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I feel trapped to be honest with you...on one side is young developers that their mind is a sponge comparing my old grumpy half-burned brain-cells (lol) and on

I feel trapped to be honest with you...on one side is young developers that their mind is a sponge comparing my old grumpy half-burned brain-cells (lol) and on the other is the AI that does incredible things that could easily replace us one way or another. I don't know anything else apart from technology and I feel doomed -_-

the_only_law 3y ago
Yeah I really regret going into the field now, especially the way I did it. There’s just no where else to go that isn’t just less of the stuff I like about it and more of the stuff I hate about it. I had a plan to go back to school and switch fields, but the more time passes, the more I realize this isn’t going to happen. Everything keeps getting more and more expensive, both in terms of money, and more notably time.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > There’s just no where else to go Yeah, that's a problem. This is literally the only marketable skill I have.
- mbm 3y ago
  What field were you thinking of switching to?
  - the_only_law 3y ago
    I don’t like to talk about that too much on this site, but I’ve have been a number of ideas, mostly still in technical fields. I thought I had my head set on something, but it was, funny enough, all predicated on having a well paid software job to fund the jump. I planned on starting this year, using community college along with statewide transfer programs to get started as quickly and as affordably as possible, but the layoff and current economic/financial situations rocked me, and I’m not sure I have the capability brains, or money to pull it off anymore.
JohnFen 3y ago
The use of LLMs as a programming aid are another strong indication to me that I need to get out of this business.
- jimmaswell 3y ago
  Why? I've been employed in the industry since 2017 and I love Copilot and ChatGPT. They make everything more convenient, especially repetitive code, and suggest good new ideas sometimes. They've been a godsend for debugging, figuring out/generating command line options, setting things up like ftp servers with weird configs, etc. It's like we've gone from walking around on foot to figuring out horseback riding. I feel freshly inspired in my productivity since I've started using AI tools.
  - ohthatsnotright 3y ago
    Not to mention, if you're able, you can paste in code to ChatGPT to give context and tell it to generate unit tests. I've found it does a generally good outline of code that annoys me to write, and then I can tweak the cases and add more as I need. Makes a chore I dislike much, much easier.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      But writing my own unit tests and code outlines, as annoying as they are, make me a better programmer and let me produce better code. I can't tell you how many times the act of writing unit tests -- just writing them, not even running them -- has given me an important insight into the code that I would have missed otherwise. Using tools to do these things for me means that my skills and abilities will suffer.
      - jimmaswell 3y ago
        I make great use copilot for test cases now. I still think through what I'm trying to do and start writing it, but as I go along copilot will tend to write what I had in mind anyway and complete 20 lines of the likes of `assertEquals("overriden address 1", model.getAddress1());` before I can blink. I'll also often enough be caught offguard by some strange output and realize it's because I did something wrong, so I catch the problem much sooner.
linguae 3y ago
I feel similarly. I've loved computers and programming from an early age, and I was inspired by the stories of researchers like Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Marshall Kirk McKusick, Alan Kay, and others. However, after graduate school and after spending nearly a decade in industry, I discovered that the world today is very different from the world these researchers lived in during their heyday. There are no groups today that have the ethos of 1970s Xerox PARC or Bell Labs. There seems to be less room for long-term exploratory work; instead there's immense pressure to quickly deliver short-term results and produce deliverables such as papers and code. The trailer of the documentary "Message Not Understood: Profit and Loss in the Age of Computing" (https://messagenotunderstood.com https://messagenotunderstood.com) summarizes how I feel. I'm also disillusioned by the state of personal computing today and by the overt attempts by platform companies to squeeze their users as much as possible. Even so, quite frankly I love computing and I don't want to leave it behind, even if I feel disillusioned about the tech industry. Some of my thoughts include becoming an independent researcher and also starting a non-profit software company that is devoted to improving the personal computing experience, but I have to figure out how to make a living while pursuing these ideas, and it seems that the cost of living is outpacing my ability to keep up (especially housing costs, which jumped over 30% since 2020 where I live).
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Even so, quite frankly I love computing and I don't want to leave it behind, even if I feel disillusioned about the tech industry. The commentary here has allowed me to reach an interim decision (subject to change in the future as I ponder these things more deeply). I am going to find another line of work. That way, rather than leaving it behind, I can make it a hobby again and do the sort of projects that improve my life. Perhaps that way, I can honor and maintain my love of computing, and earn a living doing something else. I'm perfectly OK with taking a large pay cut if I can live a happier life in exchange for that.
  - linguae 3y ago
    I've been thinking about this, too, with teaching being my prime candidate. One of the downsides of leaving the tech industry is the reality of taking a massive pay cut at a time when the cost of living (especially housing) has been rising rapidly. As an aside as an American I feel very pessimistic about the state of the American economy and about the medium-term future of this country; it's getting harder for people to get ahead thanks to rising costs (especially housing, health care, and higher education), our politics has become extremely polarized, and the general mood is becoming more tense, as if we're one or two crises away from this nation completely falling apart. It seems that this nation's economy rewards rent seekers, and it's becoming harder for people to make a living through other means.

the_only_law 3y ago

Yeah I really regret going into the field now, especially the way I did it. There’s just no where else to go that isn’t just less of the stuff I like about it and more of the stuff I hate about it. I had a plan to go back to school and switch fields, but the more time passes, the more I realize this isn’t going to happen. Everything keeps getting more and more expensive, both in terms of money, and more notably time.

