patrick.net

Our stack is AWS. I'm constantly typing commands to get auth. Constantly clicking my phone for MFA. Constantly putting tickets in with DevOps because things are constantly changing and blocking me.

But we collect health data so it has to be super duper secure.

I do feel your pain.

send me email, let's talk. i'm working on something big.

lol yeah it's more like building Lego blocks today with lambda / serverless. Plus your data is only safe if you run it on your own hardware. I like Kotlin though these days. Fun language.

@Patrick can you send @FortWayneIndiana and me our emails to each other?

FortWayneIndiana says

send me email, let's talk. i'm working on something big.

Tenpoundbass says

I would like to change careers. I just don't give a crap about coding anymore.

Would it be appropriate to suggest learning how to mine coal?

My wife is going through the same thing, she wants to be a elementary school teacher, be major pay cut. I told here I thought it would be a bad idea.

Tenpoundbass says

Patrick can you send FortWayneIndiana and me our emails to each other?

FortWayneIndiana says

send me email, let's talk. i'm working on something big.

OK, done.

rd6B says

Would it be appropriate to suggest learning how to mine coal?

No I'm just stepping away. It's painfully obvious, the Cloudbased companies over selling their shit. and abilities. Are heavy on open source Social network cultures. I dare not call it Development or Developers. They are only keeping people like me around, to help them plug in the missing holes, they are missing. Enterprise development is not the same as Social networks and Framework development. There's no shortcut plugins to get each individual unique companies business in their cash register just right.
In 2002 we were brashly made redundant, and couldn't find work for a whole year. While the Enterprise in America outsourced everything to Indian labor firms. The only problem with that, was here in the US at 2pm while we were having operational issues, their ATeam developers were home sleeping, it was their twilight. After a year of that, the business owners realized it was killing them. If we walk away, I give it less than 2 years, Companies will be begging for us to return like then. Many moved on, back then. LIke plan on doing now.

And yes it would be highly appropriate to suggest I learn the business model, politics and economics of Coal Mining. It's as good as of an alternate as any.
Coal Miners need representation too!

Tenpoundbass says

rd6B says

Would it be appropriate to suggest learning how to mine coal?

No I'm just stepping away. It's painfully obvious, the Cloudbased companies over selling their shit. and abilities. Are heavy on open source Social network cultures. I dare not call it Development or Developers. They are only keeping people like me around, to help them plug in the missing holes, they are missing. Enterprise development is not the same as Social networks and Framework development. There's no shortcut plugins to get each individual unique companies business in their cash register just right.
In 2002 we were brashly made redundant, and couldn't find work for a whole year. While the Enterprise in America outsourced everything to Indian labor firms. The only problem with that, was here in the US at 2pm while we were having operational issues, their ATeam developers were home sleeping, it was their twilight. Af...

I don't see waning demand despite mass outsourcing. Esp. here in the bay area the market is still crazy hot. However the job duties have changed. I agree it's not the same it used to be, no thinking through the whole system and writing sane APIs, it's building blocks plus devops, i.e. the Devs also maintain the infrastructure, be it via terraform, docker, k8, mesos, lambdas/azure functions, and all the non faas shit goes into fargate or other managed EC2 or Azure. Most of the outsourced work is crap so here the majority of work is not outsourced. However if you're not ready to wear a devops hat and go fullstack if necessary you're not getting the big bucks. It's ok with me but the overall craft has gone down and most work is shoddy. I"m especially critical towards faas/lambdas for everything. They have their use case but if you stitch 20 apis together with 100 lambdas and 50 sns/sqs queues and 20 different redis caches then it's bullshit. I actually prefer azure message bus, it's not as sophisticated as SQS but easier to work with and KISS based. Either way get used to the cloud, it's here to stay til the Fad fades for something else, maybe a rennaisance towards private data centers / VPCs that yo just remotely maintain who knows. The geogpraphical redundancy has to be solved to challenge the cloud though. But once again, your data is def not safe in the cloud, but people trust certificates and statements so they think it is. Also though Javascript has taken good strides into the right direction the past years. It's still a mediocre language and node.js for large projects is extremely brittle, but that's why you stitch together 5000 node microservices/lambdas cause you can't make it a large project without it going to shit.

