Hired!

I bet the people you work with are very happy to have you as a lead.

I’ve been in this scenario and I didn’t wait for layoffs. I left and applied my skills where shit code is not tolerated, and quality is rewarded.

But in this hypothetical, we got this shit code not by management encouraging the right behavior, and giving time to make it right. They’re going to keep the yes men and fire the “unproductive” ones (and I know fully, adding to the pile is not, in the long run, productive, but what does the management overseeing this mess think?)

They were just trying to make us smarter.

https://studyfinds.org/chewing-on-wood-brain-function-memory/

[kidding]

To be fair, if you give me a shit code base and expect me to add features with no time to fix the existing ones, I will also just add more shit on the pile. Because obviously that’s how you want your codebase to look.

I’m not sure why no one is direct linking it.

https://dogeque.st/

(the data looks incredibly incomplete)

There is value in just using something like this to break spending habits of the population.

A lot of people may find that a portion of their spending wasn’t that necessary after all, and will stop beyond the boycott. The businesses will need to improve services or lower prices to win customers back.

At least, that’s what I hope this achieves. The organizers might have varying goals.

In my current role, I mostly hire “senior” roles. So the applicants (which are pre screened before I see them) typically have 5+ years experience. I ask about the code they’ve written, and then I ask some questions about how they would extend the code (to meet some new requirements). What I’m looking for is not so much a specific answer, but more so “can we think through this problem together.”

That said, I’ve been the interviewer for “junior” roles…and there isn’t as much correlation between ability and experience as you might think. So no reason to feel imposter syndrome. I’ve worked with extremely smart/talented developers without any formal training.

I think all the stuff you’re doing sets a really good foundation for a career in software, if that’s where you want to go. One thing I might suggest is making a few contributions to open source or team projects. It can be useful to learn about how to read code, and present code to others (or to fit your idea into an existing code base).

They are terrible at it, compared to my mailman or UPS.

I have to do many interviews.

I don’t care if the applicant uses AI, or any other tool available to them. I just care about whether they can explain, debug, and modify/extend code (which they wrote, or at least composed somehow and are presenting as their work).

I’ve definitely been suspicious of AI use, and also had some applicants admit to it. And I don’t count that against them any more than using a web resource.

But, there is a very high correlation between using AI and failing at the explain/debug/modify part.

I feel like this could be a Columbo episode

Name and shame the brand!

This should be a Venn diagram with zero overlap, lol

Maplibre (https://maplibre.org/) offers a beautiful open source solution. There are affordable open source solutions for OSM base maps too (https://github.com/protomaps/basemaps), where you can host the whole thing as a single static file.

No one should be paying Google per API key :)

Be thankful you have a button and don’t need to navigate through 3 levels of touchscreen menus to get to the option.

True, but they were still resource constrained, which might be why they ended up with a model with lower resource requirements.

The scary part to me (noted in the article as well) is less the technical hack but more so the amount of data they are collecting.

Subaru had/has an ongoing issue where the telematics drains the battery while the car is parked, especially if it’s parked out of reach of cell towers. With the amount of data they are sending, it’s not surprising.

There is no need for the car to report its position whatsoever unless I request assistance.

Should be a nice salary boost for developers in a year or two when all these companies desperately need to rehire to fix whatever AI slop mess they have created.

And I hope every developer demands 2x their current salary if they are tasked with re-engineering that crap.

Yup. If source is not available I’m not using it if I have any choice in the matter. Binary distribution is nice, but I’d rather have source.

Plus I’m sure some kind soul has created a build pipeline that autogenerates binaries from the source. I can always either use that or clone and customize it. It’s a natural separation—as a dev I’d like my responsibility to end at “I merged working code to trunk”.

+1 for feeder