mancerayder

Definitely write to NYT or Guardian or Atlantic about this stuff! Journalists probably have a ton of info on how messed up the system is, but if feels like you have data-backed opinions and documentation to remind yourself of examples!

It's comfort (for the already made men) for the possibility of a dystopic economy where tech jobs become very rare. A scenario which could play out as we compete harder with each other for the pickings.

And what ARE those businesses? There's delis everywhere, should I open up a 24/7 bodega? Start selling knives I learn to forge on the Internet and make YouTube videos about knife making? That's going to replace our financial commitments will it?

Here's another problem - how do you get healthcare without a corporate group plan? In my state the ACA offers expensive in-network only plans where you wait months for appointments.

Managers are being slammed - FB, Amazon and recently Cloudflare and Coinbase.

New grads are being slammed, "because LLMs can do that work."

No new folks, no managers, and no olds. What a delightful career we've chosen for ourselves.

That's a lot of SV-speak. How exactly do people step into an entrepreneurial phase? They're at work in corporate settings with fixed defined roles. Most workplaces are not many-hatted-donning startup environments, but restricted roles where there are deliverables, deadlines, meetings, etc. Which leaves out of hours for "entrepreneurship" whatever that is.

Github project work on the weekends? That's not possible for most people in their mature/family years (or shouldn't be necessary - what about living life??)

Are they claiming to use AI to replace systems people too? As in infrastructure folks?

huh? That sounds like California?

Then why are manager jobs now requiring LeetCode and other technical assessments? It's not easy to get any job anywhere unless you have a technical background.

You people (as in this HN community) have your conception of middle management taken from memes, comics and to some extent a lack of experience. Managing even 5-10 people means juggling projects, personnel management, being held accountable for all actions of your people, having to be sandwiched between the pie-in-the-sky class and the myopic individual, translator in between. It means jumping on outage calls, doing architecture reviews, and getting slammed with meetings.

Please tell me where these 'managers make a lot of money and do nothing but approve timesheets' companies are, I'd kill to work for one!

Yes for sure. My point is they won't know if I moved to Mac, Linux or just a Chromebook, or just decided to stop using a desktop PC.

So I moved from Win 11 to Fedora Workstation some months back. I dual-booted back into Windows once or twice to check something, to upgrade my audio receiver with a serial port, that sort of stuff.

Everyone talks about execs monitoring metrics. What sort of metric would I have registered as? You see a desktop that's on 24/7 suddenly going offline. There's no way these people find out indirectly that I'm now using Linux on the same hardware. What are they going to do, somehow correlate my user agent string when I hit one of their websites or SSO endpoints? I mean, it's possible but I am wondering how much of this topic is wish fulfillment fantasy.

I'm encountering people in their lower 20's who seem to really struggle emotionally, and use psychological lingo to describe themselves and each other in a way that really didn't exist when I was in my 20's.

On the one hand this is great - I am a huge supporter of understanding and accepting ourselves non-pejoratively - anxiety, depression, etc.

On the flip side they talk sometimes like the forces are from outside them, like they have no agency.

And they also talk like the words came from somewhere else, "My generation compared to previous generations..." <- unless you lived those previous generations, which is impossible, you heard that from somewhere, probably a paper, and probably from a professor in school.

People used books a lot more and it was fun to sit on the floor at Barnes and Nobles.

I remember planning trips with Lonely Planet books. I just really don't miss the pre-GMaps era. I don't think I'd ever drive now without one a phone.

And here comes the reining in of spending. If companies are anywhere like I'm seeing:

1 - Company mandate, start using AI

2 - You're afraid? Here's a mandate!

3 - (Devs and others discover Claude Code features where the coolest burn mad tokens)

4 - Um, yeah we're going to have to take a look at the spend here

5 _

What's 5?

We know steps 3 and 4 will cycle a bit more, and we know it's going to cost more - these were startup teaser costs.

Strong words, but NJ and NY have had Democrats in power continuously for a while. While Christie, a Republican (and a corrupt person) torpedoed the ARC project I mentioned, the other issues seem more related to a lack of centralization.

Something like public transit that powers a region that's a sizable fraction of US GPD should not be a state affair in the first place. What Europeans have that Americans lack are perma-technocrats with a long term vision that are entrenched in power.

Unfortunately the Wall Street accountants who run our companies don't mind if you jump ship after your 2% 'reward' raise. Because when someone new comes and costs 10 % more plus recruiting costs, that latter person has 'proven' their worth in the market, similar to when a house goes up in value due to scarcity.

If you were to explain the costs of knowledge lost, of training, of taking a risk on a new unknown person, of relationships, there's no answer because it doesn't show up in any operating expense worksheet.

