Yeah, I was on the outside looking in when it came to sketch comedy until I developed a new character that can make people laugh just with hand gestures. It's really funny how you go nowhere telling other people's jokes and you really need to write your own material.
In this climate make sure you have a new job lined up before you quit your current one. Don't let on the slightest that you care what title you have because personally I would blackball anybody who talks like that.
Thats sound advice. But why that on the title? Just curious if youd elaborate. I feel like if they are asking of me to do code review, SQL, etc. then my title should align with the rest of the market, especially after a year + multiple years BI experience. Feels like its easy for you to say that about my title when you're not in my shoes (and presumably haven't been called a junior dev for awhile now). Seems completely reasonable to expect a title change at this point, in my opinion.
But personally I don't like people who are concerned about status (as opposed to getting the job done) and any participation I have in the hiring process is what I can do to have some influence over who is sitting in the seat next to me.
"Nazi", "Fascist", etc are words you can use to lose any debate instantly no matter what your politics are.
I think the sane version of this is that Gen Z didn't just lose its education, it lost its socialization. I know someone who works in administration of my Uni who tracks general well being of students who said they were expecting it to bounce back after the pandemic and they've found it hasn't. My son reports if you go to any kind of public event be it a sewing club or a music festival people 18-35 are completely absent. My wife didn't believe him but she went to a few events and found he was right.
You can blame screens or other trends that were going on before the pandemic, but the pandemic locked it in. At the rate we're going if Gen Z doesn't turn it around in 10 years there will not be a Gen Z+2.
So the argument that pandemic policy added a few years to elderly lives at the expensive of the young and the children that they might have had is salient in my book -- I had to block a friend of mine on Facebook who hasn't wanted to talk about anything but masks and long COVID since 2021.
tells the compelling story that the Mellon family teamed up with the steelworker's union to use protectionism to protect the American steel industry's investments in obsolete open hearth steel furnaces that couldn't compete on a fair market with the basic oxygen furnace process adopted by countries that had their obsolete furnaces blown up. The rest of US industry, such as our car industry, were dragged down by this because they were using expensive and inferior materials. I think this book had a huge impact in terms of convincing policymakers everywhere that tariffs are bad.
Funny the Mellon family went on to further political mischief
Ha, we gutted our manufacturing base, so if we bring it back it will now be state of the art! Not sure if that will work out for us, but hey their is some precedence.
The dollar became the world's reserve currency because the idea of Bancor lost to it. Thus subjecting the US to the Triffin dilemma which made the US capital markets benefit at the expense of a hugely underappreciated incentive to offshore manufacturing.
You can't onshore manufacturing and have a dollar reserve currency. The only question then is, Are you willing to de-dollarize to bring back manufacturing jobs?
This isn't a rhetorical question if the answer is yes, great, let's get moving. But if the answer is no, sorry, dollarization and its effects will continue to persist.
I'll take a look at that story later. I'm curious though, why is US metallurgy consistently top-notch if the processes are inferior? When I use wrenches, bicycle frames, etc from most other countries I have no end of troubles with weld delamination, stress fractures compounding into catastrophic failures, and whatnot, even including enormous wrenches just snapping in half with forces far below what something a tenth the size with American steel could handle.
> I'm curious though, why is US metallurgy consistently top-notch if the processes are inferior?
I really wonder what you're comparing with.
Try some quality surgical steel from Sweden, Japan or Germany and you'll come away impressed. China is still not quite there but they are improving rapidly, Korea is already there and poised to improve further.
Metal buyers all over the globe are turning away from the US because of the effects of the silly tariffs but they were not going there because the quality, but because of the price.
The US could easily catch up if they wanted to but the domestic market just isn't large enough.
And as for actual metallurgy knowledge I think russia still has an edge, they always were good when it came down to materials science, though they're sacrificing all of that now for very little gain.
There are people making top quality steel in the US today by modern methods but it wasn't like the new replaced the old, the old mostly disappeared and we got a little bit of the new.
Yes, I should have been more clear there: they could catch up in volume but it will require a different mindset if they want to become a net exporter of such items.
The simple model of an "intelligence explosion" is the obscure equation
dx 2
-- = x
dt
which has the solution
1
x = -----
C-t
and is interesting in relation to the classic exponential growth equation
dx
-- = x
dt
because the rate of growth is proportional to x and represents the idea of an "intelligence explosion" AND a model of why small western towns became ghost towns, it is hard to start a new social network, etc. (growth is fast as x->C, but for x<<C it is glacial) It's an obscure equation because it never gets a good discussion in the literature (that I've seen, and I've looked) outside of an aside in one of Howard Odum's tomes on emergy.
