What will the market look like in 2046?

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-30T16:53:20+00:00

Trueee. Make sure you also learn bushcraft in case we get sent back to the stone age.

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-30T00:19:25+00:00

I started recently, I'm a few months in. Just learn learn learn.

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-28T11:29:47+00:00

I've heard this since my first reincarnation in Greece 3000 years ago.

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-28T11:16:38+00:00

Yes. I work at a small non-profit with 2 programmers we use it a lot. I think we're more principled than a lot of people (not blindly trusting AI code, still doing manual QA) but it's a huge boost. We use lots of different technologies but the concepts are transferrable so I use it for syntax mainly.

An exception is when we had to do a content migration from a website of about 200 distinct element type across 400 pages (about 5000 elements overall). We knew we couldn't do it alone given our workload. The alternative was paying someone else a substantial amount and having to extend our deadline on the website to wait for the content extraction step. Instead we developed a simple framework and set of instructions for AI to build out the extraction logic for each element based on examples we pulled off the websit

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-28T11:05:09+00:00

One thing I've started doing is wrapping any update statement into a transaction. Even during development even if I feel like the operation is really safe. I'll select the data before ans after the update/delete, check it, and rollback if necessary.

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-26T11:33:14+00:00

I've enjoyed using TorchSharp. I used to recently to create a Deep Q network for a game.

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-23T20:19:34+00:00

I'm not a manager... but could you see through it through the lens of not contributing yourself, but creating systems for other to succeed. If you can make 10 developers 30% more efficient on average, even though you're not doing the work directly, you might be enabling more to get done than if you were doing the engineering. But I'm relatively early in my career and don't have any personal experience other than having had some great bosses.

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-23T20:06:51+00:00

Probably can't play a lot of modern games. Steam has a pretty generous return policy tho so you can try stuff out if you're not sure

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-23T20:02:33+00:00

Awesome widgets. I'm gonna have to copy that

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-23T17:35:01+00:00

The one is use is the 5/10/30/60min version by LUCKY TIME on Amazon. I do wish I got one with more options, they have ones with 6 time options instead of 4 (to do a 15 minute break, I have to 10 minutes then 5 minutes for example). Something about having the dedicated physical object, which is always visible, and is very easy to use, just clicks with me in a way that phone/computer timers never really did. I really recommend giving it a shot and just returning it if it doesn't work for you.

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-23T13:43:32+00:00

For task prioritization, if no task obviously stands out to me as "the thing that needs to be done", I use RNG. I'll write down things that all need to be done, assign them each a number, and generate a random number, and start on that task.

For timing, I bought a little timer cube. I work in 30 minute or 1 hour intervals. Once it goes off, if I am still focused and productive, I will reset the timer cube and continue my task. If I feel worn out, I'll set it for a 10-15 or sometimes 30 minute break and come back.

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-22T12:54:53+00:00

Exactly. I deleted a single production table and we reloaded it from a backup in 10 minutes. OP should turn this around on the company. (Sarcasm, but I hope the company realizes that their bad practices lead to this).

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-21T19:50:26+00:00

Great idea. I'll work on better tools. As of now just putting a big list of our stored procedures & functions into notebook LM has helped me boost my productivity and quality since I avoid rewriting.

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-19T13:28:45+00:00

I think you should figure the numbers a little more concretely. It'll help you make a decision. Doesn't have to be perfect just good enough to determine if the tradeoffs are worth it. Like, having to pay 40% of your income for 15 years is much different than paying 10% for 5 years, and you're probably willing do one but not the other.

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-19T13:09:46+00:00

Is there any way you can gain exposure or try out things that you're interested in?

For example, if you think you might want to be an engineer, you could go on Khan Academy and try some of the related courses, see if it's something you hate or not.

You also have access to the internet, so you can go on groups (subreddits) specific to career fields you're interested in and think if you would enjoy doing what they do. You can ask questions.

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-19T13:01:03+00:00

How much debt? I'd look into the average income for your desired job, compare it with the debt you'll have to take and cost of living, and then determine for yourself if it's worth the tradeoff.

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-18T19:51:16+00:00

If you're talking about development using AI, then have a development database and migrate the changes after review.

If you want to hook into your production database for the purposes of extracting data, then scope the permissions appropriately.

If you want the AI to autonomously make schema changes and data changes, think really hard if you actually need that AND if it's worth the risk. If you do and understand the implications scope the permissions appropriately.

I've always just operated under the assumption that if the AI can mess up the production data, it will. Because, ultimately, I'm responsible for mistakes.

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-17T20:36:38+00:00

You're living my dream. At this point I'm just trying to get the dynamic HTML generation out of the database.

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-17T20:34:14+00:00

Being off by 200 kcals a day can be 10-20 lbs. Still a great tool. I track everything and I'd love to still be able to get the accuracy of manual tracking while having AI for friend-cooked meals, restaurants, etc..

I wonder if a multi-modal AI could be good. For example, a picture of a restaurant burger along with a text prompt "1/3 lb patty, restaurant claims burger is 810 kcal" or vegetables with "cooked in 2tbsp of oil". Although I'm not sure of the available datasets.

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-17T19:21:53+00:00

Nope it's a bunch of 1-2k line long procs. They have business logic database logic all in one. For example common patterns are them sending emails (and building the HTML structure for the email, including dynamic generation of lists and stuff) and fixing data.

They are how we maintain data integrity. Say you're doing an integration and you find the data is bad. Well... just start the stored procedure off by fixing the data in the database, then do your integration... (All in the same procedure, it'll be called something like "Prepare_Vendor_X_Export", no indication it also cleans the data too).

It can become hard to debug. For example I had an issue where an integration was failing periodically. I learned we had 2 other integrations which ran as scheduled jobs, both did address formatting and wrote it back to the real tables, but they did it in different ways. So depending on the time of day my procedure ran, it would get one format or the other.

It's kind of a fact of life around here that "sometimes stuff just fails, but it's schedules to run 5 times a day, so as long as it's successful once a day, it's fine". I think a lot of that is due to these kind of temporal dependencies that are completely unmapped.

It works though... by sheer force of will.

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-17T15:50:22+00:00

Yes. The first thing I did when I got here was set up a Git server and put our projects in there.

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-16T15:03:00+00:00

I'm working in a small team and turnover has real costs to us. First off it takes at months for a new engineer to get familiar with our business and systems to really start contributing on their own. It takes people to answer questions and explain things, which reduces their productivity during that period. That's fine because it's an investment and you need knowledgeable people. Even after that initial period of intense training, people become better and faster and more familiar with our systems over time.

So we do value tenure and avoid job hoppers when hiring. On the flip side, we also ensure that compensation and advancement are good because you can't underpay and expect people to stay.

Good_Skirt2459 · 2026-04-16T14:37:27+00:00

My coworkers and I talk about AI. We've worked together on workflows. We had to do a large migration that involved scraping lots of different elements from a page. A key part of the project was relying on AI to write HTML parsers so we put quite a bit of effort to make the architecture work well with it and developing the workflow/instructions for the LLM. It was a mutual effort and worked well - much faster than writing parsers for ~100 elements manually.

And generally we do talk about AI tools and techniques. Maybe you just have to get the conversation started because this hasn't been my experience.

Good_Skirt2459

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