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> "More housing" does not automatically translate to "affordable housing"

Imagine two hypothetical cites, each with one million residents. The first one has half a million apartments, while the second one has ten million apartments.

Which city would have cheaper apartments?

PredictIt was pretty fun for me until I bet ~$250 on Hillary in 2016. I haven't touched binary options since then.

I have a total of four rental units. In the past year, I've been called out to fix something three times. Each issue took about 15 minutes to resolve. I could have hired a handyman for these jobs but it was cheaper and quicker to do it myself.

Most people are afraid of rental properties because it's out of their comfort zone.

Working a W2 job, socking money away in a 401k, and retiring at 65 = normal, safe, responsible, respectable.

Working a W2 job, slowing accumulating rental properties, fixing a toilet once in a while, and retiring at 45 or younger = deviant, risky, naughty.

Without a lien on the property this type of business model, where the company pays for tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment up front to private individuals who may not have any other assets to be used as collateral, simply wouldn’t work. It’s not that different from a mortgage.

Document DBs are like blockchain projects - overhyped and worse than existing solutions for nearly every use case. Why do ostensibly smart engineers keep falling for this stuff?

Music festivals

This is a surprisingly common trap to fall into. I worked at a startup in which the CTO criticized my dev team for not having a perfectly linear burn down chart. Every week in our retro we had the same discussion about how to improve the shape of our burn down chart; we tried putting higher valued stories at the front of the queue, involving QA earlier in the sprint, and cranking out 1 pointers mid week to tweak the graph. We rarely achieved the perfect shape. On top of this we also had one week sprints, which made it difficult to plan for the future or work on spikes, so we ended up doing very little high-level, architectural planning.

I remember one week my team cranked through their allotted stories so fast that we ran out of work two or three days into the sprint. We decided to take on a couple extra easy stories that we knew we could finish before the end of the week. Rather than being praised for doing extra work, we were criticized for "introducing volatility into the sprint". In other words, we messed up the shape of the burn down chart.

I'm currently working at a place that has virtually no process, which has it's own challenges, but I'm happy that I'm not arguing about burn down charts anymore :)

The self-descriptions people use these days are so ludicrous it's hard to tell if it's satire. If I had a Medium account, here's how my description would read:

"Software Engineer, Philanthropist, Astronaut, Shark Hunter, Breaker of Chains, Lord Commander of the Snack Bin, Protector of the Repo, and Part-time Cat Dad"

Too much or just right?

You've described exactly how I feel. I've only be at this game for 4 years and I'm already looking for a way out. Programming is fun in the way that doing drugs is fun; it's addicting and provides a quick high, but at the cost of staring into a computer screen for weeks on end with little to no interaction with other people aside from meetings (which only exist so that your superiors can tell you which widget to crank out next).

I consider myself to be very introverted yet programming is still too extreme on the asocial end. A career in programming will gradually cause your social skills to atrophy. It's pretty obvious that if you spend 40+ hours a week talking to a computer that eventually you'll start to feel and act more robotic than your peers who regularly interact with real people in the real world.

Working as a programmer doesn't provide real human experiences. Everything that you do and learn as a programmer is extremely abstract (and usually convoluted). You won't have interesting stories and wise aphorisms to share your children and grandchildren, because everything you did was inside a virtual world.

Everything you build as a developer is extremely temporary. You will work extremely hard to build something over a period of months or even years, only for that software to be immediately discarded when the business pivots and decides to pursue a totally different path. If you work for a startup, you're hard work will be absolutely worthless if the business goes belly up. If you decide to contribute to open source software and build the next generation of frameworks, tools, and languages, prepare for that to work to go out of fashion within just a couple years. A construction worker can go back to a building he built 50 years ago and it will still be standing. A doctor or lawyer with 20+ years experience will be well respected, but as a developer your experience will be disregarded unless you're an expert in whatever framework/language is the flavor of the month.

Programming pays well and is a cushy office job. It doesn't provide much else.

EDIT: I fully expect people to reply with the usual "well that's just your opinion, man!". Yes. I know. This is a personal rant and not a master's thesis. If you love this career more power to you. I'm just sharing my opinion because I know other developers feel like I do, and feel trapped in a well paying but otherwise unfulfilling career.

I just realized I've been using the wrong definition of "idempotence" for years...