Like the exponential growth equation it is unphysical as well as unecological because it doesn't describe the limits of the Petri dish, and if you start adding realistic terms to slow the growth it qualitatively isn't that different from the logistic growth equation
dx
-- = (1-x) x
dt
thus it remains obscure. Hyperbolic growth hits the limits (electricity? intractable problems?) the same way exponential growth does.
All in all, because of light cones there can be no large-scale growth faster than x^3. And more like x^2 if you want to expand something more than just empty space.
How dare you bring logic and pragmatic thinking to a discussion about the singularity. This is the singularity we are talking about. No reality allowed.
which can be summarized as "You have alignment because your business makes sense, you can't paint alignment on to your business as an afterthought" Go read the book though because Collins says it very well.
To me the combination of "I don't have much public codebases to show for it; I wrote code like an artist doodles in their spare time" and "things that I strove to learn and build slowly can be accomplished with ease" is telling.
From the viewpoint of somebody who makes a living at it and is only proud when I can put something in front of customers I don't think there is anything "easy" about it today. I mean, it is so irritating that HN is flooded with posts by people who are somewhere between delighted that they can make stuff that almost works with A.I. (e.g. no insight into the gap between "works" and "almost works") and who are crying that they don't know the secret sauce that influencers are using to launch 15 new perfectly polished products a day (e.g. no insight into anything.)
A.I. is the coding buddy I never had. It doesn't always give the right answers but neither does the programmer in the seat next to you or the crowd on Stack Overflow.
I'm curious about what you mean by "telling". What is the tell that you perceive? I would like to understand whether I misrepresented myself.
I agree with you, that none of it is easy. It is precisely why I used to doodle, to craft small projects to understand the core essence of what is going on: building an entire TCP/IP stack, writing a compiler, writing a database, an editor etc. That practice has allowed me to deploy into production a fair amount of efficient code.
But now, I find myself in the role of a project manager telling my highly capable coding buddy what to do, a role that I do not relish.
I don't know if it came from my work getting a PhD or from my work in startups [1] or earlier than that but I think any side project that "hasn't been done before" is not worth doing. For me any side project has to be something I can demo to an audience that, with a dash of showmanship, will knock their socks off.
For instance I knew a machine-learning based RSS reader was possible in 2004 and almost 20 years later it hurt that nobody else had made one, so I made one. I got interested in heart-rate variability and couldn't understand why I couldn't find any web-based HRV apps that used the BTLE API so I made
I wrote the prototype of that using Junie, the agent built into IntelliJ IDEA. I had a lot of anxiety because how do if I know if I coded it wrong or if the Windows Bluetooth stack is just being the Windows Bluetooth stack? The fact that I couldn't find public examples that could connect to a heart rate monitor made me wonder if there was a showstopper problem; what if I invest hours in study the documentation and "it just doesn't work?"
With Junie I had something up and running in 20 minutes that I understood and was ready to continue the development of. Now I can study the documentation and experiment with things and not have the fear I'm going to get stuck.
If you're making things that make no different like another TCP/IP stack and another compiler and another database and another editor no wonder you have been working on it for decades and have nothing public to show for it. You could have made an implementation of any of those things that was unique and different and shipped it which requires and entirely different kind of craftsmanship (if you use AI or not) and leaves you with a very different kind of feeling in the end.
[1] like oil and water in most people's mind, but like peanut butter and jelly in my mind.
"no wonder you have been working on it for decades and have nothing public to show for it"
That's because it was never my intention to show it off. Your motivation comes from making something new and showing it off. My motivation comes from learning something new _to me_ and capturing aha insights, even if that thing has been done before. It isn't "wrong" per se, just a different path. I'm not necessarily interested in carrying my side project to completion, just as many artists carry a notebook for their sketches that are not meant for public consumption.
I too did a PhD and several startups and produced several new products and projects that were well received in the market, and incorporated much that I learnt from my side projects.
But your comment did help jog me out of my local minimum. Thanks for your input.
Reminds me of how like 10 years ago there were the fanbois who wanted to do their cars in Material Design or tatto Material Design on their face and such.
reply