Some people just can't turn off their brains and play drone for dozens of hours a week for decades. It feels existentially, aesthetically, and sometimes ethically crushing to spend a whole life doing work you can't expect yourself to respect or value, no matter how much you get paid or how little the work overtly demands of you.
Often, the lack of meaningfully challenging demands being put on you is punishing on its own. It can feel like a relief for a week or month or year, but if you catch a glimpse of that being your whole future, you can come to recognize yourself as being in a mind-eroding secular purgatory.
This anguish is especially common among on highly capable people, high achievers, and those used to some kind of ambition. And by accident of its history, there's a lot of those people in this industry and some of them are going nuts now.
Man, I have the same feeling.
A long time in your life you build the career and now it’s just feeling so empty, like you are not a engineer anymore, now everyone can use AI and without checking code they would have good results.
> now everyone can use AI and without checking code they would have good results
?!!?
No way. Are you sure? What kind of work? Here there’s still a lot of care needed to navigate the LLM work, like knowing when to make it quit, rewrite, refactor, follow your outline.
It feels magic but when I watch people who don’t know what they are doing trying to make something new (not almost a clone of an existing product), they get pretty frustrated.
I once lost out on 3 months severance and a laptop when I quit a place and they shuttered two and a half weeks later. There had been no direction from the top for over a month other than "ehh, do something useful". I was working remotely and slowly going crazy.
> This anguish is especially common among on highly capable people, high achievers, and those used to some kind of ambition. And by accident of its history, there's a lot of those people in this industry and some of them are going nuts now.
I went nuts for years, until I sold off my interest in my dream partnership.
10 years of heaven. All the benefits and none of the downsides of my internal colleagues. Then 14 years of bureaucracy aimed at predictability over progress, which was infinitely more difficult for me to dodge as an external player.
Compensation for my interest was very objectively valued, with the rate of stalled progress priced in. Which made complete sense, while also being its own madness.
I walked away from so much value, but I don't regret it for a minute.
This exact mentality is extremely toxic and is why the historical "anti-work" movements (i.e. Anarchists) have been kneecapped, often by their supposed best friends (i.e. Commies). The major disagreement circa the 2nd internationale was "is work good, but bad that you're exploited and not paid well?" (the Marxist view) vs "Work fucking sucks and we should abolish it" (The Anarchist view)
I can't believe how much mental justification needs to be made by otherwise highly intelligent people (Bertrand Russel wrote In Praise of Idleness) to defend the right to not work.
No, I fully reject any notion of life value coming from work, and those who hold your view are basically jailors to those who don't want our identity defined by work.
That's not how the world works, and I don't need this in a thread where I'm dealing with the grief of a good career. Please shove off.
I would gladly not work and learn cello and physics independently if that were a real possibility, but it's not, and it won't be within my lifetime.
I had a job in a system that required jobs to survive that genuinely didn't bother me. I actually quite enjoyed it most of the time. Now it's permanently dead and I need something else, or I am homeless and starve to death.
> No, I fully reject any notion of life value coming from work, and those who hold your view are basically jailors to those who don't want our identity defined by work.
I mean, if they're illegal immigrants, it seems to me a country has the right to deport them. Maybe not the best way to phrase the sentiment, but taken literally it's not an incorrect idea.
This is about Romani communities that have been living in the same place for generations. You can't legally deport someone who's a citizen from birth no matter what ethnicity they are.
And even with actual illegal immigrants there's a different between saying a country can deport them, should deport them or has to deport them based on some bizarre fascist ethics.
I have no problem with people who don't like immigration and want to send them back (I just really don't agree with their opinion), but DHH is closer to the last group. He's saying that each country has a moral duty to deport immigrants and every individual citizen has to support that, and if they don't that means they're evil and want to destroy their own people.
Counterpoint: I'm the same way, and the last couple weeks I've been messing more with Qwen more and I've been more productive in my pet projects than I had been in months or perhaps years, because I'm no longer blocked by having to do the boring bits I didn't want to do before. I now have a well-read junior I can hand tasks off to while I work on something else or just mess around until I get to the next interesting bit. Just to name one example, one of my projects includes a file browser, and a feature I had put off for years was adding an item count on the status bar, which took like a couple minutes of prompting Qwen (and then a few more minutes to figure out the crash).
Don't get me wrong, I'm actually the same way. I use AI almost every day to build all sorts of pet projects now, and the results are often surprisingly good. From a productivity standpoint, AI is absolutely a game changer.
It's just that I no longer really consider myself a programming hobbyist, because what I'm doing now doesn't really feel like programming anymore. I'm mostly just talking to an AI.
It's kind of like if I were into crocheting. A big part of the fun is the repetitive process of actually making something by hand. If I suddenly had a magic machine that could produce whatever I wanted in seconds, I'd obviously be a lot more productive, but I wouldn't really call myself a crocheter anymore.
I think the key is balance. Just because you can delegate everything, doesn't mean you should. In some cases, I've found, I simply can't. I have an idea for something I want, but I don't yet know what the best solution should be, and I need to find that out by working through the code myself.
Another thing to consider is what are you trying to accomplish. If you are just coding for fun then why would you hand that off to an LLM? If you want to see if an idea is even worth pursuing then it makes sense to leverage an LLM to speed up the prototyping.
Training a human takes much less money and data than training an LLM. Even if I spent my entire life doing it, I would not be able to read the entire corpus of any LLM, even counting just the English subset. LLMs need so much more because they start out as blank slates, while we don't.
yes, but LLMs can hold all this data and once they are trained they blow any human out of the water. It takes a few years for an LLM to ingest the entire internet. No human will ever be able to do that.
Pretty sure what is meant by "lazily" is that it should just be added by default and then those that are not used should be optimized away by the linker.
Rust already does dead code elimination at a couple different levels by default, and generic link-time optimization is always an option on top of that, so I assumed GP was talking about something that was not already the status quo.
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