"65% of Hazbin/Helluva fan comics, fan animations/animatics, fan fiction.etc are unironically better than anything Vivziepop has ever made in her career!"

I'll do you one better. Vivziepop fans were some of the most annoying people I ever had the displeasure of interacting with. And that was before her animation stuff went mainstream and she just did this annoying animation meme shit. I was a moderator in an Art Community on Amino at that time and somehow Amino paid her to shill it to her fans (the community had no say in this). So they showed up in droves, ignored all community guidelines and just posted the dumbest things imaginable. I still personally dislike Vivziepop because of that.

I work way too much. Technically I'm supposed to have a 36h work week, but I have already accumulated 120h of overtime this year. I had a diagnosed burnout two years ago that wasn't entirely work related (lots of stress from family drama), but it hasn't really gotten much better since then.

What are your responsibilities ?

On paper I'm just a regular-level developer in a DevSecOps-flavoured Scrum Team of 13 (9 of which are devs, it's a pretty big team). But since I've been there since the start of our current main product, I have accumulated a lot of stupid side roles. I'm the main Frontend person, so I go to all the Frontend meetings and talk to the UX/UI Team. I'm the main onboarding person, so I do all the setup and introductions when a new colleague or intern joins in, as well as the tech support when colleagues have problems with their IDEs or other parts of their dev environments. I'm the designated Security Engineer so I have to go to all the Security meetings as well as be the one who turns all the new security regulations into actionable tickets, as well as monitor that they are actually implemented. Absolutely hate that role, so I talked to my manager about it a year ago and he assigned me a Junior dev that I could train to take over my Security duties. That manager fired that Junior last October, so all the tasks are back on my shoulders. He did assign a replacement, but that person is not a developer so they can't do anything that involves actual implementation. Meaning that my workload has actually increased because now I not only have to teach them about Security Engineering things but also explain Software Dev and how our codebases work.

Ugh, and reviewing Pull Requests has gotten so rough since my company started hard-pushing Claude Code on everyone. All the devs that use it heavily report awesome time saves, but they all ignore that that saved time just comes from them not properly checking the code. So all the shit floats to the top during PRs. Reviews have been taking around 4x as long as they used to, especially when I have to re-check everything because Claude Code fucking changes half of the already reviewed code every time it's used to "fix" something I marked during the review. Which introduces even more problems so it changes even more code during the next iteration. I spend like 1.5 MONTHS going back and forth with a guy from another team while reviewing his PR. He was just extracting a feature I had build into a more centralized repository so that other teams can use it. I built that feature in two days, making the changes to make it more generic would have taken me two more days at most. Nah, instead we got a PR with over 100 threads and like 50 commits. ughhh

Do you do application deployments ?

Luckily we're fully Cloud-based with proper CI/CD pipelines, so deployment is pretty easy. But yeah, if I ever find the time to build a feature I'm also the one deploying it, naturally.

What does the ownership look like in your compan. Do devs own everything and perform all tasks for the application to function? ( server management, server user profile management, application hosting, etc )

My department has like 100 devs and we're all working on products within the same AWS-based ecosystem. So there's a team that handles core functions, aws accounts and central dependencies, and the product teams can just focus on developing their specific products. It's a pretty chill system all things considered. Ownership for the products lies broadly with the teams that maintain them.

Do you work off hours ? I don't work on weekends, but since the job has "flexible work hours" I can work whenever I want/have to. Sometimes starting at 5am, sometimes ending at 10pm. Whatever is needed, I guess 🤷

Do you make the industry standard or are you paid less ?

When I got picked up as Junior in early 2023 I made 44k before taxes, which was more than most of the people in my graduation class. But the salary hasn't really grown with the amount of shit I have to deal with, so I feel pretty severely underpaid right now. I make just a bit under 50k (would be 55k if I worked a 40h week). Technically the yearly raises are coming up next month, but last year was just 3.8%, so I don't think this year would be much better. Either way, I'm handing in my notice of resignation next Thursday 🥳 The new job I have lined up starting in October pays 62k with a lot less responsibilities. I probably could have gotten more if I kept looking, but I really just wanted out. I might look again once I have started that new job, since I can leave with a notice of just 2 weeks in my first 6 months there. Apparently I'm pretty decent at job interviews. I only applied to like 60-ish places during my job hunt, refusing to write any cover letters and never touching anything AI-related during the whole process out of principle. Had only 3 companies offer me an interview, but all 3 interviews led to them offering me the job.

Connections
Puzzle #1107
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Great one today!

Yo, this was uploaded 45min ago and I see no link to that legendary weightlifting forum thread where they try to figure out how many days a week has? Shame! Shame, I say!

