I don't love that the AI suggestions seem to override completion of real/existing methods from the source code these days.
2,798 karma · joined November 22, 2014
That left "desktop" computing as no longer where the action was, but just a legacy platform for people doing their day jobs, and most things being dumbed down into single-purpose apps that cannot be modified, customized, combined, or anything fun/interesting/not intended by the vendor.
Definitely cleaning up other people's AI mess for them for free is not a good use of time.
at least at my BigCo, AI is being used for everything - writing slop, writing tests, code reviews, etc.
it would make sense to use AI for writing code, but human code review. or, human code, but AI test cases... or whatever combination of cross-checking, trust-but-verify, human in the loop, etc. people prefer.
i think once it gets used for everything, people have lost the plot, it's the inmates running the asylum.
It works pretty well!
Then... what people want to achieve changes, maybe they want to write a web app instead of desktop, and then you're screwed. Perl was excellent when everything was text... but when things started being XML or JSON or whatever, less so.
It's a fair point though, languages built around practicality have their place.
A few token swift bricks at sometime in the future, at someone else's expense, is so much easier than preserving land, or building habitat. As an added bonus, the extra regulation makes building new houses more complicated/tedious, and older, swift-free houses more valuable and illegal to build more of, so that's a win for everyone.
It's often heard from the progressive side of politics, in this general form, as if having everyone equally affected by bad things is a useful policy aspiration:
"<thing>, which is bad, disproportionally affects <girls, poor people, non-white people, etc.>, which is an outrage!"
Apparently, it's easier and more popular to make sure bad things are fairly distributed, rather than reduced or eliminated.
40-50 years ago, being a specialist secretary / typist was a thing, being able to quickly and proficiently write documents using a typewriter from notes or dictation. Then, with word processing, people could do it themselves to a large extent, but there's still typesetting as a skillset for books, newpapers, advertisements, etc. I think programming is like that, it used to be that anyone who wanted some software done would need to get a specialist to handle it, now, lots of them will be able to get pretty far themselves... but there will always be a small place for skilled people for highly critical stuff.
Those recruiters tend to be internal recruiters working directly for the company, which I find less pushy/annoying to deal with, and they tend to be already somewhat keen on you by the time they contact you, because they have already decided you are an appealing candidate. They'll generally fast-track you to an interview, not make you fill in some long ATS application form, keep in contact regularly, etc. - it is a much better experience than cold "applying" via an ATS / workday portal and having that go into a black hole.
I'd say, if you're not regularly getting recruiters contacting you on linkedin every week, your profile isn't very good and you should fix it until you do.
It amuses me a bit when people complain about linkedin post in the newsfeed being lame (which they are), or reminiscing about the old days when people would have their email addresses next to loud warnings saying "do not contact me if you are a recruiter!!!".
It turns out, the only thing worse than being contacted by recruiters is not being contacted by recruiters. It only takes a second to respond with a polite "no thanks, not looking right now, maybe another time!", and it is far easier to start engaging with a steady stream of regular contacts than trying to create that stream when you need it.
I think basically, yes, it's just a poor tech culture, and that's how they like it - they're not interested in any process improvements, they just want you to be a ticket taker. Find some other better project if you can, rather than trying to "fix" this one.
Figuring out, details, debugging, etc... yes, these need to happen, but you have to slot those in around delivering things, often without a complete picture.
As AI "improves", people will realize that everything "online" is likely to be either fake, manipulated, centrally controlled, a scam, and generally garbage.
If the company just wanted to have some job done, be it on site, or especially remotely, they'd use a vendor or contractor. That's what they do for moving the furniture, painting, watering the plants, payroll, advertising, legal, auditing, etc.
