As probably guessable, the state of author is in has not much to do with the Cracked Android Phone, but that I assume he tries to find remote positions (already a hard find) in US from an African country (assumption, doesn't write details). For that to happen, you need rockstar credentials. No business can accept the risk of fraud, scams, sanctioned origin country, or a dev disappearing overnight.
I was hiring devs for a number of years in EU, and we never ever looked at education - more specifically, any degree was good, as it was only an indicator that the person can learn. I would never assume practical software engineering knowledge based on a degree.
Anyone in the same situation, what the author did is a perfectly good way - build up knowledge, get mentors, build up a portfolio, work for well-known entities. But then judge your market value realistically, and possibly be in the same region/country. Even if it could technically possible, remote work with such distances has too much legal liability.
You're right that I'm looking for remote positions from Zambia, and that distance adds complexity. But I don't think the issue is legal liability or risk of fraud.
I worked remotely for Bellingcat for 8 months. They're an internationally recognised investigative journalism organisation. If they could verify me and manage the "legal liability," I don't see why tech companies can't.
The risk assesment you're describing assumes that being from Africa without a degree makes someone inherently risky. But I have verifiable work history, public code, and people who can vouch for me. That should count as verification.
I understand market realities. I'm not expecting to walk into a senior role at a FAANG company. But entry or mid-level positions shouldn't require "rockstar credentials" just because of geography. That's not about risk managment, it's about gatekeeping.
The advice to "be in the same region/country" isn't practical when there are very few tech opportunities locally that pay a living wage. Remote work was supposed to democratise access to these jobs. If it only works for people in certain countries, that's a problem worth pointing out.
Congrats to creating something you think is valuable. Do you see a risk that your business model is taking away income from an API provider that you 100% depend on - meaning the plug could be pulled at any minute while you have paying customers?
I see these posts left and right but no one mentions the _actual_ thing developers are hired for, responsibility. You could use whatever tools to aid coding already, even copy paste from StackOverflow or take whole boilerplate projects from Github already. No AI will take responsibility for code or fix a burning issue that arises because of it. The amount of "responsibility takers" also increases linearly with the size of the codebase / amount of projects.
That's quickly becoming the most important part of our jobs - we're the ones with agency and the ability to take responsibility for the work we are producing.
I'm fine with contributed AI-generated code if someone who's skills I respect is willing to stake their reputation on that code being good.
We still do that, it's just that realtime code review basically becomes the default mode. That's not to say it's not obvious there will not be a lot less of us in future. I vibed about 80% of a SaaS at the weekend with a very novel piece of hand-written code at the centre of it, just didn't want to bother with the rest. I think that ratio is about on target for now. If the models continue to improve (although that seems relatively unlikely with current architectures and input data sets), I expect that could easily keep climbing.
I just cutpasted a technical spec I wrote 22 years ago I spent months on for a language I never got around to building out, Opus zero-shotted a parser, complete with tests and examples in 3 minutes. I cutpasted the parser into a new session and asked it to write concept documentation and a language reference, and it did. The best part is after asking it to produce uses of the language, it's clear the aesthetics are total garbage in practice.
Told friends for years long in advance that we were coal miners, and I'll tell you the same thing. Embrace it and adapt
>the _actual_ thing developers are hired for, responsibility.
It is a well known fact that people advance their tech careers by building something new and leaving maintenance to others. Google is usually mentioned.
By which I mean, our industry does a piss poor job of rewarding responsibility and care.
You know how forums turned bad because people with good manners/communication skills can just go to a different discussion place so over time you consolidate with a toxic base of people with nowhere else to go?
Even if a company tries to get rid of the bad people, once you start doing random, the line must go up layoffs, the best people leave and then use their network within the company to poach the next down layers of good people. Current American 'layoff while spending the money on stock buybacks' is corporate suicide.
I wish there were some self-hosted setup that would replicate this based on either tags, bpm matching, or other similarity indicators snooped from online sites like lastfm.
I've been using https://www.beatunes.com/en/beatunes-matchlist.html (35€ for Mac or Windows) to create static playlists like this for years from my library of ~13K songs. I've created a few dozen such playlists with light curation (just kicking a song out here and there). I find myself listening to these playlists far more than the ones I created completely by hand.
I suppose you could do it often, or maybe even script it (e.g., with Keyboard Maestro on Mac) to get something a little more dynamic. But it's not something that just matches songs on the fly server side.
Comments like this are not much worth without context. Each model has wildly different perf per each language and framework, project architecture (if it can be followed up successfully). No two devs on different projects have the same experience. Even insights like "Anthropic has a lead" is a broad generalization.
Can’t give an extensive reply as I’m on mobile, but FWIW I’ve tried Claude and Codex and Copilot. We use Python and standard microservice architecture, nothing special at all.
I’ve had the most success with using one agent to write a plan document and another to follow that plan doc.
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