My problem is it always seems like I'm building skills to help some capitalist be more rich or make more money. If I want to build something to contribute to a community sans profit, there's the burdens of popularity if I'm successful.

I think people are afraid to admit that amusement is what brings them fulfillment. Having to work on something or build more skills sounds similar to a protestant work ethic to me, which was much more important when the essentials of living were not as assured as it is today (or you need to fit into certain social circles today).

I suppose it helps your personal character and having more things to talk about, but I don't know if worrying whether or not a majority of people I'd meet find me interesting because of my skill(s) is also a good selling point.

Overcoming the initial "why should I even look at this" to me is the hardest part

And we also chose to extend the presence of gambling in society - quite literally with sports gambling - but also adjacently with crypto markets and stock market apps

Tech has always had advantages around being able to slack off if you were good since it was a white collar desk job, but you could justify that to yourself as a sort of implied retainer arrangement. So it wasn't directly grifting or stealing.

Some people get a taste of real money relatively easily (like a $200k+ salary for slacking off) and want more though, maybe because they're afraid that good situation can't last and they need maximum value extracted before they're "found out".

And we are just not seeing major downsides to grifting unless you run afoul of the law, which can be slow to prosecute if you are on a bleeding edge like AI (like it was for crypto).

You can find some of the author's motivations here: https://ghuntley.com/a-new-chapter/

I obviously can't speculate beyond what's in there about the author, but for me, living in a bog standard apartment and working remote to support kids isn't exactly blog-worthy content. I used to live in apartments, and most of the new construction in the US is very cookie-cutter and sometimes depressing.

So, here's what mine would be:

1) a challenging hobby that's useful and more engaging in off-hours than more computer hobbies. Building a livable van certainly seems more interesting than living in an apartment to me.

2) changing scenery at a whim, given the time investment to find a place

3) a van that you can resell or give to your kids

I'd still choose a detachable RV though since it's probably way more comfortable for the price. Sure, I lose out on some options to stay for the night, but that isn't an insurmountable challenge if you can plan and live in a van. Living full time in an RV might also not be blog-worthy though.

I just straight-up do not believe that dollar amount, lol

You had to have bought a terrible van and went to a terrible mechanic that was maliciously breaking things so you'd come back for that to happen. Vans are work horses and usually simple compared to regular consumer vehicles.

I also have had bad tickets that define loose acceptance criteria and leave it up to the developer to decide the UX, edge cases, error handling, etc.

The former removes a lot of burden of decision from the developer. It feels like the author of the ticket is showing ownership. I can mostly worry about how to implement it and not worry if my decision is going to negatively affect users that I'll get blowback from.

The latter feels like they are letting an assumed-to-be-smart person make more decisions on the product and that they're closer to an ideas person hitting you up to make their latest world-changing startup idea.

With the latter, the developer is taking on more responsibilities and accountability. They need to be good at development and also good at understanding the users and the product and UX. That's two roles in one if they're good at both responsibilities (they probably aren't), but the compensation is likely only around 1 job.

And now that developers are also mixing with operations/cloud management responsibilities, you now have a lot of groups of people hitching their wagons to what the developers do or think is best. Everyone is here to support developers so developers are now making a bunch of decisions in areas they aren't experts at.

Following tickets (almost) blindly should be an advantage. At no point should I get a ticket and have to ask the question "will users actually want this?" because someone else should be answering that and not a developer. Being able to deliver a ticket that a developer can follow (almost) blindly means that thought and care are going into the decisions about how to deliver something. It ultimately means developers can make decisions in the areas they are experts at, and other staff can make decisions on things they are experts in.

Edit: definitely not disagreeing with your post, just some thoughts on the issue

If someone's being that greedy, they can't really use supply and demand to say their hands were tied in terms of controlling rent.

So if you think blockchain is bullshit, then VR/AR definitely is.

It feels like a sinking ship but we all know it's not going anywhere because humanity now depends too much upon getting messages anywhere in the world on the order of seconds.

Maybe having a bunch of hype cycles is normal and we're meant to dig through the bullshit for gold. Kind of resembles prompting AI over and over until you get a good response. It would be nice if the industry admitted that instead of trying to pretend every hype cycle is a guaranteed existence-changer. It changes your mindset and mental fortitude if you know you're going to be dealing with bullshit instead of being lied to and finding it out once you've accepted the job.

Also, don't forget a trend that was apparently so bullshit that people don't even mention it next to blockchain: VR/AR.

Half of them would look like job hoppers with such short tenures on their resume. Some of them have simultaneous executive positions at other companies.

If you want some evidence of short-term thinking not being a meme, it's probably that.

Pay up. Pay up. Pay up. That's why!

It will be short-lived unless its applied to make necessities as cheaply as possible. Otherwise none of us will have enough money for many luxuries.

Pretty un-fixable without better stewardship over the software industry. That won't come for decades, so you may as well join the dark side and make the money and practice the way you want with hobbies or start your own company to enforce it.

I guess the stewardship can happen on a team level, but someone who's being restrained can always go find another job where they'll build the complexity they desire that ultimately gets maintained by someone else.

I think there is even a widening talent gap where you can't get people excited about doing something that maybe should have been done years ago (assuming VM -> containers makes sense for a thing). The salary needs to go higher for things that are less beneficial to the resume.

The industry at large asks most developers to stay up-to-date, so it starts looking suspicious when a company doesn't stay up-to-date too. For C# in particular, companies who have only recently migrated to .NET 5+ are now a red flag to me considering how long .NET Core has been out.

They're gonna need to put up more money to get people back in the office then. Maybe even get rid of the open office bullshit. Remember when everyone actually had offices with actual doors?

Not only are people choosing the WFH job over the in office job given the same salary and benefits, but they'll likely choose a less-paying WFH job. Your in-office job pay needs to overcome both the convenience and getting-people-to-change-jobs taxes now. Otherwise you are getting people desperate for a job or that aren't skilled enough to land a WFH job.

So it's simple: you ask for more, you pay more. We know Schmidt's comment "Google decided that work life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning." is just trying to get more out of workers for no additional pay. Convincing people to work harder with words only costs time.

But companies aren't doing that. They're going the opposite direction and making return to office a threatening and oppressive response. Then they are also turning around and doing layoffs on top of it. Those who are good can go find a WFH job.

None of what the CEOs are doing coincide with what they are saying, and no one trusts them. Why would you actually want to do good work for a company/CEO like that? You'd just be saving them from themselves for no additional pay and a lot more driving to work!

It's also quite frustrating the money is not there for the work put in and the personal sacrifice.

Overriding equals to do memberwise comparisons on POCOs

Any checking of types where pattern matching would be better

Old-style tuples without names (old style is tuple.Item1, tuple.Item2, etc.)

Checking of multiple tuple values at once without pattern matching

Any code that could be refactored with the new LINQ methods

Long ifs/switches that could be replaced by pattern matching

Concatenate a lot of strings (one per line) so there wasn't a ton of horizontal scroll, particularly for SQL in C# code

using statements still needing a level of nesting

You're going to have patterns from the .NET Framework era being ported to .NET Core projects. It works, but you'll have two paradigms of doing things mixed into your project.

I envy people who only do hobbyist C# so get to work on code bases that have all the newest language feature usage.