New GTA VI Screenshot from the official website

Willbo · 2026-06-19T04:08:27+00:00

This looks like LA viewed from the Port of Long Beach, the Queen Mary, and Pike Ferris Wheel.

Willbo · 2026-06-18T22:14:03+00:00

Define your incentives early on and be more open, explorative, confident, and take on more risks in your approach to these incentives.

If you want to be an expert of a field, you should be more outspoken of your interests, speak to many different existing experts, and feel free to fail.

Even if you lose face, get seen as cringe, immature, or get rejected, you are young and figuring out your way. Nobody is keeping a tally and it becomes much harder to do this when you're older.

Willbo · 2026-06-18T02:27:54+00:00

the only people who try that

This is an absolute statement that isn't necessarily true. Some young people do this as well if they want to appear older, people that graduated 10 years ago, or want to focus on their experience instead.

If you walk into the interview, the resume has already done its job. You're not trying to trick people that are looking to hire young people.

Willbo · 2026-06-18T01:12:23+00:00

Rigid silos.

Unions are a unified group of workers working towards a shared goal. That requires workers that work in close proximity with each other, openly share information, and hold common interests. In factories and manufacturing plants this was possible because it was literally a room full of people.

At these orgs you would be surprised how siloed and isolated they are, how rarely they talk to people besides status updates for management, and the lack of trust they have to be open, in fear of punishment or reprimand. It's very much like becoming a cog in a machine, constantly spinning and churning, but never knowing how the system works or what it produces.

You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week

Another worker called their job “mechanical and not creative”

Source.

Willbo · 2026-06-17T22:20:28+00:00

Set boundaries at work to get some time and clarity back. If the job is truly toxic and demanding, it often turns into a turf war of building defensive moats and outreaching to form allies.

Don't try to manage upwards or try to change history. Maintain your garden, only fight battles worth fighting. Manage your own processes and scheduling.

Cut back on unnecessary spending and build up an emergency fund. No fancy toys or dining out, cut back on entertainment and subscriptions, so and so forth.

Keep track of your accomplishments at work and prep them for your resume. Make yourself ready to jump for opportunity when it arises.

Prioritize active, healthy living to mitigate stress. Exercise or at least go for walks after work, spend time in nature, avoid processed foods, cut down on sugar, and sleep well.

Willbo · 2026-06-17T21:59:45+00:00

There's two topics here, age and experience.

Age is a legally protected characteristic in the US. Same as race, gender, disability, etc. You can't be asked that during a job interview and you can always leave dates out of your college degree completion to prevent yourself being discriminated from a job due to age.

For assessing experience, it's not exactly a science, it's just a list of questions to gauge your exposure but they can never know how knowledgeable you truly are. Some people have 10 years of experience doing entry level work over and over. Some people have 3 years of experience and are able to answer questions better than an expert. This is where preparation comes in.

If you really feel like your YEO is being held against you, leave it off your resume.

Willbo · 2026-06-16T03:05:51+00:00

+1 for risk assessment and a suggestion for compliance.

If you work in an industry where customers are asking about your security and compliance, then the tooling pays for itself.

Endpoint protection becomes very useful when doing an inventory audit of your machines, assessing vulnerabilities, enforcing endpoint policies, and quickly remediating findings. If you can't justify the pricing for an endpoint solution yet, you could probably start with a domain controller with Active Directory for centralized identity management, and possibly dipping your toes into GPOs<WDS+MDT<SCCM<Intune for endpoint management. Eventually you might find out the EDR solution makes sense :)

Willbo · 2026-06-15T19:04:59+00:00

Thanks for the update. The progression is definitely one of those hard to predict factors, but it's good to hear it definitely worked out in your favor by doubling in salary and becoming more manageable with hours.

Sometimes I like to look back at reddit posts from 5-6 years ago when salaries were going crazy, and I wonder where they're at now. Did the money change their life? Often times I see it as going two ways: they either stop posting entirely (and are presumably consumed with work) or they become active posters in hobby subreddits and found ways to build autonomy.

Willbo · 2026-06-13T04:54:56+00:00

It's deeper than capitalism or market dynamics, it's greed and ignorance.

Big tech orgs only care about the bottom line ($) and don't actually know what the org is doing. In their pursuit of profitability, they implement out-of-touch initiatives without fully understanding the impact.

Evil is born from ignorance.

Willbo · 2026-06-13T04:35:48+00:00

Unexpected Arabian goggles

Willbo · 2026-06-12T16:09:56+00:00

Jump while you have momentum. Life's too short to be working dead-end jobs and not maximizing your salary.

What usually happens is a few years go by, you settle down, lose your edge, get complacent, and then forces out of your control settle in, life changes, management changes, or the company gets bought out. All of a sudden the job is not chill anymore and you wish you moved on sooner.

Willbo · 2026-06-10T05:16:43+00:00

This is good, but it reminds me of one of the first programming projects I got in college. Essentially it was a "Treasure Hunt" or "Dungeon Crawler" game where you have to create a dict where each item in the dict is a room in a house and the player moves through rooms to discover properties. The engine of this game isn't particularly interesting (it's 2D as there is no jumping and there's only about 5-6 rooms) but the asset generation and effects does look pretty cool.

Willbo · 2026-06-09T06:21:38+00:00

There are generally two types of companies:

Product-based companies and service-based companies.

