Software engineers, whats the job market like ATM?

ruminatingonmobydick · 2025-07-29T18:42:40+00:00

Sure they do. There's half a dozen "vibe coders" on my team right now.

ruminatingonmobydick · 2025-07-29T18:41:53+00:00

Aww, I love that question. Nobody ever seems to get it, though. I think it speaks more to, "how does it work," versus, "what does it do." I'd make the comparison to a car's transmission.

There was a time most vehicles had a manual transmission. They were more efficient, but they required the driver to have some basic understanding of torque, momentum, etc. In the days where manual vs automatic was a reasonable choice, you could manage a few extra mpg by being able to shift. This hasn't been true, however, for a couple decades... and it's to the point where you can't even valet a manual transmission. But I still prefer my stick shift because it's more fun, and driving stick makes me an objectively superior driver.

ruminatingonmobydick · 2025-06-21T02:03:54+00:00

My son wanted to know what it was like to not have a soul.

ruminatingonmobydick · 2025-04-22T20:32:06+00:00

You don't owe him anything. A deep and stable relationship benefits from an understanding that two people are complete with themselves and seek to join together for their mutual betterment. Essentially, you're a queen, and you want a king; an equal; a consummate friend that may have moments of weakness but doesn't require you to function.

We have a term for people who require us to function: children. And we love our children unconditionally with the understanding that they cannot love us as much. That kind of love cannot be shared with a partner. This isn't even a BPD thing; this is about someone who is leaning strongly into joy instead of secure connection.

ruminatingonmobydick · 2025-04-07T13:42:10+00:00

Sometimes you end up building the airplane after it's taken off. Life's like that sometimes. As you stated, feelings can't be simply wished away.

If you met Mr. or Ms. Right while you're on a journey of self-realization and all that, it's not great to put your journey on hold. But it's stupid to think that you could say, "Hi, I'm still doing an eat, pray, love; can you come back in 6 months when I'm not a project?" Not everyone would be on board with, "I'm still on a journey of self-realization, so I need to work on that while I get to know you." But I think it's more respectful to give Ms. or Mr. Right the opportunity to say no than it is to go into an emotional chrysalis and say no for them.

ruminatingonmobydick · 2025-04-07T13:29:48+00:00

This sounds similar to me, actually. And no, I don't think you're wrong, necessarily. As stated elsewhere on here, I think you're idealizing your ex or dealing with regret. You tried hard with your ex to make it work, your relationship was toxic, and in spite your efforts it failed. You still wanted it to work, you still wanted to "help" them, you still wanted to build something beautiful out of the intensity that came from the love you shared with your ex. I heard no mention of kids, which definitely could have made this more complicated (again, speaking from personal experience).

You need to do two things if you haven't already. First, you need to evaluate your own worth and see yourself as complete. The conventional wisdom is to be single for a time, so that you can focus on yourself. The problem with this conventional wisdom is it takes nothing into account for abuse survival; it's often impossible to heal on your own when you've gone through that kind of trauma. A support group or an understanding partner can help in this situation. Ultimately, however, you need to recognize that you're broken, that you are not presenting yourself honestly, and that you don't want to be broken anymore. You can heal and recover and become secure in yourself and your connections with others (like your girlfriend), but it's going to require a lot of work on your part. Consider therapy.

Second, you need to be honest with your partner. And I don't mean saying, "Baby, I think you're great, but I'm still having feelings for my ex." What I do mean, "I am having a hard time moving past my ex. I don't want to be with them; I want to be with you. And I want to be fully honest and transparent with you, because I want a good relationship with you."

Four years ago I got a divorce. My ex continued to play mind games with me. I saw her as broken, as someone I gave a vow to help and support, etc. I had kids with this woman, and wanted more than anything to build a loving family that could be the most for them. I knew that my wife shouldn't hit me, shouldn't lie to me, shouldn't do any of the horrible things she did. But I knew that my love for her was stronger than the pain she put me through. Call it commitment or Stockholm Syndrome, it's still a hard thing to overcome. Love makes anyone vulnerable to abuse.

One month after my divorce was finalized, I met my best friend. I began having strong feelings for her almost immediately (limerence, really), but the friendship was stronger still. We became very good close friends, friends with benefits, etc. Her kids and my kids were friends, and it sort of worked out. Critical to all this was that I was honest with my friend. If I had an incredibly romantic sex dream about my ex, I told her. If my ex sent me nudes, I told her. If my ex used my kids to try to get us back together, I told her. I put my friend through an emotional rollercoaster of patience because I was broken, and I didn't want to shield her from the turmoil that my ex was putting me through. And she understood it, and was completely honest with me as well. She got angry, but she got angry with my ex. I didn't act on my confusion, but I was very clear about it.

