321–330 of 403 posts
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I'm confused as to why someone who freely admits they have been broke & unemployed for 15 years feels they are qualified to provide "advice", make critical judgement calls about others and brag about their awesomeness. >> My actual accomplishments in the world of computing ... are the stuff of legends We agree on the legends part
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I left high school with average results and immediately got a job as a junior web developer, and I’m nothing special. I feel there must be more to this story… You don’t come off very well in your post, I imagine it could be the same in person and perhaps therein lies the issue?
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> "going back to school" to learn what I already know pretty damn well already, given that I've been programming since I was 8 It's small consolation if sitting in a classroom is something you truly hate, but the guys who are programming pros before they go into a CS program are very often the ones who do really well and get the most out of it.
TBH, it all feels like a huge gamble at this point. Neither skills, education, institutional ties, nor current employment can guarantee a stable foundation for life. This hits harder depending on how much money, social capital, or debt you accumulated before this volatility began. If you’ve paid off your debts, bought a house, and stabilized your family life, you’re gambling with how comfortable the coming years will…
Amen. It's hard to live with hope right now at all. Programmer or otherwise we're constantly told we're all going to be replaced and the economy is a mess (US). Definitely a depressing time to be alive.
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the demand for software has increased. The demand for software engineers has increased proportionally, because we were the only source of software. This correlation might no longer hold. Depending on how the future shapes up, we may have gone from artisans to middlemen, at which point we're only in the business of added value and a lot of coding is over. Not the Google kind of coding, but the "I need a website for my…
> "I need a website for my restaurant" kind, or the "I need to aggregate data from these excel files in a certain way" kind I am afraid that kind of jobs were already over by 2015. There are no code website makers available since then and if you can't do it yourself you can just pay someone on fiverr and get it done for less than $5-50 at this point, its so efficient even AI wont be more cost effective than that. If…
Note that I own an agency that does a lot of what you say is “solved”, and I assure you that it’s not (at least in terms of being an efficient market).
SMBs with ARR up to $100m (or even many times more that in ag) struggle to find anyone good to do technical work for them either internally or externally on a consistent basis.
> I am afraid that kind of jobs were already over by 2015.
Conceptually, maybe. In practice, definitely not.
> There are no code website makers available since then
… that mostly make shit websites.
> and if you can't do it yourself you can just pay someone on fiverr and get it done for less than $5-50 at this point,
Also almost certainly a shit website at that price point, probably using the no-code tools mentioned above.
These websites have so many things wrong with them that demonstrably decrease engagement or lose revenue.
> its so efficient even AI wont be more cost effective than that.
AI will be better very soon, as the best derivative AI tools will be trained on well-developed websites.
That said, AI will never have taste, and it will never have empathy for the end user. These things can only be emulated (at least for the time being).
> If you have $10k saved you can hire a competitive agency to maintain and build your website
You can get an ok “brochure” website built for that. Maintaining it, if you have an agency that actually stays in business, will be about $100 minimum for the lowest effort touch, $200 for an actually one line change (like business hours), and up from there from anything substantial.
If you work with a decent, reputable agency, a $10k customer is the lowest on the totem pole amongst the agency’s customer list. The work is usually delegated to the least experienced devs, and these clients are usually merely tolerated rather than embraced.
It sucks to be the smallest customer of an agency, but it’s a common phenomenon amongst certain classes of SMBs.
> This business is completely taken over by low cost fiverr automators and agencies for high budget projects.
This is actually true. Mainly because any decent small agency either turns into one that does larger contracts, or it gets absorbed by one.
That said, there is a growing market for mid-sized agencies (“lifestyle agencies”?).
> Agencies have become so good now that they manage websites from Adidas to Lando Norris to your average mom & pop store
As mentioned above, you absolutely do not want to be a mom and pop store working with a web agency that works with any large, international brand like Adidas.
I appreciate your points from a conceptual level, but the human element of tech, software, and websites will continue to be a huge business for many decades, imho.
Something very odd about the tone of this article. Is it mostly AI written? There is a lot of references and info. But I am feeling far more disconnected with it. For the record, I was genuinely trying to read it properly. But it is becoming unbearable by mid article.
Yes, lots of AI style/writing in this article. I wouldn't necessarily discredit an article just based on stylization if the content was worth engaging with ... but like you mentioned, when the AI is given too much creative control it goes off the rails by the middle and turns into what the kids call "AI slop". It resembles an article, it has the right ingredients (words), but they aren't combined and cooked into any…
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Amen. It's hard to live with hope right now at all. Programmer or otherwise we're constantly told we're all going to be replaced and the economy is a mess (US). Definitely a depressing time to be alive.
Also don’t forget the part where we’re told housing will never be affordable again in many areas, and don’t expect to be able to remote work to move to LCOL areas any more.
One option that didn't seem to be discussed in TFA is turning away from AI. There's an implicit assumption in the article that the coding models are here to stay in development. It's possible that assumption is incorrect for multiple reasons. Maybe (as some research indicates) the models are as good as they are going to get. They're always going to be a cross between a chipper stochastic parrot and that ego inflated…
I'd put my money on this. From my understanding of LLMs, they are basically mashing words together via markov chains and have added a little bit of subject classification with attention, a little bit of short-term memory, and enough grammar to lay things out correctly. They don't understand anything they are saying, they are not learning facts and trying to build connections between them, they are not learning from their conversations with people. They aren't even running the equivalent of a game loop where they can even think about things. I would expect something we're trying to call an AI to call you up sometimes and ask you questions. Trillions of dollars have got us this far, how far can it actually take us?
I want my actual AI personal assistant that I have to coerce somehow into doing something for me like an emo teen.
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Amen. It's hard to live with hope right now at all. Programmer or otherwise we're constantly told we're all going to be replaced and the economy is a mess (US). Definitely a depressing time to be alive.
> Amen. It's hard to live with hope right now at all. Programmer or otherwise we're constantly told we're all going to be replaced and the economy is a mess (US). Definitely a depressing time to be alive. Unless you're a plumber.
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The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent
to be fair, that cobol program has been working for probably 30 years (maybe even longer than that) - thats unusually reliable and long-lived for a software project. the only real contender in this regard is the win32 api, and actually that did get used in enterprise for a long time too before the major shift to cloud and linux in the mid 2010s. ultimately the proof is in the real-world use, even if its ugly to look…