d4mi3n

I see this argument a lot, and it’s not wrong, but it omits the fact that in the USA we tie a lot of meaning and worth to what people do for a living. It’s going to be hard to get people to buy in to having their jobs automated if they see no path to finding some other source of meaningful employment. This will remain true until such a time that we don’t tie somebody’s societal worth to their ability to be productive.

(This also ignores all the fun things about work culture in the USA, like healthcare being tied to your job.)

People were asking about these folks when MTG Arena organized — here they are. Best of luck to them in seeking union recognition and exercising their right to bargain.

What I’m seeing is more developers pushing more code of dubious quality without the ability to respond to feedback on said code.

You can have the best security review in the world, but if the author of the code is not equipped to understand the feedback it ends up being a moot point.

The challenge to me seems less technical and more cultural: how do we keep ourselves intellectually honest and engaged when we now spend the majority of our time orchestrating agents and outsourcing the design and thought processes?

End of an era. She was a very active philanthropist and will be dearly missed for all the good she brought to the world.

Can we contribute to the dialog rather than bash someone’s thoughts on it?

As a start, why do you disagree and how would you further this discussion?

I find this to be an incredibly myopic viewpoint. Software engineering is not defined by a single tool or technology, but rather how we design, implement, and maintain processes of value we want to automate or scale.

LLMs will certainly be an aide, but assuming adoption of them is required across a whole _field_ ignores whole classes of problems, domains, and constraints the production of software covers.

Rather, we should be wary of allowing our skills and hard-earned knowledge to atrophy by over reliance on new technology that is far from perfect, reliable, or even universally available. These tools more than any before suffer from the junk-in-junk-out problem and I’d much rather work with someone who knows their fundamentals than someone who knows their way around a the LLM of the month.

I think the dissonance you’re running into here is that places like Reddit are not monolithic. Saying Reddit, basically a very large collection of user submitted writing, is _entirely_ non-fiction is not correct and ignores years of short stories, web serials, fanfiction, role playing, story telling, and all manner of creative fictional writing. I’d wager to say the bulk of such work on the internet exists under the Reddit umbrella, or is at a minimum cross-posted there.

I knew the publishing and game industry weren’t known for good treatment of their labor, but WOTC had a fair reputation in that regard. This has apparently degraded prior to my joining the company and has continued to do so. A big motivator for organizing for many was the steady erosion of pay, benefits, and the lauded perks despite a workload that has and continues to grow tremendously.

Worked in tech for a long time before I got to WOTC. Went through a lot of layoffs and short term executive decisions that invariably leave anyone without preferred stock out to dry. Wish I had a union then. Glad to have one now.

Edit: Words are my own. I am not a rep of WOTC or Hasbro.

Unless one choses to bargain. Perhaps collectively.

This is actually a pretty interesting observation as GMail, when it first came out, was just as clunky as all the other webmail clients. At the time, everyone was used to Yahoo!, MSN, etc. and Google was the odd one out with their webmail client.

This changed when they were the first folks out there to get a dynamic interface in the browser (some of you may fondly or not so fondly remember the days of DHTML, XMLHTTPRequest, and the like). Fast forward 10 or 15 years and now GMail is the standard by which everything else is measured.

I'm sure there are some things that are objectively better, but a surprising amount of preference comes from familiarity.

It shows up in API responses when you look up your own user.