I now see groups of people just meandering between buzzwords and sort of calling it a career. Honestly I know people who were 'crypto developers' 3 years ago who are now 'senior AI implementation architects' and similar..and they have a 'bootcamp' etc....I am a software engineer who qualified in cs but after working around engineering and manufacturing a lot I'm also qualified in CAD...thinking to get into more physical engineering and become a chartered engineer finally and just get away from the bandwagon boosterism. Or become a nurse or teacher.
i'm enjoying making games on the side and I'd like to monetize one soon, but I look at 'tech' careers and I just rapidly lose the will to live now. 30 minutes on linkedin is enough to make most people feel nauseous and need to lie down.
I think a lot are feeling a bit like this...Also pile in all the web frameworks etc...on top of 'crypto' then 'AI'...then who knows what...
There'll be another overhyped buzzword in a few years and we will all be expected to get excited about it and I just can't anymore. Realistically the actual business value of software has barely changed in about 20 years except for niche things in finance and R&D engineering (and I know because i've worked in R&D engineering with embedded guys).
I am just not interested in learning to deploy largely pointless AI chatbots or learn yet another web framework to make largely the same ERP or PLM etc related stuff I've done before in the 'framework d'hier'
Hi I'm a big surfer (or have been most of my life but doing less now at 40!) also building a mobile game in Unity/C# right now although it's not surf related like yours it's actually based on Chinese Wuxia cinema from 5 years spent in China. I considered building a surf one and was looking at potentially trying to 'gamify' a slightly different element of the 'surfing' experience which was to focus on predicting/catching and then staying on a wave at a busy break...so top down early GTA style graphics initially waves would come almost breaking in random spots in relation to previoius waves/sets, but never identical, and you'd have to kind of 'guess' ahead of other AI controlled surfers where to place yourself then paddle for position then try to dodge others on the way in....I thought it could be kind of fun in an arcadey way and not require so much of the physics you're describing, which is no doubt really hard to code...I'd love to see your game though!
I'm going to be controversial and say that this is an interesting spectacle but it is not even remotely comparable to the difficulty of what was going on in Free Solo. This is a circus trick by comparison to that.
For example I think a lot of 'good' climbers with several multi pitch climbs behind them could do this building fairly comfortably with ropes and really the only thing interesting about this is he did it without safety equipment which is frankly just a bit daft.
(I have climbed pretty extensively in the UK and also in Yangshuo China). I was kind of 'intermediate/good' at one point.
It's not contraversial at all - buildings are extremely predictable (
to a point, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750654 and consider that the initial overhang pass failed due to not finding an open bottomed window cleaning track to slot into, they backed up, tried another spar, and success )
this was an exercise of focus, indifference to exposure, and fitness to complete the 1,660 odd feet of ascent.
> he did it without safety equipment which is frankly just a bit daft.
People vary a lot, I had spent a few years climbing before someone pointed out that you could use ropes and protection .. indoor climbing gyms were fun for a while but never really became a thing of great interest for myself.
The Tao Te Ching is sort of impossible to translate into modern English. I don't really understand it but I can speak and read Chinese and it doesn't make much sense to Chinese people either. It is the weirdest thing that it has become famous.
This is kind of how it translates in English:
'Light light moon
green grass mountain
snow sun together'
For an entire book. It's totally nonsensical but the writing in Chinese at that time was just a bit like that. Classical Chinese sort of seems to have been written more like the way rappers put together their battling rhymes sometimes - you aren't meant to understand it
>"The simplicity of Lao Tzu's language can present an almost impenetrable density of meaning. The reversals and paradoxes in this great poem are the oppositions of the yin and yang — male/female, light/dark, glory/modesty — but the knowing and being of them, the balancing act, results in neither stasis nor synthesis ... reversal, recurrence, are the movement, and yet the movement is onward."
Thanks for your literal character interpretation / perspective.
I love Aphex Twin but my only issue is he keeps saying in interviews how he hates surfers?!
Being a proud Cornish surfer and one of his earlier fans this saddens me. We were his first fans!
There used to be raves in Cornwall like the one in cult UK surfing classic 'Blue Juice'. They were 'lush' (i've noticed Aphex regularly says 'lush' too so is clearly from a surfer-adjacent group of friends and maybe he's just p1ssing about).
I agree that the term 'Engineer' has lost all meaning in the software/IT world. I studied CS at a UK uni which was a subject in the engineering school. I then worked with engineers on multidisciplinary projects (mechanical, electrical, chemical) and am a qualified CAD engineer.
When people start advertising for roles my 'mobile engineer' for someone who makes iphone apps it just makes me feel a bit sad. It genuinely cheapens the term.
I imagine 'architects' also get p1ssed off for the same reason tbh. There's probably loads of real architects who see an 'architect' and say 'he's not a bloody architect! I went to architecture school for SEVEN YEARS!!! He's an idiot with a 1 month AWS certificate!'
