If we're doing conspiracy theories what if fable is really dumb and not better than opus and the guardrails hide that nicely. Meanwhile the hype train keeps chugging.
And in the before times, you learned a lot and walked away with knowledge on the deps needed, connections, .env secrets, and cleaned it all up and documented it so the next dev would have an easier time doing it.
I think it depends on how “before” we’re talking about.
I can remember a time when learning was valued and leaving the camp cleaner than you found it was considered a basic professional standard.
But I can also remember a time when Scrum became all the rage and next thing you know we’re all stuck on the sprinting treadmill, management is obsessing over “velocity”, and it’s generally an everyone-for-themself free-for-all to clear the absolute minimum criteria to get the ticket moved to the “done” column in a semi-desperate effort to keep up with your ever-growing backlog of tickets to which you’ve been over committed. Don’t worry about incomprehensible code or flaky designs; taking your time to do it right the first time looks bad on the KPI dashboard but rework does the opposite because you get to count the second (third, fourth, etc.) times the same task needs to be revisited towards your velocity metrics, too.
I’m not sure most developers younger than maybe 40 realize just how much worse our line of work has become over the past ~15 years.
Yes it did. That's how I learned a great many things throughout my career. I'm sure some people didn't pay attention or try to understand what they were doing, and didn't learn. That's on them. But most of us learned a lot that way.
Indeed, there were plenty of people doing just that. I imagine they get the most out of vibe coding. However, when it became a problem, an engineer was still required to fix it.
It might have been you, a couple of months later, or someone else. I have dealt with slop produced by unknowing programmers most of my career. With this vibe coding I think my job is still safe. The amount, though, is increasing exponentially.
The second tome I had to do that for the same project (new computer), I sarted taking very detailed notes when doing this kind of unpleasant, supposedly one-off things.
Okay that thing is cool. I made my own a while back with Pi 4 running https://www.birdweather.com/birdnetpi and I made my own fancy microphones with solder and a fuzzy cover. Worked amazingly well.
I am going through this right now! I am provisionally approved and still waiting. Even worse I am going through SMS phone number verification with SMTP2GO.
Apparently if you wanna send automated texts in America, you need a real phone number. And to not get immediately blocked, you need to fill out a form that goes to the major carriers for approval (like AT&T). And the form is not unlike Paddle's verification. You need a company, EIN, samples of what your texts will look like. Massive pain.
> And the form is not unlike Paddle's verification. You need a company, EIN, samples of what your texts will look like. Massive pain.
In defense of Paddle (I use them for my own livelihood), they're on the hook for remitting sales taxes to ALL the governments where your customers might reside. They also manage customer disputes, chargebacks, refunds etc. I always redirect support emails to Paddle.net [0] which does the trick 99% of the time.
Stripe or PayPal are nothing like that. They're just payment platforms.
Since Paddle takes on so much liability, it seems reasonable to ask for a lot of initial paperwork from its sellers.
Yep, it's called 10DLC. My teams work on telephony integrations, and for the devs to even test that outbound SMS is working, we need to go through this process with every provider we integrate. Massive pain, indeed.
"Just hold out until they are desperate enough that they HAVE to give you a large raise!" is laughable.
Every single day you don't quit and get paid what you are worth, is a day you are leaving money on the table. Imagine waiting years for that big raise when you could have left and made tens to hundreds of thousands more in that time.
I did not say don't look for a new job though. I said that if you can't find one. Sometimes you can't find a better job - better is more than just pay, there are other factors that may apply to you personally (ethics of the job, working hours, where they need you to work, how much travel...)
Holding out isn't ideal, but it might be the best for you.
Are we sure some of that is just cutting costs while increasing ai spend and then falsely claiming ai replaced them? What better way to justify your ai projects and ai spend than to lay off entry level data entry people and junior devs regardless of the success of your projects.
Yeah so most of my friends who are dealing with spike in outsourced devs in their work environments are cleaning up the AI slop churned out by offshore people who are slinging code and getting the business requirements all wrong. Their jobs are now to clean up the mountains of code coming in from people who don't really get the problems they are being asked to solve.
Outsourcing seems to come in cycles, where it's tried, fails due to communication issues (resulting in quality issues), then things get inhoused again.
I do think there is some opportunity for AI to smooth out the communication aspect, but I think what we will actually see is larger volumes of poorly guided work coming through for each feature. The AI does not fix the lack of deep systems understanding which is why inhousing is always the antidote to bad outsourcing.
I need to make this clear, there are great devs on either side of the various oceans, the issue is usually communication between two parties with nuturally mis-aligned incentives.
I’ve had a lot of success in past with the Apple approach. I design and architect locally but build it overseas. I think AI and the post-WFH office work culture really helped executives get over the hump / learn to make decisions and lead without being in the same physical space daily. Also, feel like the communication gap is largely a solved problem at this point. It is incredibly common to find English speakers in this profession from any country. The trick is learning to project management. At times, you simply just give the person objective instructions of what to build and the exact rendering and color palette. Or the exact packages you they can use as dependencies. But largely the world communicates together much better than the previous wave of outsourcing.
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