a task that they know how to do, have the means to do, know they need to do, have the time to do and want to do, they can... just do it.

In fact neurotypical people can't even imagine it being any other way. For me with ADHD this sounds like a super power that I can't even comprehend having.

To simplify it very much, the ADHD brain is chronically understimultated. It lacks dopamine.

So easy boring tasks can be insanely painful. That is why stimulants work so well. It is not to get us "high", it so so we get the same level of stimulation as a neurotypical person watching paint dry.

But, we can still get over-stimulated as well so it is a balance act.

Neurotypical people mostly manage time and exhaustion, I guess but managing ADHD is managing your level of stimulation and focus and time tertiary.

You need to build activities into your routine that stimulate you, both mentally and physically. Washing your clothing can be much more taxing for you that fixing that complex bug no one else can figure out. ADHD can make the hard things easy and the easy things hard.

So yeah, ultimately every human is different and what works for one might not work for another. Yes some advice or trick for neurotypical people might also work for someone with ADHD but if you don't understand yourself you will not know what to user and what to dismiss and only hurt yourself.

General advice for running a marathon will not for for someone who has no legs. I can't will my brain to work differently than it does. I can just learn to cope with my ADHD brain. And you being judgemental about it will not change that.

I am also sorry but I do have ADHD and I'm no different than any other human being, and so aren't you. Many people just deal with it much better than you, but at least it means it is possible. Nobody said it is easy but people with ADHD have a tendency to think that people doing what they need to do have it easy, "they just do it". Well, no. That is not how it works. It is hard for everybody.

They often do not want to do things. They will often choose to do the easy or more pleasant task but they do not have the same struggle someone with ADHD has.

The world is not fair. Yes, you can still achieve your goals with ADHD but you will have to go about it differently. The first step is in accepting yourself and leaning into your strengths and weaknesses.

I've also found that there's no real cure for it. You can take the meds but they'll chip away at your personality and health in other ways.

Also there is ADHD coaching. Having someone who had ADHD themselves coach me through my problems was an absolute game changer.

Maybe that could be an option for you as well. Worked much better that traditional therapy for me personally.

As for medication, well for most people with ADHD it works really well and is worth the relative mild side effect. But that is most, for some it does not work unfortunately. I think it is always worth trying but yeah it is no silver bullet that works for everyone.

I mean most software engineering jobs are not especially exciting. I have done web dev for smaller companies that never had more than a few hundred concurrent users. It is boring CRUD apps all day every day.

Still at least you could have a bit of fun with the technical challenges. Now with AI it becomes completely mind numbing.

Blender.

Is has seen some drastic changes in UI but barely any backlash. Even holy-cows like right-click select got mercilessly slaughtered and I am not even mad about it, in fact I love the changes.

The main thing is that they are focusing on providing value to users and are dog footing their own software to create movies.

But yeah, generally people hate change and you should avoid changing things as much as possible. Sadly that doesn't work with the way incentives in most companies work.

But if you need to do actual work you want maximum information density. You want icons that are easy to tell apart by color, not some sleek minimalist grey in grey.

If you use a tool every day for multiple hours your UI needs will be vastly different. We have forgotten how to build tools for power users.

IMHO Photoshop is still the classic example of this. The UI can feel overwhelming at first, like dropping into a helicopter cockpit. But once you start getting a hang of what you're doing, anything more "minimal" just feels like dumbing things down for the lowest common denominator.

From what I've seen in large enterprises, it's also why OG users are so attached to their mainframe terminal UIs. Yes, it's very hard to learn, but once you've developed some facility, everything else feels unusably slow.

I've never had a bad experience designing like I respect the users intelligence. Humans are insanely smart and capable, treat them that way and good results occur.

while i agree, i wish more dense applications like Photoshop took the Rhino3D approach of integrating a CLI directly into the interface. yes, you can click the icons or select tools from the menu, but being able to just type a command and arguments (or have it prompt for the arguments ex-post-facto) feels just incredible in an otherwise-GUI application, in a way that memorizing keyboard shortcuts just doesn't compare.

My experience isn't quite that. While most humans can be capable when they want to, in typical situations they often don't and aren't. People who have put in years to become proficient in mainframe terminals aren't representative people in a typical situation; most people (myself definitely included) perform most daily actions on autopilot.

EDIT

And that's why I like Vim and most TUI that much. I don't need to follow the cursor or wait an abitrary amount of time because "reasons". It's all muscle memory, and my attention is more on what I'm trying to do than how I'm doing it.

I can imagine how shit it would have been if you have to log into windows and open a web app and use the mouse and stuff to click through a web form hacked up to do the job.

Obviously, maybe more obviouisly now than ever in recorded history, not all humans are smart or capable.

