IT guy here, not a programmer per se, but I have given up and am re-training into fraud detection. I want to take down some of the fuckers that ruined the industry before I die
I was in IT 20+ years.
I quit 4 years ago and opened an arcade. My only regret is I should have bailed out 10 years ago.
I’m a non native English speaker , what do you mean by an arcade ? ___
It’s a place with a bunch of games like pinball, video arcades, billiards, etc.
who are the people that ruined the industry ? who do you blame ?
Hmm, you could work on an open-source project for detecting and/or mitigating corporate and government influence campaigns in the fediverse. I think, right now, the fediverse is still too small for it to make sense for those actors to deploy expensive, sophisticated attacks against it, but if the community grows that threat is going to grow with it, probably at least as long as we’re alive. I assume you’re talking about financial fraud; I don’t know how similar detecting “fraud” accounts would be but I imagine there’s some overlap.
I think it would be fun to work on a bot / influencer detector. And if it works, it would hopefully make the fediverse more resilient to coordinated influence campaigns designed to destroy or capture it. Which would help to ruin the corporate media hellscape that has been wreaking havoc on the world ever since the inception of feed manipulation.
The end of software engineering will come when the end of world comes. Many clients have realized the mess caused by AI slop and the bugs it creates, the mess it makes while resolving its own conflicting pull requests and the haunting hallucinating in long prompts. Also, the cost involved in long run is bonkers for the trash quality.
> the end of software engineering
> looks inside
> overhyped slop generator
To be fair having been in software for awhile, plenty of people were slinging slop before AI as well.
The difference is back then, we could block the PR, now management demands velocity at all costs.
It will catch up eventually.
Didn’t management always demand velocity at all costs? This is really not new.
In the last few years prior to widespread coding llms (at least at the shops I worked at then) there was an appreciation for reducing incidents and defensive, clean code.
Now the expectation is if the AI causes an outage, the AI will fix it quickly, so code quality doesn’t matter and just yeet everything into production.
Slop back then was using Electron at all cost, since it allowed them to hire cheaper web devs instead. Now it’s vibe-coded Electron apps.
Went to college to become a programer. Now going to graduate with a literal dead degree (no joke my degree stopped being offered so I am the last to get it) and work the warehouse and food service, along with Uber driving and delivering as I try to get a career in bartending instead.
Edit: 50k in federal loans FYI
Can I just say, I graduated a decade ago and have no idea what you must be going thru.
However, I want to maybe give you a little hope. A college degree is just a piece of paper. I’ve worked with software engineers that were former teachers, artists, and biologists. Think of the college degree as proof that you’re capable of learning.
All that AI has really done is increased the amount of work people are expected to get done, so I don’t think there’s NO hope for you in software engineering as a whole. You could pivot into another industry that just requires a math or compsci degree. Or keep trying your hand at software engineering.
Good luck
I’m going to be a baker! just putting it off as long as possible because I don’t want to wake up at 2am.
Every other baker gets up at 2am. Be the only 2pm baker out there for fresh evening breads!
Yes, I’m sick of morning people getting all the good stuff. I want to come home from work and sit in a cafe/bakery and eat nice things.
We need a night owls society.
In before the AI shills show up, nice
Time to learn plumbing.
Shouldn’t the book illusion be of some pipes? Or the guide topic be butchery?
Search for O’Reilly books, the style is spot on with their covers.
True. I never paid close attention. I probably saw a snake on a python book and assumed the front cover image was relevant to the contents.
I’m staying here, but my son who wanted to become a programmer has now decided to study for maritime officer. I don’t know when AI will take over ships.
We’ve been predicting the demise of the coding career since the dawn of the coding career, but even if it’s not dying, being proficient in coding and becoming proficient in one other trade is a good way to find opportunities to make software that makes that trade easier. The bar for quality in trade-specific software is shockingly low and money can be made in those niches.
Think there is a much higher immediate risk for new developers trying to get going in the market. So much management right now is pretty comfortable that new programmers with zero real world experience offers nothing the GenAI can’t do under the supervision of a senior developer.
