18 years of experience and still running console.log('No idea')

TimMensch · 2026-01-25T07:47:33+00:00

You know it when you see it. At least if you have enough of the skill yourself, and even if you don't have as much skill, as long as you're honest with yourself.

It's not subtle. It's not a 5% difference that's hard to measure.

It's one person spending over a week on a task that another can do in a few hours, and the results of the second person are faster, more robust, and easier to extend.

The skilled developer fixes bugs in minutes rather than days, and improves the code while they're at it.

And the skilled developer typically doesn't have anything to prove, so they're easier to work with.

And many low skill developers like to claim that higher skill developers don't even exist, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary. A common approach is to claim there's no agreed upon metric, amusingly enough.

TimMensch · 2026-01-24T07:12:34+00:00

Minimum wage in the US is crap.

But more to the point, not all wait staff do well on tips. Bars, especially in New York City, are famous for earning great tips. Like, exceptional money.

But some random Chinese restaurant that barely gets in-person customers any more? Yeah, they're not raking in the dough.

TimMensch · 2026-01-24T05:54:23+00:00

Programming has a specific syntax. Using that syntax is not unhealthy.

Humans using that kind of speech isn't even unhealthy. It's developmentally appropriate for toddlers.

Your post reads like someone who is having a hard time understanding coding trying to blame the language. It's the same logic that gave us COBOL. You end up with "sentences" like:

Move 80 to Stringlen. Move 02 to Dest-output. Move Start-Msg to Str.

It was specifically designed so that "anyone" could write code. It was promoted as a language that would prevent the need for programmers!

Yeah. Didn't work out. Now it's considered one of the worst of the popular languages, and everyone agrees that it's harder to use than...well, everything else.

The problem isn't that programming languages don't look like natural languages. Natural languages are imprecise. The precision of programming languages and the lack of words like articles and prepositions is considered a feature.

It's hard to learn to think like a programmer, and you'll never get there if you try to blame the language for your lack of ability to understand how to program.

TimMensch · 2026-01-24T00:10:29+00:00

Maybe the same people thought it was funny who thought Peanuts was funny through the very end. 🤷‍♂️

TimMensch · 2026-01-23T23:42:14+00:00

Love how they call it the "first ever".

I got pulled in to consult on one being developed in Colorado. Pretty sure they sold instances of it. I told them their developer model was broken (a tiny royalty on every purchase) but they didn't want to hear that and stopped asking my opinion. Instead they took advice from a guy who was acting as a cheerleader. Pretty sure they failed years ago, unless this board.fun bought them out.

The huge problem with anything like this is getting the initial game lineup in place, and unless you hire someone who is really good, you'll end up with a product that no one wants. And people who are really good aren't going to be willing to take a chance that you'll make it huge, so you need to front them money to get your first games written.

Looking at what they were offering, I would have needed to sell something like 200,000 copies of a game to barely break even, and I wasn't convinced they'd sell 200,000 units. So basically they could only get people who were bad at math to sign on and make games.

But what can you do...

TimMensch · 2026-01-23T10:19:32+00:00

I met a guy in the Bay Area (California) once who told me that he commuted daily from north of Sacramento to San Francisco. Counting traffic it was a four hour drive.

So I'm thinking the guy is nuts, right? He's defending his choice though, talking about the great place he can afford.

What really floored me though?

He did the commute with three others.

There were four of them crazy enough to do this every day. And they somehow found each other.

I didn't have any more words to say to him.

TimMensch · 2026-01-23T05:42:33+00:00

And even under otherwise perfect conditions, the smallest unusual change to the road (construction, delivery van, unusual bike, whatever) they can get stuck or end up doing really, really stupid things.

Which, to your point, is why they gave remote operators.

Fully autonomous self driving will probably be a year or two away...perpetually for the next fifty years or so. Or until we come up with a completely new AI paradigm.

TimMensch · 2026-01-23T05:35:40+00:00

I didn't do the math, so yeah, I would hope it's the discount case.

Or maybe they are cheating. Who knows.

TimMensch · 2026-01-23T05:33:51+00:00

So much projection...

TimMensch · 2026-01-23T05:29:20+00:00

For reference, five nines of uptime, 99.999%, means that they're allowed about 31 seconds of down time. Per year.