Regardless of capability, however, many humans excel at memorizing complex routes across obscure paths that they experience through spaced repetition, which research suggests can alter memory pathways in the brain to facilitate easier recall[1] and also engages memory functions in our nervous systems beyond our brain.[2]

Any UI, including bad ones, can foster efficient workflows in any user _if_ it accomplishes things compatible with repetitive use:

- the UI's behaviors and interactions are minimally interally consistent

- the UI has pathways from a starting point to a result that are discoverable through those behaviors and interactions

- the UI's reactions to input are sufficiently efficient to avoid arbitrary or dynamic pauses, which can disrupt effective repetition

- the UI's interactions are minimally accessible to people; if they use buttons, shapes, colors, sounds, controls, etc., a person can consistently distinguish between and physically access them when necessary

- a person interacts with the UI long enough to find those pathways from starting points to results, and does so repetitively over long time spans

Modern UI design often attempts to reduce the time to value for users at arbitrary experience levels, at the expense of maintaining the consistency of pathways that reward longtime users who have accumulated training.

The only people using the UI when the change happens are people with a non-zero amount of accumulated training. Any change disrupts consistency. It's a net negative to the people who are around to complain about it, and also resets the often competitive field of users; not only do experienced users have to relearn their workflows to avoid committing errors or wasting time, they also have to compete with new users who have easier access to results that previously required experience through repetition to efficiently reach.

For example, a UI designer might change the UI to surface a feature that they want users to access more easily by making it require 1 or 2 interactions to reach, but a veteran user already has "easy" access to that feature even if it takes 6 or 7 interactions to reach it, some of them obscure. If the change removes the result from the end of the old pathway and moves it to a new one that experienced users don't know, the new UI becomes less efficient for them no matter how smart or capable they are (or aren't). Both the new user and experienced user might be smart and capable or stupid and incompetent; the differentiating factor is experience.

Arguably, the "smart and capable humans" who use complex UIs are either the ones who achieve a level of power to prevent UI changes that degrade consistency of existing pathways to preserve their productivity at the expense of less-experienced users needing more time and training (at which point they probably don't need to use that UI anymore anyway, and the act mostly rewards other experienced users), or the ones who divert time that might be spent complaining about UI changes toward adapting to the new UI's pathways.

The truly disruptive UI/UX changes for repetitively used workflows are the ones that introduce unpredictable delays between interactions. Repetition rewards rhythm and consistent feedback, and unpredictable interaction delays destroy both.

1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07425-w

2: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53922-x

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

The questions of who will benefit from AI is a political questions. As power is currently firmly in the had of the capital class, AI will only make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Wages are not based on how much value you produce but how much it cost to reproduce your labor. How much it cost for you to stay alive and be able to work and feed your family. What kind of living standard that entails is a political matter and depends on how strong your unions are, how willing you are to fight for it and so on.

Same with welfare. It is something which was fought for and if the power balance is such that they can get away with giving you less, they will do. In fact some rich pricks would gladly turn you into soylent green if they could get away with it.

I have hope in decentral technologies. Solar power is a rare example. If things gp right then in a few decades, your typical household will just not depend on anybody anymore in terms of energy needs. That's a significant shift.

That is, if big corps don't manage to capture that somehow, though I can't currently see how. But it has happened before. The www and email used to be as decentralized as you could imagine. Nowadays rarely any email gets sent that doesn't come from or go to a gmail server, or definitely not outside one of the biggest 3 providers. Similarly with the www. Everything is so centralized now, it's a great success of big tech.

This is all a bit too abstract for me right now but seems interesting.

I am having a lot of fun learning about generative AI. It is just a bit thankless because I know the stuff I am building will be dead on arrival. So, I will not get any praise regardless on how well I do my job, maybe even get blamed.

But hey, after all the junior devs have been starved because no one wants to hire them, I will make bank once the next AI winter comes and companies desperately look for people who can actually code.

If you have your own company you can just weather it out and invest in good talent. Really a good position to be in.

The problem is purely social. There are language ecosystems where great care is taken to not break stuff and where you can let your project rot for a decade or two and still come back to and it will perfectly compile with the newest release. And then there is the JS world where people introduce churn just for the sake of their ego.

Maintaining a project is orders of magnitudes more complex than creating a new green field project. It takes a lot of discipline. There is just a lot, a lot of context to keep in mind that really challenges even the human brain. That is why we see so many useless rewrites of existing software. It is easier, more exciting and most importantly something to brag about on your CV.

Ai will only cause more churn because it makes it easier to create more churn. Ultimately leaving humans with more maintenance work and less fun time.

In some cases perhaps. But breaking changes aren’t usually “we renamed methodA to methodB”, it’s “we changed the functionality for X,Y, Z reasons”. It would be very difficult to somehow declaratively write out how someone changes their code to accommodate for that, it might change their approach entirely!

I think there are others in that space but that's the one I knew of. I think it's a relevant space for Semgrep, too, but I don't know if they are interested in that case