Why is IT so bad at trying to steal others' glory!?
Linkedin is verging on unusable/not fit for purpose...
Example, how can I see job adverts with very very niche requirements in quite unusual roles (one of which I do actually know about eg data 'migration projects for large companies that specialize in peristaltic pumps').
I‘ve seen a job advert for that kind of thing with literally hundreds of applicants. I would be surprised, given the fact that is a niche area that only a handful of companies even operate in, and companies very rarely migrate to new systems, if there are even hundreds of people in the world who have even done something like that! That is terrible for both the recruiter and the applicant. How are you even supposed to demonstrate you have done that kind of thing before in a literal crowd of people?!
There are a lot of sensible comments on this thread but seems not a very strong consensus. I can see why! ERP is an extremely complicated space...
There was a thread a while ago about ERPs on a post about future start up ideas....i'll copy what I wrote there which you may find interesting...you may find that whole thread interesting:
'Ah ok. I'm an interested in this as a topic and would like to take a stab at this as I think it's an almost impossible project. I would like to caveat any opinion first by saying these: I have a great deal of experience customizing and creating little bits of bespoke functionality for various ERP systems (SAP obviously but also some of the smaller ones aimed at niche markets eg construction). I also have similar experience with similarly complicated and sprawling PLM systems. I've spent basically my entire software career around ERP and PLM systems and systems that break out pieces of ERP functionality and try to often do it elsewhere (usually badly), and then usually have to somehow bring everything back into an ERP system anyway, either manually or with at least some level of (but rarely complete) automation.
I am a CS graduate from a 'famous' UK university (UCL). I'm also a qualified CAD engineer, project manager within agile (DSDM agile etc)...ITIL qualified etc. i.e I've spent a lot of time across these kinds of many tentacled systems that really do reach across the entirety of any large business. I've worked with these systems from FTSE 50 businesses to small 50 person manufacturing startups.
I've also been involved in the migration between PLM systems (horrible from a data perspective - all those CAD files etc) and also ERP systems (horrible but largely just the mapping between two different Entity Relationship Diagrams almost incomprehensible to any living human in terms of complexity).
It would be an incredibly ambitious undertaking to compete with one of the major players in either of these spaces. It is not something you could really even do at the scale of a start-up the likes of which YC and the media understand as 'start-up'. You would need so many not just 'early stage' founders with wildly different skillsets, you would need effectively an entire large manufacturing business, from end to end, in terms of personnel because your 'domain expert' essentially includes 'every business function you can imagine'. That's before you could even begin to think about software. It's a fascinating idea but think about it - procurement/purchasing, warehousing and logistics, engineering and design, sales and marketing, finance (very important here), HR, operations, R&D, Q&A...and these are just the ones I can think of that I have come across in my dealings with these systems. They really do touch every department.
The length of time to market would also be such that this kind of project would not really be appropriate to describe as a 'start up'. You'd essentially be creating a 'Unicorn Killer' and that unicorn killer would need insane resources to even have a chance at market success. The number and requirement for specialist migration tools into your new system from existing clients would be a 'massive' undertaking also.
It's such a bold idea but I think to describe an undertaking of that size 'start-up' would be to completely stretch the meaning of the term 'start-up' so far beyond its usage that the term would lose all meaning.'
Location: Travelling SE Asia but I am British (Cornish)
Remote: No preference. Worked remotely during COVID and a lot since. Most of my career has been office based.
Willing to relocate： Yes
Technologies: .NET, SQL Server, Angular for frontend. Although I did java and MySQL at university (UCL). Play around with Unity. Also a qualified CAD engineer (Creo).
As others have mentioned this is an extremely odd thing to expect to work....
I'll give an example. I worked for a FTSE 100 company using a very old Product Lifecycle Management system (model manager - based actually on pre-DOS technology)....we had to upgrade it to a new fancy one.
Therefore we had to migrate all data relating to the company, and group companies engineering designs...everything to do with 2D drawings, 3D designs...any important connections etc....all electrical designs....excel sheets related to these containing lists of PCBs and their component parts in Bills Of Materials etc...There is absolutely no way in hell I would trust AI with almost any of that, to get it right....or even to attempt a load without almost immediately erroring.
Totally agree. We wouldn’t trust AI to run that kind of migration either... And we don’t.
But here’s what we do use AI for:
• Mapping legacy schemas
• Spotting patterns
• Generating boilerplate ETL code fast
Then humans step in:
• Validate every mapping
• Write custom logic for edge cases
• Test everything... every field, every BOM, every relationship
• Migrate with deterministic, human-reviewed code
i'm enjoying making games on the side and I'd like to monetize one soon, but I look at 'tech' careers and I just rapidly lose the will to live now. 30 minutes on linkedin is enough to make most people feel nauseous and need to lie down.
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