Don't assume businesses operate the same way some job-hunting person on monday morning is.

I don't think that's accurate for professional users. Personal users, especially those for whom $200/m is a significant cost, will definitely try to get the most out of it.

I know several $200/m user (I'm on the $100 personally), and they've all had the same experience I had when first upgrading to the max package: initially you try to use it as much as you can and feel like you need to keep it busy. But that goes away after a few days and you use it when you have need. The primary point of the max tiers for my peers is to not hit limits during their work if they occasionally use it intensively because it's disrupting to have to wait for X hours to continue.

If you get a benefit from using it, and you bill at $200 an hour, and you work 160+ hours a month, the $200 monthly cost doesn't register as a significant cost and you won't make it determine your usage patterns. I'm sure that'd be different if VC money goes away and it turns out the true price would need to be closer to $5k, but at this point it's similar to your ISP for fiber costing $80 a month. You enjoy the speed for a few days, but then it becomes the new normal.

Whether they get strung along by a human, a chatbot, or a simple cronjob - does it matter?

Lots of people see PHP in general as a dead end career-wise and WP specifically as almost an insult, so there aren't many that advanced their skills and have continued to work with PHP (or Wordpress, but I believe that an experienced PHP developer has no trouble picking up WP).

We're generally very neutral on how someone arrived where they are, we don't require certificates or degrees, we focus on experience and skills. I wouldn't hire someone who isn't experienced with at least one side of our stack though (unless they're extremely good) because it takes time from other developers to upskill them and that's the one resource we don't have.

I won't disclose where I work though as that would dox myself and I much prefer anonymity.

But it's still extremely hard to find senior+. I'm sure our tech stack plays a role, and naturally senior developers are much less common than juniors. But whenever I hear about the job market being super hard, I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe.

AI is not replacing anyone from my perspective, but AI might become our only hope at some point, because we're growing aggressively. I have to keep mediocre people because I can't even replace at that level easily - the only ones I'm pruning are the ones that are net-negative contributors.

Just because you have pocksuppet.org and I hack pocksuppet.net doesn't mean that one of us is phishing.

Anything you can do with query builders, you can do with SQL of course, it's just more difficult / verbose (to me).

Let's say I have a lot of entities that are tied to domains, and I have users that have roles on those domains. I do a lot of reports, and for the vast majority, I don't have to worry about whether a user has the necessary access on the domain, I just call a central service, pass my query builder, the user, and the required access level, and it figures out whether the query builder already contains the necessary parts or not, which joins are required (e.g. if I'm selecting from subdomain, I need to join with domain and then join domain to user_domain) and add all of that transparently. I can treat service accounts differently, and I can just ignore all of that noise if a super admin is running the report.

I could absolutely do all of that in SQL, the SQL doesn't really change (if anything, query builders tend to produce worse SQL in my experience since you're not writing DB-specific code), just how I interact with it. The abstraction allows me to compose the query instead of writing it, giving me more flexibility.

I agree after a closer look though. the pattern is so strong, you can identify it visually. comments 2, 3, and 4 are all three paragraphs, the next three are all one longer paragraph, and all are of very similar length.

You don't know their motives for running their site, but you do get a clear message about their character by observing their actions, and you'd do well to listen to that message.

Better windows don't help either - but they're great for noise outside. The only thing that helps against horrible neighbors is moving. If you've never learned that lesson, you've never had horrible neighbors.

The US government wasn't a friend of Kony in 2012. Before Trump 2, the US were not that friendly with Russia, yet people protested in many places around the world to show support for Ukraine and to voice their opposition to Russia's imperialistic wars, being aligned with their governments' position.

It's different with Iran. Some of that is likely to be Iran's lower profile, but not all -- it's not like media outlets are not reporting on it at all and you have to get your information from niche sources to hear about events in Iran.