Problem is historically new developers weren’t trusted to make any decisions if more senior employees were aware of such scenarios, so a new developer was pretty much verbatim implement guidance from more senior teams just deal with obvious rote tedium associated with getting it to code. Also the senior dev will have to fix all your screw ups when you inevitably botch it a few times. Awfully similar to the role GenAI can do now. So has to be some cultural shift to figure out how onboarding new generation developers looks.
Note I could be wrong about the middle paragraph, it’s what the larger organization thinks, but I kind of got going by being ‘senior’ for lack of a company having options and moved from there. Similarly, I’ve never had success onboarding a junior that wouldn’t take independent ownership. I’d get too frustrated at lack of growth and having to correct the same mistakes and be painfully specific, much like I do with GenAI. A new college hire that had his own vision and ability to take vague guidance and implement his vision, that I could work with, but it has happened once in a great while.
This is basically me.
I was in restaurant management in the late '90s, and knew it well, but loved computers and had been teaching myself programming for a while.
My last restaurant job was for a small franchisee, and I moved into IT and support for them after a couple of years (while also doing catering, covering vacations for managers, doing graphics on vehicles and banners, pretty much whatever needed to be done).
In 2001 I went to work for the company that sold us our POS Systems. Originally I did installation, training, and support, but started coding pretty quickly, and after a few years became lead.
I now own all of that software / IP, and my own company.
That rules. I hope you use your powers for good.
I’ve spent my entire career as a professor advocating that students should pick a minor, certificate, or double major if they’re capable.
My rationale is remarkably similar I think. Literally ever field, hobby, and area of study involve some form of technology. Many of those disciplines lack the sophistication of the tooling and that we have in more programming related fields, which makes people with an additional specialized skill set extremely valuable.
Hell, look around at fintech, bioinformatics, computational arts, etc. We have emerging Fields all the time that are essentially computer science combined with another field.
That’s unironically a good idea if you are just getting into it. The trades pay very well and are in high demand.
Tell me about it. Giving thought to retraining as an electrician given how in demand they are.
I want to get training as an electrician so I can take my house completely off the grid (or at least, be independent with the grid as a redundancy) one day without accidentally burning it down. Then I want to make free software to monitor and manage home power usage, and share it with the world so we can all have nice, efficient, futuristic homes without some corporate combine demanding a monthly fee and invasive surveillance for the pleasure.
I also want you to do this
It’s coming along slowly. I don’t have any formal training yet, still trying to find a coding job that pays the bills before I commit to a paid educational course, but I’ve been out of work for a while now and it may be time to take the plunge.
So far my education is mostly just watching youtubers who are doing things similar to what I want to do, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/@ProjectsWithDave He seems legit to me, but I am very new to the field so I feel like I’m the kind of person who could be taken in by correct-sounding nonsense.
There’s jobs that will put you through apprenticeships as part of the first 2 years of employment. You do the course work at night (which should be pretty easy if you’ve already trained as a software engineer).
Saaaaaaaame
I was looking around for active electricians’ comms and found this:
https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/akunohana_learning_electricity
It’s new and small, but akunohana is actively posting as they’re learning about electricity; I’m going to follow along and see if I can contribute.
The trades pay very well and are in high demand.
But you’ll pay for it with crippling back pain at 45. Maybe some nice cancer as a bonus, from all the exposure to weird chemicals. Oh, and 90% of your coworkers racist, sexist, homophobic MAGA-heads who’ll make sure you hear about it at every opportunity.
The trades can still be good, but go into it with eyes open. It’s no paradise.
Woman here, can confirm. Worked as an aircraft mechanic for a year and a truck driver for another, you will encounter the scum of the earth. So glad to be back to working with civilized humans.
People whine that women wont enter the trades, theres a reason they dont want to and its not because the work is too hard.
People seem to discount how much having a pleasant, or at least neutral at best even, work environment is essential for any job. And decent coworkers.
They’re gonna stay like that unless a bunch of woke people join them out of nowhere for several years and convert/push out all of the weirdos
Then you just have the crippling back pain and cancer!
Joke’s on you, I’ve already got crippling back pain before turning 45.
