There's a lot of money injected into astroturfing and propaganda by big LLM in my opinion. I'm unsure who it is, specifically, but it is undeniable it's there; from reddit posts talking about how "I havent written code in 60 years" to "I have 30 YoE, FAANG experience, impeccable track record, and I can't get a job....Drumroll It's due to AI!".
Even here it can get pretty negative in the comments, in waves. I've noticed a lot of articles about LLMs, making wild claims about its reach tend to get a lot of pro-LLM, supportive comments at first and then on less generalizing, fear-mongering comments are added, arguing against LLMs or limiting their predictions of it.
I'm guessing a lot of people aren't necessarily technical, and fully believe the big-llm promises and make broad assumptions about our profession; that or they're bots.
So only FAANG does engineering now? Pretty elitist take. Would you happen to have a FAANG company in your resume, by any chance?
Yes, non tech companies tend to care less about the technical end of things. They, we, "don't do engineering" in the sense of dealing with large scale systems, optimization, etc. Still have to understand the product, and translate business requirements into code and systems, often running with budget constraints. If that's not engineering, I don't know what is.
No, my opinion is that most engineering is done in startups. Few people I know went to startups and had to engineer real systems end-to-end. These weren't usually FAANG-scale monsters and single node could handle all projected load.
> Would you happen to have a FAANG company in your resume, by any chance?
No, I went to academia instead. But my spouse and brother in law are in FAANG (two different companies), and my husband admits he hadn't engineered a shit for years (and he's not a manager), but there was a glimpse of real engineering over the years, especially pre-2020.
Yeah, but it's very likely you won't be working like a mule, or creating a bicycle with three wheels. How could oneself be innovative and top talent under such conditions?
It's mostly about pay too. And yeah some people want more exciting jobs and maybe even outlandish stuff like the ones you listed (regardless of the sarcasm!). Yes at the end of the day most software isn't super exciting, but it doesn't make a tech stack or platform where most of your job prospects would approximate to "working on some run of the mill, mega enterprise or SMB software project" any more attractive for devs.
Especially when even its advocates somehow use that as an "upside". It might very well be for a lot of people! But it's also a massive turn off for others. I have never worked in a startup or big tech, and work on very concrete and critical products yet I'd very much rather work on even outlandish SV stuff (at least the pay is usually great and the job environment could be good!) rather than on some SMB CRUD or some generic backend service. If I don't have a choice I could do it but it's not super enticing.
For all of the "SV startups" that are working on hard tech problems (new DBs, LLMs, etc.) there are thousands of SV startup CRUD apps.
Most SV tech stacks are romanticized when in reality they are just are all mostly some flavor of a MEAN stack that is building a CRUD. The allure is the lottery payout and a clean slate tech stack, not that the specific tech itself is used.
This is just the run of the mill politics you see at every big company (or mid sized one).
I worked at a PHP shop, it was pure mierda. Worst code I've ever seen in my life. Pure incompetency. Does that say anything about PHP shops as a whole?
What's skills? Pumping out code ala startup? Sounds like a stable environment. Someone with a good eye will still be able to pick out flaws in the processes/architecture and learn a thing or two.
"The main concern is having replaceable talent to reliably do X" as in every other company?
I swear you guys make having a regular job sound like being under slavery. It's just a job. Some companies are boring, that's just part of the job, and being able to adapt to different environments is what makes a good sde imo.
Lots of places are not like this. I work at a large tech company, at its not like this at all.
My machine is not locked down. I can use vim or whatever ide/editor I want. We don't use scrum/safe, we're expected to contribute to the actual system design. etc If I have a choice, i'm not working at a place like that.
However if you work in dotnet at a traditional "enterprise", it is highly likely to be like this. I have a choice, so i'm not going to choose that.
Wanting replaceable talent drives the tech decisions to only use the "standard" microsoft stack. Other companies value picking the right tool, then teaching people. The best companies don't even care what language you use, and are happy to bring you up speed.
I've found a position that uses dotnet which does not have this culture which is good. But i can totally imagine not picking dotnet to avoid this culture.
Good thing that at scale, private package repositories or even in-house development is done. Personally, I would argue that an engineer unable to tell apart perfect from good, isn't a very good engineer in my book, but some engineers are unable to make compromises.
And what's Ruby's maintainability like? As in, once the project gets inherited by a new dev, or your reach a larger than a couple of devs scale?
Not being ironic, genuinely curious. My only parallel is JavaScript and that becomes a pain in the ass quick due to the small bugs that go unnoticed, even working as a lone dev. TypeScript catches a great deal of those and you can get by with less testing and a more readable (imo) codebase, so a win-win for me.
Even here it can get pretty negative in the comments, in waves. I've noticed a lot of articles about LLMs, making wild claims about its reach tend to get a lot of pro-LLM, supportive comments at first and then on less generalizing, fear-mongering comments are added, arguing against LLMs or limiting their predictions of it.
I'm guessing a lot of people aren't necessarily technical, and fully believe the big-llm promises and make broad assumptions about our profession; that or they're bots.