I quit. The clankers won

"I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me, and it'll happen to you, too." - Abe Simpson

I don't disagree that code quality is currently more important than it's ever been (to get the most out of the tools). I expect that quality will increase though as people refine either training or instructions. I was able to get much better (well factored, aligned to business logic) output that I'm generally happy-ish with a couple months ago with some coding guidelines I wrote. It's possible that newer models don't even need that, but they work well enough with it that I haven't touched those instructions since.

I know it sounds extreme to dismiss that workflow, but I don't think people are talking enough about the subtle psychological consequences of LLM writing for this kind of thing.

In the same way that googling for an SEO article's superficial answer ends up meaning you never really bother to memorize it, "ask chat" seems to lead to never really bothering to think hard about it.

Of course I google things, but maybe I should be trying to learn in a way that minimizes the need. Maybe its important to learn how to learn in way that minimizes exposure to sycophantic average-blog-speak.

> I doubt any company is seriously investing in a worker who would likely be gone the next year.

There is a mismatch between how you would expect industry to work and what my last 30 years has taught me.

> With 35 companies, that would be around 1-2 years per company on average if you are retired or near retirement.

I have been at 4 companies for around 2 years or more. The rest of the positions were either contract or startup or contract-to-hire. The vast majority of engineers seem to settle in and suffer at terrible companies, rather than make moves to better jobs. They also tend to settle at whatever they are assigned and grow their skillsets by their employer's needs, rather than on their own.

Over the last 2 decades, if you stayed somewhere for over 2 years, you better have added concrete skills to your resume and have increased your compensation by over 10%. If that's not on track, look for another job, imo.

Contract-to-hire has been very popular. ie JPMC, credit, medical, adtech, games, big retail, subcontractor shops, to startups (4 of which were acquired). All initiatives to progress the careers of developers is applied more or less company wide because the line between contract-to-hire and fulltime is considered an engineering issue if there is more than hub. If you are a sole contributor, on some satellite project or still considered in training, you might not participate due to scheduling that had already been arranged, but the idea that contractors are excluded is more a possibility than a certainty. Most of the initiatives are little more than maybe someone talking with you every quarter, anyway.

> Getting lip service seems already good deal at that point.

It's strange that people are assuming engineers are treated special because of a resume that nobody looks at after an offer is made - having conducted hundreds of interviews. This must be a very rare thing some people may do.

Pour yourself a drink, as I have a longish story that might be a useful metaphor.

Back in the day, there were more or less two consumer flight sims: MS Flight Simulator and XPlane. MSFS was and has always been the much prettier one, much easier to work with; xplane is kludgy, very old-school *NIX, and chonky in terms of resource usage. I was doing some work integrating flight systems data (FDAU/FDR outputs) into a cheaper flight re-creation tool, since the aircraft OEM's tool cost more than my annual salary. Hmm, actually, ten years of my salary.

So why use xplane at all, then?

The difference was that MSFS flight dynamics was driven from a model using table-based lookup that reproduced performance characteristics for a given airframe, whereas xplane (as you might be able to tell from the company name, Laminar Research) does fluid and gas simulation over the actual skin of the airframe, and then does the physics for the forces and masses and such.

I caught some flack for going with xplane: "Why not MSFS!? It's so much prettier!"

Unless the airframe is in a state that is near-equivalent with tabular lookup model, the actual flight is not going to be actually re-created. A plane in distress is very often in a boundary state- at best. OR you might be flying a plane that doesn't really have a model, like, say, a brand new planform (like the company was trying to develop). Without the aerodynamic fundamentals, the further away you get from the model represented by the tabular lookups, the greater the risk gets.

And how does this relate?

Those fundamentals- aerodynamic or mathematical or electrical- will be able to deal with a much broader range than models trained on existing data, regardless of whether or not they are LLMs or tabular lookups. If we rely on LLMs for aerodynamics, for chemistry, for electrical engineering, we are setting ourselves up for something like the 2008 Econopalypse except now it affects ALL the physical sciences; a Black Swan event that breaks reality.

I am genuinely worried we're working outselves into just such an event, where the fundamentals are all but forgotten, and a new phenomenon simply breaks the nuts and bolts of the applied sciences.

As for my xplane selection, it helped in other ways. Because often the FDR data is just plain wrong, but with xplane you could actually tell, because a control surface sticking out one way, while the flight instruments say another, lights up a "YOU GOT PROBLEMS" light in the cockpit as the aircraft inexplicably lurches to the right.