First one already mentioned in the comments is you can be kicked out at any time within your rental agreement. I was "lucky" enough to get our rental sold two years ago and then again this year. Packing and looking for another rental with 2 months notice is not fun (and boxes smell).

Another difference is location and place itself. You'll have much fewer rentals in a very nice neighborhood, and even those that are rented out, are the worst - corner lots (3x gardening cost/effort), facing major roads or other things that make life less comfortable.

Rental condition is not under your control. At least in Seattle area owners I rented from didn't keep the house well maintained, which resulted in:

* roof leak (no moss treatment performed, grew and lifted shingles).

* 25 yo furnace "worked" until one midnight my family had to evacuate and call fire fighters due to CO alarms getting off. Four days without heating after that (owner offered to reimburse for the cheapest hotel nearby).

* Appliances are not replaced until they break. I looked at one property few weeks ago that had original once white appliances. I asked if owner is willing to upgrade them, the agent laughed at told us they will fix it if something doesn't work after we move in.

Engineers always fought about technology - MS technology stack iterations that promised new era in development, Borland RAD tools that made everyone "GUI developer", all those had evangelists and companies who pushed it. It's a healthy competition and we see where Java EE ended up, although in 2010s it was still promised as one and only future for servers.

Will this time be different? I don't know and I'm afraid there's a critical mass accumulated to push it forward forcefully. But when I talk to my friends and students I give one advice that I follow - invest in your intelligence, not tooling and ecosystem of large corporations. Build something yourself, not for the sake of chasing venture investors with your million LOC slope, but to learn and master real skills. When one student implemented Paxos for his thesis and followed my advice, the feedback was that not only he learned and built a mental model of the algorithm and all corner cases, but also led to novel algorithm development, just because his brain was into it, not on top of AI.

In this context, I argue that if a significant sector of economy goes fully AI, it is similar to the collapse of the Soviet Union where within few months most people lost their jobs. The wikipedia link above shows how similar scenarios unfolded in many eastern block countries, specifically mass unemployment, poverty and crime.

Not from so distant past - Soviet Union collapse caused mass unemployment and similar socioeconomic scenarios - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_wild_nineties

Mass poverty and skyrocketing crime levels (mugged for sneakers was common), while ultra rich grabbed money and power.

Quote from the post article: "To quote Michael Polanyi: we know more than we can tell. Some load-bearing context exists precisely because it was never put into words, and writing it down would change what it is."

Imagine how much knowledge exists only in the heads of software engineers, with code being just a functioning footprint of that "Theory". I know SRE in FAANG who told me that multi-billion system is supported by tribal knowledge within their group, and for years, even pre-AI it was a protection against automation.

* Many software engineers didn't do real engineering work during their entire careers. In large companies it's even harder - you arrive as a small gear and are inserted into a large mechanism. You learn some configuration language some smart-ass invented to get a promo, "learn" the product by cleaning tons of those configs, refactoring them, "fixing" results in another bespoke framework by adjusting some knobs in the config language you are now expert in. Five years pass and you are still doing that.

* There are many near-engineering positions in the industry. The guy who always told how he liked to work with people and that's why stopped coding, another lady who always was fascinated by the product and working with users. They all fill in the space in small and large companies as .*M

* The train is slow moving, especially in large companies. Commit to prod can easily span months, with six months being a norm. For some large, critical systems, Agentic code still didn't reach the production as of today.

Considering above, AI is replacing some BS jobs, people who were near-code but above it suddenly enjoy vibe-coding, their shit still didn't hit the fan in slow moving companies. But oh man, it looks like a productivity boom.

It was an easy, steady cash-positive business until it wasn't. If those farmers thought what is final product and who benefits from it most, they'd grow diversified crops to sell locally, which many California family farms do.

A lot of code doesn't follow there guidelines because they don't care about efficiency and don't need it. But there are numerous projects who care about performance and efficiency, and realize the pitfalls once code runs in production (ScyllaDB is one example).

LLMs don't help as well, generating everything async up to the main, using wrong primitives and not properly designing the system.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48017861

Points: 8

# Comments: 1

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” quote is usually applied to markets, but it can be applied to software engineering as well - all jobs can be gone even if world will be submerged into technological crisis, with single nine availability (and I'm talking about 9% :) ) and all accounts compromised.

That's why you see hundred level call stacks, polymorphism with a single implementation and still errors are hidden or root causes hidden behind "exception caught".

IMO luxury manufacturers like MB and BMW tried to squeeze larger screens, more of them and there was not enough space to put those screens, buttins and vents. Some luxuty brands make vents supper slim.