I'm a 57-year-old engineer still going strong, and I know plenty of others. This job isn't conceptually that hard if you have the experience to break problems into manageable chunks. I probably can't juggle as many things in my head as when I was 25 and proudly cranking out spaghetti code. But experience makes up for a lot of that.
Now, would I relish looking for a programmer job right now at my age? Hell no.
The problem with this idea of feature backlog, at least everywhere I've worked, is what you really have is an idea backlog. You have some things people want to build, and maybe a business analyst or product owner has done a first pass. But they're far from the rubber-meets-the-road part where someone needs to write out a detailed spec based on the exact current state of the app/system, and the developers start asking questions as they run into unspecified edge cases--all of which usually means sitting down with the client again over a series of meetings.
AI coding agents help speed up none of that. Meanwhile the developers are either sitting in meetings or working on something else while the product owners hash it out with the client.
And sometimes, after all that, you realize the client can get 95% of what they're asking for if you just tweak some existing feature. Everyone's mostly happy, the app stays less complex.
If the claim isn't falsifiable, than you can't do science. If you can't disprove a 2X multiplier how are you going to prove a 6X? 1000X? What's stopping the next hype man from claiming a billion X multiplier?
A software architect who doesn't actually code is worse than useless imo, because they drag actual developers down, forcing them to implement their Powerpoint apps. I say that having worked in the architecture group at one of largest companies in the world.
"I don't care if the app is a synchronous multi-page form with zero no need for websockets. It must have them!" (because it says so on my slide)
I used to think this, and I’m sure there are plenty of bad architects who add net-negative value, but having worked on some extremely difficult systems as an IC, I would have given anything to have future me able to hand down a scalable architecture from on high, vetted by past experience and domain familiarity.
Not having that, I developed the knowledge myself through trial and error, but we would have saved a lot of time, money, and stress doing it right the first time.
In general, I think this kind of “architect bad” take underestimates the cost and the stress of being responsible for a system that ultimately isn’t a great fit for the domain, and needing to balance hacking another fix onto it vs migrating to what now know is the right thing.
> I don't care if the app is a synchronous multi-page form with zero no need for websockets. It must have them
Sounds exactly like the kind of intuition an LLM will have.. "best practice" that's really whatever fads/marketing hype that there is a lot of noise about, never been informed by experiments or pain.
There was a post complaining about AI preference for god objects earlier, but the thing about stuff like that is, you could mechanically disincentivize it purely from complexity metrics or ASTs, either in training, or at the agentic layer later. I'm really much more worried about when LLMs are flooding the internet with marketing, and LLMs are consuming the marketing to determine best practice
Yes, if you're using them to write large chunks of code or entire features. If you just use them to clear up some trivial problem in an unfamiliar technology that you used to spend 30 minutes googling with 50 tabs open, or stuff like write a method to filter, map and reduce an array based on specific criteria, they're a godsend.
100%. Googling when you don't even know enough to ask the right questions, with 50 tabs open and trying to read down to the 3rd or 4th Stack Overflow answer (which is usually the best for some inexplicable reason), was my least favorite part of development.
I don't miss wasting an hour on a problem in a technology I'm not familiar with, where it's not like a big conceptual thing but something I could clear up in 5 seconds if I just had an expert in the room.
Lol I would love to see a scammer try to get my mom or dad to do anything other than press the power button. He's in for a world of hurt.
The other day my mom got a text saying she had a $399 charge on Apple, and to call the number if it wasn't her. So she called, because of course, why wouldn't you? Apparently the scammer finally got frustrated and hung up on her because she couldn't understand his accent.
I got in a series of debates over the Covid vaccine on Facebook with a guy I like and respect, who hosts sound baths, promotes psychedelic therapy, and does a bunch of other wellness-related stuff along with his wife. The idea was maybe we could civilly come to some kind of understanding.
We kept it civil. But in the end, I came to the conclusion that being anti-vaxx was a core part of his identity as part of the wellness community, and I was never going to change that.
> Infants are supposed to get vitamin K and other nutrients from breastfeeding, but we push formula.
This is literally nonsense.
From the article:
> All newborns lack vitamin K. No matter how much vitamin K a mother consumes, it doesn’t sufficiently pass through the placenta, and breast milk contains only small amounts. That puts babies who are exclusively breastfed at a higher risk for vitamin K deficiency bleeding. Formula is fortified with vitamin K, but even with that, experts agree, babies should still get the shot.
Now, would I relish looking for a programmer job right now at my age? Hell no.
reply