> Is it? So you can what? Buy exotic vehicles? Buy extra houses? Buy surgeries? Buy expensive experiences?
Regain your own time. As a former CTO who has recently exited, recovering my own time again is more valuable to me than the money (although the money means I can retain my own time going forward).
> His life has meaning, he’s of value to his employees and customers and partners.
Your work is not you and if you think that way, you're gonna be crushed when you come to retire. Even though I loved what I did for a career, it's better to do what you love for yourself, not "employees and customers and partners". Many people have other interests outside of building tech, but even if building tech is your only thing, exiting is a chance at starting something fresh and on your own terms.
You can live in the heart of San Francisco on $2k/mo, including rent. You don’t need to work 10hours a week as a software developer, to support that lifestyle.
I could fit a solar system in the gap between your two options of a) full time CTO or b) 9 figures to ‘win back your time’.
Personally I believe you’ve been operating on autopilot, and not designing your life to suit your own needs.
Bro, what? $2k? I just double checked and everything available for less than $2k is awful if you care about, IDK, having a family, a pet, a kitchen, outdoor space, green space, not having to share everything, including peace and quiet, with a revolving cast of characters.
Not that these things are required to “live,” but I certainly am not interested in making these tradeoffs.
Yes I exactly did that! Moved into an SRO on the edge of Chinatown. It's a nice tiny apartment, I'm on the edge of a mecca of affordable grocery stores, and I'm two blocks from my part-time job that gives me free-time to self-fund my software hustle. But there are other options. What's wrong with living with good people in a room share?
Finding good people to live with is a miracle and not a permanent one. All it took is one good roommate to decide he didn't need to take his antipsychotics anymore for me to never want a roommate again.
So enjoy your situation while the good times roll, no shade, but people have their own reasons to never consider living in an SRO besides mere materialism.
BTW I was originally searching for an SRO but I landed a 'micro-apartment' (I just double-checked terms), it has its own kitchen/bathroom. Had I stopped looking I wouldn't have found this great situation. Great enough that when I won a housing lottery the following month, for a nicer apartment at the same rate, I was content to give it up and let someone else receive it.
I've just bought a house in Alderwasley in Derbyshire, the nearest town is Wirksworth [1]. I assumed that, because this area was the heart of the industrial revolution [2], the town was an eponymously named workers town built for mill workers (there are actually entire towns in the area that were built for mill workers).
Then I read the history on wikipedia:
The name was recorded as Werchesworde in the Domesday Book of 1086 A.D. Outlying farms (berewicks) were Cromford, Middleton, Hopton, Wellesdene [sic], Carsington, Kirk Ireton and Callow. It gave its name to the earlier Wirksworth wapentake or hundred. The Survey of English Place-Names records Wyrcesuuyrthe in 835, Werchesworde in 1086, and Wirksworth(e) in 1536.
The toponym might be "Weorc's enclosure", or "fortified enclosure".
I just love how place names in the UK have evolved.
I agree, it's fascinating. I've lived in four countries, including England and the US, but I haven't seen anything quite like the UK names elsewhere. You do see a lot of indigenous names in the US, but they haven't evolved in the same way, probably largely because it's all so much more recent, but also because there was only one really one actual invasion, not waves of them coming from all different directions - Beakers, Celts, Roman, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Norman.
> I've just bought a house in Alderwasley in Derbyshire
Congratulations! A quick check of the map shows you're right near Whatstandwell, Nether Heague, Shottle, Hognaston, and of course Knockerdown. It all makes Tolkien and Pratchett seem a bit unimaginative!
Not having thought about it too hard, if the three norths all align at -2 degrees west longitude, wouldn't they also be aligned at 178 degrees East longitude, somewhere near the east coast of New Zealand?
Do the analogous "three souths" also have an alignment, and is it precisely opposite the north poles?
> Not having thought about it too hard, if the three norths all align at -2 degrees west longitude, wouldn't they also be aligned at 178 degrees East longitude, somewhere near the east coast of New Zealand?
There is no required equivalent 'three souths' alignment because the Earth's magnetic field is not a pure dipole. Higher-moment variations can cause essentially arbitrary (but small) deviations of magnetic north/south from its dipole approximation.
I also found that after my first 3 day fast I was able to deal with hunger much better. I used to get irritable when hungry and now I realise I can just tolerate it without any real downside — even years after my last fast.
