I learned coding nearly 24 years ago and still learning new stuff all the time. At no point in time I had to rely on a subscription model to learn and do new stuff.

If LLM and agents are the default tools for coding and building software, at least for next few years, it seems like a no-brainer to invest $2000-3000 on hardware, like a Halo Strix PC.

4+ years in product development. Python/R + a low-level language. Terabyte-scale data stream and batch processing. HPC knowledge (vectorization, memory access, distributed computing) to build efficient algorithms. Degree in a quantitative field (Math, Stats, Physics, CS, or Engineering).

Upper limit on compensation was 200k.

> Although saying that I know first hand low starting salaries have pushed students towards mechanical engineering or CS if inclined.

You answered your own question. The American engineering pool consists mostly of high school diplomas who can't pass PE exam at multiple trials.

Edit: coincidentally, my wife was offered a state civil engineering job in Bay area. Didn't take up because the salary offered was below 100k, even with 5 years of experience.

At my work in insurance solutions we're solving perabyte scale problems. We do not have a Rust developer in the team, but taught ourselves with the AI and now automating workflows which took days to under a minute now.

I have limited enterprise budget and Claude 4.7 costs 7x more. So unless there's close to 7x improvement, it doesn't make sense to switch to 4.7.

I actually gave both 4.6 a really complex task. It kept on thinking for several minutes before I hit the brakes. I then gave 4.7 the same task, and didn't notice any difference in behavior. Clearly not worth the 7x premium.

I hope 4.6 becomes cheaper/free at some point because I'm starting to see a push towards optimizing token expenditures across the board. While frontier models are still the default for developing new workflows, everybody is starting to ask how to automate repetitive tasks without using tokens.

Our household income is 300k, and I took a big risk purchasing a home in Socal where mortgage is 50% of our take home income. In a space of 1 year or so, we went from saving two out of four paychecks each month, to sinking two into mortgage each month.

For me, we have one kid and we plan to stay put for at least 10 years. It's a good school district. The quality of life is excellent considering the weather, outdoors, cultural diversity, things to do, and proximity to international airport. We have friends and family here.

But to me what mattered most is that I am 40, our income is going to plateau. Renting is good advice, but in 5-10 years, we won't be able to afford rent here, let alone buy. On the other hand, I can refinance now and bring my mortgage down to what I was paying for rent previously, and in 10-15 years be mortgage free at a place with all the benefits I mentioned above.