500k/yr, not enough savings to last even a year, and really no job prospects in sight?

Doesn't add up.

I was hearing the same about an acquaintance who is an experienced IC, earning "market rate" for the tech which is about the same as C-suite pay for non-tech companies in my country. Struggling to find work, running out of savings. Turned out they were declining top market end Python IC roles because they wanted to specifically earn the same as instead of taking a ~30% paycut.

Do not let your title or previous earnings inflate your ego into homelessness. Save well. Even the good jobs don't last forever, so make them count.

It seems from the article they used the savings to keep the business running.

If that’s the case it’s not surprising. Businesses can be incredibly expensive to run if you are not profitable.

Most likely a fake figure.

I've been pretty happy with my M1-2 devices like most posters here seem to say, but I don't have the same level of core stability while doing dev work. Am I doing something wrong with my workloads?

- Orbstack, but just for one containerised service - Laravel Herd for app environments, so all native services instead of containers with bigger VM overhead - Brave browser, profile for work and personal - PHPStorm (quite a hog on RAM) - Now agents in the mix

Had an M1 Pro 8GB but I found 8 to really not be enough. M2 Air 16GB has been a much better sweet spot, albeit it feels like the battery life on it is worse than M1. I've recently started trying to use Zed more and more as my editor instead of PHPStorm and things feel mostly stable, but I still feel like a beefier machine would be good for work purposes.

I don't think you're doing anything wrong. I struggle with similar workloads on 32GB RAM. Compute isn't the issue, once I have a JetBrains IDE open, a dev environment, some browser tabs, Claude, and a bunch of other crap Electron apps I need the machine is already swapping quite a bit.

My big issue with the M1 generation is the lack of more E-cores, which get assigned a lot of the OS background tasks. When working at the top of the RAM limit, I'd notice issues around lag to the point that I started looking at CPU stats and found those two measly e-cores completely maxed out for hours on end. Occasionally a crash, though that could be RAM related rather than CPU.

A bit of googling around seems to point that architecture as somewhat of a problem for others, and might be why Apple quickly moved to put more e-cores on the later generations.

Something to consider. Never managed to get proper distinct confirmation that this was the problem, but a (corporate) laptop upgrade did get me out of this pickle.

Years ago there were frequent crashes (kernel panics) i could directly relate to IntelliJ (PHPStorm, etc), so it might sound dull but upgrading to the latest versions is the first thing I’d check. In this case even a manual check on their website instead of relying on the auto updater to work.

I have found that my M5pro gets unstable when I really stress it's memory use. I think that with 8 or 16GB you are going to hit this quite a lot more than I do with 48GB.

6 lines of dockerfile changed for me, no issue.

Read a youtube comment that I think sums up some of the fanbase's thoughts: Bioware has been going downhill since the last 30 minutes of Mass Effect 3 gameplay. Even with the later expanded endings it felt disappointing. Not to mention "Marauder Shields" being your final boss.

I've been able to execute several highly niche, large scale refactors in a production system in the last 6 months, entirely enabled by AI tooling. The kinds of changes that individually by hand would have taken months and you would never get top down approval to do because it would take paid developer time away from client-focused work.

This has stabilised the system, fleshed out unfinished ideas, expanded testing capability, introduced new developer-experience oriented tools, and refactored sensitive systems to be more flexible for future use. Not to mention addressing the kinds of uber-niche tech debt that would take years to bite and months to fix.

It's far from fantasy.

Not just comprehension, but authority.

We tend to forget in tech-oriented forums that most of us are bound to those who pay our salaries, and for many developers that payment is to be focused on revenue-generating, or client-focused work.

Developing advanced comprehension and being able to use it for long-term system stability are unfortunately not always paired in the daily work.

"Production languages" is a false dichotomy by implying PHP isn't one.

There's been a patch since yesterday.

Hah, good shout on the JS community side of things. Felt the same coming from Laravel land, and even the inverse problem - I started using Livewire for my frontends so I wouldn't have to manage JS frontend frameworks, but now that Claude can do it, the value prop of Livewire is much less to me.

It's about depth of involvement, steering and ownership.

I had Claude build me some TamperMonkey scripts here and there, I don't claim I wrote those.

I do claim I built my side project with it being mostly vibe coded, because I've steered, planned and guided every aspect of that site regardless of how it was built. I own it, I maintain it. Months of building on the side.