I haven't thought of a word for it yet, but it has something to do with how many people participate in the discourse now. The numbers are large enough that someone somewhere will always have some opinion. Every time.
This is what I really don’t get about these types of folks. Do they really want to remember their life’s work as “kissing ass and playing politics”? I get the “work to live” and all that, but you’re basically tossing away half your life…for what, money? How much money do you need!?
Because that's not how they perceive their works. Instead it is "advocating for one's own team and passion", "helping others advance their career", "networking and building long-term connections".
Well you can "work to live" in a nice big house, with a nanny, eating steaks, flying business class to ski in the alps or scuba in the Galapagos... I think it takes a lot of money before you feel like you don't need more money.
Not at all. Most people can be super happy with less than the average tech salary (at a point where they don't feel they need more if it comes at the expense of work life balance, time with family, job satisfaction, etc).
I’ll never understand this WHY X - BECAUSE Y - WELL Y IS TOO MUCH, Z IS MORE THAN ENOUGH comment trifecta. Obviously a lot of people are not super happy, otherwise they wouldn’t kiss asses and play politics to get more money.
Just that all of those activities you mention feel like a useless life compared to spending time with your own children in a house big enough for everyone to have their space, but small enough to force you to feel you're living with each other, seeing them grow and thrive, and going around your closest nature patch.
Not much money is needed to have a fulfilling and worth-living life.
Other than the big house, which can easily be achieved in much of the country, nothing in the list above incentivizes me to either work harder or kids ass.
Sure, lots of people don't care about those things and therefore don't shape their careers to get them. But some do, and that's what we're talking about.
Though to be clear I should have said "it can take a lot of money..."
It feels unsavory from the outside, but politics is also the art of getting stuff done. It’s not throwing your life away if you can point at an org chart and a roadmap delivered and say “I helped build that”. Leadership is just as important as implementation.
You need to have the right personality. Either actually enjoy the game, or have an unsatiable (fear-driven?) need for status, or something else of this sort. We don't get to choose our personalities, though some limited modifications are possible - see treatments for personality disorders, for example.
I question this every single day. Constantly the argument arises that if I played politics and ass-kissed, I might receive more opportunities to create bigger impact to help people / entertain people / provide some valuable service or product. Yet it feels painful to have to self-promote (even if framing it as "documentation of your work").
It is akin to musicianship in a sense. How many of the absolutely, obscenely, most talented musicians have you come across in completely obscured settings? At the pub, the hole-in-the-wall jazz club in a C-tier city, deep on the internet with 13 plays on SoundCloud. But we all know that pop music doesn't necessarily reward technical musicianship.
It isn't the highest paying path in life, but this is what I chose as well. Working for small companies with good people is infinitely better than working at massive companies with decent people. No matter how many good intentions there are, the politicking is utterly exhausting and unfulfilling.
Then again, I'm the kind of person who moved to the countryside to get away from the city life, so YMMV.
I've done both things, and they have their pros and cons. Big businesses can build bigger and more impactful things, and it is very satisfying to contribute to those things. The original poster is still clearly proud of the things they were able to build by "playing politics and kissing ass".
But (for me) there is definitely a certain ennui to being a little cog in a big machine, especially because everybody else there is doing the same thing. So being in smaller more cohesive companies definitely has its advantages.
It is almost certainly a problem with size, cost, and features.
The wearables are just too big, too expensive, and the feature set too small.
Much like with VR goggles, every problem they solve is solved far better and more cheaply with another device most people already have and use.
I don't think it has anything to do with the moral or social implications of taking pictures of people privately. The second any of the above are resolved, society will willingly give up even more privacy without a hiccup, as we've done every other time the choice was presented.
Agreed. But perhaps that’s the problem? Instead of trying to go instantly mainstream via the consumer market, perhaps the tie-hold are niche professional / commercial markets? Or niche consumers markets provided by the business (e.g., museums)?
It’s not a tech issue, it’s a marketing issue (and lack of imagination).
Technology is amazing and I want to raise my children in such a way that they learn to use it to improve and enrich their lives.
Video games are amazing. Art has never been easier to create. Being able to spend time with your friends when they are not physically present is incredible. There are so many great podcasts for children.
But silicon valley seems directly opposed to enabling the best technology uses without also requiring exposure to the worst.
Please, can I just let my son listen to music when he goes to bed without also being forced to expose him to some off-brand tiktok hamfisted haphazardly into the app with no way to disable.
Can I let him watch great YouTube channels without the feed automatically funneling him towards absolute garbage.
Something as simple as per app time limits are seemingly impossible for Google or Apple to implement.
It's exhausting to navigate when you don't want to be draconian and just ban everything out right, as if that's even realistic.
Not sure about Google but Apple has per-app time limits, per-app type time limits, overall screen time limits, time of day limits, parental review before app install, parental review before purchases can be made, etc. I've found it to be quite robust in managing my kids' access to the internet.
I’m continually impressed by my 12 year old son’s ability to get around those restrictions. He recently got around his time limit with Brawl Stars by having his friends sending him Brawl Stars view links via WhatsApp. This opens links using Safari’s underlying engine (SFSafariViewController), which does not get considered by the safari app time block.
The tools very commonly don't work as advertised tho, but people still buy them because of the incredible promises of increased efficiency. And since it's usually not easy to measure, they keep paying, sometimes companies even force their employees to use it.
It's an even bigger grift from the POV of companies building AI into their products - investors pressure companies to add AI features, managers demand thing that aren't achievable, developers bodge things together because they know it's worthless, marketing sells it like it's perfect, customers don't actually want it so sales bundles it into every plan and increases the price. Number go up, everyone gets a promotion. The customer has no alternatives because everyone else is doing the same.
> The tools work as advertised and are currently priced way cheaper than they cost to create?
Well, that's the grift problem right there - some people use public funds to subsidize a product, undermine the competition, front-run and scalp the hardware market, create inflation for everything, misallocate capital and deprive other assets of investment, all the while attempting a vendor lock-in at somebody else's expense.
Why would anybody see any of these as good is beyond me.
I can confirm that they are completely useless for real programming
And I can confirm, with similar years of experience, that they are not useless.
Absolutely incredible tools that have saved hours and hours helping me understand large codebases, brainstorm features, and point out gaps in my implementation or understanding.
I think the main disconnect in the discourse is that there are those pretending they can reliably just write all the software, when anyone using them regularly can clearly see they cannot.
But that doesn't mean they aren't extremely valuable tools in an engineer's arsenal.
I feel like I have to be strategic with my use of claude code. things like frequently clearing out sessions to minimize context, writing the plan out to a file so that I can review it more effectively myself and even edit it, breaking problems down into consumable chunks, attacking those chunks in separate sessions, etc. it's a lot of prep work I have to do to make the tool thrive. that doesn't mean it's useless, though.
The world turns around us. you can choose not to turn with it, but it turns all the same.
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