>you are fed up with specific positions/companies that are a poor fit for you
Agree. With no degree, but a skill and interest in programming coupled with experience, you're actually in a pretty good place. Find a company that doesn't suck. They seem elusive but they exist. They might not pay as well, but you can get through the day without counting the seconds until it's over.
Shit companies are always hiring because they have high turnover, so it would seem like all companies are shit, but they are not.
Maybe get out of NYC. If you are in the straight tech industry, think about doing tech in another industry, they all need it.
FWIW, there will always be times of stress in tech, but if the place is actually well managed, those times would be minimized.
Passing the cost to the consumer isn't a requirement. Sometimes it's impossible and stay competitive with local business.
Say local business charges $110. Imported charges $80 but a 50% tariff making it $120. If the import charges $120, they won't be competitive on price, so if that was their only differentiation, they would need eat at least $10 in tariffs.
I think he means the display price. When you buy something for $100 and it ends up being $110 on checkout, the taxes are obfuscated on the display price.
Perhaps briefly. Companies tried this with offshoring support. Some really took a hit and had to bring it back. Some didn't though, so it's not all or nothing in the medium term. In the short term, most of the execs will buy into the hype and try it. I suspect the lower quality companies will use it, but the companies whose value is in their reputation for quality will continue to use people.
Yes, good point. I suspect the numbers won't be precise. The objective is to qualify raising prices, not necessarily their own transparency. Of course this is signaling that Amazon is choosing to distribute the costs to customers rather than absorbing them in any way, so take that for what it is.
>This has to be illegal. You can't slap on a $20 sales tax fee at the end when it's actually $12 and pocket the difference as profit.
Not sure where you are, but this is pretty much de rigueur in the US for a whole bunch of stuff, notably telecom (mobile and fixed line), ISP, cable TV, electric utilities, as well as other stuff. On your invoice, you'll see stuff like "regulatory recovery fee", "franchise fee", "FCC Admin fee" and the like. None of which are taxes or government imposed fees. Rather, they're just using standard cost-of-doing-business expenses to tack on to your bill while claiming the price is at least 10-15% less.
My favorite is the $23/month "broadcast TV surcharge," which the cable company claims is to cover fees paid to the networks they carry. Since they have to pay these folks to carry their content anyway, they should just include it in the normal price, right? But if they did, that alone would increase the "price" by at least 15-20%.
As such, at least in the US, what law makes this "illegal?" Please tell me as it would save me at least $100/month in such fees/surcharges, or at least the "price" would be the actual "total you owe" price on the bottom line.
This isn't sales tax, this is tariff. Not sure if they are any laws regarding that or not.
It might be like shipping and handling: $20. The shipping is probably $5, the handling is $15. The handling is just a fee they charge to sell it to you. They want you to think it's shipping that's why they put "shipping" first. Uber Eats calls it "taxes and other fees," which are mostly fees, but they want you to think it's taxes, that's why they put "taxes" first.
Many business are scummy like that, we've just gotten used to it.
The point being, they are signaling a price hike and they are trying to attribute it to tariffs, which maybe or may not be true down to the penny. If they were exact in what the tariff was, people can easily calculate their cost, which Amazon doesn't want. I'm sure they will sneak in some extra profit in there at some point using similar tactics as described above.
Even if they can get away with it I don't think this will work so well. So upon check out you're just getting a fee and sometimes it's egregiously high and sometimes it is nonexistent? If you're buying a $100 item (and let's say a $50 cost basis) that has three versions: US made, Japanese made and Chinese made you could get a $0 fee, a $5 or a $50 fee. And at the same time you know that retailers could be just completely making up the tariff fee because there is absolutely no regulation or accountability? Seems like a very fast way to completely lose the trust of your customers.
>So upon check out you're just getting a fee and sometimes it's egregiously high and sometimes it is nonexistent? If you're buying a $100 item (and let's say a $50 cost basis) that has three versions: US made, Japanese made and Chinese made you could get a $0 fee, a $5 or a $50 fee.