It’s like my brain has retrained itself to ‘just get over it’. It was quite something
> You’re one air con fuckup from asphyxiating on your own CO2 by the looks of it.
You might as well say the same thing about any sealed building, like virtually every skyscraper, or honestly most hotels I've stayed in (without exterior windows that you can open).
Buildings have air ducts for forced air flow. This isn't any different. Each capsule has one vent for fresh air, another that removes the air. It's the same way regular rooms work.
And oxygen and CO2 diffuse through air and ducts anyways, passively, even if blower fans fail. Plus there are additional gaps anyways for safety. You're not going to suffocate. They do actually think about these things in building codes. You're not allowed to build rooms that would suffocate someone if mechanical fans failed.
Ventilation for accommodation in the UK is extremely poorly regulated, or not at all, from what I can tell. I've been given rooms with a hermetically sealed window and no A/C unit.
I stayed at a brand new Hyatt the other day and the A/C had no "fan" only option (ie to avoid dry throats), and when off, provided no passive ventilation as far as I could tell. No opening window. And this was an aparthotel with a cooker etc. Absolutely ridiculous.
Premier Inn's budget 'Hub' brand chain have sealed windows and just wall-mounted A/C (not fed fresh air from a central duct). Should be illegal
I think legally they're allowed to use the 1 inch space under the door as ventilation...
You actually need a lot of ventilation in hotels because they often use very harsh chemicals especially in the linen
I read the article twice and still doesn't make sense. I tried to make sense but no matter how I slice and dice the article, the "inverse parentheses" idea seems inconsistent or ill defined.
Two comments here which explain the ill-definedness of it:
You said: “There's considerable evidence and reason to believe Washington invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to supercharge opium production”, yet you provide nothing to back up your claim. It is not trolling to point that out.
Your link to some stats on levels of poppy production does not support your conspiracy theory.
It isn't about a particular time in history, it's about the individual. An individual who suffers hardships often has to endure to overcome said hardships. That makes the individual more resilient and more able to deal with future hardships.
I think the phrasing can come across as a bit macho, which I don't think is the point. It's about resilience.
As someone who has had some serious hardship and is certainly more resilient because of it, I can also confirm the mental scarring that comes as ‘part of the package’.
I think to an extent the mental impact of it is a necessary evil. The future resilience manifests as a drive to not find yourself in the same (or an equally difficult) position again — because it’s so emotionally devastating — so you fight harder to not allow it to happen again. This makes a person more driven in general.
Another aspect is that you’ve seen how ‘deep’ an emotion can be (traumatic) and so more ‘everyday’ emotional events can seem much more trivial, making them easier to deal with. Although, it can sometimes leave the person seeming ‘cold’ emotionally. One thing I found was I was less tolerant of people without the level of resilience I had, which I had to work on.
Of course, there will be some people that can’t endure the initial hardship and don’t develop that resilience. My impression is that most people do endure and find a way to come out of the other side, like a basic survival instinct, although that’s purely anecdotal.
But how do you account for things like cycles of violence and PTSD? I have veteran friends that, sure, could handle being shot at better than me, but on the other hand I can go to a fireworks show without worrying about having a public breakdown. Or I got friends that suffer for lack of the structure the military provided and just veg out now, picking fights at the bar for a little excitement.
Hell I guess you can describe them as "hard men" but I wouldn't want to be that way and it doesn't seem to make you more successful in modern society.
People with mental health issues need help and support. Just because there’s a pithy saying, doesn’t make it universally beneficial to have suffered hardship.
Not sure what else you’re expecting? I’m not advocating imposed hardship, just trying to give some context for why it can often lead to a more robust and driven person. It’s clearly not universally true.
I imagine there are lots of veterans that are able to cope and have become more robust. But there will always be mental health aftershocks, because that’s why it was a hardship in the first place.
> cancelling Amazon Prime at first, but realized I didn't -really- need some JIXFOZ branded gadgets next day, after all.
The problem with cancelling Prime is the unrelenting haranguing to re-sign up and the clearly punitive delivery charges. You get adverts from cancelling due to adverts and end up paying more.
I’ve just started to focus my purchases at specialist UK stores, rather than defaulting to Amazon for everything.
The delivery fees are a good thing. I end up with less impulse purchases when I have to bookmark my wants until I have a pooled enough for free delivery. Turns out I don't need that many things after all.
