cauliflower99

Really enjoyable read - well done! I wonder where else we could use an effective, minimal approach that solves the problem at first principles?

Anyone else struggling with the aggressive claude "staccato" sentences? It's really jarring.

Folks who are new in any role in any industry really need to understand that remote work is a huge disadvantage when you know nothing or nearly nothing.

Anecdotally, I've run an apprenticeship program for a few years now in software. We hire 5 apprentices at a time - usually people who have done some online courses in programming and want to get into the industry. They would be pre-junior.

The year we went fully remote for lockdowns, the failure rate of the apprenticeship went from 0% to 80%. We went to a hybrid policy of "you choose how many days you want in the office" - failure rate dropped to 40% with the top of the group being the 2 people who were in the office everyday. Today, it is a mandated 4 days a week in the office - failure rate is at 0% again.

Not only does nobody fail, but the folks who consistently turn up to the office and get involved talking to seniors are inevitably the ones who progress the fastest. The ones fighting to work from home because it's inconvenient consistently do worse.

All those opportunities to improve by 1% via a meaningful conversation or a whiteboard diagram disappear when working from home. The 1%'s matter the most when you're a junior.

Super surprised to see Ireland mentioned at the top comment here. I've always thought it catastrophic that betting companies could advertise on TV here, but never really considered how other countries compared to us. Is it really the case that we're outliers? Would love to see laws change here.

This article seems to be in stark contrast to the online opinions where all we hear about are senior engineers with decades of experience who can't get a job.

So is it a sample bias where a few stories are grabbing lots of attention and giving the impression of a job shortage, or is there really a better outlook for the software industry?

Irish man here - Over the last few years, we've graduated from providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy. We've seen huge energy price increases as a result. We're seeing more and more cost-of-living protests, the war now means more will suffer with fuel prices and we're still going ahead with closing down energy suppliers (this is a 2025 article but the point still stands).

To anyone praising these stupid, politically incentivised initiatives - congratulations to us on making the poor and middle-classes poorer.

But it's all good - we're saving the world I guess. The poor folks can sort themselves out.