Yeah, that’s true. It amazes me how some of my team in NYC will make double what I make, but live like I lived when I was a student, and be amazed that I own a car.

*If you’re in the US.

Some interns in the US make more than experienced engineers in Europe…

I work at a FAANG company. I’ve also worked at startups and smaller national companies. They’re all morally bankrupt, just in many different ways.

Hell, I’ve worked for “tech for good” clients that have done reprehensible things that required legal intervention…

I remember joining the industry and switching our company over to full Continuous Integration and Deployment. Instead of uploading DLL’s directly to prod via FTP, we could verify each build, deploy to each environment, run some service tests to see if pages were loading, all the way up to prod - with rollback. I showed my manager, and he shrugged. He didn’t see the benefit of this happening when, in his eyes, all he needed to do was drag and drop, and load the page to make sure all is fine.

Unsurprisingly, I found out that this is how he builds websites to this day…

From a company perspective, it’s a common sentiment. Google and Amazon have mantras around trying to stay agile and relevant despite being behemoths, and both have arguably kept into boomer tech territory the second they made a poor CEO hire. Microsoft had their Ballmer era, and while Nadella did a lot of good at Microsoft they’ve had a lot of failures in established divisions to be soaked up by AI and sales.

I think that all of big tech has struggled over the last 3 years. Sacrificing employee skill for shareholder value has ultimately moved them all into IBM territory, whereas the cool tech is happening at startups again. If AI is a bust, and another company comes along and eats their lunch in their established markets like consumer devices, web tooling, or cloud computing, they’re in real danger of another huge set of layoffs and resetting their businesses to only core profit-making ventures. What I think we’ve seen companies shift towards death, Day 2, rotting from the inside, or whatever your business calls stagnation.

Definitely not a US thing. Here in the UK I don’t think I’ve worked 9-5 for over 20 years…

I graduated in CS alongside a guy in his fifties. He’s now retired, but he had easily 10-15 years as a software engineer, and was the lead of a group at a large company before he retired, so I assume it all went well for him.

If you want to learn something, do it. if you want to do it professionally, do it.

It’s funny how Stack Overflow was created because forums were shit for programming discussion, and because Q&A was dominated, sold, and locked down by Experts-Exchange.

Now, pretty much the second the final founder bailed (and jumped on the AI train) SO starts enshittifying its product…

It’s a mix of both. My wife makes good money as a teacher, primarily because she’s very senior in her role, and takes leadership responsibilities. Teachers are required in (mostly) equal measure everywhere, whereas software engineers always gravitate towards HCOL areas where the jobs are. If you’re not in one of these areas, you’re stuck with limited jobs, with limited pay.

My commute is close to two hours, one way, but the pay I can get here is over double what I’ll get where I live. Comparably, as a senior I probably get paid less than a new graduate in a HCOL city in the US.

My wife is a teacher. Her pay was mostly comparable to mine throughout our careers. My pay has literally tripled since working in London.

Currently, there are senior design and development roles in my home city of Bristol that pay less than what you’d get paid as a fast food manager.

Not all programmers live in the US. In the UK, especially outside of London, the pay is surprisingly bad.

Those offices are usually locked down anyway, on floors where the unwashed masses aren’t granted access. Hell, if you want to even be on a call with someone like the CTO you’ll have to reach out to three different entities, book a specific room, and reach out to that person’s team of assistants to ensure everything is aligned.

If they got access to the CTO office they definitely broke in, or evaded security in some way. That alone at any company will get you fired, and probably arrested.

Source: Once attended a meeting with a SVP at a big tech company. I genuinely think it would be easier to meet the president.

Spend 10 mins on Blind, and you’ll see that once anonymous, people tend to be far more right-wing than you’d like to think.

Has anyone tried to scrape Reddit, so that the valuable content from some subs isn’t lost for good?

Same, about a decade for me too, and never worked from my bed once.

If I’m tinkering with something, I might sit on the sofa or lie in bed for half an hour, but no way would I work from bed. Sounds like a sore neck waiting to happen…

My daily drivers are MacOS and Fedora (with Windows on my Surface Book), but I’m a software engineer, not the average person.

I would love for Linux on the desktop to be viable for the average person, but there isn’t really a built-in option that can beat Windows at what it’s good at, and that’s backwards compatibility, and a clean interface that users know. The attitude of “well, Linux is just better” hasn’t worked for decades, and it never will until there is a distro that prioritises that (hard) switch.

My point exactly. I’ve watched people break down over the start menu changing, or being unable to do anything after switching to a Mac. If you think the average person will go through this shit you’re mistaken…but I’d expect nothing less from Lemmy. It’s a bit like Slashdot from 20 years ago…

Pretty much anything beats Windows in that regard

Fonts have looked like shit on Linux for years, if not decades. The poor UI and lack of polish has been a big problem in design communities for a long time, and to many it’s one of the reasons why Linux is less favourable to Mac and Windows.

This is the biggest hangup for me. Even if there is a GUI, most instructions will send you into the terminal nonetheless.

For all the deserved shit that Windows gets, it “just works” without ever needing to touch config or a terminal. Until a Linux distro and window management system can get this part right, it’s silly to call it a desktop replacement for the average person because it’s not trying to be.

Prove it.

If there is a recommendation that satisfies:

• A nice looking UI with good fonts, and a clean interface.
• The ability to run random Windows applications with minimal fuss.

All without needing to use the terminal, then that will likely win the battle.