An employee is someone who, as well as just doing their job, sporadically does other things like maintaining relationships, product ideas, interviewing candidates, training new hires, and whatever other ad-hoc stuff is required to keep a company operational. If you want to be hired as an employee, and potentially get promoted, etc, then doing your actual job is just a bare minimum to not get fired (and maybe not even that, with layoffs being so popular), and an ability to contribute to all the other stuff is what will get you hired and keep you employed.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with being a contractor, or just doing your job / the bare minimum, but companies need employees who can do more to keep existing, and its up to you if you want to be one or not.
What exactly do you mean by "infrastructure" or "systems"? At my organization, that basically means stuff like grafana, open telemetry, kubernetes, aws/azure, etc.
Your "AI infrastructure" is perhaps what other people call "MLOps" - data pipelines, airflow, that kind of stuff.
Both of those are different from each other, and also different from being a developer/SWE etc.
Its a bit annoying to me how these things have become segmented, I kind of preferred when it was all just "programming" or "computers" and most people did most things, but unfortunately these days the market is quite segmented / specialized, and the key to getting any particular job is to already be familiar with the popular tools in that space.
Often, it's ideal to use several / all of the vendors for each thing, and play them off against each other. e.g., have some of your database stuff on oracle, some on mssql, or some cloud stuff on aws and some on azure, make your apps portable, and tell them both that you'll switch to the other unless you get a good deal, with that being a plausible threat because you're already using the other one and know how to make your stuff work on both, and occasionally rotate apps between vendors, or change the mix from 50/50 to 60/40 just to show you can.
Of course, the vendors will be trying to work against this and will want to do some supposedly amazing deal if you go exclusively with them for everything... which might be attractive in the short term, but opens the client up to getting screwed in the long term once they fall into all the lock-in traps and lose the very _ability_ to switch vendors.
For a multi-billion dollar megacorp, dealing/fixing things for individual customers is in the too-hard basket.
If you're going to kick the can down the road, why not kick it pretty far?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/25/datacenters-...
Nice to see some success for their ideas.
https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/mayor-mamdani...
Especially at a BigCo, where there are different environments, with different passwords, and password expiry/rotation/complexity rules.
Like, when asking for help, or working together... you say to them "ok, lets ssh to devfoo1234", and they do it, and then type in their password, and maybe get it wrong, then need to reset it, or whatever... and it takes half a minute or more for them to just ssh to some host. Maybe there are several hosts involved, and it all multiplies out.
I mention to them "you know... i never use ssh passwords, i don't actually know my devfoo1234 password... maybe you should google for ssh-keygen, set it up, let me know if you have any problems?" and they're like "oh yeah, thats cool. i should do that sometime later!".... and then they never do, and they are forever messing with passwords.
I just don't get it.
To a lesser extent performance reviews / ratings are the same - "you're doing great, keep it up!" - they don't really tell you what you need to do to progress. You have to figure that out and drive it for yourself.
2) sometimes there would be ads in magazines, once on any given BBS, there would usually be text files available for download with listings of other BBSs and dail up numbers, usually by city / area code.
3) both. there were a small handful of dominant big name BBSs, usually with some limited free access and paid access beyond that with lots of dialin lines, lots of up to date stuff available for download, etc., basically run as a business like an ISP and with fulltime staff. Then there would be smaller, hobbyist BBSs with one or a few dialin lines, probably free or very cheap, but less stuff available for download, updated less often, or maybe just a part-time operation instead of 24 hours. various schools, clubs, magazines, etc. also operated their own niche BBSs for users too/members too.
4) mostly just like usenet group, mailing list, forum, etc. it's not that different from, say, reddit or stack overflow or something like that, other than being all text, shorter messages, and generally people would be posting using their real name / identity, and often discussions on BBSs would lead to meetups in person and vice versa, maybe you'd recommend your school friends to use or try a certain BBS. to me, that was the big difference vs the internet today where it is mostly anonymous and discussions never really lead to meetups or ongoing friendships.
5) a lot of the discussion was just about where to buy hardware, prices, buying/selling gear, and hardware / products themselves. a big part of it was just about distributing files too - software, shareware, images, adult content, etc.