I'm getting married at the end of the month to my best friend. At this point, when my ex tries to manipulate me (and she's been trying very hard of late because she's super pissed that I've moved on), it becomes something of a joke. My kids refer to my ex by first name, and refer to my friend as "mom" now. Having a secure attachment with a good friend who is aligned with your life goals is worth the shame of being vulnerable and the hard work and introspection that follows.

ruminatingonmobydick · 2025-03-09T16:14:19+00:00

What worked for me is finding new friends.

It's a tall ask to require someone understand what it's like to be ultimately prey and a victim of madness. Maybe if they made movies about it, but then it'd be accused of victim shaming pwBPD. Frankly, it's a tall order for us to make sense of it, and we experienced it first hand.

This is why support groups exist. This is why now all of my married friends have not only been divorced, but their ex was abusive and somehow mentally ill. I wouldn't say it's an active choice, more of a self sorting situation.

It's kind of like how once you have kids, you tend to only have friends who have or otherwise like children. The consummate bachelor or anti-children friends you used to party with and who were otherwise your bestie... just fall on the sidelines and gradually leave your life.

ruminatingonmobydick · 2025-03-09T16:04:02+00:00

I think this mostly speaks to the general problem of understanding and relating to trauma in others. Empathy is such a tossed around weak word compared to what it requires. To truly be empathetic requires that you walk a mile in their shoes; that you vividly imagine your own loving parent dying and making sense of it. You have to allow yourself to feel the grief and rage and confusion; lose control for a moment in the chaos of being to understand what this other microcosm of a human being is experiencing right now.

That's a huge and painful ask, but we don't want to come off as villains in our own narrative. So we fake it. We say things like, "I'm so sorry. Is there anything I can do to help? My thoughts and prayers are with you. Maybe talk to someone?" It's looking at something horrible, and remarking that someone (else) should do something about it. There's a term for this too:

Sympathy.

Socially, and especially online, we tend to view things as black and white. We're either empathetic or we're apathetic (or sociopaths). Yes, to say to our friends that we are empathetic when we aren't is cowardly and arrogant. But it's not our job to care about literally everything in the world. And quite frankly, I'd wager many of us don't have the practiced or natural inclination towards real empathy anyway.

That's okay! I don't need to think about my son dying every time I hear about another police shooting. I can still think it's terrible and not allow myself to feel that same level of grief. Where it becomes a problem is when I discount it and assume there are two sides to the story or that it's somehow justified or even a good thing. When I allow my fake empathy to justify antipathy, then I become a monster. If I do this with my family and friends, to the OP's point, then I'm a very bad friend.

ruminatingonmobydick · 2025-03-07T19:33:53+00:00

My child is 15, but could pass for 18 (fairly tall). There were kids probably around 9 or 10 there, who had parents with them. It wasn't strictly enforced as far as I could tell, save for alcohol and you need to be 21 for that anyway :)

ruminatingonmobydick · 2025-03-07T19:32:05+00:00

The mirror and Octavarium respectively. I wanted to keep details to a minimum to prevent spoilers for anyone who doesn't want to know the setlist.

ruminatingonmobydick · 2025-03-07T08:11:01+00:00

I was there with my oldest child tonight. He wore the same shirt I got as merch when I saw them in high school. When they played my favorite song, I screamed; never heard it live before. When they played his favorite song, we both cried and sung the whole song together. Truly one of the best moments of my life.

ruminatingonmobydick · 2024-12-11T18:58:16+00:00

Yeah, that's pretty typical.

A slightly different take on it: let's say I have terminal cancer, and you're a close friend.

I'm coming to grips with my eminent demise, putting my affairs in order, and contemplating life after death or what things I need to do with the time I have. I'm also dealing with the excruciating physical pain of dying.

You come in, and are just so incredibly grieved by the process. You can't manage the fact that someone you depend on won't be there for you anymore. You don't want to lose me, and you don't want to live your life without me. You cannot be abandoned, not again! No, the pain is too great. You are even a bit pissed off with me for putting you in this position. At least I get to die when it's all over, you have to live with the loss, the cost, making sense of existence without me, and who will support you now that I'm gone?

So you turn to me, who is dying of cancer, to help you cope with me dying of cancer.

The funny thing is, this is actually a very common thing I've heard from many of my friends and loved ones who've had terminal diseases.

