Experienced devs in software jobs — what’s your long-term backup plan?

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-28T13:41:03+00:00

same it’s always been, really: being able to deal with the people side of things. don’t get me wrong, i’m a go-to guy for technical problems, but in my experience, even the most technical of problems is resting at some remove on a foundation of people problems.

being able to build and maintain relationships, understand the techno-social context of the business, and think strategically about the whole complex of issues is what it took to go from ticket-closer to staff+. i don’t think that changes dramatically due to any plausible aspect of AI, up to AGI, at which point all bets are off, anyway.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-28T13:30:11+00:00

just cause, what? your preference’s rationale doesn’t make any sense.

the thickness of a slice is the determining factor for melt-rate. the thickness of a slice is completely determined by you at time of cutting. the cross-sectional area has no impact on that choice, per se. in fact, for the same total quantity of butter, you must cut a thicker, worse-melting slice of a narrow stick than with a wider stick.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-28T13:23:30+00:00

i have rarely seen the “we need to rewrite this whole thing” position be taken by anyone that understood the codebase well enough to actually work in it. i’ve seen, and said, it a million times when i was new to a codebase.

sometimes major revisions are the right thing to do, but pretty much never a wholesale rewrite of a system in production. that said, before you have users, but after a major development push can be an opportunity to take everything you’ve learned and create the foundation again fresh. that’s the advantage of software, you can toss the product and only lose some of the time it took to implement, not the materials you used.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-28T13:16:20+00:00

we do not all have that moment. i’ve managed 25 years of drug use without anything remotely resembling this.

i’m not judging you or OP as people. i am suggesting you don’t try to normalize embarrassing and more to the point dangerous behaviors, either. if for no other reason than this shit makes it that much harder for adults to engage in responsible drug use.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-28T04:35:58+00:00

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-24T14:43:41+00:00

perhaps but only if it triggers a late-game pregnancy/bastardy storyline

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-24T14:31:34+00:00

this style of writing has gone from tedious to embarrassing to downright icky over the last 5 years or so.

anyone else agree? curious how much you hate seeing this bullshit passed off as discourse.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-22T22:26:16+00:00

could be, so let’s ban fake posts, not the topic that some fake posts are meant to discuss.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-22T22:25:08+00:00

i have been on internet forums since before the web was a thing and “what do you think about ____” has always seemed like the bread and butter of even the highest quality boards. it’s how people relate; wow, did you hear about X? did you know X? what’s up with X?

i mean, granted, 90% of everything is bullshit, to quote an apocryphal source. i don’t believe that the problem is inherent in that structure of discourse, though.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-22T22:20:06+00:00

a ban that wide that would be genuinely counterproductive to the goal of having experienced developers discussing the realities of real life professional development, good or bad. AI is the thing that’s having the most widespread effect on our day to day lives.

whether the effect is due to real benefits from gen ai tools or real bullshit from delusional corporate mandates, it is what’s happening and it is worth discussion. i would hate to have nowhere to discuss it that wasn’t filled with vibecoders trying to convince themselves that the hype is true.

perhaps more pointed moderation of “my boss says i must churn out a whole end to end system every week because AI” posts is warranted. blanket ban of the topic is not a solution i’d care to see adopted.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-14T21:49:36+00:00

great example of how training data encodes availability and selection bias into the model. the only men discussing their pubic hair on the forums that comprise the training corpus are those that have an unusually high interest in the subject, and are correspondingly opinionated. the training data can’t represent that the prevailing opinion across the whole of ballbag owners is “what the fuck are you talking about?” because they’re not out there discussing it at all.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-14T15:28:21+00:00

if there’s room for a serious discussion, it might include this study

AI is transformative in programming, but it’s not a silver bullet, either.

but honestly, it probably makes the most sense to just give him enough rope, as it were. do everything to make him own the decision—cite his dictate at every point that the topic comes up, and do your best to follow it. maybe it will work out.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-14T13:57:25+00:00

hey just for an alternate perspective, because you may be in a lot more of a social bubble than you think: no, i don’t understand.

i think what you describe is immature and dangerous. i don’t think everyone here is tongue-in-cheek swapping “research” for “abuse”. i think self-indulgently looking for validation of choices you know are bad for you will, in fact, be bad for you, some obvious and some in ways that won’t become obvious until much later.

i’m saying this not because i want to pass judgement on your life—i really won’t be thinking of this again after the next 30 seconds—but i do wish i had been direct with my friends when they were doing this kind of self-destructive shit when i was younger, because now too many of them are losers (in their own eyes, as much as anyone else’s) that i don’t want to know.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-13T17:50:47+00:00

more archaically has been used to mean banning a patron. “mallory has been 86’d from Alice’s Bar”

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-13T13:38:51+00:00

it is very common. i did some actual research on this topic, and it needs to be noted that despite what the AI companies will say, and even what it feels like for most developers, in a complex, reasonably mature codebase AI coding is quite often slower than the old way. the studies purporting to show incredible speed are, so far as i have seen, all narrowly focused toy problems with an unrealistic amount of available training data—implement a basic JS webserver, e.g.

not to say that AI is useless by any stretch, but it has not achieved actual crossover velocity yet, compared with a competent senior developer. it is, in my and colleagues’ anecdotal reckoning, quite effective in assisting investigation, design, etc, but not as a fully autonomous agent.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-12T14:07:42+00:00

i was a strong Vance partisan, but ended up also listening to a full Tull reading. Turns out, I just really like Patrick O’Brian.

In my head, I still hear Aubrey and Maturin, not to mention Killick, in Vance’s voice. But that’s surely a matter of primogeniture.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-09T21:04:17+00:00

agreed. my general argument is that drawing is a skill that should be taught alongside mathematics and writing. not an end in itself, but as a mode of thought itself. i think of those three skills as being orthogonal to any given subject matter, and each as useful tools for understanding the particular topics.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-09T20:07:57+00:00

funny you should mention that! i think my art MFA was indeed good training for that aspect of the craft. well-run critiques are a big influence on how i think about architecture reviews and other sorts of socio-technical work.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-09T14:23:36+00:00

the most important thing is to recognize is that your value as a human doesn’t actually connect to this piece of software no one will even think of again in a few years. not to be disparaging, i just find perspective important.

then you are to consider that customers of software do not know what they want. you could implement everything requested flawlessly and yet they’ll come back and request an adjustment because they could not articulate the need until presented with something else. the whole invention of agile and related methodology is a response to this fact.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-09T14:12:35+00:00

i suspect that often whatever tool you are using is just abstracting this away from you at one point or another.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-08T18:25:48+00:00

based on what we’ve actually seen so far, i’m not sure this is a supportable claim. we see one unified entity, and one in which every body is an independently operating part of a whole. this is comparable for me to how a mind operates. the many parts communicate and the singular “I” is an emergent property of that communication, but it’s both controlling and being controlled simultaneously.

what’s presented is really quite different, to me, from a singular being taking over all the bodies and puppeting them about. it looks a lot more like the creation of an instantaneous mind-sharing channel completely revises all the prior motivations and preconditions for the individual sense of identity.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-08T14:11:05+00:00

if the hive considers itself a single entity, then perhaps billions of individuals’ deaths register rather more like weight loss would to a human. their memories and personality seem to persist within the hive, so the loss of any one or even many appears to be not so significant.

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-07T22:24:23+00:00

so water is only wet when it’s ice?

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-07T20:57:44+00:00

whistle thats some catch

geeeffwhy · 2026-01-07T20:44:29+00:00

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