If I had enough money that employment is optional, then yeah, I can make that choice, but until then, I'm not complicit.

Pick any mountainous, desert, or coastal part of the world and you are guaranteed scenery for ~95% of the drive.

Pick any historic part of the world and you are guaranteed nice-looking buildings anywhere you walk.

A sizeable fraction of the world fits into either of the above. Yeah, if you live in cornfields and strip malls, you aren't going to find much interesting. But in fact, most of the world isn't like that. Arguably the cornfields and strip malls are the minority.

Throw a dart anywhere on Kyrgyzstan, Japan, Indonesia, Norway, China, India, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Argentina, Namibia, the southwestern US, northwestern US, or Mexico. You'll find lots of interesting things wherever your dart landed. These aren't very cherry-picked countries, I just named a few off the top of my head that come to mind where the "dart anyhere is interesting" is true. My point is that the world is full of "Switzerlands".

I worked at Amazon, previously.

> Management needs visibility.

I know this very well, and this is a problem. The nature of jobs in any industry is that not all of them are equally visible. As a manager, you should be proactive in assessing the state of things rather than waiting for people to deliver visibility to you. People who deliver "visibility" in spades are often charlatans. People who deliver fixes, code, and improvements in spades usually do not have time to manage their own public relations for your visibility.

However, you have ALL the tools to proactively see what they've been upto. You can attend their standups and other regular meetings, you can set up an updates document, you can see what they've been posting in Slack, you can look at their PRs and commits, you can look at JIRA tickets, and in the age of AI you can have AI explain to you all of the parts of the above that you do not understand.

Yeah, but then I wouldn't have been able to pay for my healthcare. A certain toxic company's health insurance paid for my care, though. Prior to joining said toxic company I'd be racking up $6000+ in healthcare bills a year with shitty startup-sponsored insurance.

After 2 years, it was decided I didn't play the hero well enough though, and ended up having to leave. I work for a less toxic company now, but the next time I need a heart-related surgery (likely in ~5-10 years) I'll join a toxic company in the months leading up to pay for it.

The rules of the US, I guess.

> I’m too old to manufacture stress

My point was less about manufacturing artificial stress. I don't do that. But many times I see issues in coworkers' code. If the company will value and praise me for catching and fixing them early, then by all means I'll do that. But if fixing issues in the codebase early for prevention only gets me criticism of "you haven't met expectations, we expect you to exceed expectations every performance cycle" then hell, I don't feel like fixing anything proactively. In that world I'd rather be the hero that fixes it when it surfaces, that's more likely to nail the rating.

I've had one f up an account by placing 2000 limit orders at the wrong price, but that's another story.

Speaking from experience, this does nothing. If you're at a company that is okay with average performers, then absolutely, 100%, fix all the bugs in advance, make the system rock solid and stable, prevent downtime, be a good engineer.

If on the other hand if you're at a company where 10% of people must get stack ranked and PIP, or at a company where "meets expectations" actually means you're going to get the stick, and you're supposed to be "redefining" expectations every year ... then yeah, don't do anything preventative. The optics are better when you take the 3am on-call and fix the issue (that you secretly knew in the first place would happen some time in the future in your coworker's code, and already knew how to fix -- but don't actually fix it until it surfaces). Be the savior that the VPs praise in the next meeting, that's your insurance against the PIP.

They set the rules of the game, you just play the game. The rules were their choice. They could have chosen different rules.

I'm not. Everyone is told to get 10X the amount of shit per day done these days. Safety checks are out the window at that point.

I've stopped scrolling social media and tired of seeing fake landscapes, fake foods, and fake cities that don't exist.

The benchmarks need to change. The current coding benchmarks don't capture the realities of software engineering.

I had a bunch of images that got masked by some logic, I had to evaluate something on the original images, Claude 4.7 decided to inpaint the masked images instead of just fetching the actual unmasked images from upstream.

I had another model once that decided that because it couldn't figure out how to fill out a form to log into HuggingFace to download weights for some open source model that it was going to instantiate the model with random weights and run inference on a thousand images.

Its coding was fine, but the solution was not the right one.

Are you not getting a ton of spam from this form being open to public?

