Based on what I have seen, read and experienced, a tech doesn't just go away. It evolves (unless you know one company was building it and then got shut down). Social media in the current form if it went away, would get replaced with something even worse.
From what I’ve heard, people burned out on TikTok are switching to more mindful alternatives. Perhaps what Loops could do is try to capture those people as well?
This is why (personal experience) I am seeing a lot of FullStack jobs compared to specialized Backend, FE, Ops roles. AI does 90% of the job of a senior engineer (What the CEOs believe) and the companies now want someone that can do the full "100" and not just supply the missing "10". So that remaining 90 is now coming from an amalgamation of other responsibilities.
In my mind we will have a bimodal set of skills in software development, likely something like a product engineer (an engineer who is also a product manager-- this person conceptualizes features and systemically considers the software as a whole in terms of ergonomics, business sense, and the delight in building something used by others) and something like a deep-in-the-weeds engineer (an engineer who innovates on the margins of high performance, tuning, deep improvements to libraries and other things of that nature). The former is needing to skill in rapid context switching, keeping the full model of customer journey in their minds, while also executing on technical rigor enough to prevent inefficiencies. The latter will need to skill in being able to dive extremely deeply into nuanced subjects like fine-tuning the garbage collector, compiler, network performance, or internal parts of the DOM or OS or similar.
I would expect a lot of product engineering to specialize further into domains like healthtech, fintech, adtech, etc. While the in-the-weeds engineering will be platform, infra, and embedded systems type folks.
Actually, ideally I'd love to dig deep into and specialize in database management systems internals. I think data engineering in general is the underspoken but fundamental necessity to any sort of application, AI or otherwise, but especially any concept of a data warehouse.
I was learning it and having a great time with it. Unfortunately the job market for it is abysmal. And in 2026 with the current state of the job market I didn't want to focus my time on something that wouldn't help me to get a job. But still the most fun I have had with a language.
Just saw a Discord-weekend take on reddit! Haha. Guy was saying he could create it in a day and then self-host it on his servers so that he doesn't have to put Nitro ads on top of it
Indian here. You are correct. Expecting any employed Indian software developer to not be able to spare 1$ is stupid. Like how exactly poor do you think we are?!
You misunderstood the point. The point isn't that you are poor. The point is that the burden of the money lies on average heavier on you than someone from USA. This creates an uneven playing field.
I like to compare it with donations. If you get a USD donated, that is the same USD regardless of who gave it. Right? Right?!? Either way you don't know how heavy the burden is on the person who donated. You probably don't care. But it matters to the person who donated.
A $1 fee is fine for Indian software developers and it kills the spam. If it's a greater burden for people in India than the US, well, not all solutions are perfect, but some are useful.
Because it discriminates a marginalized group which is by tradition very important to the FOSS community: students
Also, no it wouldn't kill spam. The spam would be moved to pwned machines where the owner would suddenly have an incentive (financial) to fix the system, if they know.
What remains is people who would be so rich that $1 means nothing to them. Ie. white collar criminals who are already rich enough to not care.
I think the point was that if an aspirational minimum wage worker on a borrowed computer wants to put up a PR then it would cost them less than ten minutes of wages to afford $1USD in the US, while the same worker in India would need to put up about half a day's wages.
This is very noble in theory, but in practice you're not going to get many high-quality PRs from someone who's never been paid to write software and has no financial support.
so we continue to make the rich richer and the broke students struggle more to get valuable experience. Very easy to point in 10-20 years under the coming "engineer crisis" why 'suddenly' can't support the systems we built.
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