> People making random claims about AGI soon is really weakening my confidence in AI in general
See it as a simple BS detector.
Readit NewsElon is literally in the files, talking about going to the island. It's documented
Who knows who did what on this island, and I hope we'll figure it out. But in the meantime, going to this island or/and being friend with Epstein doesn't automatically make someone a pedo or rapist.
yodsanklai commented on We asked 15k European devs about jobs, salaries, and AI [pdf] static.germantechjobs.de/... · Posted by u/birdculture
Yeah, the numbers in Germany are not so rosy. If these numbers are true, we are looking at -
- An "average" salary of around 65K / year
- This after (an average of) 5-6 rounds of interviews
- 6 months of "probation", with only 2 weeks of notice
- And all after 4-6 years of degree/s and 4-5 years of experience (so around 10 years of investment)
Then after taxation 65K annually means around 3500/month in pocket. Then with the current prices - around 1200 goes in rent alone. Not a lot of room to spend after that. Then, prices keep going up and even a simple (new) car is around 20,000. Not to mention the stress / savings you have to keep since people can be let go anytime. To top it, there is a ceiling in Germany - unless you are extra-ordinary forget making above 100K ever even after 25 years of experience.
IT / software dev is a "barely survivable" kind of job in Germany right (sadly) now. I do not recommend it to kids in school/uni anymore (again unfortunately).
It's a bit more complicated than this. First, averages hide a lot of variability, both in skillsets and salaries. You have SWEs earning very high income. Also there's the question of opportunities. Some of these SWEs/devs could have had better prospects in different fields, while others not. And there's also the question of whether you like what you do. For many people, programming is a passion.
> I am, of course, in no position to question senior dev
Don't assume senior devs know necessarily better. There's a wide range of abilities in our profession!
That being said software engineering is made of trade offs and your colleagues may be aware of the issues you mention. Maybe this was decided on purpose based on constraints at the time, or maybe it was a bad design, but it's now costly to fix.
In any case, you should probably not question them and re-assess the case when you have more experience and seniority in the company.
It's still very important to know the best practices, but it doesn't mean they have to be followed blindly in all situations.
1) There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates. Sorry, but once bitten, twice shy. One company gets caught at it and the whole industry develops a reputation.
2) If you've got a problem finding candidates, there's 16,000 more on the market now. Congratulations!
3) If you think there must be something wrong with those 16,000, well, that would explain where your pipeline is going wrong.
> There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates
I don't see how this is even possible. There would be a memo from the CEO to 1000s of recruiters asking them to favor foreigners? that would leak immediately.
I'm not american, but it seems to me there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.
I'm not sure anyway what is the relationship between the potential difficulty of hiring new folks, and firing current folks in USA to offshore roles, are relates.
> there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B.
As an interviewer in a big tech company, it seems all candidates I interview are foreigners who often graduated in the US. Either the company discriminates (which I really doubt it does), or there aren't enough qualified Americans for some jobs. And even if there are, the largest pool of candidates, the better.
>Amazon axes 16,000 American jobs as it ... relocates to a larger campus in India
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/10/amazon-to-invest-additiona...
I wonder how this is also related to the attacks on the H1B visa.
yodsanklai commented on There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him fastcompany.com/91477114/... · Posted by u/coloneltcb
he's also not afraid to speak out
The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ, which I don't think is true. Academia is a badly broken system, and many people with formal credentials like PhDs have wasted huge amounts of time and effort on producing what is ultimately low-quality scientific work. This is a pretty uncontroversial statement among people I know in academia - or who were in academia but left - and this should absolutely affect the degree to which federal government agencies are willing to hire people who have formal credentials like a STEM PhD.
Academia may be broken, but a lot of bright students still pursue PhDs and it's better to have them in your pool of candidates rather than not.
Recently I picked a smallish task from our backlog. This is some code I'm not familiar with, frontend stuff I wouldn't tackle normally.
Claude wrote something. I tested, it didn't work. I explained the issue. It added a bunch of traces, asked me to collect the logs, figured out a fix, submitted the change.
Got bunch of linter errors that I don't understand, and that I copied and pasted to Claude. It fixed something, but still got lint errors, which Claude dismissed as irrelevant, but I realized I wasn't happy with the new behavior.
After 3 days of iteration, my change seems ok, passed the CI, the linters, and automatic review.
At that stage, I have no idea if this is the right way to fix the problem, and if it breaks something, I won't be able to fix it myself as I'm clueless. Also, it could be that a human reviewer tells me it's totally wrong, or ask me questions I won't be able to answer.
Not only, this process wasn't fun at all, but I also didn't learn anything, and I may introduce technical debt which AI may not be able to fix.
I agree that coding agents can boost efficiency in some cases, but I don't see a shift left of IDEs at that stage.