I've had similar ideas but I'd probably make it something easy to remember like myname.com/message and it quizzes the user or various things that only my family would know. Things like the color of the bedsheets, which specific IKEA kallax square the cat loves to hang out in, the location in the kitchen where the rice is stored

This happens on the stock market on a scale 100x larger than Polymarket.

c.f. manipulated earnings reports, taco trades, strait of hummus nonsense

I disagree. The vast majority of jobs are difficult to work at old age and with medical conditions that typically come with old age. As long as we value keeping people alive for their natural lifespan (I hope we do), then our base assumption needs to be that we every time we pay someone we need to pay them $1 for now and $1 for their retirement. Approximately 1:1 because the actually-productive working age is ~25-65 and the retirement age is ~65-105.

Investment returns are never guaranteed, and shouldn't be factored into that.

We're hiring people here, not robots.

Look, my electricity bill doubled. Will the landlord pay for efficiency upgrades? Nope. Will the landlord still increase rent? Hell yes. My water bill doubled. Extrapolate those numbers.

Taco Bell used to cost $5 for a meal, and now costs $14.

My $5 sandwich now costs $15.

50%+ of my income is lost to taxes of sorts. Before you lecture me on tax, I know my taxes better than you know me. Sales taxes, self-employment taxes, tariffs are all taxes.

I get hit with $5-7K of medical bills a year. With insurance. I have a rare idiopathic heart condition, so that's my cost (systematic tax) to stay alive, and probably would be the cost for a potential genetically-infected kid to stay alive as well. I also pay $3K/year in orthodontics last and this year, and another $2-3K in preventative care out of pocket. After my orthodontics is over, I'm sure some other $4K/year shit will come up. I'm stashing up cash for all of this.

"Live in the Midwestern United States" and "avoid San Francisco", you say. But there are no jobs there. None that I could get. Everything I could get wanted me to be 3 days/week on site in silicon valley. Jobs that I found in even LA or Boston were literally half the salary or less. Jobs elsewhere were less than 1/3 the salary. Considering more than half my salary goes to taxes, tariffs, and more taxes of sorts, my partner and I really need that cash.

I don't have time to cook every meal at home. I don't have time to see kids. I'd get PIP from my job if I did that. Today's jobs don't let you work 40 hours a week; you need to work closer to 80. At my last job I worked 70 hours a week and still got PIPed. My coworkers took my ideas, finished them on weekends, worked 100 hour weeks, presented to leadership on Monday without my name. I didn't meet the "bar". My work is making millions for a big corp as I write this. Just not in my name.

Public schools are expensive. Because you pay for it in housing costs. Wherever housing is cheap, public schools are shitty. I live where housing is cheap, relatively speaking, for the bay. But I don't have kids, so it works out.

My financial planning model works like this.

For every $1 I need to support myself and my partner, I need to earn about $8. $4 goes to taxes government laundering, $4 left. For the $4 left, $2 goes to retirement (base assumption is the economy is now irreparably broken and S&P500 isn't necessarily going to grow in the next 40 years like it did the past 40), $1 goes to my catastrophe fund (in case of very realistic war or AI unemployment), $1 goes towards spending now.

My partner and I barely meet that 8x bar. That is my bar to feel safe. I couldn't meet it with kids. Without kids, we have a sane and happy life. Everything is covered, from the taxes to the whopping medical bills to housing. End of story.

It's not my problem, really. I'm very happy childless. Unless that money materializes, I can't afford kids.

And yes, kids cost that much.

I'm a senior level software engineer in the bay area. I don't have kids. I don't think I can afford them. I'm tired of people telling me I can afford them. The world works differently today. In the 1980's, if you had a stable job that let you leave at 5pm, you could more or less handle kids.

Today, leaving at 5pm means risking PIP and not having an income; your company may lay off people randomly without notice; your rents could go up 10-20% unexpectedly; groceries could double in price over a couple years; you basically need to be working round the clock to not get PIPed and even sustain an income. And if you work around the clock you also need cash to hire nannies because you don't have the time to raise them yourself. As such I wouldn't even think about kids in this world without having saved up the full sum of my expenses AND their expenses for their ENTIRE life until 21 years old in CASH before even having the kid. We just don't have the job security today.