Comments by "Traveller" (@traveller23e) on "A Life After Layoff" channel.

Thank you...also, there's not much you can really find out from a company's website. As a programmer, I usually don't give a shit if they're selling aircraft or video games, I care about what languages and technologies they use and what kind of organisation and management they have.
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It's a classic in software jobs
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What happened?
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"Good ability to self-manage" and "able to keep deadlines" are another good combo
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@SlickRCBD Not to mention maintenance, the price to buy the car, etc.
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@AV57 True, although it doesn't help that 1) the employers don't organise any decent training, and 2) they don't pay enough for old employees to stay
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@visceratrocar The difference is that AI now has (or very soon will have) the ability to take nonsensical and woolly business concepts and turn them into code, and that's the real gap that has always failed to be spanned with all these attempts at "anyone can code now" tools.
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@egates and how'd it go?
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At my first job I knew how much the raise would be after the first 3 months (17%), but that raise just never came. Only contact my boss would have with me was to tell me (with every other word in all caps) that I wasn't doing stuff properly (there was no training) or according to the plan (code for a word doc he half-assed and then considered a full plan with everything clearly laid out to make our lives easier, despite the fact that it always left a huge number of open questions). Those plans were actually a major insult, because I was hired to be a programmer, not a typist, but he removed any possibility of my doing my job properly. Still, didn't help the deadlines never allowed doing things the right way either...
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It's amazing to me that they use "essential worker" yet don't pay those employees the highest salaries in the company...if they're essential, why don't we get paid like the company depends on them?
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@nathanm2664 Lol classic, same here. I lasted 5 months before getting a better job. "Scrum" where all the tasks were pushed on you and you had to get x number of story points done a day, deadlines absurdly unrealistic in order to appease the client, CEO who thought of himself as the god of programming but whose entire architecture was as difficult as possible to work with...I was hired around the same time as 4 or 5 other people, and by the time I left only one other was still in the company. Unlike some of the other people here I did get pay for the time during my notice, but the guy never dealt with some important bureaucracy leaving me in a pickle. Actually when I turned in my notice, he asked if there was any way he could convince me to stay 😂. Conveniently, my new job started exactly a week before he had a make-it-or-break-it golive that was bound to be a disaster.
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@savannahsmiles1797 I just had a headhunter proudly tell me about the great training I would have access to by working for them, they have this website where I can learn stuff in complete autonomy... The irony of course is as a self-taught software developer I know full well what employers think of that if you can't show any work experience, and that basically boils down to the same thing as being sent to a website on an as-needed basis.
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@Anamnesis I'm a software developer, so it's literally my job to learn new things and come up with solutions. Typically the solutions are to problems the business people have created for themselves, and as for the "learning things" part when job hunting recruiters for some reason seem to expect you to have experience in exactly the technologies they use.
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@friendmaker9210 Arguably that would imply market salary is lower than "market salary". Regardless, time to unionize.
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Ones I always love to see (on programming jobs, for reference) are "good time management" and "functions well under stress"
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Tragedy of the commons. Global warming isn't exactly going to improve the economy long-term either, but companies don't give a shit about that either.
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@bogdyee Sure, the industry has all sorts of tools that help such as compilers and profilers, and unit tests are certainly helpful, but the fact is that a compiler is deterministic (assuming a bug-free compiler, mileage may vary). Unit tests and profilers are useful for testing the program. Other kinds of analyzers are good for figuring out potential problems. Not sure what you mean by the delightfully vague "cloud tools", but I assume it has to do with tracking network traffic, or maybe load balancing and stuff? But at any rate none of these are both nondeterministic to a significant degree and affect the end result. Hooking up AI straight to the IDE in a position to generate code seems like a vary risky proposition. Your comparison to a plane's autopilot is not very apt, because the autopilots have very precise operational parameters and have a predetermined set of manouvres they can do (like level change, maintain a specific vertical speed, autoland in conditions that allow it, etc). Outside of this the pilots have to take over, and even when autopilot is engaged you still constantly have a pilot flying. AI has no such limits. Even if you tell people to look over the code before copying and pasting it, what are the chances they will do so? And it's a small (and practical!) step from the dev copying and pasting to someone hooking the AI up to the IDE and getting rid of the middleman. Regarding allowing AI to take important decisions, I suspect it's already happening. And the better and more intelligent AI gets the bigger a problem it will become.
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Same. Last year I had a guy almost hire me, he just wanted me to do a "quick" programming project so he could see how I did it. Requirements were "create a web app including authentication that consumes this NASA API and displays the data". I asked if the project would be paid, and he acted surprised and said I'd been the first person to ask that. I said I'd consider it, and once all the documentation arrived via email I looked at it and quietly groaned. I ended up not doing it as I was a little limited on time around travel and whatnot, and the recruiter later told me the hiring manager had been surprised since he thought it was just a couple hours of work. By my estimate it would probably have been a couple days to get right, in large part because I'm not a cybersecurity expert and would want to be extra careful with the login system.
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@althunder4269 I'm in Italy and am not set up to work as a business, so best case they ignore it, worst case I have the GdF (tax police) on my back. Chances are there's nothing I could do to make a bill legally binding when there was no up-front agreement to pay, but I'm hardly an expert so could be wrong.
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@Jupiterxice AI-powered hacking is scary as hell. There will come a day when our programming is done by AI, our cybersecurity is done by AI, and it'll be defeated by AI. And the owners of the AI are gunna get really rich real quick.
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