Maybe a good difference between "senior" at ten years and senior at twenty years is whether you think amount of code produced is a positive metric or a negative one.
No, that sounds right. First you don't know how to write something, then you know one way, then you know multiple ways, then later you know multiple ways and have the instinct to pick the best one first.
There's rarely a bullet point advantage that some new language or tech stack can offer me that would outweigh ten years of observation of how a familiar setup behaves in production, such that the space of unknown unknowns is reduced to almost nothing.
My personal rule is that the new technology stack item needs to either make is possible for me to build something that I couldn't have built without it, or needs to provide a productivity boost significant enough to overcome the productivity lost by straying from the more familiar path - even harder for team projects where multiple people need to learn the new component.
Yeah. I'm in agreement there. I guess that it's an application of The Law of Least Surprise for a future developer (who might actually be me, which it often is)
Hard agree. Though I don't think most people who exhibit the problem are consciously trying to pad a resume. I think it's more mundane than that, most people just follow the crowd and earnestly think the new layers of complexity being sold this year will solve more problems than they introduce.
People want to find blog posts that dictate a best practice or generally correct solution. They don't have the skill or experience or mindset to evaluate each distinct problem and craft the optimally simple solution for it.
All I ever see anymore is architecture and tech stacks that promise to solve the perceived weakness that's currently in fashion while starting from scratch and taking steps backward in ways that people don't even realize or appreciate were already solved.
About Saturday Night Live they say, "The show doesn't start because it's ready, it starts because it's 11:30."
We're not going to be governed by AI because we're ready, it's going to be because the people who own it have secured enough power to make it happen. Whether it takes the form of government or capitalism.
You say that like we've already done away with human doctors and lawyers. Lawyers can't even use LLMs as an aid without them making up fake citations. The technology isn't close to being able to be used unsupervised, and humans are proving too irresponsible to supervise it.
I'd also be excited about this technology if it had come before everything we've seen in the last 25 years. It's irresponsibly naive not to understand by now that technological advances are being used more against us than for us.
My Galaxy S20 gallery app had a great search feature that would find any text in any picture. I take lots of screenshots and relied on that search to find them.
I got an S25 recently and when I search for "wife" it tries to find pictures with my wife in them. But before it does that it has to ask me who my wife is. There's no way to get it to search for the word "wife." (If I'm wrong, please tell me how.) Other text searches simply don't work either.
Sometimes it's the small ways in which the world is getting dumber.
Ironically, the S20 had a decent hybrid behavior of searching by either text or object that the text represents. Whatever smarter AI they replaced it with is useless.
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