I wasted several hours this week going around in the exact same circles. We have a billing account, but kept hitting a gemini quota. Fine. But then on the quota page, every quota said 0% usage. And our bill was like $5. Some docs said check AI studio, but then the "import project from google cloud to AI studio" button kept silently failing. This was a requests per minute quota, which was set at 15 (not a whole lot...) but wouldn't reset for 24 hours. So then I kept making new projects so I could keep testing this thing I'm building, until eventually I ran out.
The only way we could get it resolved was to (somehow) get a real human at google on the phone because we're in some startup program or something and have some connection there. Then he put in a manual request to bump our quota up.
Google cloud is the most kafkaesque insane system I've ever had the misfortune of dealing with. Every time I use it I can tell the org chart is leaking.
For the last decade or so I get a second $0.85 monthly bill from google. Nobody at google knows why, but they recommend to leave it because who knows what could be disabled if I block those payments. Interesting detail here is that this is on a bank account that we stopped using in 2017, so the only reason we are keeping that account alive is for these stupid google payments. In the cloud environment there is an invoice for the amounts, but no way to change the billing info to our current account and also no way (not by us, not by google support) to figure out what these payments are actually for...
Calling it kafkaesque is giving it too much credit.
> Point I am trying to make in my rambly way is that each parent is hodge podge of various choices. And it does not work in aggregate.
On top of that, you have some of the biggest, most moneyed companies in the country spending billions of dollars to get kids and adults hooked. Even for parents with good intentions, it's not a fair fight.
Maybe I'm going off the deep end, but I sometimes think people that work at Facebook should be considered social pariahs. The amount of damage that company has done to our country and society is truly incalculable. It's really hard for me to forgive anyone who had any part in it.
True, but that's kind of a good thing as a fan. Cheap tickets, and you get to wander around the paddock as they prep the cars before the race, even with a regular ticket. That level of access in F1 is not possible for regular people.
This is what I see. Less of door slamming completely shut, more like, the door was enormous and maybe a little too open. We forget, the 6 month coding bootcamp to 6 figure salary pipeline was a real thing for a while at the ZIRP apex.
There are still junior engineers out there who have experiments on their githubs, who build weird little things because they can. Those people were the best engineers anyway. The last decade of "money falls from the sky and anyone can learn to code" brought in a bunch of people who were interested in it for the money, and those people were hard to work with anyway. I'd lump the sidehustle "ship 30 projects in 30 days" crowd in here too. I think AI will effectively eliminate junior engineers in the second camp, but absolutely will not those in the first camp. It will certainly make it harder for those junior engineers at the margins between those two extremes.
There's nothing more discouraging than trying to guide a junior engineer who is just typing what you say into cursor. Like clearly you don't want to absorb this, and I can also type stuff into an AI, so why are you here?
The best engineers I've worked with build things because they are truly interested in them, not because they're trying to get rich. This is true of literally all creative pursuits.
I love building software because it's extremely gratifying to a) solve puzzles and b) see things actually working when I've built them from literally nothing. I've never been great at coming up with projects to work on, but I love working on solving problems that other people are passionate about.
If software were "just" a job without any of the gratifying aspects, I wouldn't do nearly as good a job.
heh. i am making software for 40 years more-or-less.
Last re-engineering project was mostly done when they fired me as the probational period was almost over, and seems they did not want me further - too expensive? - and anyone can finish it right? Well...
So i am finishing it for them, one more month, without a contract, for my own sake. Maybe they pay, maybe they don't - this is reality. But I want to see this thing working live.. i have been through maybe 20-30 projects/products of such size and bigger, and only 3-4 had flown. The rest did not - and never for technical reasons.
Then/now i'll be back to the job-search. Ah. Long lists of crypto-or-adtech-or-ai-dreams, mostly..
Mentoring, juniors? i have not seen anything even faintly smelling of that, for decade..
The recent-ish Dell XPS I had for work was the worst hardware I've ever had in my entire life, full stop. The touchpad was an abomination. Like, nobody bothered to use it before it shipped. Just completely broken. I also experienced everything else you experienced with regard to power management. That fact that a team of human beings could create something so awful actually made me depressed.
Very happy with my framework when I switched jobs. And my asus zenbook was also great.
Talent makes luck. Ex-colleagues reach out to me and ask me to work with them because they know the type of work I do, not because it's lucky.
Also wtf did I just read. Op said he uses his network to find work. And you go on a rant about how you're rising and grinding to get that bread, and everything you have ever earned completely comes from you, no help from others? Jesus Christ dude, chill out.