JohnFen 3y ago
> There’s just no where else to go Yeah, that's a problem. This is literally the only marketable skill I have.
mbm 3y ago
What field were you thinking of switching to?
- the_only_law 3y ago
  I don’t like to talk about that too much on this site, but I’ve have been a number of ideas, mostly still in technical fields. I thought I had my head set on something, but it was, funny enough, all predicated on having a well paid software job to fund the jump. I planned on starting this year, using community college along with statewide transfer programs to get started as quickly and as affordably as possible, but the layoff and current economic/financial situations rocked me, and I’m not sure I have the capability brains, or money to pull it off anymore.

JohnFen 3y ago

The use of LLMs as a programming aid are another strong indication to me that I need to get out of this business.

jimmaswell 3y ago
Why? I've been employed in the industry since 2017 and I love Copilot and ChatGPT. They make everything more convenient, especially repetitive code, and suggest good new ideas sometimes. They've been a godsend for debugging, figuring out/generating command line options, setting things up like ftp servers with weird configs, etc. It's like we've gone from walking around on foot to figuring out horseback riding. I feel freshly inspired in my productivity since I've started using AI tools.
- ohthatsnotright 3y ago
  Not to mention, if you're able, you can paste in code to ChatGPT to give context and tell it to generate unit tests. I've found it does a generally good outline of code that annoys me to write, and then I can tweak the cases and add more as I need. Makes a chore I dislike much, much easier.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    But writing my own unit tests and code outlines, as annoying as they are, make me a better programmer and let me produce better code. I can't tell you how many times the act of writing unit tests -- just writing them, not even running them -- has given me an important insight into the code that I would have missed otherwise. Using tools to do these things for me means that my skills and abilities will suffer.
    - jimmaswell 3y ago
      I make great use copilot for test cases now. I still think through what I'm trying to do and start writing it, but as I go along copilot will tend to write what I had in mind anyway and complete 20 lines of the likes of `assertEquals("overriden address 1", model.getAddress1());` before I can blink. I'll also often enough be caught offguard by some strange output and realize it's because I did something wrong, so I catch the problem much sooner.

linguae 3y ago

I feel similarly. I've loved computers and programming from an early age, and I was inspired by the stories of researchers like Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Marshall Kirk McKusick, Alan Kay, and others. However, after graduate school and after spending nearly a decade in industry, I discovered that the world today is very different from the world these researchers lived in during their heyday. There are no groups today that have the ethos of 1970s Xerox PARC or Bell Labs. There seems to be less room for long-term exploratory work; instead there's immense pressure to quickly deliver short-term results and produce deliverables such as papers and code. The trailer of the documentary "Message Not Understood: Profit and Loss in the Age of Computing" (https://messagenotunderstood.com https://messagenotunderstood.com) summarizes how I feel. I'm also disillusioned by the state of personal computing today and by the overt attempts by platform companies to squeeze their users as much as possible. Even so, quite frankly I love computing and I don't want to leave it behind, even if I feel disillusioned about the tech industry. Some of my thoughts include becoming an independent researcher and also starting a non-profit software company that is devoted to improving the personal computing experience, but I have to figure out how to make a living while pursuing these ideas, and it seems that the cost of living is outpacing my ability to keep up (especially housing costs, which jumped over 30% since 2020 where I live).

JohnFen 3y ago
> Even so, quite frankly I love computing and I don't want to leave it behind, even if I feel disillusioned about the tech industry. The commentary here has allowed me to reach an interim decision (subject to change in the future as I ponder these things more deeply). I am going to find another line of work. That way, rather than leaving it behind, I can make it a hobby again and do the sort of projects that improve my life. Perhaps that way, I can honor and maintain my love of computing, and earn a living doing something else. I'm perfectly OK with taking a large pay cut if I can live a happier life in exchange for that.
- linguae 3y ago
  I've been thinking about this, too, with teaching being my prime candidate. One of the downsides of leaving the tech industry is the reality of taking a massive pay cut at a time when the cost of living (especially housing) has been rising rapidly. As an aside as an American I feel very pessimistic about the state of the American economy and about the medium-term future of this country; it's getting harder for people to get ahead thanks to rising costs (especially housing, health care, and higher education), our politics has become extremely polarized, and the general mood is becoming more tense, as if we're one or two crises away from this nation completely falling apart. It seems that this nation's economy rewards rent seekers, and it's becoming harder for people to make a living through other means.