> But not having to spend hours here and there getting up to speed on some mundane but unfamiliar aspect of the implementation
Red flag. In other words you don’t understand the implementation well enough to know if the AI has done a good job. So the work you have committed may work or it may have subtle artefacts/bugs that you’re not aware of, because doing the job properly isn’t of interest to you.
This is ‘phoning it in’, not professional software engineering.
Learning an unfamiliar aspect and doing it be hand will have the same issues. If you're new to Terraform, you are new to Terraform, and are probably going to even insert more footguns than the AI.
No, you can not. Without understanding the technology, at best you can "vibe-review" it, and determine that it "kinda sorta looks like it's doing what it's supposed to do, maybe?".
> Learning an unfamiliar aspect and doing it be hand will have the same issues. If you're new to Terraform, you are new to Terraform
Which is why you spend time upfront becoming familiar with whatever it is you need to implement. Otherwise it’s just programming by coincidence [1], which is how amateurs write code.
> and are probably going to even insert more footguns than the AI.
Very unlikely. If I spend time understanding a domain then I tend to make fewer errors when working within that domain.
It sounds like you've never worked a job where you aren't just supporting 1 product that you built yourslef. Fix the bug and move on. I do not have the time or resources to understand it fully. It's a 20 year old app full of business logic and MS changed something in their API. I do not need to understand the full stack. I need to understand the bug and how to fix it. My boss wants it fixed yesterday. So I fix it and move onto the next task. Some of us have to wear many hats.
> It sounds like you've never worked a job where you aren't just supporting 1 product that you built yourslef
In my 40 years of writing code, I’ve worked on many different code bases and in many different organisations. And I never changed a line of code, deleted code, or added more code unless I could run it in my head and ‘know’ (to the extent that it’s possible) what it will do and how it will interact with the rest of the project. That’s the job.
I’m not against using AI. I use it myself, but if you don’t understand the scope fully, then you can’t possibly validate what the AI is spitting out, you can only hope that it has not fucked up.
Even using AI to write tests will fall short if you can’t tell if the tests are good enough.
For now we still need to be experts. The day we don’t need experts the LLMs should start writing in machine code, not human readable languages
> I do not need to understand the full stack.
Nobody said that. It’s important to understand the scope of the change. Knowing more may well improve decision making, but pragmatism is of course important.
Not understanding the thing you’re changing isn’t pragmatism.
Either you're a true 100x coder who can get a full understanding of every single project and every effect it will have through the full end to end stack.
Or you were never under time pressure and always had enough time to do it.
Either way, I'm jealous for you. For me it's "here's code that Bob wrote 10 years ago, it's not working. Customers are complaining and this needs to be fixed yesterday".
"Sorry I need to understand what it will do and how it will interact with the rest of the project, that'll take a few days and I can't fix it before that" wasn't an option. You fix the immediate issue, run whatever tests it may have and throw it to QA for release approval.
Most likely the fix will work and nobody has to touch that bit in a few years. Should we spend time to understand it fully and document it, add proper and comprehensive tests? Yep. But the bosses will never approve the expense.
If I had an AI agent at point, it could "understand" the codebase in minutes and give me clues as to what's the blast radius for the possible fix.
> Either you're a true 100x coder who can get a full understanding of every single project and every effect it will have through the full end to end stack.
It's hard to state how good I am without sounding like an arsehole, so here goes... I am certainly a very experienced engineer, I've coded from the age of 10 and now at 50 I'm 'retired' after selling the company that I founded. I started in the 8bit era doing low level to-the-metal coding and ended it building an internationally used healthcare SaaS app (with a smattering of games engineering in-between). I've been a technical proof-reader for two Manning books, have at least one popular open-source project, and I still write code for fun and am working on my next idea around data-sovereignty in my now infinite free time... so yeah, I'm decent, and I feel like I've gained enough experience to have an opinion on this.
But also you're not reading what I wrote. I never said "a full understanding of every single project and every effect it will have through the full end to end stack", which I explicitly dealt with in my last reply, when I said: "It’s important to understand the scope of the change. Knowing more may well improve decision making, but pragmatism is of course important."
If the scope is small, you don't need "a full understanding of every single project and every effect it will have through the full end to end stack". But in terms of what it does touch, yeah you should know it, especially if you want to become a better software engineer, and not just an engineer with the same 1 years worth of experience x 30.
