Based on what you've written, my answer is: no. You don't sound cut out for it.
> The market isn't the limitless growth starry-eyed future it was during the first 20 years of the 21st century. Now I imagine with AI, headcounts are just going to whittle down to the bare essentials as junior devs become completely unneeded, thus removing their chance of getting enough experience to level up to senior.
You couldn't be more wrong.
20 years ago, you needed to buy or rent servers, pay for bandwidth, marketing/reaching your audience was hard, eyeballs were expensive, etc. To get a service off the ground, you needed to have at least $50k of cash for table stakes.
Today, you can get a virtual slice of very fast compute with very cheap bandwidth for $50/mo. It isn't unreasonable to work a minimum wage job, live very modestly, for 5 years, covering that $50/mo expense, building a product by yourself, that could become worth $1B or more.
In other words, there is practically limitless opportunity today, whereas before only those with significantly more resources had the opportunities.
If you aren't able to see the incredible opportunity you have in front of you, then yeah, you should most likely get out of the industry, because you ARE right that as software continues to get easier to create through innovation, the need for simple laborers will continue to decline.
If there is practically limitless opportunity today, what have you been doing to harness it, if you don't mind sharing? Just curious what specific avenues of growth you see as viable/interesting given your experience and insight.
Operating my own consulting practice, working on a startup, working with non-profits, and getting to pick and choose what I work on.
I've been in the industry since the late 1980s, and I will say that things have only gotten better with respect to opportunity as time has passed, and everything going on today is just more signal that things are, at least in the short term, continuing to get better.
Regarding avenues for growth, it's the same story that repeats throughout history: automation. Just as the agricultural revolution and industrial revolutions supported the growth of population through increased output, the technological revolution is having the same impact over the last 20 years.
Despite the radical impact that recent, where "recent" is the past 10-20 years, technological advancement has had on life as we know it, it's my opinion that we are actually only just scratching the surface of the impact that it will have on humanity, likely over the next 100-200 years.
It's going to take a lot of people with a lot of novel ideas to take us through that revolution. And, each step will introduce changes that will free up people to pursue what comes next, to continue to build on top of the advancements that came before.
If that doesn't excite you and make you want to be part of that, then yeah, you probably should find a different career.
With our aging population that's only living longer and longer, there's already a dire shortage of healthcare professionals: perhaps you'd be better suited to pursuing that, instead?
If Calendly didn't include language in their Terms & Conditions that stated using the Calendly application requires users to give permission to listed third-party services like Heap to collect usage information, then shame on them.
> Information Collected Automatically From You.
>
> [...]
>
> Third-Party Tools.
> We may disclose information to third parties or allow third parties to directly collect information using these technologies on our Website, such as social media companies, advertising networks, companies that provide analytics including ad tracking and reporting, security providers, and others that help us operate our business and Website. We use such third-party tools subject to your consent, opt-out preferences, or other appropriate legal basis where legally required. [...]
So, yeah, if you use Calendly, you accept their terms of use and their privacy policy has informed users of such third-party collection of data, so there's the informed consent by accepting these terms.
IANAL, but if this class action doesn't get thrown out, it will have a serious chilling effect on any company that has users in California.
All visits to Calendly.com are met with the following boilerplate message:
> We respect your personal privacy
>
> We and our third party partners use cookies and other tracking technologies to provide a proactive support experience, enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts.
>
> Learn more
And, "Learn more" is linked to https://calendly.com/privacy - so, yes, but it may be possible that by that point you're already being tracked.
I suppose it's an interesting question that needs a definitive answer: by clicking on a link to a website, are you thereby implicitly agreeing to the site's terms and conditions before you've had a chance to review them, at least until you've had the opportunity to review them and then decide to discontinue using that site or not?
Is a brick-and-mortar business obligated to present you with a copy of their business policies _before_ you enter their establishment? No. You are free to inquire before patronizing their business, and they are free to inform you of them after-the-fact. I would expect that a website should be treated similarly: by visiting the site, until you choose to discontinue using the site, you are agreeing to the site's terms and conditions, sight-unseen, whatever they may be.
> The distributed model means that a single post from an account with followers on (e.g.) 400 instances means that that’s 400 connections to 400 servers, all at once.
If only the kids working on Mastodon were old enough to know what NNTP is, they wouldn't have made such poor engineering decisions.
Of course, in order to comply with the GPL, you must make the source available as well. Which means, anyone else can turn around and either do the same thing, or even make a copy available for free:
If anyone feels strongly enough about these package maintainers charging a fee, they are welcome to pay the fee and then make the packages available free of charge.
But, that would be work. Less work than the work done by the original package creator, but still, work.
And, many people want to be compensated for their time. Ultimately, as long as the package maintainer charges a reasonable enough fee that the value provided exceeds the relative cost of the fee, then everyone wins.
It's hard to know if "their code was horribly written" without privileged knowledge about their code, but we can infer some things or at least formulate some reasonable assumptions based on what factual information is publicly available:
> On August 1, 2012, Knight Capital Americas LLC (“Knight”) experienced a significant error in the operation of its automated routing system for equity orders, known as SMARS. [...]
> Upon deployment, the new RLP code in SMARS was intended to replace unused code in the relevant portion of the order router. This unused code previously had been used for functionality called “Power Peg,” which Knight had discontinued using many years earlier. Despite the lack of use, the Power Peg functionality remained present and callable at the time of the RLP deployment. The new RLP code also repurposed a flag that was formerly used to activate the Power Peg code. Knight intended to delete the Power Peg code so that when this flag was set to “yes,” the new RLP functionality—rather than Power Peg—would be engaged."
> [...] In 2003, Knight ceased using the Power Peg functionality. In 2005, Knight moved the tracking of cumulative shares function in the Power Peg code to an earlier point in the SMARS code sequence. Knight did not retest the Power Peg code after moving the cumulative quantity function to determine whether Power Peg would still function correctly if called.
A system that can, in a catastrophic failure, single-handedly put your entire company out of business, is what I'd consider mission-critical.
Mission-critical systems should, by definition, be held to a higher standard of quality than non-critical systems.
A mission-critical system that has dead code still in production for 9 years, untested, and allowing the "repurpos[ing of] a flag," suggests the level of quality that may be at play.
Your guess is as good as mine, but this smells like a pretty grievous coding error, lack of quality around deployment processes, and insufficient testing and validation.
For a system that is so mission-critical, that a simple "mistake" put the entire company out of business in one single event, this seems pretty "horrible" to me.
> Most of my roles have been through recommendations which short-circuited the typical tech interviews or was I hired by non-technical people who only cared about the output, so I have been fortunate in that regard.
If you realize that this approach leads to success, why are you trying to do things differently?
When you know of a path that leads to success, and you decide to not travel that path, you shouldn't be surprised when you find yourself on a path that doesn't lead to success.
You already know which path does. Talk to your therapist and try to figure out why you're choosing to not take that path.
Honestly, the reason is that I have no idea how I ended up in those places or why those people thought I could do the work. It's a place I have been exploring by speaking to old bosses, but ultimately I do not really know how to target a search towards people like that.
One of the reasons I'm working on these side projects is to try to show to others who I am as a way of marketing myself to those kinds of people.
When people talk about "10X developers," this is what we are referring to.
It is possible for an individual to have outsized impact, and it's not necessarily about having extraordinary skill, it's about knowing what to work on and what to ignore.
I never said it was _easy_. I said it was _possible_, and it hasn't always been possible to do with a $50/mo starting cost.
That was my point.
Opportunity today is more affordable than it has ever been in the history of computing.