After realizing that, I decided I'd try as hard as I possibly could to never have to work at a job that I didn't like. I already didn't want kids so that part is easy. The other part of the equation is saving lots of money. I'm not an ascetic by any means, but I live well below my means on a SWE salary which means I can save quite a bit of money each year.

I also recognize that not wanting to go corporate severely limits my options down the line. But capitalism is all about making money for other people. If I can make someone a lot of money, they're not going to care about if I have the chops to stand up a Kubernetes cluster or write a Next.js app or whatever (I hope).

I don't think I'm super smart, I'd say I'm pretty average for this line of work. But I reckon that most SWEs are focused on learning new technologies to get to their next job, or are overly concerned with technical problems. I like to think that I am pragmatic enough about only doing things that are going to deliver business value to make up for being average in smarts.

Anyways, there's not really a point to this rant. These are just some thoughts I have had about optimizing my career for my own happiness, and how I hope I can stay a hot commodity even though I hate working in the cloud and my software skills aren't bleeding edge.

The things I did to get here are honestly kind of stupid. I started out at a defense contractor after graduating and left in the first six months because all the software devs were jumping ship. Went to a small business defense contractor (yep that's a thing) and learned to build web apps with React and Django. Then the pace of business slowed so after about 18 months I got on the Leetcode grind and got into a FAANG. Realized I hated it, so I quit after about 9 months with no job lined up.

While unemployed I convinced myself I was going to get a job in robotics (I actually got pretty close, I had 3 final level interviews with robotics companies), but the job market went to shit pretty much the exact day I quit my job lol. I spent about 6 months just learning ROS, Inverse Kinematics, math for robotics, gradient descent and optimization, localization, path planning, mapping etc. I taught at a game development summer camp for a month and a half, that was awesome. Working with kids is always a blast. Also learned Rust and built a prototype for a multiplayer browser-based coding game I had been thinking about for a while. It was an excuse to make a full stack application with some fun infrastructure stuff.

https://ai-arena.com/#/multiplayer

The backend is no longer running, but originally users could see their territory on the galaxy grow as their code won battles for them.

For the current role, I really just got lucky. The previous engineer was on his way out for non-job related reasons. He had read a lot of the books I had (Code Complete, Domain Driven Design) and I think we just connected over shared interests and intellectual curiosity.

I think that in the modern day, so many people are really just in this space for the paycheck-- and that's okay! Everyone needs to make a living. But I think that if you have that intellectual curiosity and like making stuff, people will see that and get excited. It ends up being a blessing and a curse.

I have failed interviews because of honesty "I would Google the names of books and read up on that subject" or "I think if I was doing CSS then I would be in the wrong role" (I realize how douchey that sounds but I just was not meant to design things, I have tried). But I have also gone further in interviews than I should have because I was really engrossed in a particular problem like path planning or inverse kinematics and I was able to talk about things in plain terms.

I think it's easier to learn things quickly if they are something you're actually interested in, it becomes effortless. Basically I just try to do that so I can learn optimally, then I try to get lucky.

EDIT: Oh I just thought of more good advice. Find senior devs to learn from. They can be kind of grumpy in their online presence, but they help you avoid so many tar pits. I am in a Discord channel with a handful of senior engineers. The best way to get feedback is to naively say "I'm going to do X", they will immediately let you know why X is a bad idea. A lot of their advice boils down to KISS and use languages with strong typing.

This is literally the second sentence of that article.

Right now I'm engineer No. 1 at a current startup just doing DDD with a Django monolith. I'm still pretty Jr. and I'm wondering if there's a way to scale without needing to get into all of the things the author of this article mentions. Is it possible to get to a $100M valuation without needing all of this extra stuff? I realize it varies from business to business, but if anyone has examples of successes where people just used simple architecture's I'd appreciate it.

> Don't put in 80 hours a week for months unless you have good reason to think it's going to be worth it and do it with the full knowledge that you might be gambling on the company's generosity.