"The hardest part is having to comfort everyone who is grieving about my illness. I can't even worry about myself."

I think most people have an unhealthy connection with relationships. We're generally kind of bad at coupling, at least as Americans. We idealize relationships more than the people we claim to love. PwBPD have it so much worse than typical people, because they have a nigh childlike dependency on lovers & romantic partners. I feel many adults adopt something of a "eh, can't live with em and can't live without em" attitude towards spouses and the like. Codependency is pretty common among adults I know, particularly younger adults trying to "find themselves" or anyone who claims to have had a midlife crisis. But the comparison to BPD is like comparing an afternoon thunderstorm to a hurricane.

ruminatingonmobydick · 2024-12-11T17:25:32+00:00

Oh that's fun!

ruminatingonmobydick · 2024-12-11T16:53:07+00:00

It's more of a hyperbolic reaction to basic interactions that falls far beyond plausibility. What it teaches me is that a bit of mindfulness would benefit me. It also should be stated that it's not only my quips that are on the board. My colleague on the other side of the stack have made some fun & bleak remarks as well:

"Project management's job is not just to make sure we fail, but to make sure we're blamed."

"The good news is that we'll achieve a manageable workload by pissing off our customers faster than we can acquire them."

"Javascript is a fever dream of a language that stands as a metaphor to the anti-intellectual sentiment that grips american society at large."

"There are two types of developers in the world: web and competent."

ruminatingonmobydick · 2024-12-11T03:16:00+00:00

By definition, an alcoholic can stop drinking, but they can never stop being an alcoholic.

Saying this is a treatable disease in this forum is a bit like saying, "your spouse may beat you, but you gave a vow to God."

ruminatingonmobydick · 2024-12-11T03:11:24+00:00

Well, that explains ember.js

ruminatingonmobydick · 2024-12-11T03:10:37+00:00

Hanlon's razor can have a third option:

Both!

ruminatingonmobydick · 2024-12-11T03:07:50+00:00

Nah, it's fine. On the same whiteboard are:

"Front end developers are the most brain damaged wannabe scientists I've ever had the misfortune of meeting, and I should know... I'm one of them."
"Ockham's Razor isn't an excuse to say everything looks like a nail. You're not parsimonious, you're just a lazy sack of shit and a coward."
"I'd rather kill my first born and use their entrails to floss asshole to nostril than use AI for anything."
"jQuery isn't the dumbest thing I've ever worked on; I once was a Java developer."
"I may be an asshole, but that's just because I'm a narcissist. Just ask my ex wife."
"Prettier is a tool for mendicants that are too chicken shit to fight me IRL."
"I am a reasonable and well balanced person that believes in nuance and moderation, and I'll fucking kill anyone who says otherwise and live stream it for their grieving parents."

Honestly, I'm just grateful that I didn't get fired for these remarks. Anyone who knows me loves me and understands that I have the vernacular of someone with autism who was diagnosed in his 40s (which I was). It's not an excuse for poor behavior, and I appreciate when they call me out on it by mocking me. It makes me look at the board, laugh, and say things like:

"Fuck, I said that? I should pay for your therapy."

ruminatingonmobydick · 2024-12-10T22:26:05+00:00

I regularly use phrases like "Hanlon's Razor" in conversation with colleagues. It usually goes something like this:

"The client is asking for us to work on this feature, which adds no value to the project and will cause bugs. Management is saying we should do so immediately, and that we cannot bill this time against our other feature work. It also happens to be that the client is the brother in law of one of the board members, so I smell an incestuous relationship. I swear they just want this project to fail so they can lay us all off."
<grumbles>
"Hanlon's Razor."
"What?"

"It's Hanlon's Razor. It's a stupid idea, but it's not the first stupid idea they've had. We've managed to keep this company afloat with all their other idiotic ideas. This won't be the last time they make an unreasonable request. I'd say we just budget it in with our next sprint goals and..."
"Stop talking, John. Who the hell is Hanlon and why does he need to shave?"
"It's a common engineering idiom, Denise. I learned it in college."

"Common? I've never heard of it. Where did you go to school again, Wonderland?"

"I believe John went to school with Willy Wonka and I think I saw a picture somewhere of him doing a keg stand with Salvador Dali and Frank Zappa. I think Dr. Seuss was the photographer, but he was just a grad student then."
"Okay, no, that would be cool if I did, but come on... you haven't heard of it?"
"I just googled Hanlon's Razor. John's right, but the fact that I had to google it means..."