I agree that the trades can be hard on the body and there is a decent risk that your career can be cut short due to injury. However, the characterization of tradesmen as all ignorant MAGA types is unfair. I imagine this varies a lot by region and market but I live in a fairly liberal-leftist area and happen to know a bunch of folks in the trades and they are not like that.
FWIW I am in a fairly affluent city and my friends will sometimes complain about working with subcontractors who come in from the exurbs who will throw fits about not being able to easily park their giant trucks wherever they want or make sideways comments about crime in the city. The response to that is usually something like “oh, you don’t have all these annoying parking rules in your rural town? Maybe you should go work on building multimillion dollar projects over there then? Oh, what’s that? There are no multimillion dollar projects in the middle of fucking nowhere? Hmmm”
There are also trades and regions where unions are still highly regarded.
And the pay. Its usually the people who own the business making lots of money. Everyone else is making slightly above minimum wage working 12+ hour days Monday to Saturday.
How do you do it? I wouldn’t mind being a plumber but I have no idea how I’d get started. I don’t even know what tools I’d need.
Your local plumbers union can probably help you get an apprenticeship and get going.
Seems I do have a local plumbers’ union, and it looks like they are accepting applications. Thanks!
Don’t get discouraged if you don’t get picked right away. Sometimes they have a year or more backlog on apprenticeships.
If you stick it out, it can be a great career!
Thanks, I don’t know if they’ll want me, seems like they’re mostly looking for new high school grads and I am well-removed from my high school years. But maybe my experience with coding will be an asset, somehow.
You could also look into becoming an electrician. That touches on more high tech stuff than plumbing. And you get to flex your math skills as a master electrician. I think (hope) that there is a fairly rigorous certification for getting into electrical apprenticeship programs in every region. In the city where I grew up, they had to sit for exams in order to get to specific levels.
Edit to add: while both jobs have too much crawling through spiderwebs in crawlspaces for my tastes, electricians encounter orders of magnitude less poop than plumbers.
Every job gets a little more techie every year. I’m sure the master plumbers use some pretty sophisticated software to plan out the plumbing in a house.
Heck, just a simple job needs planning, billing, and more. All of which use computer systems.
Even just knowing logic and high end math is showing that you’re not just a knucklehead looking to do the bare minimum.
Every bit of experience you had in a previous role can be used in the current one. Just spend a few minutes thinking of how it would work and use that in any interviews you get.
Just remember, even though most of these folks didn’t go to university, doesn’t mean they’re any dumber than you are. If they’re doing high quality work, they’re probably just as smart, or smarter.
You need to find someone who is a) cool and not a bad teacher and b) a good plumber and c) willing to take you on to teach you and d) work your butt off till you’re useful.
I suppose my question is more how do I do A B and C? is it all just knowing someone?
yup. the trades are some of the most nepotistic fields there are.
A lot of community colleges either double as trade schools or have active relationships with local trade schools.
Another option is to talk to your local employment office. They usually have more programs than just unemployment insurance. Depending on your financial circumstances and your location, you might even be able to have the government pay for your training program/certification. At the very least, they’ll have useful points of contact and information about training for various jobs.
*Unless you’re in the south.
Everyone and their Dad is in trades of one kind or another, and they hire their kids.
I’d rather be an electrician than a plumber. It’s like a simpler, deadlier Ethernet.
And electricians don’t have to interact with human feces nearly as often.
Three phase PoE anyone?
Powerline networking is a thing and a great choice for bringing hardline connections to remote parts of a house.
I had a shed that had electric but my WiFi couldn’t reach and a cheap powerline kit and a spare OpenWRT worked a treat.
I think all power lines should have a communications protocol. Not every device has to use them, and they’d be lower bandwidth than data-only lines, but I think the era of data-communicating appliances is here to stay, and it’d be better they go over the wires we have rather than clogging up the wireless spectrum.
Within a single building for sure, but even neighborhood lines could carry some data I bet. I wonder if and how that would work. Gonna have to learn some more about electricity and grid infrastructure.
The cybersecurity specialist in me really doesn’t like the idea of having enough wire in public spaces that it’s essentially impossible to monitor, sending infrastructure related data.
