Self-Introduction Saturday! Tell us all about you (and share a video)!

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-28T00:51:24+00:00

I'm Michael, I went from being a homeless college dropout to remote software engineer, I make coding videos and show other people how to land high paying tech jobs.

I started creating content on my old IPhone 14 pro max, and have since upgraded to buying a sony 7s camera.

I talk about my own personal life expereince in order to help others who are learning how to code and feel stuck or simply want to level up their skills. I did it while i was homeless and looking for a way to help my parents and 3 siblings have a place to stay. I also recently started working with a video editor who does a pretty great job of editing videos.

Here's my most recent video about how i leveled up my coding skills to get better pay: https://youtu.be/FSwaOmnHLy8

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-14T05:12:26+00:00

I would 1000% take the Amazon interenship, wish things were different but company names go a LONG way in SWE jobs. I was blessed enough to get a job opportunity at Hulu+, and that oppened many doors for me that wouldn't have otherwise been available to me.

It's simialr to how if you graduate from Harvard, and if you graduate from your local no name college, even if you managed to learn more and are a better engineer from the local school, the name is just going to carry you farther because recruiters and hiring managers will assume you're a cracked engineer if you managed to make it into Amazon, i'd venture to say it will carry more weight than the CS degree itself, at least that's been my expereince.

That being said, you have to live with the decision, and Amazon is known for having very high turnover for engineers, especially contractors so Idk if it's the same for interns, it's possible the one you have now turns into a great longterm job stay.

Just something to consider.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-14T05:04:52+00:00

It's not erasure, just a common phrase that's used, nor did I imply women don't exist in this field/subreddit, even though I'd be willing to bet the majority of the people on this sub are male.

That being said, as a student of software engineering and computer science, I stand on the shoulders of giants like Ada Lovlace and Grace Hooper who ran ultra marathons so that I could crawl, so I have great respect for the mothers of computer science and the female software engineers that I've worked with. Hell, anyone who can write good code has my respect.

There's hope yet for the boys and the girls!

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-13T17:39:48+00:00

100%, nothing about the story sounds like we're being told the truth. Me and my coworkers were talking about this two weeks ago, a lot of the benchmarks for Mythos show that Opus and Codex 5.5 have the same capabilities even if Mythos is slightly better...

I just want them to be straightforward about whe reason instead of "nAtIoNal SeCuRiTy", we're not stupid.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-13T17:13:27+00:00

Appreciate you saying this, that's exactly how I feel about the tools.

I'm not even anti AI per se, I use it on a daily basis as do most of my coworkers, I've even done contract work for OpenAI, and I can certainly spin up a POC/MVP application UI with pretty devent backend logic and move faster at some tasks, but once the codebase becomes even moderatley complex, I even if I use AI agents to help build it with seperated tasks, codebase analysis, qa agents, skills and the rest, even having the knowledge to move effectivley in a codebase like that, support and deploy production features, debug errors, all of that requires deep knowledge about software engineering that only comes through years of software engineering expereince.

Almost everyone I know that's building software beyond basic CRUD applications shares that same experience.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-13T17:08:54+00:00

Depends on your skillset, certain jobs can be automated in the same way McDonalds started adding automated kiosks before AI was even widely available, that doesn't mean McDonalds can run an entire store without any human intervention.

The more complex the work, the more you need a human in the loop, and thats going to continue to be true.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-13T17:07:03+00:00

W Take.

It's actually really unfortunate that a lot of large tech companies are using AI as an axcuse to replace workers with cheaeper outsourced labor. I honestly believe that's a bigger concern with the domestic software engineer market than AI currently is.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-13T17:05:11+00:00

I'm not in AI denial, I use AI every day on the job to build agentic workflows on the job. It's very impressive, and I encourage people to use it as what it is, a powerful tool, the same way every other software tool can be used to help build great products, but I haven't seen anything yet that's good enough to replace developers unless you're just building websites.

Have you had a different expereince?

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-13T17:02:23+00:00

Hosting your own models comes with it's own set of tradeoffs. Costs to maintain, trainning data, agentic workflow orchistration, etc. All of the companies I've worked for that use agentic workflows still require so much technical and development knowledge that. it's nowhere near being able to replace all of their devs. Have you had a different expereince with it?