It should also not take "a few days" to investigate the scope. If it's taking you that long then you're not exercising the capability that allows you to navigate around unfamiliar code and understand what it's doing. That knowledge accumulates too, so unless you're working on a completely different project every single day, you're going to get quicker and quicker.
I have seen pathological cases where a dev that worked for me went so far down the rabbit hole that he got nothing done, so it has to be a pragmatic process of discovery. It should entirely depend on the extent to which your change could leak out into other areas of the project. For example, if you had a reusable library that had some core functionality that is used throughout the project and you wanted to change some of its core behaviour, then I'd want to find all of the usages of that library to understand how that change will affect the behaviour (if at all). But equally, if I was updating a UI page or control that has limited tentacles throughout the app, then I'd be quite comfortable not doing a deep dive.
> "here's code that Bob wrote 10 years ago, it's not working. Customers are complaining and this needs to be fixed yesterday".
I've been in that exact situation. You need to make a decision about your career. Are you just going to half-arse the job, or are you going to get better? If you think continuing as you are is good for your career, because you've made your idiot boss happy for 5 minutes before they give you the next unreasonable deadline, then you're wrong.
The fact is the approach you're taking is slower. It's slower because you and the team of engineers you're in (assuming everyone takes the same approach) are accumulating bugs, technical debt, and are not building institutional knowledge. When those bugs need dealing with in the future, or that technical debt causes the application to slow to a crawl, or have some customer-affecting side-effects, then you're going to waste time solving those issues and you're sure as hell gonna want the institutional knowledge to resolve those problems. AI doesn't "understand" in the way you're implying. If it did understand then we wouldn't be needed at all.
> Most likely the fix will work and nobody has to touch that bit in a few years. Should we spend time to understand it fully and document it, add proper and comprehensive tests? Yep. But the bosses will never approve the expense.
So you work for a terrible boss. That doesn't make my argument wrong, that makes your boss wrong. You can obviously see the problem, but instead of doing something about it, you're arguing against good software development methodology. That's odd. You should take umbrage with your boss.
The best engineers I have worked with in my career were the ones that fully understood the code base they were working on.
>Red flag. In other words you don’t understand the implementation well enough to know if the AI has done a good job.
Red flag again! If your protection is to "understand the implementation" it means buggy code. What makes a code worthy of trust is passing tests, well designed tests that cover the angles. LGTM is vibe testing
I go as far as saying it does not matter if code was written by a human who understands or not, what matters is how well it is tested. Vibe testing is the problem, not vibe coding.
Tests are not a panacea. They don't care about anything other than what you test. If you don't have code testing maintainability and readability, only that it "works", you end up like the product in that post.
Ultimate example: Biology (and everything related, like physiology, anatomy), where the test is similarly limited to "does it produce children that can survive". It is a huuuuuge mess, and trying to change any one thing always messes up things elsewhere in unexpected and hard or impossible to solve ways. It's genius, it works, it sells - and trying to deliberately change anything is a huge PITA because everything is interconnected and there is no clean design anywhere. You manage to change some single gene to change some very minor behavior, suddenly the ear shape changes and fur color and eye sight and digestion and disease resistance, stuff like that.
I wonder if for a large class of jobs, simple unit tests will be enough to be a negative that the llm output will try to match. Test driven delegation in a way.. that said i share the same worries as you. The fact that the LLM can wire multiple files / class / libs in a few seconds to pass your tests doesn't guarantee a good design. And the people who love vibe coding the most are the one who never valued design in the first place, just quick results..
> If your protection is to "understand the implementation" it means buggy code.
Hilarious. Understanding the code is literally the most important thing. If you don't understand the code then you can't understand any unit tests you write either. How could you possibly claim test coverage for something you don't understand?
I suspect you primarily develop code with dynamic languages where you're reinventing type-systems day-in day-out to test your code. Personally, I try to minimise the need for unit-tests by using well-defined types and constraints. The type-system is a much better unit-tester than any human with a poor understanding of the code.
Regain your own time. As a former CTO who has recently exited, recovering my own time again is more valuable to me than the money (although the money means I can retain my own time going forward).
> His life has meaning, he’s of value to his employees and customers and partners.
Your work is not you and if you think that way, you're gonna be crushed when you come to retire. Even though I loved what I did for a career, it's better to do what you love for yourself, not "employees and customers and partners". Many people have other interests outside of building tech, but even if building tech is your only thing, exiting is a chance at starting something fresh and on your own terms.
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