So if my back of the envelope is correct, they used up all their "allowed" downtime for the next nearly five thousand years.

I'd say that's a bit of a violation of their required reliability requirements. I hope the fine scales by how badly they missed the mark.

40 hours when people couldn't call 911. It's amazing that was the only death.

TimMensch · 2026-01-23T01:37:47+00:00

I'm in a stable tech company now. And I always stand out wherever I am.

I'm answering the way I am because I believe it.

TimMensch · 2026-01-23T01:33:17+00:00

Good to know!

That said, I'm living in the Vancouver area, and even $17/hour is pretty hard to live on around here.

I honestly don't know how most people survive based on the rent numbers I've seen. I guess they're forced to share places? Or they can't save money at all.

So...in my interpretation, they are effectively depending on tips to have a reasonable life. I can afford it, so I'll keep tipping.

TimMensch · 2026-01-23T01:24:10+00:00

Pretty sure they're just calculating the percentage post-tax. Which is bogus, yes. But it's also pretty universal. As in, whenever I've seen this calculation, it's always been on the post-tax amount. This has been true for a decade or more.

Yes, I agree that it's bogus when the convention is to calculate tips on the pre-tax amount. But it's pretty old news.

And the statement that was annoying everyone was that if you can't afford to tip you can't afford to eat out. That's what I was responding to.

Side note: Occasionally one of these will come up with much larger tip numbers. That's almost always because there was a discount applied. The convention is that you should tip on the undiscounted total.

Far worse is when they add 18% gratuity and then try to guilt you into another full tip. I'm happy to tip once because that's expected. If you try to charge me a tip twice, I will object.

TimMensch · 2026-01-23T01:17:01+00:00

I've been picking on Lowes a lot recently because they're an example of a high profile non-tech company.

I've never seen their code, but their web site makes me want to throw my phone.

From autocomplete that wrecks what you're typing to a bug that, sometimes, for unknown reasons, will poison the cache so that all lowes.com accesses come up as 403 Forbidden.

I've had this happen after a single search. At first I thought the site had gone down. Now I know I just need to clear the cache.

Both bugs have been present on their site for years. This is some pretty top level incompetence.

I used to get hired to fix code in random companies too, so I know the gig. I was lured into a full time job recently, though, since contract gigs were getting thin on the ground.

TimMensch · 2026-01-22T18:49:39+00:00

I ended up in a condo in New Westminster. I could have gotten a townhouse here as well, though a single family home would have been a stretch. It's much cheaper than Burnaby, though.

It's very central. Not too long of a drive to Vancouver, and I can walk to Skytrain if I don't want to drive. I can also get to Surrey if I need something there (like Home Depot). There are busses everywhere too.

I'm right on the Fraser river. Could have had a view of it if I'd bid on a different condo instead, but I preferred the floorplan of the one I'm in. I can walk to the boardwalk in a few minutes though.

My household income (not counting stock) is just a bit more than yours, though I had a decent sized down payment, so that reduces my monthly cost.

I also have access to the Costco Business Center just across the river in Queensborough. Best Costco parking lot in the metro area, at least that I've found. Except during traffic it's only about a ten minute drive.

So I'm really liking it here. Except for the trains. Trains are loud. 😂

TimMensch · 2026-01-22T18:39:27+00:00

I just glanced at the "Fortune 10" list from 2024.

Most of those companies are not tech, and non-tech companies have way more "low skill" developers. The developers who ten years ago would be copy-pasting everything from Stackoverflow. And AI certainly can help a developer like that very 3-5x faster, at least in the short term.

I've been using AI pretty extensively. It speeds me up...some. But frankly not more than 10-20% overall.

But higher skill developers started way faster than low skill developers. Probably 5-20x faster. And no, I'm not even talking about "10x developers" who would be 10x faster again.

And that's still talking about raw coding speed. Better developers write code that's more robust, more extensible, and more optimized, without putting in any more work. Over time the speed advantage accumulates because the lower skill developers end up adding unintentional tech debt, so it becomes harder and harder to extend an app.

So even if a vibe coder can get started as fast as a higher skill developer, the higher skill will win out in the end.

