There is nothing unreasonable about if you want to live in a country you should learn the language. I said in another comment that I’m learning Spanish now because I plan to move to a Spanish speaking country for retirement.

I agree too. And before the pearl clutching starts, I’m very much practicing what I preach as an American seriously considering retiring to a Spanish speaking country and who just came back from the target country after spending six weeks there - and planning on returning once or twice a year.

I’m learning Spanish and find it disheartening that many of the ex-pats [1] I hung out with don’t even attempt to learn Spanish. I’m currently somewhere around an A2/low B1.

[1] yes I also am against people calling themselves “ex-pats” instead of “immigrants”

It depends on the work you are going to be doing. For example, if you are going to do research, then it is more important that you speak and write fluently in English, than whatever language is spoken in the country you'll be working in.

Though being fluent in the local language will, of course, make your life a lot easier

This is very much bubble thinking.

The traffic on every social media is increasing.

There is no mass creation of homelabs and no this will also not be “The Year of Linux on the Desktop”

Also “some companies” is amorphous. All of the cloud providers announced record revenue growth gated only by a lack of being able to get chips

The right answer is just to have a well documented publicly available API for your customers and eat your own dogfood.

There is an entire industry of Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow consultants and almost any other major SaaS app that you can hire to customize the app based on public APIs. I can’t imagine choosing any mission critical SaaS app without publicly documented APIs

The last company I worked for before going into consulting full time was a startup where I was the then new CTOs first technical hire. The company before then outsourced the actual technical work to a third party consulting company until they found product market fit.

His primary mandate was API and micro service first.

Our customers were large health care systems.

We had a customer facing website that was built on top of the same APIs that we sold our customers.

Our customers paid for the features they wanted and those features were available on our website, they were used for their website and mobile apps and the ETL process was either via a file they sent us and we ran through the same APIs or they could use our APIs directly for both online and batch processes.

This is no different from the API mandate Bezos made at Amazon back in 2000.

You don’t have to keep an API static - that’s what versioning is for.

I think the talking point is maintaining a well versioned and solid API as product is way harder than shipping a few screens that can change whenever you need them to. (behind those screens being a bunch of duct tape to a clusterF of internal APIs). no guarantees.

what you're saying is that you were at a company that did that hard thing of shipping APIs as product.

As far as work? I haven’t found a method to get over my addiction to food and shelter and I need money to support my addictions and need to convince companies to keep giving me money by doing work. Thats my motivation.

As far as learning new “things”, it depends on what those things are.

I’ve been working in the AWS + app dev consulting space for six years and have been working with AWS for around 10. I know CloudFormation for infrastructure as code well and started using it in 2017. As I got more into consulting, I knew that eventually I was going to have to learn Terraform and the AWS CDK. Last year, two projects came up where I had to use both respectively.

I was able to one shot both with a detailed set of requirements I designed with ChatGPT. Why bother learning either? I know system design on AWS and how to verify the correctness of the output.

The second anecdote. I haven’t done any web development in decades and always wanted to get back into it enough at least to do internal websites. I have a good sense of UX and putting myself in the shoes of users. Now with v0 and coding agents, why bother? My goal was never to be a great web developer. I just wanted to create usable internal tools.

My entire focus over the last decade was to become more architectural and customer focused in consulting. I’m glad I did and those two areas have kept me employable and have been most of learning focus. Before AI, I delegated the grunt work to more junior developers, now I delegate it to AI.

As far as where my focus is at now 50+ outside of staying employable? I’ve been a gym rat since I was 16 (including a 15 year previous stint as a part time fitness instructor), and I spend my free time learning Spanish for my eventual retirement out of the country (motivation enough to get the f** out of dodge) and near term starting this year, we will be spending a few months in our target country every year - we just came back from spending two months there.

So it isn’t difficult to earn the right to be picky. But yet here you are unemployed for two years and burning through savings because of fealty toward a language…

I'm not the OP, and fealty to a language isn't why I was picky. But the reality is many software developers have substantial savings from a combination of well above average wages and non-extravagant tastes, and career paths which aren't based upon tenure, so they can always say "and others are busy accumulating two years of savings they'll never need doing things they don't want to do, because it's the default..."

And unless your investments are self sustaining - ie they throw off enough earnings to support your lifestyle without going into the principal - it is still dumb to have fealty to a language as the only reason you aren’t working.

He talked about a “burn rate” so he obviously isn’t in that position.

I talked about the burn rate. Personally I doubt using a particular language I specialised in would be a dealbreaker if I wrote code for a living, but I find the mentality that one must in all cases spend 40+ hours a week working in jobs less well matched to ones skillset and interests out of fealty to not consuming any part of the principal of ones savings (irrespective of how large they are) or making any other lifestyle changes even more unfathomable.

I didn’t say in all cases. I understand wanting to take a break because of burnout [1], family obligations, to explore a hobby, pursue a passion, etc.

But because of a language preference?

I specialize in AWS consulting + app dev. It’s something I’ve been doing for a decade, I know it well and I even did a 4 year stint at AWS working in the consulting department (full time RSU earning blue badge employee). But I wouldn’t refuse on principle to get a job that required me to spend all day on GCP or Azure.

[1] I really don’t understand burn out though. In 30 years across 10 jobs, when the “shit I have to put up with” got to high I would just get another job instead if toiling away

I shot you an email.

It came out in the Epic trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases of loot boxes and other pay to win mechanics.

Apple doesn’t care about revenue from a random TODO app.

From games? Why would people pay to play those games when they can make their own?

You’re not going to make a game using AI.

Not yet, which is the point of this discussion.

truly a k-shaped economy we live in

And in Australia most of that money went to Murdoch controlled media.