Yes I know there is still some scripting that needs to be done. But for the most part you can automate those.
An idiot can use templates and continuously plug in new requirements.
I don't think they need someone with my skillset and pay level to accomplish that.
I could do a deeper dive and pound out niche for myself. But these systems make me feel like an end User.
You invest to much time and energy learning to be an end User. Then that system goes obsolete, then so do you.
I saw plenty of J.D. Edwards, Cold Fusion, and FoxPro developers end up like that.

Yeah but there are definite trends in the right direction. Also you get paid to see the big picture and not use lego scripting for everything but designing a solid, statically typed service where necessary. JS without async await is pure shit, and even async/await is just ok. Goroutines are cool but lack structured concurrency. The best concurrency model I know or at least which is trending into the right direction is Kotlin's coroutines. I'm employing a mix of Java, C#, Kotlin, JS and feel those are good enough for everything. If you need embedded you can still use good old C/C++. Go is very fast and pragmatic, but again mostly for smaller tasks, Ruby is for people who want to have fun but it's never gotten a serious grip beyond prototypes. Scala is simply too hard to maintain and find developers for, but it's a cool language. Python is the de-facto machine learning and beginners language, so it's always lurking somewhere in your stack. I remember the ColdFusion/FoxPro days but was just a tad bit too late for it, so started with Java. Oracle's GraalVM is actually very cool, fast, dependable/safe and polyglot. Maybe I'll join you and FW in a few years if it works out and I'm bored. Also you could become a manager and let the minions do the scripting, but then you have to deal with people ;)

I've lost the passion and the will to do all of that. I wrote my own Javascript libraries, and used only JQUERY. I wrote my own Stateless Stack, because I got tired of giving a shit about the new version of everything.
I'm tired of developing for the lowest common denominator. I'm sick of Post Turtles getting promoted to the point, they are my enterprise Customer. Their lack of knowledge is supposed to be my burden of patience. I must always entertain their ideas, even when I've seen it a thousand times fail, and the path I've chosen is the one that works in every case I've tried. I used to love working with the owners, that knew their business so well, they understood my input on creating the model. Today they insist the craziest shit, but always check if every variable is "Bob" or "Fred" and do something totally different that doesn't fit anywhere else in the domain for it. Nope no table and classes to build a programmable exception flow. Just us an "If" everywhere! Can't understand why I need to know anything they feel like is a threat to their job, that I might program in. Which is really what it's all about. Everyone is a manager of some sort these days, and every project is potentially taking their job away. They are in charge of upgrading the new system. And they are working hard to keep themselves baked into it. But they don't have a clue how. I bid them all "Good Day!" I'm moving on.

I hear you and the point about everybody becoming a manager is very true. But that's why 90% of the job postings are for Coders, not managers. This shit trend has been going on for many years now. The recruiters be like "we have this great position .... blah blah" and I am like " well I have some good input on what I would do differently so maybe you have some overarching position like a hands on dev manager / architect" and the recruiters be like "no! no! we have too many chiefs already and we need some Indians!! Hey they have free food and foozball table, ain't that great?! Come on sign here so you get paid less and have to be 24/7 on pagerduty but you get a lot of sweat equity which may get canceled by upper mgmt any time of course, come take this shitty job so we can grab that juicy commission! Please no more managers!"

I'm in the same boat TPB. Cyber security/network engineer for the last 15 years and I'm bored out of my mind. I absolutely hate going to work during the week and am tired of the same layer 2/3 and higher products that all do the same fucking thing, packaged up as something new and better.

Im considering taking a year off and buying a mid sizes sailboat and bugging out to the carribean with my family for a bit.

I don't know if politics would be any better. In fact I think it could be worse than coding.

Mid life crisis?

I have changed work and industry plenty for better pay and challenge ,after 3-4 yrs it all gets boring.

FortWayneIndiana , what do you have that is interesting?

I feel your pain, too. I've been thinking of retiring from the day job and just becoming an independent working on my own fun projects. If I don't make a penny at it, that's OK; at least I am living life on my own terms. The "problem" is that the money is great right now; the real problem is that I'm getting older every day and don't want to be the richest person in the cemetery. But if I do leave the current job and relax for a few years, I know I'll never get back in even if I need to.

FortWayneIndiana says

send me email, let's talk. i'm working on something big.

You 2 should meet up at starbucks and not buy anything.

