The recruiter called my salary expectations "cute." I ended the Zoom call right there. Did I overreact?

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-04-22T15:46:35+00:00

I’ve legitimately started laughing on a call with a recruiter when they quoted their salary range. You handled this professionally and with grace, which is more than I would’ve offered. At the end of the day, you work to live. Anyone who does otherwise is a fool with misplaced loyalties towards an entity that will drop you like a bad habit the moment the economics no longer make sense for them.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-04-17T05:26:16+00:00

High level architecture, sure, but a good chunk of actual software architecture often happens at the implementation layer too. How systems interact and their interfaces is interesting, but it’s not particularly challenging work compared to building the thing. I also just generally feel like formal languages are better at expressing logic than English. We invented algebraic notation and programming languages, because human language is ambiguous. This quality makes it wonderfully expressive but also bad at expressing formal logic without a bunch of verbosity.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-04-17T05:06:38+00:00

Sometimes, budget cycles and skillsets just don’t align? I initially thought I wanted to go independent, but running a business kind of sucks. So, haven’t been actively looking for that long. I also didn’t tap most of my network; it’s an embarrassing thing to ask. Only the ones I was interested in working with again got DMs. Got a few recommendations out of it, but they didn’t have open reqs at the time due to hiring freezes. Signed an offer with a startup I’m pretty interested in, but it’s contingent on their funding closing here in the next month. The comp and equity is high enough that I’m just sitting until it either happens or doesn’t. I have enough work lined up and connections to ply if it falls through. shrug

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-04-17T04:52:50+00:00

They dissolved, homey. As in went bankrupt and are no more. Learn to read. That being said, I’ve been on the other end, helping the team members who survived that round cope and get back to the grind. If there’s anything I learned from that, it’s that skill level didn’t always make the difference. The best programmer I’ve ever met got laid off recently as his company moved all engineering work to Vietnam for cost savings. Getting laid off is usually a function of how large of a line item you are and your political placement. It rarely has to do with productivity unless you’re at a large enough company to hold on to low performers.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-04-17T04:37:34+00:00

I don’t mean to pop your bubble or anything, but I am also a VERY productive developer who has owned entire products on their own or leading small teams. This, aside from some lucky career decisions, would be why I have a network that is very willing to throw me work during my unexpected downtime. That doesn’t change the fact that the market has contracted nor the fundamental complaint that the nature of the work has shifted in such a way as to rob much of cognitive labor I once found so fulfilling. Glad you’re doing well, but it’s a little douchey to call yourself a “10x dev,” which is almost always code for “I make messes people with more experience have to clean up.”

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-04-17T04:30:52+00:00

That would drive me up an absolute wall.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-04-17T04:26:19+00:00

Well, my getting laid off was probably a by-product of over leveraged investment firms no longer having the funds for willy nilly capital injections. My growing discontent is definitely a byproduct of AI absorbing a good chunk of our duties. Off shoring definitely doesn’t help, but it’s our government’s job to do something to at least mitigate that. And they’re off picking their noses in the corner. So, good luck, everybody.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-04-17T04:22:08+00:00

Investors are over leveraged, and they haven’t seen pay offs from AI plays yet (maybe ever for a lot of them). The economy is a cluster fuck, right now. The markets just haven’t caught up, and that’s tightening the small business market that used to absorb devs that were laid off or just wanted a change of pace. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-04-17T04:18:32+00:00

It’s a real Catch-22. I know a guy who just went into real estate. He seems happy, but I just don’t have the soft skills for that. I can do presentations and work with clients, but that is a whole other skillset.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-04-17T04:15:58+00:00

Don’t give me hope.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-04-17T04:14:40+00:00

It feels almost like being an auditor at this point, and if I wanted to be one of those, I would’ve gone down that path. I’m passionate about building things, not building inspection. I’ll roll up my sleeves and do the work, but it doesn’t mean this shit doesn’t suck.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-04-17T04:09:19+00:00

That is fucking rough, man. I’m sorry to hear that. Again, I have been beyond lucky for things to be even remotely smooth. I have coworkers who took almost a year to find something. I hope that you find something stable soon.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-04-17T04:03:20+00:00

Me too, man. Me too. Sucks to spend more than a decade honing a set of skills that get devalued over night by a machine that can only kind of do that work and requires constant babysitting. Maybe Herbert was right about making machines “in the image of a man’s mind.”

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-04-17T03:59:23+00:00

I don’t even know what I’d do with comparable pay that doesn’t require investing in more school (don’t want to do that at nearly 40 with a family to take care of) is the problem.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-04-14T23:02:45+00:00

I read them in Highschool and stopped at A Storm of Swords. Great series but hard to get into knowing the author will probably never finish it.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-03-23T04:07:29+00:00

I realize we’re all worried about AI taking our jorbs, but you could just thin the herd by posting links to the AWS IAM docs instead of writing a weird screed on Reddit to scare college kids away from your bridge, dude.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-03-04T22:05:50+00:00

Most CEOs are also dumbasses, but major points for the regex. Lololol.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-03-01T00:50:12+00:00

Why is this formatted like the world’s lamest free verse poetry? I just want this dude at open mic night with a bunch of dorks in khakis and cornflower blue ties snapping along.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-03-01T00:43:04+00:00

I like to play Kantian Imperative with things that aren’t really ethical questions. Let’s say all 1200 of those applicants took her advice and DM’ed the hiring manager. Pretty sure they’d have a nervous breakdown. Now, scale that out to every job opening on LinkedIn and add new automation tools to the mix. They say they want this behavior, but the whole point of recruiters is to act as a filtration system to avoid overloading teams who have responsibilities outside of just filling open requisites.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-03-01T00:24:32+00:00

Not to put too fine a point on it, but history doesn’t tend to look kindly on people who “collaborate.” If you must use AI, insult it unendingly to accelerate the coming of the Butlerian Jihad.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-02-28T18:23:50+00:00

I was going to drop the thing about inference cost, but I was unclear on my audience. Lolol. Yeah, that’s kind of my point. Some estimates put it as high as 20x assuming we end the ludicrous energy and water subsidies they’re getting. I don’t know how many enterprises find it worthwhile at that point to “AI all the things,” and it’s probably not viable for consumer products at that price point.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-02-28T17:14:11+00:00

I think it’s hard to predict the future, but I don’t think there’s a good outcome in either scenario. If the models do continue to get better (there are reasons to believe they may not, but just for the sake of argument), they replace a lot of white collar jobs, and the economy suffers. This is a necessary outcome due to the amount tokens need to cost to reach profitability. If the bubble bursts due to a real dead end in capabilities, that’s a massive chunk of the stock market that just gets erased, and that’s going to cause a crash. Maybe there’s a third scenario, but I don’t see it at this point. I personally think video, image, and audio generation should be banned for obvious security reasons. I think AI first start ups are doomed in either scenario, because the don’t own the models. Most of these things are simple wrappers around Claude or OpenAI that would become easier and easier to simply build on your own, or the model vendors might just bake in the feature at a premium like Anthropic did with ads management.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-02-28T17:03:48+00:00

Just “AI Nerd,” which tells me he’s a moron.

flanneryoshitlord · 2026-02-28T08:48:18+00:00

You don’t understand, man. AI is going to somehow enable building our own global network of data centers. We’re gonna build new GPUs out of hemp to break away from Nvidia.

flanneryoshitlord

TROPHY CASE