I've not seen smart professionals put passion before money unless it's their own company, and that's becaue they expect to earn quite a lot in the future, so it's usually money first, and that's OK because you need it to live comfortably.

Very relevant book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Cartels_Do_Not_Exist

Oh, right! This one was cheaper because it wasn't ready. Cheaper is gooder for business.

The value of an engineer is not what task they work on, but what problems they can solve. To this teen, the code is a black box, the LLM has most of the value in their pairing, and another random teen will replace easily them.

LLMs were trained on the work of engineers, not prompting teens. The profession will continue to evolve, and the LLMs will improve along, thanks to professional, manual code still being written, not to vibe-coders.

https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/penis-size-by-country

A good Java architecture is possible, though, but it requires planning, discipline, and restraint; and yet the ever-changing business needs can mar your beautiful castle given enough time. COBOL is simpler and more straightforward, you have to go out of your way to mess it as badly as Java allows.

This is the secret sauce. You'll be responsible for any defects if you didn't prepare your test data to act like a massive unit test. Wonder how hard is to prepare the ideal test data vs writing the unit tests themselves in COBOL and verifying their translation. I guess if you throw enough data at it, the effort is minimal while the coverage becomes good enough to fix any bugs manually.

As a side note, I can't fathom why they chose Java. It's easier to teach COBOL to a competent engineer than to rewrite everything in a language that encourages onion architectures. Why not Go, for example?

I can see some engineers deciding that the button press needs 2FA or TOTP so only you can unpress it. Bonus points if you need to buy their brand's smartwatch to use it.

Disclaimer: I don't know any trans person IRL, so my perception is likely skewed by their loud online interactions.

See this article about muxes, the third gender of the prehispanic Zapotec civilization that still survives today, for an example of accepting gender choice differences healthily, without creating culture wars, and without aggresive treatments on an otherwise healthy individual:

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20181125-the-third-gender...

Trying to make-believe that people can convert to the opposite sex, and even go back, is doing more psychological damage than accepting our differences, not to speak of the invasive/destructive treatments on an otherwise healthy body.