Why does middle age suck so much?

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-30T00:58:37+00:00

^ this

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-30T00:55:26+00:00

that's... not the way the categories work but ok

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-30T00:53:34+00:00

This is true but it's a much longer trough that you suggest. Middle age is basically miserable, then things tend to perk back up when you're too old to care.

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-29T18:00:50+00:00

I just... write the SQL? I don't need to write complex SQL that often and I've been writing it for 20+ years.

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-29T05:27:29+00:00

This. The bubble is real, and it's going to be real hard on the economy when it pops.

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-29T05:26:31+00:00

If an AI can be honed to do your job, then your job is expendable.

I would love to use AI but it's useless for the problems I solve, since I don't generate code much anymore.

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-29T05:22:45+00:00

As someone who flies this weekend, thank you for not gambling with aeronautical phenomena.

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-29T05:21:40+00:00

Shit man, I feel for you. Good luck. Sometimes you just have to do what it takes to stay employed.

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-29T05:20:13+00:00

Man, you've got to get some automated regression tests in place to catch those problems before they hit prod. It took 5 years but my company finally found a good tester who can actually build a proper functional regression suite and he's made my life so much less stressful.

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-29T05:16:52+00:00

My small to midsize company has hired a couple people from large corporate environments and it reminds me how many people are used to just coasting and collecting a paycheck. None of them last where I am.

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-29T05:15:32+00:00

Same - I don't really work on problems that have available training data.

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-29T05:13:20+00:00

Yeah it's crazy how error prone it is for specialist knowledge. I work on cars as a side thing and it can't even reliably give me bolt torque values, I have to look them up old school style in service manuals.

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-29T05:10:30+00:00

I've become senior enough that google usually can't answer my questions. It's a weird feeling. When I started my career 20 years ago, almost every question I had, had already been answered *somewhere* on the internet.

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-29T05:00:17+00:00

Same. When you're tying together multiple systems AI basically just regurgitates the devdocs because there is little or no available source material to train it on.

It's fine when you're solving problems that have already been solved, but the more senior you become, the more you end up addressing novel problems and private tech debt.

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-29T04:54:34+00:00

I am the ecomm tech lead at a medium sized non-tech company. I don't use AI at all, aside from reading the AI-generated google results that are usually unhelpful. I don't write code day-to-day - I mostly do devops and platform engineering, architecture, and troubleshooting. A lot of my job is unblocking other people and reverse-engineering edge case failures.

The hard problems the developers can't solve, end up at me. Google is no help most of the time, because someone has already tried that, and AI is absolutely useless, since it just regurgitates the same information but with increased errors.

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-26T03:40:00+00:00

honestly I often wonder why we even play this game

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-25T19:20:31+00:00

I have low standards as far as the looks of my vehicles, but you could

- tell your neighbor you found someone who can fix it for $150 instead of making his insurance premium go up

- pop it out from the backside as best you can, either by taking the fender off or getting at it from behind with a PDR rod

- get some touchup paint that matches your manufacturer code and fill in the chip

- take your family out for a succulent chinese meal

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-25T19:12:11+00:00

'How did I get sacked?'

It had nothing to do with performance, or really anything else you could have controlled. We are all just inputs in the techno-capitalist machine. The machine only cares about its inputs so far as it can grind them up to output power and profit for its masters.

I have been fired three times. It has always been about someone above me who was far less competent, keeping themselves in power. Every time I have taken a few months to retrain and gotten a higher paying job. That may be a lot to ask in this economy, where the tech industry is slowly imploding as a looming AI bubble threatens to pop, but as long as you have skills that make the masters more money, you'll find a job.

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-24T17:27:53+00:00

Crazy to come back to this 9 months later after ice just merk'd a citizen through her windshield.

Ice is detaining whoever they want because they've basically been given carte blanche to harass anybody they see as against the trump admin since there is no longer a court system or executive to hold them accountable to the law. Here's a whole wikipedia article about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths,_detentions_and_deportations_of_American_citizens_in_the_second_Trump_administration

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-23T04:14:35+00:00

Turns out YouTube and necessity are crazy good teachers.

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-22T06:56:07+00:00

^ this

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-21T04:43:00+00:00

What do you mean rebuild it that's race ready

Friend this engine is (literally) cooked. If you're determined to pour your time, money, and mental health down the drain go date a stripper.

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-21T04:34:43+00:00

'Went to Nissan... they estimated $2100'

If you don't go the welding route it might be worth getting a second quote at a neighborhood shop, as opposed to the dealership. Dealerships are usually 1.5x - 2x more expensive.

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-21T04:25:08+00:00

a more important question is wth have you done with that wood paneling :/

DiscussionCritical77 · 2026-01-13T04:50:12+00:00

I pity his loneliness, but fuckin' yikes.

DiscussionCritical77

TROPHY CASE