jselysianeagle

Interesting, because I hear that argument all the time on some of the CS related subreddits. "Jevon's Paradox" gets mentioned quite a bit.

> It's because you're absolutely unwilling to invest in domestic candidates and train them.

I'm all for companies doing this, but the pipeline needs to be improved as whole, meaning we need to have candidates that already have enough prior education so that there's more of them that can be trained more quickly. And one way to address that is to make the entire public schooling system better through better funding, starting all the way from kindergarten through to the university system.

> If you are skilled you will be around the skilled people who won the lottery.

But it's a lottery that's truly random then there's no reason to believe that those that won the lottery would necessarily be highly skilled, right?

Anecdotally, over the course of my ~15 yrs of experience in the industry, I've definitely met some brilliant people on H1-B visas but I'd put that estimate at around ~30% or so, the rest were just people of average skill / talent doing work that a US citizen could be doing.

Again, just my personal observation, others may have wildly differing estimates based on places they've worked at.

> if you own a warehouse and you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year, automation has minted a very comfortable living for someone while dropping your labor costs significantly.

So I've seen this argument made before, but they never seem to explain convincingly enough why that sole technician (or small group of technicians) would be paid so handsomely.

In a market in which there's a glut of labor, wouldn't there be plenty of desperate, and very capable, workers competing for the few available positions, thereby driving down the wages for those positions significantly as well?

> The only good news here is that we'll probably only have to worry about getting by for a decade max.

What’s goin to happen after a decade?

> Like what other profession markets themselves as "Hey, our job is so easy that any schmuck off the street can enter the career with 4 months of training."

For one, the industry never did professionalize to begin with, certainly not in the way accountants, lawyers etc did. We never had any real body that could certify proficiency, which is what contributed to companies having to resort to leetcode and other such styles of interviewing.

Additionally, it wasn't software engineers doing this, but people looking to cash in on students looking to get a 6-figure job. They were business people, not software engineers.

> More people that are not devs, are using AI to create things, and are skilling up to a mediocre level?

What skills are being developed by non-devs prompting AI to churn out code they don't understand? Note that I'm not debating if the code is good or works or whatever, I'm asking if any real skills are being developed merely by prompting AI towards some goal.

> When these are found, very often one class of people is put out of work while another class of people gains employment.

I think what's contributing to the sense of dread is that so far at least, it's not at all clear that AI will be similar to past iterations of such "creative destruction". I hope to be wrong but I fear the jobs it does end up creating, if any, will be far lower paid and soul-sucking, and it will likely destroy many more jobs than it creates.

But getting an answer is not the same thing as understanding why that is the correct answer, or going deeper and learning more about the subject.

IMHO, the people who genuinely desire to learn will trudge through whatever they need to in order to grow their understanding - be it through reading books, original research papers or what have you.

If, OTOH, all you seek is the answers and that alone is satisfying to you, then of course you simply will not be motivated to do it the old school way anyway. But that's hardly different now in the age of AI.

Honestly in a high COL city in the US, having 4-5 kids would be doable on $300k TC but it wouldn't be easy to give them more than a middle class lifestyle at best.

Elsewhere in the US in smaller towns, I could see it being much more feasible.

> But this constant chaos, fear and looking at job offers can't be good for morale.

Definitely makes it harder to make long term plans/commitments. It was tolerable at least when the market was decent, ie, if you were reasonably good at what you did you could be confident about landing a new role before your severance ran out (typically within a couple months-ish). If this current state of the tech market is the new normal, where it takes many months of searching to land something, that alone will likely cause many to reconsider this field, I think.

> Regardless of that. AI is here to stay. Nobody is going to revoke the constitutions and criminalize AI to prevent this from happening.

> What's going to happen will happen.

Username checks out.

If you don't mind sharing, what did you pivot to? Glad you found a path you're happy with!

Where is this "mountain of evidence" that an attack from Iran was imminent?

> GLP-1s

How do GLP-1s indicate a casino economy?

I think by "reward" in the context of this discussion on loneliness, OP may have meant the opportunity to meet people, make friends, perhaps hit it off with someone and land a date, if you're single. Not that it's entirely useless/detrimental to spend time at home reading or pursuing whatever solo hobbies you happen to have.