It would be more obfuscated than that. They're scummy, I didn't say they weren't clever. A company probably wouldn't make the exact same product in three different countries and Amazon probably wouldn't stock all three, they'd just pick the version they could make the most money on. Also, they probably wouldn't make the difference obvious, just a few cents or dollars here or there. They would say the tariff is $5, when it really was $4.50 and they'd just round up. At scale that really ads up.
>Seems like a very fast way to completely lose the trust of your customers.
Most of them lost trust a long time ago. I mean, what companies do you trust? I don't trust very many, if any.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe we should all trust Amazon...
Edit: Amazon said displaying tariffs was never approved and won't happen. More junk news.
I currently trust that when I add items to my shopping cart at a known retailer (either online or brick&mortar) the prices listed are the ones I'll see at checkout, plus some small deterministic sales tax and/or shipping fee.
>Do many people hobby code with that entrepreneur mindset thing? Or sit down to play guitar thinking they want to make a hit and feeling bad if they just noodle some cover songs?
I absolutely do. Money and power is a great motivator. I don't feel bad about any of it. I took my shot and continue to do so.
>What a miserable existence that must be. How do you get that way? Should we blame LinkedIn or what is it?
It was not. I made some good side money. I always joke that I program to feed my computer habit. The benefit of it is you actually code like you are making a product, and there is usually a big skill difference between someone coding for fun and someone coding to make an actual sellable product; it's the 80/20 rule. That last 80% is what separates the good from the great. Like Jobs said, "Real artists ship."
The big difference for me is that what's actually fun (hard technical problems like e.g. writing an OS kernel, a db engine, a path tracer, an LLM from scratch...) is mentally challenging, and might progress your career, but it's not actually in any way sellable.
To make something sellable, you usually have to make it not-so-technical and not-so-complex. Simply because of the time constraints of hobby work and solo work. Your effort would go mostly to the market analysis and your product would need more polish meaning that for a personal project, it would usually be trivial (You can sell a shopping list iOS app, but you can't easily sell a 5 year hobby project making an OS). The sellable OS would be a 500 man-year product. What yo do by coding a kernel for 5 years is possibly that you can improve the product that is yourself.
So unless you actually enjoy the goal of marketing/selling/running a business, then the Shopping list iOS app won't be a good hobby.
>The big difference for me is that what's actually fun (hard technical problems like e.g. writing an OS kernel, a db engine, a path tracer, an LLM from scratch...) is mentally challenging, and might progress your career, but it's not actually in any way sellable.
I'm not saying it's worthless by any means. I assume this would be the baseline. The benefit of making an actual sellable product is you learn how to finish, which is often a lesson not learned from hobbyists. It's fun to work on new tech, but if someone never learns how to make a product that can ship, their value in an organization is probably more limited than someone who can.
>Your effort would go mostly to the market analysis and your product would need more polish meaning that for a personal project,
It's the polish that's valuable, I couldn't care less about the business side of it, leave that to business people.
Let's use your example of working on the Linux Kernel. If Linus just made a kernel and said, "this is great!" we never would have had the GNU/Linux revolution. It was packaged and installers were created and distributions were made and it was eventually able to be installed pretty easily by anyone. That's making a viable product, that is finishing.
>To make something sellable, you usually have to make it not-so-technical and not-so-complex.
Sort of, you have to make a not-so-complex wrapper so other people can use it. The complexity is still there, but you have to abstract it so devs without that knowledge can use it. I feel that if no one else can use it, where's the value?
“The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.”
Another simplistic example is I'm working on making a custom domain specific model. Getting it to infer properly is great (getting there), but the value to the company is to make it fast, wrap it in a usable API, get it to log useful errors, and integrate it into our software. The first is the fun part, the second is finishing to make it useful. That's value.
> I can teach someone who knows how things work how to glue libraries together when/if we do need it, but I can't teach someone who glues libraries together how to make their own things; it's simply not worth the time or effort because it's effectively like starting from scratch and I may as well start with a complete junior in that case.