But then again, a weekend playing around with a flipper zero and a walk through town is enough to realize that it probably doesn’t matter.
Think some intelligent opsec is needed when acquiring a flipper?
In these grand United States, that is
I don’t think so. Ultimately, it’s a low power computer with a software defined radio in it. Nothing inherently nefarious.
I am Canadian however, so jury’s out about the US
Yeah I imagine for lines outside the home, or in public places, it would be best to assume that the channel is untrustworthy and the data is public. Essential comms would need to have redundancy of course. But for an oven reporting its at temp, or a thermostat reporting its room’s temperature to a central HVAC controller, I think it would be nicer than running everything over wifi.
You could even have a signal smoother at the main so nothing inside the house can get out. The way I’m imagining it, all the household power would come from the home battery, which would be fed by a combination of solar panels and grid power. If the battery’s full and the sun is shining, power feeds back into the main. If the battery’s low, power is drawn from the panels, and if that doesn’t meet demand, power is drawn from the grid. But the whole house is buffered (electrically and informationally) by the battery.
We have several good standards for power-line networking.
All of them fail for the usual problems, like all companies making sure every connector you can buy is proprietary and incompatible with each other’s.
Yeah. I know it’s possible to have a backward-compatible network over regular residential wiring, I have a pair of those ethernet ports that plug into standard outlets, but there would need to be a broadly accepted networking standard for devices that have that feature built in.
Maybe a starting point would be an open hardware, open software server device that connects to the electrical grid and the regular ethernet (via cable or wireless) that manages all the active devices on the power network. If a device implements a protocol the hub recognizes, it registers the device and makes it available for management via a web interface. I think I’d want some kind of manual confirmation before new devices start communicating with the ethernet anyway, as well as a way to grant and revoke internet privileges for devices on the fly, e.g. I might want to upgrade the firmware on one appliance to fix a bug, then close it off again until the next update. There could be switches / dimmers etc. that implement the standard and act as passthroughs for legacy devices to give them a bit of centralized control too.
If it gets good enough for hobbyist / diy electronics makers to start baking the standard into their devices, it could become a defacto open standard. I think it would be cool to have networked devices that won’t brick once the manufacturer goes bust / decides to shut down the servers that make the hardware work. I think that should be the bare minimum we demand from hardware manufacturers: that they don’t build implicit or explicit killswitches into the devices the sell. But that’s a separate ramble and I feel I’ve gone on long enough here 🙃
👴 my first PC in the mid-90s had a 10mbit coaxial network card that my brother and I used for a 2 PC LAN connection, and let me tell ya - you wouldn’t want to handle that while the PC was turned on.
Although the zap was less hurtful than an electrical fence.Looking it up, it was most likely 10BASE5.
I sent this to my plumber to congratulate him on his career choice.
Turns out now he’s an electrician and his company got hired to help build an AI data center. 💀Sixty electricians from his company alone on one job. Drones surveilling the repetitive work overhead.
So much for escaping the impacts of AI.
lol, you’re joking
managers have been into “remote work” long before workers have.
No.
Computer, I need software please!
Why won’t it work? I asked for software!
You asked wrong! You forgot “no mistakes”
Did you try turning it off and on and then ask for software again?
Brb, restarting all data centers.
Hey maybe we need to keep them off until the coin battery dies so the bios resets?
I’m a few weeks from graduating in software engineering, I think I’m going back to my old plan of finding a strong rope and a sturdy tree.
~(But to be straight: There are a lot of better options for a career, please try them first)~Nothing wrong with being an arborist.
I work in software but I have a side job working for an arborist, and you might have been joking but it’s legit a great industry to have a backup plan in.
Most arborists near me have more work than they can keep up with. You see, the thing about trees is, you trim them, wait a year, and the bastards grow back! It’s like a giant scam and the trees are all in on it!
It’s a pretty fun job too, if you’re relatively fit. You get to climb trees, throw logs into giant scary chippers, and you get first dibs on all the best gun and sword shaped sticks.