SunnyvaleCA says

But if I do leave the current job and relax for a few years, I know I'll never get back in even if I need to.

That's the decision that separates the men from the boys. I realize it's scary thinking about a retirement where you might not be able to afford to eat at Applebee's everyday.

think about what you really like to do in your free time and then change your life so you can do that all day.

Did you become a marine biologist?

mell says

Did you become a marine biologist?

No, I stuck with architecture after I did the Guggenheim and realized that it wasn't that hard.

I've gotten bored/sick of every major job I've ever had after about 3-4 years. By year 5 I usually quit, and have been filled with similar emotions and feelings each time - boredom, sick of the crap, sick of your boss, monotony, a certain problem is neverending, the job lacks meaning, etc.. Each job has a few unique "problems" that just never go away, and coworkers often make them worse, which upsets me.

I'm on year 7 w/ my coding job. I'm bored as hell and am considering taking a yr off for travel like josh said. I've learned enough about myself to know that I could also switch to another coding job, but I'll probably get bored of that before my usual 4 yrs.

@Tenpoundbass reading your post makes me wonder if you too just get sick of jobs, or maybe what bothers you is that your work is too dynamic? It sounds like instead of building something and then moving onto another project, you constantly demo the previous code, rebuild it, or modify it in ways that weren't anticipated, making it into a Frankenstein. I know the feeling of working very hard on "my beautiful codebase" to have it become totally obsolete less than 1 year later. It's kinda crushing. Luckily for me, that has been very rare.

If you think the constant change of business model, requirements, and it's affect on your code might be what's bothering you - there's plenty of jobs where your code has the opposite problem - it will "live forever" hahah.

I'm not sure how to recommend finding such jobs, but maybe Govt or utility jobs, or jobs that partially deal w/ govt regulations. I too work w/ HIPAA regulated data, and things have been pretty stable.

Tenpoundbass says

Anyone think I'll make a great Political Analyst

Stick with coding, not that I think your question is serious. I'm sure there is always a lot to learn on every coding job, even if the company has their head up their ass (so to speak).

Are we really supposed to answer your question, while believing that your comments on this forum reflect your actual beliefs ?

From my perspective, as polarized as we have become, you're way to wrapped up emotionally in the right wing pole. Like others here, sometimes even more, you draw a crazy caricature of who the democrats are. I think a good political analyst would be able to see today's "win at any cost" republicans a little more honestly, while also understanding where a majority of democrats are coming from. You're way too high on the Koolaid.

The current right wing populist thesis that it's us against them, with "them" being the globalist deep state, is bs but it does work, becasue there are substantial negatives (for the US) to globalization, as necessary and inevitable as it is. Globalization has largely already happened, and people long for simpler times, when half the world lived on pennies a day.

Joe Rogan is right, our form of government is somewhat obsolete. We should have a panel of elected extremely smart decision makers that aren't beholding to money. At least not nearly as much as politicians are in our current system. Although I don't know how that could be democratically implemented.

Questions:

1) Political analyst or strategist ?

2) In the current environment is it even possible for our leaders to come together and find solutions that work for everyone to a relative degree ? Or does it have to be this divide and conquer "there is no such thing as truth and facts anymore," ever increasing division and dishonesty?

3) Which would you fight for ? Solutions and compromise ? Or Civil war ? If it's the latter you would fight for, maybe you could get paid by the oligarchs to keep the mindless bullshit brewing. I've always half assumed you were already getting paid for that.

Hircus says

If you think the constant change of business model, requirements, and it's affect on your code might be what's bothering you - there's plenty of jobs where your code has the opposite problem - it will "live forever" hahah.

Just to be sure, I have a strict standard on the type of companies I'll work for. This company had it in spades 5 years ago.
Now the culture has flipped 180. I wouldn't take this job if I interviewed for it today.

And I don't give two craps about the other stuff you said. It took me all of three months by myself, to data model and develop the stack for their many business requirements. I don't give a crap if it's taken them 1 1/4 years to have nothing. That's on them. And to be honest Netsuite gives me great hope. If companies are willing to give them hundreds of thousands a year. I can't wait to bring my Multi use middleware to market.

Tenpounder,

Would you be interested in a startup?

Almost all coding is done. Any future coding could be overseen by you and you could simply take care of maintenance.

Ask Patrick for my email if you want to start a conversation.