I agree. I'm also not 100% convinced the original story is even true.

Yes, I make sure that I have verified that what I am seeing is real. I immediately do a fact check. I read Haaretz because if Israeli media is confirming it then it is undoubtedly real.

So many people ask "how could people have just let this happen" with respect to the Holocaust. This is how. They didn't want to believe it. Or they justified it. Or they were more worried about other things.

Maybe you should re-examine your biases.

What is also true is that you can clearly see Israel conducting a genocide live, while every news outlet in the west denies it or justifies it.

I am not talking about fake news, I am talking about citizen journalists, footage of children who have been pulled out of rubble. Footage of leaflets dropped on a column of refugees. The civilian death tolls that the US confirms themselves. The harder Israel denies their atrocities, the stronger the backlash becomes when people see the truth with their own eyes.

Israel's far right and Netanyahu bear a huge amount of blame for the rise of antisemitism, because they point to these atrocities and say "this is what Jewish people globally stand for".

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/bisan-plestia-motaz-...

I don't know that Turkey has zero discriminatory laws against non-muslims, but they managed to operate as a secular state for almost 100 years before Erdogan.

> Do you think it's realistic that if Israel is replaced by a new state tomorrow that has a majority arab muslim population it won't quickly become somewhat theocratic and enforce some degree of religious law against people of other religions?

I have no way of knowing this.

> I think this outside view of a one state solution pretends the entire population of Israel believes in some sort of Western Democratic values and will provide a strong foundation of individual rights. I just don't see good evidence for that.

Noam Chomsky and Norm Finkelstein both agree with you on this point, and I tend to agree with them. My argument was not that a one-state solution was viable, but I was trying to get the OP to say if their idea of Zionism was exclusionary or not.

Personally I do not think that a one-state solution would be possible unless mass de-radicalization took place, because Israeli ethno-nationalists see coexistence as genocide. I think the most viable option is a two-state solution, where a competent Palestinian standing army could hopefully force some sort of detente.

No, it would not. There would still be 400,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Palestinians in the West Bank would still live under occupation. Do you think that situation will not also reach a boiling point and end in ethnic cleansing as fascist rhetoric in Israel increases?

I think the framing of this argument is so tricky, because states don't have any rights. States aren't human beings. There is so much to unpack in the statement "X state has a right to exist".

> On other hand, my interpretation of people who are self-proclaimed anti-Zionists logically flows from above statement that they believe that the present state of Israel DOES NOT have a right to exist. Which implies deportation of extermination of 6 million Jewish Israelis

I am not saying that Israel's borders should be dissolved, but if Israel and Palestine were integrated into a single state where Jews and Arabs had equal rights, would this not still be a home for Jews?

Destruction of the state of Israel is not equivalent with the genocide of all Israeli Jews, unless your definition of genocide is the same as the one used by white supremacists in the US, who believe that letting non-whites into the country is genocide.

The point I am trying to make is that is Zionism, by your definition, exclusionary? If so then what you are describing is an ethnostate, which many would argue is a fascist idea.

Jews, Roma, Kurds, and all ethnic minorities deserve human rights. However, they are not entitled to statehood and their states are not entitled to any rights themselves.

Also, I do agree there are antisemites who say "zionism" as a dogwhistle for "jews".

Fascism does not "just stop". You can already hear the far right wingers claiming that Israel also has a right to expand into Lebanon and the Transjordan. Ironically looking at how Germany was radicalized is really useful for understanding how Fascism has taken hold in Israel.

What I believe is actually happening is that TikTok debunks a lot of Hasbara talking points about the Israeli occupation of palestine (because people can see the violence with their own eyes), but then people are not educated further about the nuances of Zionism and Judaism, the different political movements within Israel like Gush Emunim and how they are not related to Judaism at large.

Because Israel has so successfully conflated Zionism (a political movement) with Judaism (a religious one), it increases the possibility that when westerners stop supporting Israel they can adopt antisemitic viewpoints.