To be sure, there certainly are many introverts who are perfectly happy on their own with no need to get out and meet people. More power to them! But there are many that crave human connection, even if they happen to have many intellectual interests and for these types of individuals, they would be well served at least carving out some portion of their time to get out of the house with the explicit aim of meeting people. And yes, not every such outing will lead to lifelong friends or meeting your next soulmate, but it's a numbers game.

Hmm I think this depends alot on the individual and their particular life situation though. I've done a ton of travel solo over the years and the vast majority of the time it was really fun.

> unless you're already in your 40s or 50s, you're going to see the bottom fall out of that sector mid-career.

Can you elaborate? What's going to happen to the healthcare system?

Docker re-uses layers as needed and can detect when a new layer needs to be added. It's not like images grow in size without bound each time something is changed in the Dockerfile.

I'm not sure what the complication here is. If application code changes, or some dependency changes, you build a new docker image as needed, possibly with an updated Dockerfile as well if that's required. The Dockerfile is part of the application repo and versioned just like everything else in the repo. CICD helps build and push a new image during PRs, or tag creation, just like you would with any application package / artifact. Frequent building and pushing of docker images can over time start taking up space of course but you can take care of that by maybe cleaning out old images from time to time if you can determine they're no longer needed.

Isn't this problem usually solved by building an actual image for your specific application, tagging that and pushing to some docker repo? At least that's how it's been at placec I've worked at that used docker. What am I missing?

Product discovery is one facet of it, certainly. It’s also about pursuading people to buy a product / service they don’t really need, creating demand where none (or not as much) existed previously, of convincing people that their product / service is better than that of others when this might not in fact be the case.

> American higher education is expensive, because you chose to defund public universities. And because you have an unhealthy obsession with rankings and top universities. Those are the things you need to change more than education itself.

There's this and also the massive budgets for college sports and fancy student housing that make it worse.

> Tactically switching industries midway through my career led me to significantly higher comp longer term (several multiples).

Out of curiosity, which industry did you switch from (and to)?

"petit bourgeoisie" used to mean "lower middle class".

People who interview at these companies report on their interview experience. It's true, these leetcode style questions do get asked and not just by the FAANG companies but lots of much smaller, no-name companies as well.

Yes, you can certainly find companies out there that don't interview in this way, but leetcode interviews are extremely common.

Same here - I was recently offered an "interview support" job by one of these body shops in a far away Asian country, which I immediately rejected. The role would've been to help candidates pass interviews using tricks (cheats, really) like the ones that've been brought up in other discussions before.

> In 2023, the software engineering industry faces a record-breaking shortage of professionals. This skills crisis has resulted in an astonishing 1 million tech job vacancies that still need to be fulfilled. Reports suggest that the number of US job vacancies, due to a lack of talent, will reach 85.2 million by 2030.

This doesn't disprove any of what's been shared earlier in this thread. Because of the layoffs and uncertainty around the future effects of interest rates on the wider economy, many companies have laid off thousands and are being much pickier about their hiring.

So even though there's vacancies, that doesn't mean the experience of seeking a job is as easy as it used to be - just the opposite, in fact. This is what many mean by "the market has shifted".

I don't know if there's studies out there conclusively proving that it's gotten harder to find a job (longer to land an offer, lower salaries on offer on average, # of remote jobs available, # of applicants applying to them etc), but I think we might never find such to begin with because these specific metrics might not be as keenly tracked.

Considering that literally hundreds of thousands of qualified people have been laid off this year alone, many of them devs, and plenty of anecdotes on this and other tech forums/chat groups about how the job market has shifted to favor employers, I think it isn't wildly irrational to believe the person you're responding to.

Sure, "the plural of anecdote isn't data" and all that, but talk to recruiters and you'll hear much the same. Yes, even in this market it's possible to get outstanding offers but I'm fairly confident in asserting that that's much rarer right now than it was, say, a year or two ago.

> The best reason to be ambitious is the realization that the people above you are just as flawed as you are.

Can I steal this? It's so on-point and I've seen it many, many times throughout the course of my career. There's been a few truly brilliant managers and principal engineers I've had the good fortune to work under, but for the vast majority of upper level leadership this tracks.