My perspective is just as valid, and I also wrote,
>I'm not for/or against a particular style
... so I'm not sure why some of you took offense in my comment, but I can definitely imagine why :)
>Ex-colleagues reach out to me and ask me to work with them
Never happened to me, that's the point I'm making.
1. I wish work just landed at my feet.
2. As that never happened and most likely was never going to happen, I had to learn another set of skills to overcome that.
3. That made me a much more resilient individual.
(4. This is not meant as criticism to
@arthurfirst's style. I wish clients just called me and I didn't have to save all that money/time I spend taking care of that)
Now tell the AI to distill a bunch of user goals into a living system which has to evolve over time, integrate with other systems, etc etc. And deliver and support that system
I use Claude code every day and it is a slam dunk for situations like the one above, fiddly UIs and the like. Seriously , some of the best money I spend. But it is not good at more abstract stuff. Still a massive time saver for me and does effectively do a lot of work that would have gotten farmed out to junior engineers.
Maybe this will change in a few years and I'll have to become a potato farmer. I'm not going to get into predictions. But to act like it can do what an engineer with 20 years of experience can do means the AI brain worm got you or it says something about your abilities.
right, but this is akin to arguing why the table saw also does not do x/y/z — I don't know why we only complain about AI and how it does NOT do everything well yet.
Maybe it's expectations set by all the AI companies, idk, but this kind of mentality seems very particular to AI products and nothing else.
I'm OK pondering the right use for the tool for as long as it'll take for the dust to settle. And I'm OK too trying some of it myself. What I resent is the pervasive request/pressure to use it everywhere right now, or 'be left out'.
My biggest gripe with the hype, as there's so much talk of craftmanship here, is: most programmers I've met hate doing code reviews and a good proportion prefer rewriting to reading and understanding other people's code. Now suddenly everyone is to be a prompter and astute reviewer of a flood of code they didn't write and now that you have the tool you should be faster faster faster or there's a problem with you.
well that's the issue. The table saw is a tool, we can very clearly agree it's good at cutting a giant plank of wood but horrible at screwing a bolt in. A carpenter can do both, but not a table saw. We never try to say the table saw IS the carpenter.
All this hype and especially the AGI talks want to treat the AI as an engineer itself. Even an assuredly senior engineer above is saying that it's better than them. So I think it's valid to ask "well can it do [thing a senior engineer does on the daily]" if we're suggesting that it can replace an engineer.
I'm not complaining about it, I said in my post that it's a huge time saver. It's here to stay, and that's pretty clear to see. It has mostly automated away the need for junior engineers, which just 5 years ago would have been a very unexpected outcome, but it's kind of the reality now.
All that being said:
There's a segment of the software eng population that has their heads in the sand about it and the argument basically boils down to "AI bad". Those people are in trouble because they are also the people who insist on a whole committee meeting and trail of design documents to change the color of a button on a website that sells shoes. Most of their actual hard skills are pretty easy to outsource to an AI.
There's also a techbro segment of the population, who are selling snake oil about AGI being imminent, so fire your whole team and hire me in order to outsource your entire product to an army of AI agents. Their thoughts basically boil down to "I'm a grifter, and I smell money". Nevermind the fact that the outcome of such a program would be a smoldering tire fire, they'll be onto the next grift by then.
As with literally everything, there are loud, crazy people on either side and the truth is in the middle somewhere.
Junior engineers will be fine; OpenAI is actually choosing to hire juniors now because they just learned all their theory and structure, and are way more willing to push the LLMs to see what they can do.
Bad code is bad code. There’s been bad code since day one; the question is how fast are you willing to fail, learn, fail again, learn more, and keep going.
LLMs make failing fast nearly effortless, and THAT is power that I think young people really take to.
Growing up, homeschool kids were absolutely weird as hell. Sure, some turn out fine, but it's very hard to do right, and requires parents putting their kids outside of everyone's comfort zone, which is... uncomfortable, so it rarely happens.
The homeschooled neighbor kid from a super religious family absolutely went off the deep end at 18. Many such cases.
I can only consume information where each nugget of truth can be contained in 160 characters. Nothing extra, each insight must be a atomic and self contained, an element in the larger tweet stream. When I pull my phone out to scroll instagram in the middle of reading your piece, I get lost if it's not formatted like this.
zizek does regularly do a bit of meandering but damn, does everything need to read like a chatGPT summary?
The only way we could get it resolved was to (somehow) get a real human at google on the phone because we're in some startup program or something and have some connection there. Then he put in a manual request to bump our quota up.
Google cloud is the most kafkaesque insane system I've ever had the misfortune of dealing with. Every time I use it I can tell the org chart is leaking.
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