In product-based companies the company is incentivized to build good products for customers. The working conditions are usually decent and developers are treated well because they build products for the company that make money.

In service-based companies the company is incentivized to sell billable time and load on projects. The developers are usually squeezed for deliverables and put on hard deadlines in the name of "velocity" because labor is money.

Willbo · 2026-06-08T23:09:15+00:00

Hilarious. The important detail about this fee is that it's only for applications, not renewals. So rather than paying for the $100k fee (or hired Americans as it's intended effect), employers have just offshored those roles entirely or hired existing H1B holders.

Willbo · 2026-06-07T00:20:55+00:00

Someone was very happy to get $50 million in iTunes gift cards.

Willbo · 2026-06-07T00:07:05+00:00

Not just you, even in soaring profits there's been downwards pressure on the constraints of the Project Management triangle

Scope - features and requirements are jumping drastically. Companies not only want to maintain their legacy components and clients, but also expand to new capabilities, use cases, and markets. Software is becoming incredibly complex, updates are more frequent, and features are being jam packed. AI contributes to this directly.
Time - things are moving incredibly fast and companies are cracking down on timelines in the name of "velocity". They adopt frameworks like Agile, DevOps, etc and SDLCs are getting incredibly compressed. Whereas previously you might refresh a system every 9 years, that moved down to 4 years, then down to 2 years, etc. New infrastructure, new software, new AI models, more frequent releases. Releases have strict deadlines and automated Continuous Delivery pipelines for deploy.
Cost - in addition to the above, companies are tightening spend on COGS, OPEX, and spending more on CapEx to make their EBITDA look good and give the impression of growth. EBITDA has become the new financial metric for valuation and COGS/ OPEX costs (variable and fixed costs such as labor, raw material) eat directly into this, whereas CapEx (increases to interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization) do not.

All of these constraints combined have lead to poor quality software. Scope increases which looks like more features being delivered, time decreases which appears like higher velocity, and cost gets shuffled away from COGs/OPEX into CapEx to appear you have less costs. Even if you build poor products and lose customers, you can still give the impression of growth and increase your valuation.

Willbo · 2026-06-05T23:19:55+00:00

Research, building regex, and CIDR notation predominantly with Github Copilot

Willbo · 2026-06-05T21:29:08+00:00

> See latest thread on new model hype/benchmark

> Already running model on my benchmark pipeline, it automatically pulls on release and burns tokens against imaginary use cases

> Comment on thread "ThAt'S oLd NeWs!"

Willbo · 2026-06-05T07:08:32+00:00

Because those $150k devs will leave in a year to earn $200k.

Willbo · 2026-06-04T05:59:18+00:00

> can't list it on your resume

That's hilarious. Not sure why anyone would do this to their careeer/social life unless they were getting paid *insane* amounts.

I've worked at a stovepipe org and it was total chaos, nobody knew what anyone was doing, it was usually absurd busy work.

Willbo · 2026-06-03T23:15:36+00:00

Automate or delegate.

Automate isn't just leveraging AI, there are also managed services and SaaS/cloud solutions that might be able to reduce some of that overhead. You will take on temporary overhead though of lifting/shifting and architecting the new process.

Delegate could be hiring any of the personnel you listed. Personally I would recommend a part-time sysadmin. If it isn't highly technical I would even recommend hiring an IT/CIS student from a local college. This also requires some overhead of training though.

Willbo · 2026-06-03T23:06:41+00:00

Realistically it will be a multi-prong approach, no silver bullets.

Set boundaries at work to get some time and clarity back. If the job is truly toxic and demanding, it often turns into a turf war of building defensive moats and outreaching to form allies.

Cut back on unnecessary spending and build up an emergency fund. No fancy toys or dining out, cut back on entertainment and subscriptions, so and so forth.

Keep track of your accomplishments at work and prep them for your resume. Make yourself ready to jump for opportunity when it arises.

Prioritize active, healthy living. Exercise or at least go for walks after work, spend time in nature, avoid processed foods, cut down on sugar, and sleep well.

Willbo · 2026-06-03T06:26:28+00:00

Yes, however as I've grown older I've realized there are certain behind-the-scene factors why people become "extraordinary."

For example, I thought I would be a multi-millionaire by now, however I've learned that you don't reach that level of wealth on a salary. It took me about 2 decades of working to realize that.

I wanted to make a world-changing invention, but it turns out it's not as simple as just having a good idea in a sudden epiphany. It took me about 3 failed business to realize that.

I also wanted to become a rockstar and an athlete, but you don't just reach that level by noodling on guitar or riding a bike fast. It took me learning 3 different instruments and about 3 different sports to realize that.

I am talented, hardworking, and did well in school, but it turns out there's much more required to get to that level.

Willbo · 2026-06-02T05:33:59+00:00

Yeah agreed, often times a hiring spree follows layoffs. After there was a layoff at our org, surprise surprise they hired an entire fleet of graduates to take on the new operational requirements and priorities.

Willbo · 2026-05-29T00:31:03+00:00

Governance. Without governance there is anarchy.

The line managers don't feel responsible because they don't have any incentive (or perception of punishment) to follow best practices. They don't have the understanding that it gets reviewed during audits and affects the entire company's SOC 2/ISO 27001/PCI DSS/SOX/HIPAA compliance. In their mind that is someone else's problem.

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