LaGrange

Thing is, it's not how incompetent they are, but the opportunism itself. The property I mentioned pulls in opportunists regardless of their competence. So eventually if you work in a field like this, you end up surrounded by them. There's always _some_ around you, of course, everywhere - but across time different fields tended to pull so many of them they would become suffocating to anyone who isn't one. And if you think you can interview your way out of this - an opportunist will often have an easier time to pass a harsh interview process than someone who cares.

IT isn't the only one - finance and law had the issue since forever, AFAIK - but now I'd rather be in a field that's _actively repellent_ to them.

For at least the last 3 decades programming was a field that rewarded utter mediocrity with (relatively to other fields) massive remuneration. It has been filled with opportunists for as long as I remember.

Bluntly? Because working with y'all is becoming insufferable. Because I don't want to work in IT. Note this isn't "I don't want to program" or whatever. That's cool and fun. But the people in here? Oh gods.

Also I'm sick and tired of working on projects where the best social benefit from my work would be if I stopped. And IT has this talent of doing this to even most superficially useful projects. I worked on solar panel software that got turned into a scam by marketing. That takes a talent, of sort.

The best time to jump out of IT was to never get into it. The second best time is now.

As for why barista? People need food and drink and coffee is great.

That sounds quite expensive to start, to be honest. But if you can? Sounds fun.

Changing flats so it's cheaper (it's hard but still possible here), then go for an entry-level "barista" job.

It's gonna be very broke, but I'm not the first one in my friends circle to make the jump, so I have some support.

Edit: I probably will keep coding. Just... nobody else is ever going to see or use my code again.

> I mean, that works for you since you're retiring. But for people still working in the industry, you adapt or die. As it's always been.

There are jobs outside of IT. They are harder, they have less benefits, they pay less. It's a whole project to switch your lifestyle so you can even afford them.

I know nobody who regrets making the jump. I hope to make it within this year. I'll be poor, but at least I won't work in IT.

> But understanding the optimal work flow for what to delegate and what to do yourself is difficult.

No it's not, you can learn it in less than a day. I've done it a few times while evaluating how much the agents have progressed (despite what people keep saying, not much).

> Understanding the need for precision in the language used, and learning how to elegantly phrase things that were previously just abstract thoughts is absolutely a talent that can be refined.

Some of us learned technical writing to communicate with _humans_ before, and we're sitting here alternating crying and laughing as y'all scramble to figure it out just to put all that into a hallucination machine.

> You can still do creative thinking while using AI as a powerful tool at your disposal.

It remains the case that AI _erodes_ your ability to that.

So, eventually, after a few years, no, you can't.

Edit: meanwhile you're making yourself disposable. So, have fun with that.

Because adults remain children. As in, their parent’s kids and therefore property. [edit: I should mention also property of the state beyond that] It’s less explicit in US I guess but in some places that’s very blunt - if you don’t support your parents enough you can be sued for abuse. And there are situations where an adult in us has been declared too irresponsible and forced into conversion camps by parents in the US. It’s insane, yes, and if you’re lucky enough this might be entirely invisible to you. But if you’re gray or trans or autistic and get a but unlucky this can become a very harsh reality.

Protect the children refers to a type of property, not a type of human.

It’s not unlimited. The limit might be very high these days, but it’s at most bandwidth times duration. And while that sounds trivial, it does mean they aren’t selling you an infinity of a resource.

I mean, looking at it in 2026 Word 2000 looks _amazing_. How far my standards have fallen.

And yeah, I've met a lot of people who love Figma. I hate it so much, personally, getting around and finding what I need in it is so much pain.

lol that’s a line so incredibly naive it hurts.

One does not “simply” reduce spending.

> It might work against people just use their Mini Mac with OpenClaw to summarize news every morning,

Good enough for me.

> More centralized web ftw.

This ain't got anything to do with "centralized web," this kind of epistemological vandalism can't be shunned enough.

It was. I was differentiating between eating them (evidence unclear) and breathing them (pretty clear).

FYI this article and thread is about Paris, France, not Paris, Texas.

We don’t really know if eating microplastics is particularly bad, but we do know breathing any pm2.5 and below dust is.

Yep, CO2 is a problem but pm2.5 pollution made many cities hell to live in - and much (not all, of course) of that comes from rubber tyres and asphalt roads.

That's just a weird way of saying that the reforms didn't go far enough.

"There was a rise in hospitalizations of pedestrians and cyclists"

looks at the reason

CARS.

> Have fun being poor

Not going to lie, I’d rather be poor. Not destitute - I’ve been poor but not destitute and I’d rather not go desperate - but poor? As in (because “poor” is very imprecise and can imply anything between utter poverty to “not owning three homes”) like having a low paying job but still enough to pay rent?

I’d rather be that than do AI assisted software development. Genuinely the only thing stopping me now is that there’s actually way more skill and qualifications in most low-paying jobs than a typical software developer imagines, and acquiring those takes time and money itself. But by now I know multiple people who made the jump even before the latest madness, and they’re all happier. Some still code, but don’t even publish. Some are like “I haven’t used a proper computer in _months_ this is great.” All work hard jobs at odd hours. None regret.

Doesn’t matter. There’s no world where a multiplayer action game is worth it, and anyway this is a classic example of trying to solve a social problem with technology.

The reason cheating is a problem at all is that instead of playing with friends, you use online matchmaking to play with equally alienated online strangers. This causes issues well in excess of cheating, including paranoia over cheating.

> Well, admins (or anybody other than the developers / deployment pipeline) having permissions to alter the JS sounds like a significant vulnerability.

It's a common feature of CMS'es and "tag management systems." Its presence is a massive PITA to developers even _besides_ the security, but PMs _love them_, in my experience.

> It’s counterintuitive but I learned this best by playing RTS games. If you don’t spend money your opponent can outdo you on the map by simply spending their money.

OK, hear me out over here:

We are not in an RTS.

Edit: in real-world settings lacking redundancy tends to make systems incredibly fragile, in a way that just rarely matters in an RTS. Which we are _not in_.

Those are fairly normal comments around here.

> At Citus Data, we saw many customers with solid-sized teams of Postgres experts whose primary job was constant tuning, operating, and essentially babysitting the system to keep it performing at scale.

Oh no, not a company hiring a team of specialist in a core technology you need! What next, paying them a good wage? C'mon, it's so much better to get a bunch of random, excuse me, "specialized" SaaS tools that will _surely_ not lead to requiring five teams of specialists in random technologies that will eventually be discontinued once Google acquires the company running them.

OK but seriously, yeah sometimes "specialized" is good, though much less rarely than people pretend it to be. Having specialists ain't bad, and I'd say is better than telling a random developer to become a specialist in some cloud tech and pretending you didn't just end up turning a - hopefully decent - developer into a poor DBA. Not to mention that a small team of Postgres specialists can maintain a truly stupendous amount of Postgres.

Ability to actually code something like that is likely inversely correlated with willingness to give Dr Sbaitso access to one’s shell.

> rejection of whiteness

It's 2026, wtf are you talking about.

Bye, nobody will miss you.

I’m trans, I’m autistic, and I caught on how bad he was day one, as his comics had a very specific slant to them that felt less like truly looking at workplace dynamics, and more acting misanthropic and aggrieved.

I get you might have not caught on so soon - I’d call myself lucky - but you had plenty of time to figure out that not only he isn’t good, but also never was.

Any empire that falls back in the give me more money race will not be empire for long.

Give me more money now.

Brendan Eich was garbage, though, and on top of that he made Brave which is basically a joke, so not exactly missing him.

Last time I was at school requirement analysis was a thing, but do go off.