at the time ( this has changed ) the Starbucks employee could own a home and put into that equity. so lower cost of living and ability to save towards equity massively overwhelmed any perceived value of a 'high salary'. Throw in the cost of living in the Bay Area and the reality was the software engineers were barely subsisting while the barista was actually building a life for themselves.

essentially. even inside the continental US.... the cost of living and cost of equity, tax structures, etc all matter a great deal. That doesn't change leaving the US. In fact it largely just gets more complicated.

but you can ABSOLUTELY make a whole lot less in a region where you will live better and make more money Long term.

fun one first.

I once did a coding interview entirely in bash. and the poor software engineer giving the interview did not have that as a skillset. so he was deeply confused when I spent like 70% of the time building a massive sed awk xargs one liner. then proceeded to answer every question in order with it.

I thought he was so confused by it that's why I never heard back. Turns out it was much stranger. The recruiter died. Took them months to figure out his backlog.

2nd story.

I am the responsible party for some poor persons worst interview. And I still feel awful about it. Like they were panicking cause they really wanted the role, and honestly the interview questions were unnecessarily hard and designed to induce stress ( not my call just company decision. personally I can see some of the logic for it but I question the efficacy ). result is this poor kid was spiraling. So I tried to throw them some confidence builder questions... but they were so far into the spiral they bombed those too. And like... I KNEW they knew the answers from previous parts of the interview. But like, they just lost it mentally.

I was told later they spent like 10 minutes in the bathroom recovering before doing the next stage of the interview.

I fucking hated that interview. I still think about it. Wish I coulda just sat down with em after and just apologized and told em they didn't do anything wrong. They just had a bad day and that's fine. It happens. They can try again. Like... I hate someone took it that badly. I hate I was unable to get em that confidence boost they needed to show off their skill.

Experience sometimes just plain leaves scars for everyone.

And the conservatives are always going off about it not being profitable for the USPS... but like... that subsidized shipping service is like nitrous for the US economy. We made a fortune off that. And achieved huge sweeping strategic objectives.

Example.

The ENTIRE US commercial airline industry was originally subsidized by Air Mail. We built planes and radar systems using USPS subsidies. We quite literally had Pan Am build midway island years before ww2 kicked off to prepare for that war... using Air Mail subsidies.

Logistics is not for the naive or the feint of heart.

It's non deterministic by its nature. Without good frameworks and safeguards it's unpredictable. We know that much for certain.

But it's worse than that. We don't know all the attack vectors for prompt escapes yet at all. That's barely been figured out.

And the psychological toll of working in slop heavy environments is CLEARLY VERY BAD.

So ... we raced a technology out the door without even minimal research into how to do that safely or effectively. As an industry we just shot ourselves in both knees and made the case for a regulatory blow back of epic proportions. And like... That sucks. Complete failure of leadership across the entire industry. Short term gains for short term losses followed by long term losses.

I flew around the US basically automating stuff with a network automation and operations orchestration team. This is before amazon really was a thing. So we were going into big old school data centers where the largest leap in tech since the 80s was VMWare ESX ( the new hotness ).

every site we went into we were by and large putting a lot of people out of work. these old telecom giants and industrial giants basically had a lot of folks who were like... the guy who reboots switches. Or the guy who maintains a specific bash script to take backups.

the stuff we did made most of these folks instantly obsolete. especially the CCNAs.

Now for those that don't know... 2000 or so... high schools started getting kids CCNA certifications to be top of rack switch kids so they could get a 'good job'. And it was a GOOD JOB. It paid VERY well. Better than most kids with a liberal arts degree.

Fast forward an almost a decade and we were wiping that entire career path out FAST. Datacenters went from having an army of CCNAs to a couple CCIEs and a couple CCNAs to do the physical labor. A lot of people who had only ever done one thing in their career for ten years were losing their cushy upper medium income salary and finding out their career path ended. They were as you might imagine... angry, afraid, prepared to sabotage... etc.

I didn't like that side of the work at all. But it really was inevitable.

Fast forward 15 years. The highest paid people in tech are CCIEs that can code. I know guys making 700k a year cause they know python and BGP inside and out.

We ripped the middle out of networking and EVERYONE paid the price. It's amazing to me that we never learn from our past.

They have active issue tickets that are highest priority and have been open for 20 years. That's not hyperbole. Actually 20 years.

I can tell you it's saved the day for me on a few occasions and lord knows it can parse docs better than any human and give you what you want in a clear cogent manner. But it's sometimes flat out wrong, and it's sometimes making things harder than you want, or isn't very context aware no matter how much you try to point it in the right direction.

But it's still good at stuff and saves time.

Early adopter pain is early adopter pain.

What scares me more is we are trading short term gains for long term losses here. And we are destroying the feeder system for senior engineers... and that's going to end horrifically.