Becoming a professional software engineer without a Comp Sci (or overlapping engineering degree) was a bad idea for the reasons you mention.
I made it 15 years on mostly willpower earning millions of dollars, but never worked for a FAANG in any capacity, was unemployed (and even homeless) for different stints starting out, and to this day still get asked why I don't have a CS or engineering degree.
And a Haiku-powered Claude Code could now probably one-shot most of the stuff I have ever banged my head on as hard as I could to figure out.
I am just reflecting on the past though. What will make you "successful" then won't be what makes you that now.
I respect you. To be honest, I still haven't found my footing. Most of what I earned was squandered paying off debts from being scammed, and my work is irregular. And as you said, the game is always changing, the rules keep shifting. I feel anxious, but reading the words of a senior like you makes me feel better.
I lived in a 3 pyeong (about 100 sq ft) space for three years (I wasn't homeless, so I had it better than you). Still, I'm grateful that now I have a small 8 pyeong (about 260 sq ft) space. Thank you for sharing your experiences and emotions.
I want to succeed through willpower, just like you. As you know, most of my coding is done better by AI. Unless it's large scale programming, the work that comes to people like us is usually small scale, handled at the level of specific frameworks.
Nevertheless, I still believe there is a place for me somewhere (though that might be self hypnosis).
My whole career (15+ year) is built on orgs (Fortune 500s, academia, government, and even startups) hiring me to actually get something done that an employee spent months "working on" that ended up useless and scrapped. It's everywhere, all the time.
Additionally, you can be productive from a development sense, ship functional software that is to spec, and everybody is happy - and it still never gets used, or gets canceled, and does nothing for anyone. This too, could also be considered performative.
The money does put food on the family dinner table, so be it.
The most shocking thing about entering Software as a career was the enormous number of "Brillant Paula Beans"[1] that are out there silently working, doing meetings, participating in all the software rituals, but producing useless and ultimately scrapped work product.
Yeah, the second one is really the most bitter pill - work for a year or more, see that the PMF or the actual product isn't going to meet the needs; raise red flags, nobody cares (or worse, people actively fight you and torpedo you) and then you get to see it literally do nothing in production.
I have seen this a lot in the mid sized business (<300 employees usually) and its the "we have enough money and no accountability and terrible processes to even understand the world" but my favorite one is my friend spent six months building a product offshoot from a core product, got pulled into meetings with directors to tell him to shut up about how it wasn't going to work for the target market, and when he finished they sold 4 units.
I’ve been in such a work context for the better part of two years, as a contractor, and by God it is soul crushing to give your best to do a good job, and to see it ultimately ends up in the bin.
I quit weeks ago, and they are already begging me back because I was good at what I was doing, to work on yet another hallucination from the higher ups that will be scrapped in 6 months.
The good money doesn’t make up for the existential pain. Maybe I’m too old for this shit. (20 year career and a burnout that made me reassess the value of my time on earth)
Thales Bad Bot Report categorizes the traffic between "good" and "bad" bots.
I would add that AI dramatically blurs the line between legitimate and malicious, and the intent generally speaking.
In regards to social bots, there's a 2024 study of over 1 million accounts on X and over 60% were found likely to be bots. Curiously, when Musk took over Twitter, the "Blue Checkmark" became something that can be bought for several bucks a month (with crypto, even), without any sort of verification.
Screw Cloudflare. I went through a bizarre 3+ months hiring process where I would have a disconnected, vague 30 minute interview with someone every couple weeks. Then, suddenly rejected for no real reason given.
Their hiring process is remarkably bad for a company that otherwise is so well run. My most recent experience was them throwing a workday link at me to fill something out before we even had the initial phone screen and the forms/ui was so poorly designed that I stopped responding to them.
I've always thought the "strict invitation trees" or vouch trees would be an interesting way to moderate a community, even before the LLM era. A user can vouch for an unlimited number of new accounts, but if more than 10% of the vouched accounts are banned or flagged down the line, the parent voucher acct is also banned/flagged.
Since it creates a tree structure, you can wipe out entire armies of bot/spam/otherwise accounts by following the vouches up the tree.
Wait for the EU AI Act to require text watermarking in August. It will work, and it will be effective -- not because it'll be impossible to circumvent, but because all the big SaaSes will have to adopt it, and the hurdle of stripping it back out will filter out the vast majority of the sloppers.
Im not a crypto person, but I was intrigued by Chia. They generate their coins based on allocating disk space. So if you have a bit of free space, you can fill it with plots and play the lotto.
The intriguing part is that I think it works against scaling. The incremental cost for me to use the 500GB of free space on my disk is $0, but someone scaling a bot farm has to buy all their space.
Real people tend to have a lot more idle capacity than optimized, scaled businesses, so any kind of proof of idle capacity seems like it would disadvantage bot farms.
I’ve also thought that proof of collateral spending would be a good system. For example, you buy groceries and the store gives you a token saying you spent $X of real world money. Those tokens help show you're not a bot. Keeping that system honest and equitable would be extremely difficult though.
Maybe schools could give kids tokens for attendance. It sounds kind of dumb, but who knows.
The actual reality of Chia is that it drove up hard drive prices just like LLMs drove up GPU prices. People bought petabytes of space just to run Chia and if you wanted a computer you had to outbid them.
Probably all three of those. Tildes and fediverse instances do the first, resurgence pending for the second, and lastly non-mainstream social media sites have no SEO garbage by default.
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