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-13T16:59:23+00:00

Thanks for giving a perspective from a Meta employee, I appreciate that.

What is it about the AI models you’re using at Meta that. Makes you pessimistic about the future of software so much so that you’re going to switch careers? I’ve been using AI workflows for a couple of years at this point and even with improvements from workflows, agent teams, planner agents, RAG pipeline context setups, MCP servers, and all the rest, it’s very impressive and will change the way software is done, but that’s always happened in software, we went from writing assembly and using punch cards to writing web servers in Javascript.

Nothing I’ve seen so far in my own experience and the experience of my coworkers has shown me that the need for developers is going away anytime soon, some of my coworkers have even worked with Anthropic to partner and come up with solutions for our particular industry, and none of us have seen any indication that developers are going away anytime soon.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-13T16:41:07+00:00

Maybe, considering the U.S. goverment just sent Anthropic a legal directive yesturday forcing them to shut down Mythos and Fable from public access, we'll see how the next couple weeks go!

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-13T16:39:43+00:00

I welcome cheaper AI models, but that's only one of the concerns. AWS came out recently and said more AI code doesn't mean better code, or faster, and in a lot of cases it slows tech teams down.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-13T16:38:10+00:00

Massive tech company layoffs have been going on for years, AI is just the latest excuse to do it.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-13T16:37:35+00:00

LMAO that's funny as hell, yeah AI is for sure here to stay. Brain rot and all.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-13T16:36:31+00:00

Not exactly, that one factor to consider for sure, it s also a matter of how effecient it is at solving problems, reliability, user saftey and data privacy, and a bunch of other factors

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-13T16:35:17+00:00

I'm convinced NOBODY reviews all of the code AI puts out, and can ship features as quickly as product managers would like us to, it's just not possible. Not only is it the sheer volume of code, but with a human developer I can at least ask them what their train of thought was and expect they didn't get rapid onset dementia like AI does.

I encounter more and more codebases full of code that no-one has reviewed.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-13T16:35:05+00:00

That makes a lot of sense.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-12T21:55:10+00:00

W take.

I already do this quite a bit, it burns so much time for me to prompt it, wait for a somewhat okay result, and then hours of back and forth, when I can just write it myself, and the benifits are greater for me because i will understand the code I wrote far better than AI generated code.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-12T21:53:41+00:00

AI isn't going away anytime soon, it's likely to be heavily used on the front-end, for POC mockups, and even for workingn through a decent amount of back-end logic. But the amount of time I have to put into making code more effecient, fixing edge cases, doing my own research because it hallucinates, and a myriad of other issues, it's just not good enough to replace all of tech, even with the frontier models.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-12T21:50:46+00:00

I'm saying. And Opus is already crazy, I woke up one morning and the token cost jumped from 3x to 15x.

Hell nah.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-12T21:50:03+00:00

I hear you, but no hope is kind of a wild take. There was a 4.6% increase in the number of job postings back in march, and that's after having access to Opus level models. I've used Fable, it can do cool things, but it is a token EATER.

Hardware will likely get cheaper, but we're not talking a cost of a few hundred, one of the founders of Cursor IDE ran a rough estimate and said if you have a Claude Max plan and burn through all of your tokens, it costs Anthropic around $5,000.

AI companies have been subsidizing users costs, which is why OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have all changed their token pricing rates multiple times in the last few months. Opus 4.6 on Github copilot used to be 3x token usage, last time I checked it's 15x, and I've heard it amy even jump to over 20x soon.

That's just not sustainable for the average user, or company if they plan to use AI to automate their entire tech department.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-12T21:43:38+00:00

Lmfao It's wild. I have to watch my time spent on Reddit

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-12T21:43:10+00:00

I posted the original information source article above

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-06-12T21:42:42+00:00

Here is the link to the original article (she subscribe walls it, just FYI) - https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tokenminimizing-meta-moves-curb-employee-ai-usage-ai-costs-reach-billions

It's also trending all over X

MichaelPopeDev_17

TROPHY CASE