Unironically a great example for explaining the difference between 0 and null

God if more men had midriffs like that

you literally have access to all the code in the world

I'd like to believe that they were honorable enough to not secretly train on code without people's permission. But realistically they totally did exactly that, but just made the AI Model this incompetent through some other engineering blunder.

Also, random side thought - training only on public repos probably yields you way higher code quality as opposed to training on both public and private repos? I assume we all have some very messy private repos that we're too embarrassed to publish because the code quality is absolute shit ... right?

I lowkey do want to work like that, but it has to be on my own terms. Because Fast paced and high pressure works much much better with my brain than infinite meetings + horribly convoluted bureaucratic hoops to jump through to work productivly + nothing gets done + there's still high pressure because people are frustrated about it.

My company started providing every programmer who wanted it with Github Copilot in like 2023, iirc. I declined it (we were still allowed to decline it back then, sigh). My process of thought was that it takes almost zero skill to "learn" AI tools, but once they're part of your workflow you become reliant on them and your actual rate of learning stalls. I still wasn't particularly experienced or good at programming back then (only started my IT career in late 2021) so I wanted to heavily invest in myself and level up my skills as much as I could.
Fast forward to today, and there is a significant skill gap between me and the coworkers I was on par with when Copilot was introduced. I'm still not some kind of superstar programmer, but when it comes to my specific niche (React/Typescript) I'm considered one of the go-to people to consult within my department. Meanwhile some of my colleagues still need almost weekly reminders to use let/const instead of var (yes we have a linter, but they accidentally turn it off sometimes...).

About a month ago management started hard-pushing their AI bullshit. Everyone is mandated to install and use Claude Code. So.. I did. It took me maybe a day to learn, most of which was spent fiddling with IntelliJ (I took the chance to migrate from Windows IntelliJ to using its Linux build within a WSL, it's such an improvement!). I did all the mandated Claude tutorials and everything I got out of it is more resentment for my coworkers. This tool really is made for total morons. Even the "advanced features" like writing custom hooks and subagents or connecting to custom MCP servers are just so... stupid. If that's the most complicated thing they do on a day-to-day basis, I am very much not surprised about their brain atrophying.

Anyways, I am now also the go-to person my colleagues approach when they need help with their Claude setup. Because the guy who self-identifies as competent in AI topics just straight up lies way too much, as he can't handle being perceived as anything but extremely smart and competent (which just wastes everyone's time, since finding issues is way harder when he insists his first hunch is always the 100% correct solution and doesn't admit it when he makes a wrong assumption).

I'm very much not worried about my job security (someone with the capacity to actually understand the code they write is much more valuable and harder to replace, plus I hold a lot of knowledge about our existing product) but I'm certainly having a hard time applying for new jobs. Recruiters and managers really are stupid enough to think that using AI requires any sort of deeper skill, so putting AI on your CV as a skill is basically required nowadays (I still refuse to do it). And the AI bros whose applications I'm competing with are just much more comfortable with lying about their actual coding skill and competence, so on the first scan my resume does end up looking worse than theirs. But I have absolutely crushed every interview that I was actually invited to, because faking technical skill in actual conversation is way harder. I'm not too pessimistic about my prospects of finding a new job, even if the market definitely sucks right now.

A chemistry teacher I had like a decade ago used to insist that being good at chemistry has a great correlation with being good at baking, because both are about following recipes. I'd say that video disproves that claim.

The first ebike I bought was 200€. You're telling me two tanks of gas would cost more than my entire main mode of transportation did for the two years or so I used it daily (tbf, I had it maintenanced once for 50€)

Oh, I definitely am! Although plan A is to find a new job before this one implodes, but the chances aren't great because the market for software engineers is in a bit of a slump rn and I'm pretty picky about not working for unethical/enviromentally destructive causes 😮‍💨

Hey, I literally have those pants! They really are a weakness, as there are no pockets on them :(

For anyone else wondering: It's some sort of ergonomic mouse thing

Seems like a steep requirement, I'd be fine with:

1. [0..n] Genders
2. >= 35°C

slop

Like, if I'm doing something for myself, that's exactly the place where I wanna do something amazing,

That's always my intention with my personal projects too! But that always results in "Wow I just learned how to do this thing much better, let me refactor the whole project to do it perfectly everywhere" followed by my Adderall running out. So there's just so many half-done refactors I either forget about or abandon because I get a new idea the next day, but that's totally just a skill issue.

You're right though, the code I write at work is much worse, but my Company hosts their own GitLab instance so the code we write can't even be used to poison Copilot :(

Whoever the guy was who posted about not pooping for a few days

Well they sound like a results-driven innovator who doesn't let unnecessary processes get in their way. I'm surprised my company's recruiters haven't already hunted them down and offered them a position as head architect.