On the other hand, when I was staffed to lead a project that did have another senior developer who is one level below me, I tried to split up the actual work but it became such a coordination nightmare once we started refining the project because he could just use Claude code and it would make all of the modifications needed for a feature from the front end work, to the backend APIs, to the Terraform and the deployment scripts.

I would have actually slowed him down.

Before now, Republican representatives would never let even a Republican President usurp their power.

No business is going to run workloads on OCI outside of ones running Oracle. They a They are a way distance fourth in cloud. I’ve been working in cloud consulting for five years including the first three directly at AWS (Professional Services). No one worried about having talking points about competing against Oracle.

Microsoft, Google and Amazon have both internal products that can benefit from inference and cloud hosting.

Google also has GCP and unlike OpenAI who is dependent on VC funding and Oracle who is borrowing money. Google throws off cash like crazy and self funds its infrastructure which is already better than everyone else’s

https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2025/06/11/mississi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Play_Services

Public companies are outright bribing the President to get mergers passed (Paramount) and the entire confiscating TikTok to give it to his buddy at Oracle on the cheap can’t be ignored.

On the federal level, there really isn’t any legal standard anymore.

Last time, a lot of the companies were public and the general public saw stock losses. This time the only companies that are publicly really exposed by the AI bubble are Nvidia with all of their circular financing and Oracle. Of course Tesla has always been a meme stock.

Defined contribution plans - for now - can’t have private equity in their funds. Defined benefit plans and endowments are exposed.

Apple famously hasn’t invested that much in AI, Google is spending a lot on infrastructure. But between search and GCP and YouTube they have a real business plan and are funding based on profits. Amazon is in the same boat. Microsoft is bowing out of spending money on training and focused on inference - and they also have Azure. Meta is making money using AI for ad targeting and probably in the future to generate ads.

I can also see consulting companies being hurt (I work in cloud consulting) as businesses are throwing money at them to “AI enable” their business.

ChatGPT freaked out, Gemini got it right (there isn’t one).

Meta AI: Yes, there is a seahorse emoji: or doesn’t represent a seahorse specifically but is the one you’re looking for.

(Those emojis are fish and shells)

Grok gave me a random emoji of a whale

If I were 22 post 2010, instead of 1996, you damn well better be believe I would have been “grinding leetcode to get into a FAANG” instead of wallowing in enterprise dev making what a returning intern makes at BigTech.

I’m not bitter, by 2012 I was 38, recently remarried and wasn’t about to uproot my (step)kids. But by youngest graduated from high school in May 2020 and I had an offer from BigTech June of 2020.

I definitely encourage any younger developer to play the game.

As far as jumping ship, if my goal is to exchange labor for money, why wouldn’t I exchange the most money for my labor given my other priorities? Instead of letting a company pay me less than market value or even worse what they pay someone coming in at my level.

Besides, I had my first house built in 2002 for $175K when I was making $65K and had no student loans. Neither is true for most students graduating today.

And it’s copium thinking that people at BigTech making 50%+ more at every level work that much harder than an enterprise CRUD developer doing Java at a bank.

I’m not advocating someone works 70 hours a week at a startup getting underpaid with the promise of “equity” that will statistically be worthless. I am advocating they get paid in cash and/or RSUs and immediately sell as soon as they vest and diversify.

And next year will be my 30th year working, I’ve never experienced burn out because I exercise my agency to say “no” to being overworked knowing I could get another job worse case and continue exchanging my labor for money and stay housed and fed.

But I still did the same thing the article and commenters suggested. I stayed strictly aligned with what the CTO wanted and just from that, I was able to guide the entire technical architecture of the company for two years even though I had no hands on experience with AWS.

Let’s not be fooled though. My next job after that startup that had 60 people was at the second largest employer in the US - AWS working in the consulting division (AWS Professional Services).

It was an immediate 50% bump in pay. An even greater contrast is that an intern I mentored got a return offer at 22 in 2022 that was the same I made at 46 in 2020. They are now at 25 making slightly more than I’m making at a medium size third party consulting company working full time as a staff consultant.

Your principled stand is leaving a lot of money on the table.

At 51, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever work at any large company again and I have turned down a position that was going to be created for me at another large well known non technical company where a former coworker was a director and ignored overtures from GCP in their professional services department that would pay a lot more.

I also wouldn’t like the company I work at now with around 700 people if I weren’t brought in as a staff engineer where I have almost complete autonomy on how I lead my projects and the ear of the CxOs

But let’s not pretend the extra $75K to $100K+ I could be making isn’t worth playing politics. I’m just at a place in life where I can prioritize other things than money.

Also, at 51, I’ve learned a few things. Not to make your “career” at any company and to always be prepared to jump ship when the environment changes or the raises don’t keep up with the market. I’m now on my 10th job.

https://stryker-mutator.io/docs/

As Jobs said about Dropbox, music streaming is a feature not a product