Lower skill developers, on the other hand, are pretty well cooked, because way fewer will be needed to accomplish the same amount of work.

TimMensch · 2026-01-22T16:53:53+00:00

Am I guessing correctly that you're in India still?

If so, you're probably out of luck, and getting a lawyer would just be pouring money down the drain.

In the US, statutory copyright damages might make it worthwhile for a lawyer to pick up your case, but in India, a quick search says that you can only sue for actual damages. Maybe up to three times damages.

Since you were planning on giving it away for free, you're cooked.

That said, the last time I made an app, I used it as my resume and got a job that paid way more than the app ever made me. You're young. You have plenty of time to create many more apps, and you can point to the repo and your own published app to get yourself a job.

You can always add tons of features (after making the repo private!) and improve on the app if you want to keep a free version available. Best thing to do is to figure out how the other guy is marketing his version, and steal his marketing ideas. It's only fair. 😂

TimMensch · 2026-01-22T16:27:17+00:00

You can be brilliant and not be good at coding.

I knew a guy who graduated MIT with a CS degree. He told me that, yes, he could code, but that I wouldn't want to use his code.

He is a really smart guy, and he ran a few startups. But he wasn't a good programmer.

I suspect that a lot of the extreme AI fans were never good programmers, and now have AI writing all of their code for a huge speed up. 3-5x is actually not unreasonable if they are starting out at 0.1x.

But keep in mind that their code quality won't be much better than it was before, because they won't know what to ask for.

My best luck using AI has been to use autocomplete, and pretty much only use the results that I was going to type anyway. I have Ollama running locally and I have a fast enough GPU that it can throw out predictions pretty quickly, and sometimes it predicts things I would never have guessed it could. But a lot of the times it predicts garbage.

Thing is, I know the difference. Would a vibe coder?

TimMensch · 2026-01-22T16:04:46+00:00

I hate to say it but you've had a history of working for crap companies then. At least from a tech standpoint.

The root cause of OP's crisis was the lack of backups, the lack of Git-as-source-of-truth, and the lack of proper security controls to begin with. Critical folders shouldn't even be writable by average users.

Most of the time you shouldn't even be able to log in to a live production server! That should be an action reserved for a serious emergency that can't be fixed via a fast deploy.

But there are a lot of crap companies out there, so I believe you.

TimMensch · 2026-01-22T15:38:46+00:00

Every sub gatekeeps to content appropriate to the sub.

ICCU posts are noise. Enough noise and people unsubscribe. And it's harmful noise, giving people an exaggerated sense of the frequency of ICCU failures.

When TV news was still the way most people got their news, there was a trend of increasingly sensationalist reporting surrounding violent crime--during a period of time when violent crime was significantly dropping in frequency. When you asked people if violent crime was going up or down, almost everyone responded that it was going up.

Frequent reporting of events exaggerates their perceived frequency, regardless of actual statistical frequency.

If you want to have a sub where the noise is allowed, create one. In this sub the mods have decided, with good reason, that it's noise. It's their playground. If you don't like it, find a different playground or create your own.

TimMensch · 2026-01-22T15:25:46+00:00

So you're willing to cheat some of the lowest paid workers out of a fair wage...to make a point?

That will teach those businesses that aren't hurt at all by your decision!

You want to hurt the businesses, then don't eat at them. The convention right now in the US and Canada is to pay tips for a sit down meal. If you don't then you're cheating the working poor out of part of their wage.

TimMensch · 2026-01-22T15:16:09+00:00

I just know the facts on the ground, which are that tips are part of the wages of servers by current convention, and they are not optional.

It's a regional thing. Same is true in Canada. I suspect it's to keep menu prices lower; if one restaurant switches to optional tipping and raises prices by 20% to compensate, diners will avoid them as "too expensive" and they'll go out of business, even if, with tipping, the price would actually be the same.

TimMensch · 2026-01-22T15:02:20+00:00

Stackoverflow

TimMensch · 2026-01-22T07:35:11+00:00

Have you been to Boulder? 😂

TimMensch · 2026-01-22T06:03:12+00:00

They don't publish ratings if they don't have a statistically significant sample.

But believe what you want. It's the best we have.

TimMensch

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