What you're supposed to do is find another job, and explain that you love this job so much, but the other offer is really good, can they come up close to it and you'll stay. Repeat this every few years or find a new job and move to it.

Counter-examples are France and Japan. Democracies, electoral terms. High-speed rail that the world looks up to, investment in infrastructure everywhere. In France you have Grand Paris, a programme to transform the suburbs into denser housing and commercial space, a calculation and planning that INCLUDES public transport.

And the green initiatives in France. These, transit, Grand Paris, and much more are initiatives that take many years to realize.

Now let's move over to New Jersey and New York City. The most densely populated state (NJ) has some of the worst transit despite being in the NYC greater metropolitan area. An old tunnel between the two needs to be replaced, but politicians with four year mental horizons canned it until recently (ARC project). Infrastructure is a fight between Federal, two states and a city politically and partially from a funding perspective.

We could go on, but I just wanted to point out that the United States is a poor example of good governance. And that we don't need to live in a totalitarian nightmare just because we acknowledge the US fails to produce innovation and investment for the public good.

And let's not talk about debt, as if it is a unique problem to France or anything new.

You are already paying for other people's healthcare costs, whether it's private or public!

If you pay for home insurance (you kind of have to unless you own your home outright or are renting), you're paying for other people's fire or water damage. And one day they might pay for yours.

If there's a lot of fires or water damage, everyone's costs go up.

and you said no?

I am seeing this first hand. A light year for layoffs (below 5 percent), a couple of months after a universally unpopular end of year comp, where exceeding expectations meant you get a raise right around inflation (3 ish percent).

Good people are leaving, people who can't, don't. It's hard not too see how it dilutes talent.

One of the consequences of having bean counters run tech companies.

Unfortunately I saw this pre-AI with microservices, where while empowering developers with their beloved microservices, we create intense complexity and deployment headaches. AI will fix the slop with an obscuring layer of complexity on top.

I did, but let me hammer home the point: when you try to restore balance in a corporate settings, your peers, not management, are the ones self-promoting how much they work.

I've worked in many environments where I came up against workaholic co-workers who pulled everyone down with them into weekend work and extra effort.

So yes, deserved.

This is not senior management versus us, it's us versus us, that's the American way.

I have much of your perspective already and trust me, I propagandize it in person.

At the same time like everyone else here I need jobs to pay the bills, and in every job I'm faced with these workaholic types who believe "this is not a 9 to 5 job" is a great motto. You'll find many of these people here, too.

I try to be too useful to fire. But when I was younger places I worked at had brutal on-call situations and limited time off. One place had 15 days of PTO per year, and that included sick days.

Our CEOs are happily, gleefully, boasting about how we're replaceable. That sort of stuff causes pitchforks to rise up in other countries.

We Americans are hard-working sheep, and we deserve all the motivational Corpspeak we have to suffer through on LinkedIn posts.

I've worked in this industry (tech) a very long time, and in every job I have peers that boast about off hours work.

We get what we deserve.

That's a cultural thing. Perhaps it's part of the Protestant work ethic. My favorite are Americans who call themselves "foodies", which means taking instructions from Tiktok influencers, visiting tourist traps, waiting in line to eat and overpaying on "Michelin" restaurants.

Italian and French grandmothers make far better food without calling themselves "foodies" and a 15 year old from those countries has better knowledge and breadth of food.

1M is not a lot of money for a home in the NYC suburbs, at least where the schools are OK. I'm referring to the nice NJ towns, Westchester, etc.

1M is also the price of a one bedroom apartment in the city of 8.6M. That is, if you don't want a 45 minute one way commute.

Numerous people are denigrating DevOps people - resume padding, over-complexity, etc.

I think that's startup-thinking, at least in my experience. Maybe in a small company the DevOps guy does all infra.

In my experience, especially in financial services, who runs the show are platform engineering MDs - these people want maximum control for their software engineers, who they split up into a thousand little groups who all want to manage their own repos, their own deployments, their own everything. It's believed that microservices gives them that power.

I guarantee you devops people hate complexity, they're the ones getting called at night and on the weekend, because it's supposedly always an "infrastructure issue" until proven otherwise.

Also the deployment logs end up in a log aggregation system, and god forbid software developers troubleshoot their own deployments by checking logs. It's an Incident.

Are microservices a past fad yet?

What is the blacklist and is it company-specific?

I'd be more concerned about industry-wide blacklisting.

There's nothing like that reveal of the first MacBook Air, where he whips it out of a manilla envelope. I loved that first one at the time. Maybe less so on my lap when it turned into a stovetop - but it was innovative and cool and exciting, and the stuff now is not.

Every single Pixel upgrade I made - every single one - in the last decade has been because of battery life.

This law will be tragic for Google and Apple. What will compel people to upgrade their functional phones?