I had been active on Reddit for close to 15 years, and left due to the API decisions. That move feels more justified every time I bump into Reddit, from being unable to view programming questions from a work VPN, to the emails begging me to invest in their IPO, to their exec pay fiasco.

Reddit is a shell of what it was, but I think this is largely due to stepping away from it. I know several people that use it religiously, and they don’t notice it as much as I do.

In a similar vein, Lemmy can have some absolutely batshit views too, and can also be incredibly toxic at times. We just don’t notice it as much because we’re used to it, but I bet some people new to Lemmy would see some posts/comments and think “eh, no thanks”. I won’t say that Lemmy is as toxic as Reddit, but the community size makes it more obvious on Reddit.

Yeah, that’s true. It amazes me how some of my team in NYC will make double what I make, but live like I lived when I was a student, and be amazed that I own a car.

*If you’re in the US.

Some interns in the US make more than experienced engineers in Europe…

I work at a FAANG company. I’ve also worked at startups and smaller national companies. They’re all morally bankrupt, just in many different ways.

Hell, I’ve worked for “tech for good” clients that have done reprehensible things that required legal intervention…

On one hand, Farage is a massive cunt, an enemy of the state, and the man responsible for irreparable damage to UK politics due to Brexit.

On the other, if Reform is going to run against the Tories, there’s a real opportunity his tinpot party takes the Gammon/flag-shagger vote away from Sunak’s populist run as Tory leader, and in a month we see the Tory party get absolutely annihilated.

Years ago, I said that it was quite sad to see that Conservative’s had lost their party to the populism of the Boris era, because many MP’s that wanted to see a strong union (bear in mind the full name of the Tories is the Conservative and Unionist Party) were expelled from the party and ostracised to make room for grifters under BoJo. While I’m no conservative, many voters value conservatism in their politics, and while I don’t like Starmer much either, he’s basically the closest thing to a Conservative AND a Liberal in major party politics in the UK.

My vote is probably with the Greens this year, but in many areas Labour should absolutely destroy the Tories, hopefully to the point where they become the third or fourth party in the UK.

I remember joining the industry and switching our company over to full Continuous Integration and Deployment. Instead of uploading DLL’s directly to prod via FTP, we could verify each build, deploy to each environment, run some service tests to see if pages were loading, all the way up to prod - with rollback. I showed my manager, and he shrugged. He didn’t see the benefit of this happening when, in his eyes, all he needed to do was drag and drop, and load the page to make sure all is fine.

Unsurprisingly, I found out that this is how he builds websites to this day…

As someone with IBS, I’ve kept an eye on potential remedies or cures for years, and while I’d love to be supportive of this, I’m skeptical that it will actually amount to something until human trials are effective and treatment actually starts to roll out.

I spend time in England and France,.so can answer for mostly one and a little of the second.

For England, the best transportation is usually in the south east, mainly London. In most of the UK, public transport can take you there, but it’s both prohibitively expensive, unreliable for anything time-sensitive, or will take longer than just driving. In Bristol, we joke about how terrible our public transport is by talking about cycling. We cycle more than all cities bar London. Pair that with the fact that our roads are heavily congested AND we’re a mostly hilly city shows that the only option that won’t result in being late for work is cycling…

In (southern) France, it’s quite similar. The price is much better, but the connectivity could be better. You’ll also find that transport doesn’t deal with peak times as well as roads can.

I graduated in CS alongside a guy in his fifties. He’s now retired, but he had easily 10-15 years as a software engineer, and was the lead of a group at a large company before he retired, so I assume it all went well for him.

If you want to learn something, do it. if you want to do it professionally, do it.

It’s a mix of both. My wife makes good money as a teacher, primarily because she’s very senior in her role, and takes leadership responsibilities. Teachers are required in (mostly) equal measure everywhere, whereas software engineers always gravitate towards HCOL areas where the jobs are. If you’re not in one of these areas, you’re stuck with limited jobs, with limited pay.