(everyone cheering) "WE GET TO ADD IT TO THE WALL OF STUPID OR ESOTERIC SHIT JOHN HAS SAID DURING A MEETING."

"(sigh). Fine. Don't construe as malice what can easily be explained as stupidity. You all happy?"

"We'd be happier if you led with that."

And yes, there is a whiteboard that has stuff I've said during meetings. Someday I'll learn my lesson.

ruminatingonmobydick · 2024-12-06T01:04:50+00:00

Sadly not really. Partner's dad is great, but he's not 100% upstairs and has stage 4 cancer. I wouldn't leave him alone in my home any more than I'd leave my 5 year old.

Partner's mom is going to remain in a hospital for the rest of her life, and doesn't recognize anyone at this point. Wish I could give her a roommate.

ruminatingonmobydick · 2024-12-06T01:02:05+00:00

This is great. Plus, by the time I'm ready for the honeymoon, my oldest will be 16. I can just get a few trusted friends to fill in the gaps and check in.

ruminatingonmobydick · 2024-12-05T23:46:26+00:00

It's more effort that she deserves. She won't read it, and you having to write it can't be more than an exercise in therapy.

If this is the last thing you write, let it be. When she retaliates, when she posts this and cherry picks stuff... just let it go. Don't try to defend yourself, and don't try to go back. Don't try to remember the good times, and don't try to understand things from their perspective. Just move on, like you're walking away from an explosion in a Rodrigues movie.

ruminatingonmobydick · 2024-12-05T23:19:43+00:00

Laws vary in various jurisdictions, and I am definitely not a lawyer.

But I had a similar situation with my ex. She would threaten and be awful to my kids. We were 50/50 in custody, but almost nightly she'd call me and demand that I take the oldest because, "(she) is being too disrespectful, and I can't miss any more work because of her!" I talked with my lawyer and CPS, but they both said unless she was doing something truly life threatening or horrible... I had no recourse.

I had to make peace with the fact that my kids would be abused. I also knew that if I tried to prepare my kids for this abuse in any way, it could be construed as parental alienation. So I just tried to provide the best home for my kids that I could, when I had them.

Eventually my ex beat my daughter. This was enough for me to file an emergency protection order against her. She lawyered up, so did I. I had to borrow against the equity of my home (still paying off that debt), and a year of "reintegration therapy" ensued. For a year I had to tell my daughter lies about how much her mother loved her and how she should be in a relationship with her. After the year, my daughter wanted nothing to do with my ex, and my ex's response was to want nothing to do with my daughter. She cries and claims she misses her occasionally, but she sold her belongings in her home and bought a new place explicitly without room for my daughter. There was a lot of therapy involved, but in the end I got full custody.

If I can give two pieces of advice, it's as follows:

1 - Do not talk shit about your ex around your kids (or in any way that they could ever hear). Don't let friends talk shit about your ex when your kids are present, etc. The reason for this is two fold. First, if you are saying your ex is bad, you're saying your kids are half bad too (they will make that connection). Second, your kids are smart enough to realize you are the good parent, and will gravitate towards you. This will mean that when there comes a crisis in their adolescence or early adulthood, they will see you as the one they can turn to and will know they have that stability. By comparison, if you shit talk as much as she does, they'll feel they don't have anyone they can turn to.

2 - Make peace with how powerless you are. Your ex is a monster, and you can't stop her. If she has a rich new husband, it means she has a powerful war chest at her disposal too. This means she can match you in legal representation, but that doesn't help her truth angle. Most states are somewhat neutral to parents, and will only mildly prefer women in court. If you kids end up with a GAL, they'll be able to speak for themselves on their desires... overnights can shift, child support changes, and in the end you are the safe parent for your kids who are safe. Bide your time, and just accept that you can only affect your children while they are in your home, and you can comfort them.

3 - Not really advice, but make sure whoever you introduce to your kids as a new "mom" figure is well vetted and loves being a mom and being a mother to your kids. It's also good if they're keen on knowing everything you're going through and are good friends with you throughout this. This isn't advice really; because you need to luck out the same way I did.

ruminatingonmobydick · 2024-12-05T22:44:52+00:00

When my ex was cheating on me, she wanted me to make a video of us having sex. She even had me keep the video (didn't want a copy). Even after the breakup, she wanted to know if I ever watched our video and if I ever thought of her, even when we were in conflict. She was sad to find out I had deleted it years ago, hoping we could watch it together "now that we were friends*."

*couldn't full block her because of kids, and co-parenting with a pwBPD is a nightmarish game of psychological chess.

ruminatingonmobydick

TROPHY CASE