I was half joking. 😅 Of all the tradesfolk I’ve hired to do work on my house, my arborist is the only one who’s job I could see myself actually liking. He gets paid to be a nerd about something (trees, tree health, tree care), the work itself seems a lot more pleasant than dealing with plumbing or electrical repairs, and at least my guy is a one man band who just shows up and does his thing, which is certainly appealing after a career of various EMs, PMs, TPMs, and other people who need to be appeased when doing work. Also the fun tools.
I know this is a haha community, but software isn’t dead. Most corps are going to insist you use AI. Especially as a junior dev. Look for places that say things like “engineers make the decisions”. You need to find a place where you can get experience learning how software is built, even if the bot does the typing. People have been getting laid off and that sucks but software devs aren’t going anywhere. Ai writes bad code. They need us to make sure bad code doesn’t go to production.
I am a junior dev and I am not earning that great, but at least my company is not forcing me to use AI, which from some reports I have read is quite the exception. They do mention it a lot (“just let claude generate this or that driver”) but they actually understand when I say I dislike using it because I need to learn this stuff and build experience, which simply does not happen when I offload my brain, like some do.
They need us to make sure bad code doesn’t go to production.
what worries me: that’s not something a junior can do.
I see it with the local lawyers office, they have stopped hiring junior lawyers and are replacing the junior’s tasks by AI. Fine for now, but I wonder what happens when the others retire, who’s going to replace them if no juniors are trained?
I got a degree in development a few years ago and couldn’t find a job. There was nothing out there for a junior dev. I was persistent for about a year then, I just gave up.
Now I work in Commercial Real Estate but I can see this industry is about to be decimated by AI also. They are slowly starting to figure it out and build AI tools that do their job.
Bold of you to think they wouldn’t replace AI with more AI and lie to their own face in the mirror that their company collapsing is good just because, AI.
Yeah, I suggest following the age old wisdom of rats on this. Abandon the sinking ship before it sinks with you in it.
Bet on it, there will be (or are already) big revolutions in engineering/programming and art (and music), especially these 2 areas.
Instrinsic/individualistic expression (also motive) is going to become a new form of rocketfuel in that vacuum being created by clankers. Human potential and what really defines existence scales faster than boring exponential growth of calculation power.
It’s interesting and scary; if the human spirit is worth anything creatively, we’re about to find out how much.
Don’t let it get you down. You need to remember that this whole AI hype / AI will replace everyone is coming from people who invested a lot of money into it and really need it to succeed now.
Many also have an oversimplified view of what the discipline of software engineering includes in addition to little understanding how different types of AI work.
Besides, skillsets you learned in SE can easily applied to other ‘non-virtual’ fields. Many people suck at providing clear and specific instructions or requirements; businesses also have many real world processes that need to be optimized; identifying problems in a system (you first need to see there is an issue, if you want to ask an AI to fix it for you in the next step); being able to break down and tackle large, complex topics; … I could probably come up with many more points.
In my career as a programmer mostly writing custom software for smaller companies, 90% of the job was understanding the clients’ businesses and working out what they needed the software to do. Designing, writing and supporting the software was relatively trivial. My bosses never understood my lack of enthusiasm when they would hire newly-graduated Computer Science students and stick them on my team. Never mind that they knew almost nothing about the actual process of producing complete working software – they were completely useless for the main task of gathering requirements.
Yea those things you really only learn being in the industry for a couple of years, however fewer entry level hires now, because of AI and overall degradation of communication skills, means a derth of competent employees in the industry later. Tragedy of the commons…
Ah so you’re a black man in a predominately racist white county with a strong police force?
For real though. If life sucks, try something else. Teach English abroad, move to another state or country. Not much to lose if you’re struggling.
You could learn farsi and arabic and join the military. They are always hiring lately and they have lowered their standards a lot I hear. Medical, maximum enlistment age, drug history, criminal background, fitness, intellgence, all lowered. You can start your first enlistment at 42 now. As long as you get in before your 43rd birthday you’re gold.
(I’m just kidding, dont join the military)
I’m no an american, and i would rather die than support the people who put pinochet in power and are currently gutting south america once again