I just want to point out that this goes beyond an argument explaining how hobby projects can be useful and enters the territory of personal attack. I presume you mean that whatever they made is substandard in some way ("[gluing] libraries together" is nonsense criticism; everything in software is someone's abstraction) but I don't see why you would think that.
For any given singular project "gluing libraries together" is not a particularly interesting critique, but as a default way of doing things it is very relevant to the resulting skill levels of people as well as their respect for quality. I have enough experience with former coworkers to understand which attitude results in which and it's with that backdrop in mind I've written the post. I stated my assumptions pretty clearly and why I've made them as well.
I absolutely think gluing libraries together is a substandard default way of working that leads to poor results, by the way. "[...] everything in software is someone's abstraction" is a cop-out that ignores the massive gap that exists between finding the lowest level you can execute (in many cases an OS call that cannot be split up into a smaller part, or calls into the lowest API you can find like OpenGL, Vulkan, etc., where we have to play by a driver's rules) and executing a function in a library that calls a library that calls a library that calls the OS or the like.
Taking on the cost of countless layers of function calls, potentially manager code, etc., just because "everything in software is someone's abstraction" is, to use your phrasing, a "nonsense" excuse for poor work and not taking ownership of the code that will execute.
I have a former coworker that elected to use a tokenizer/parser library that clocked in at about 6k lines of Rust code, where I personally decided to simply write one in about 600 lines (in Odin, which probably is considered more verbose). The 600 line one was faster, used less memory and naturally was easier to understand (easy enough to understand for someone who literally had never written a tokenizer/parser before to use and extend). It's defensible to use a library for a tokenizer/parser, of course, because "everything in software is someone's abstraction", but do you see the problem here where we get worse software and no one ever learns how to make better things if everyone just decides to `cargo install` readymade solutions?
I'm not saying that my colleague could at that moment have written the Odin solution in this case, but he would certainly be more likely to if he implemented things from scratch as a way of practicing, or decided to otherwise take ownership of the code that runs in work projects.
> I stated my assumptions pretty clearly and why I've made them as well.
The first yes, the second no. If you had a reason for the assumption, I think it would not be an assumption.
> I have a former coworker ...
One might assume you are thinking more about your former co-worker than you are about Clubber. They could make that assumption because you describe in detail an actual instance of what you complain about in the absence of any other such description in Clubber's comment.
Should they assume that? Even if they have reasons? Even if they're right? What does it add to the discussion?
I think you could have made a good point about their assessment missing the mark because I agree that the skills you write about are improved by "finding the lowest level you can execute" more than "coding to make an actual sellable product". Still, they might consider the latter to be no different from the former (the former is certainly a more precise description, regardless). Your story about the co-worker is a good one on that topic. It's unfortunate that the assumptions make your comments easier to dismiss.
You've made a whole lot of assumptions in that reply, all from 10 sentences. Maybe ask some questions next time instead of making assumptions that fit your preconceived notions. Your intuition is a bit off.
I think I was about as charitable as your post deserved, and I stated my assumptions clearly. You can either address them (and the bigger point) or choose not to.
"Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned states that they will lose federal funding for roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects if they continue to foster diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, impede President Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts or defy other directives from the administration."
It far time to stop taking what the news says at face value. They've been doing this for decades.
I did actually look a bit harder before I commented, I'm aware of how the media works. "Unleashing American Energy" pauses (cancels) all the "Green New Deal" programs as stated in the article. There was supposedly federal funding for a lot of new public transit projects that's now gone. Maybe it'll come back later, reframed as new projects... but I think that's extremely unlikely for a lot of this. The focus is now elsewhere.
I doubt it, police departments issue tickets as a major source of revenue. I've heard it said if you want to get rid of police departments, just have everyone follow the driving laws.
I suspect they'll allow just enough over so that police can still get their sweet, sweet tax revenue in this brave new world.
Kind of makes one wonder why all those politicians who spend 2020-2022 talking big talk about defunding the police didn't introduce "well everyone is already going 80 on this stretch of interstate so that ought to be the speed limit" bills in that time.
Most police cars that I know of have license scanners and that scanner will inform police if the owner of said car has a suspended license, which results in an immediate trip to jail.