My commute is close to two hours, one way, but the pay I can get here is over double what I’ll get where I live. Comparably, as a senior I probably get paid less than a new graduate in a HCOL city in the US.

My wife is a teacher. Her pay was mostly comparable to mine throughout our careers. My pay has literally tripled since working in London.

Currently, there are senior design and development roles in my home city of Bristol that pay less than what you’d get paid as a fast food manager.

Not all programmers live in the US. In the UK, especially outside of London, the pay is surprisingly bad.

Given how messed up the care homes have been for over a decade, I can’t say I’m surprised. The cost is insane, and some of the documentaries released from the BBC and Channel 4 have shown that the “care” available has been worse than what you’d see in a prison.

In their eyes, it’s a natural progression. Children are probably cheaper, after all…

What’s funny is that this wasn’t a small company either. I won’t name it because it’ll be very easy to find this person, but they landed a leadership position with very little experience - think a few years working as a dev, and maybe one as a manager.

In my eight years working in consultancy, I’ve seen plenty of examples of this. I could write a book on some of the mental shit I’ve seen, from workplace wellness app owners trying to bully me online for having a single bug in their app, to finding several GB of fake Katy Perry nudes stored in a production database for a major company. Tech is totally fucked.

A box that allows someone to write HTML and JS and have it appear verbatim on a web page.

A horrific idea, and one that’s surprisingly hard to implement, as any sane CMS will stop you executing random code onto a web page, and any sane framework would stop you building a form in a free text box to POST data.

Every time we tried to fight this he would say “but WordPress would let you do this”. He tried to petition his boss to rewrite an entire web site and application we’d just built and delivered to spec and on budget in WordPress because “it would be better”.

Unironically, yes.

I worked for a client where we had successfully delivered a working FOH site and booking/order system. A new head of marketing joined, and from the first meeting this guy proclaimed himself as a “tech lead” and evangelist. He wanted “full FTP access” within the first 5 minutes of our meeting. We told him we didn’t use FTP as everything was deployed via our CI pipeline, and he kicked off.

After some crisis meetings, he said he wanted to change the entire CMS to be HTML boxes, threatening to ditch us if we didn’t give him what we wanted. They were paying lots for this change, so in the end we obliged. He proceeded to delete basically everything we’d built, and tried to replicate all functionality using a A/B injection tool and a HTML field. Clients were pissed, because none of it worked, and they lost some serious money from it.

In the end, we rolled back and said “fuck it, full git access, you’re a dev now”, and at midnight he brought the site down because he decided to rewrite some db transaction logic to write data to another store. To him, transactions were “outdated tech”, and he tried to clean it up by just performing destructive changes on their own…

In the end, they ditched us, and we were glad to be gone (they bought out their own contract). Sadly, he got his way, changed his title to “lead tech director”, hired a team, and their site went from fairly slick to looking like something from Geocities. That company no longer exists, and sadly, I can’t remember his name so I can’t see where he failed upwards to.

I’d love to know how they measured this, because if they just took two Jira boards for two projects, compared the ticket times, and said “yep, Rust is good” that’s both insane and completely expected by some big tech managers.

I don’t deny it, it’s just nice to see reasoning with a headline, so that I could take it to another team and say “let’s try Rust because…”

Funny enough, I probably did more software engineering as a web dev than I did as a software engineer at some companies.

In the UK, at least, the only difference typically between a web developer and a software engineer is £15-20k in salary. Frankly, we’re all software engineers…

Should also add Hacktivist. A few of their songs are politically charged, and several calls BoJo a cunt.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YWzwEPYIjYM

That’s standard in the UK. Our justice system views rehabilitation as the ultimate goal, not punishment. They will serve this as a minimum, but will likely never see life outside of a cell based on their reaction to being sentenced.

Even after parole, their life will forever be scrutinised by law enforcement and medical examiners to determine their mental state. Anything that doesn’t scream “normal member of society” puts them back in jail.