Nope. Software was my second career - I was a high performing sales person before software. Sales was fun, and I liked it, but it was a lot of work to stay in that Top 10%.
I would have no problem leaving if something better came around, and I have no problem adapting if I need to, I just believe that there is going to be a MASSIVE increase in demand for high performing software professionals with experience... we just aren't seeing it right now because of the business cycle.
>I just believe that there is going to be a MASSIVE increase in demand for high performing software professionals with experience... we just aren't seeing it right now because of the business cycle.
I'm pretty concerned for early career developers. The industry is failing them by 1) Allowing the early career devs to outsource their critical thinking to AI and 2) Actively hiring fewer early career devs because they're extracting more work from their existing develops with AI. They're failing themselves by relying too much on AI, and not developing those important long-term skills and intuitions.
For that reason I feel pretty safe in my (admittedly niche) career space, and have a similar prediction that in 5-10 years we will have created a experience gap that we can't fix. Experienced engineers with good troubleshooting and debug skills will be even more valuable.
Maybe its just me, but $950M seems a lot of money to invest in a "company".
Had to check my assumptions though so I looked up what the lower end of GDP for a country is and sure enough they have American Samoa, Dominica, and Tonga beat. Now that money is probably meant to last 16 months so its not quite apples to apples but kind of wild regardless.
In economics, comparing a corporate investment round to a country's GDP is considered flawed. As you noted with your "16 months", the company is sitting on a $950M bank account that it will slowly burn through over the years. Comparing a multi-year pile of cash to a single year of national production distorts the scale.
You are basically comparing a nation's actual hard work and output to a speculative pile of cash. Even comparing corporate revenue to GDP is frowned upon by economists. A company's revenue includes the cost of all the inputs it bought from other companies (such as servers, electricity, and software licenses). GDP, by definition, strips out intermediate costs to avoid double-counting and measures only final value added.
You're also picking nations that do not produce much or have a very low population (Tonga only has 100k people), which pulls down the GDP due to how it's calculated.
I think the point is sound but the author is selling the fictional executives ("decision makers") short.
Design research will inevitably always lead to a place thats reductive, nostalgic, and average (i.e. https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...). Designers themselves are loaded with biases and often enough want to perform design work that doesn't serve the business (in software we would call this Resume Driven Development - building with shiny new things so you can put it on your resume).
On the flip side, design is constantly victim to Dunning-Kruger or "bike shedding" - people with limited knowledge or competence in a domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence.
If the author was trying to write about the latter, they are failing to first acknowledge the former... for all we know the "decision makers" have decades of competent experience in brand, design, and user experience.
We were talking about covid era trends specifically. Covid peaked around 2020-2022 and it's difficult to determine what other trends during that time period are directly caused by covid, or correlated, or even unrelated. Long term generational trends don't tell us as much about what was or wasn't caused by Covid itself.
why can't the name be 'scape goat'? Since that's what they are - the "real" responsibility rests on the owners, and they happily shed it as limited liability ownership of shares.
> Methanol poisoning stories in the news almost exclusively result from people trying to sell denatured or industrial alcohol
Pretty sure this was a relic of prohibition right? The feds would contaminate ethanol with methanol to keep people from drinking it, but then they hurt a bunch of people and never faced any consequences...
> Pretty sure this was a relic of prohibition right? The feds would contaminate ethanol with methanol to keep people from drinking it
We still do this now. We don't do it because alcohol is illegal, we do it because we levy higher taxes on non-poisonous alcohol, and if someone decides to drink the poisoned alcohol, they deserve what they get.
During the covid period, the price of hand sanitizer, which is thickened alcohol, rose to exceed the price of drinkable alcohol.
Several beverage factories proposed to rework themselves to produce sanitizer instead, which would have been good for everyone.
But they couldn't, because federal law would have required them to poison the sanitizer, which would have contaminated their machinery so badly that they would have been unable to switch back to producing drinkable alcohol afterwards.
So - even if we ignore the idea that intentionally poisoning people is wrong - there was a serious cost to the legal regime, one that still exists.
This is false. Several breweries and distilleries started producing sanitizer basically overnight [0]. The requirement to add denaturing components to alcohol was suspended during the pandemic specifically to allow it [1].
In my opinion you are mostly right. I lived in a Detroit suburb when the city's population dipped below 1M, which was a big deal at the time. 1M was a federal funding floor or something like that so they were literally rounding up homeless people to try and make the cut... unfortunately it didn't work.
I think there is an untold story here about the part that the automobile played in the fall of Detroit. Detroit probably experienced more sprawl than other cities due to the influence of automobiles on the local economy. You only need to drive around Bloomfield Hills for 10 min to know that the metro has plenty of money, but the people who could afford 2 cars weren't staying in the city proper.
On the flip side it was a terribly exciting place to live at that time. Detroit still had excellent music, sports, and entertainment. Unlike the major metros on the coasts, I never knew anyone who had a problem making rent or had to work extra jobs to get by. A double edged sword I suppose.
I would have no problem leaving if something better came around, and I have no problem adapting if I need to, I just believe that there is going to be a MASSIVE increase in demand for high performing software professionals with experience... we just aren't seeing it right now because of the business cycle.
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