I already switched months ago.

Or, you can just setup a forgejo instance and migrate all your repos to it.

As others have said, relationships are the key. The current state of the tech job market is bad. Probably the worst I’ve ever seen and it is still getting steadily worse.

I spent almost a year applying before getting my latest job. I was even getting interviews until the beginning of this year. Then they very abruptly stopped for some reason. Only reason I got the job I have now is because an old business associate happened to think of me and reached out to see if I was looking. I’ve been doing this for years and I’ve got a solid resume but it is tough out there.

That said, I’m not trying to discourage you. Keep at it and you’ll find something. Working on side projects or contributing to open source projects can help give you accomplishments to put on your resume.

Create custom functions. Excel has lots of built in functions. “SUM()”, “CONCAT()”, etc. You can use VBA to create your own functions that manipulate data within cells.

I rarely use LLM’s for generating code. Usually, by the time I’ve provided all the necessary context, I might as well have just written the code myself. I do use LLM’s for doing research. As long as it’s understood that the response is only as accurate as the source material, they often do a decent job of distilling down to what I’m actually looking for.

To a point. I completely revamped the off site backups when I ditched Veeam. Four (out of probably ten) VM’s were able to be backed up off-site successfully in PBS. I think I restored two of those because they were newer than what I had locally. The rest never made it off-site, probably due to the local PBS VM choking on disk write conflicts.

I was looking for something on Academy Sports’ website a while back. They replaced their catalog search with an AI chat which really sucks at searching for products.

I gave up and bought what I needed from a different store.

Congratulations! You’ve given birth to a beautiful baby [object Object].

Still I wonder what the future holds and suppose it’s still too early to know how this will all turn out. I will admit that I’m more in the naysayers camp, but perhaps that’s from a fear of losing my livelihood?

It’s all just conjecture at this point. I vividly remember how “the cloud” was allegedly going to help organizations eliminate the IT department, dramatically lower operating costs, and basically put every system admin out of a job.

It succeeded at none of those things. It did help some organizations shift costs from CapEx to OpEx. But it also effectively made data centers available to organizations (and individuals) who didn’t have access to that kind of technology before. It didn’t live up to the hype but it has had a major impact.

Personally, I figure a lot of these “AI” companies are going to fold. There’s just not any value in cramming LLM’s into every product. Not to mention we’ve spent the better part of 30+ years trying to get away from users having to type when they want the computer to do something. Moving back away from a “point- and-click” interface, which has hardly reached its general best state, could be a steep uphill battle.

Again, all conjecture.

“We’re talking 10 to 20 — to even 100 — times as productive as I’ve ever been in my career,” Steve Yegge, a veteran coder who built his own tool for running swarms of coding agents, told me. “It’s like we’ve been walking our whole lives,” he says, but now they have been given a ride, “and it’s fast as [expletive].” Like many of his peers, though, Yegge can’t quite figure out what it means for the future of his profession. For decades, being a software developer meant mastering coding languages, but now a language technology itself is upending the very nature of the job.

Hate to tell them this but if the LLM’s available today are really somehow making you 10 x as productive, then you suck at your job. I suppose the opinion tracks though. I have worked with way too many devs who can pump out lines of bug filled, poor performing code at a rapid pace while seeming to have no idea how it works or how to fix it. These are the same people who are now gleefully hacking together a bunch of LLM generated code that they still don’t know how to read.

You still have to understand the complexities and nuances of the tools that your using because the LLM you’re generating code with does not and it will come back to bite you in the ass.

If you want to do resource profiling, Visual Studio can do that out of the box. For simple benchmarking, specifically for seeing how long certain calls take, I just just the Stopwatch class and ouput the result to a log entry. Assuming you’re using C# that is.

Second Protectli. They are solid little x86 boxes with no moving parts.

I saw a job posting the other day that had a hard requirement of 7+ years of experience with a specific IDE. It was phrased as an absolute must have.

That’s how you know an organization is totally clueless. TBF, not all IDE’s are created equal but it would be kind of like a construction foreman refusing to hire a anyone who didn’t have 7+ years of experience with DeWalt power tools.

Next week, we will spend 3 days trying to get the product team to pick out a dress only for them to insist that the one that is way too small “will fit” and that the dev can just “alter it real quick and it will be fine.” Even despite loud protests from the dev team that they cannot alter it and it will not be fine.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t fine.

The value of institutional knowledge is almost impossible to quantify and organizations are often totally inept at assessing the risks that come with losing it. Even if the risks are properly assessed and understood, the cost of mitigating them is immediate for a potential return on investment which is unknown.

I know from personal experience that getting an organization to mitigate these types of risks is usually an up hill battle. Even when the organization can easily afford it.

It’s easier to stick their heads in the sand and it goes way beyond just “white color” professionals. If you own a manufacturing plant, you could potentially lose a machinists annual salary, or more, in one hour of downtime. But I’ve seen at least a few large operations where the tool and die shop consists of one very overworked machinist. Management’s attitude is “oh, well we’ll just hire his replacement off the street whenever he finally decides to retire.”

The only problem with that is that the current guy has been there for 20 years, knows where ALL the bodies are buried, and has the skills to bring the plant back online with a welder and some scrap metal.

Even if the next person is really good at their job and magically shows up at the front door, it’s going to take them a while to get up to speed. That “while” costs money. In fact, it costs a lot of money. But there’s no way to reflect that on an income statement so nobody does anything about it.

Eons ago, I had a guy bring me a non functioning Compaq desktop and say, “Wull the fan was makin’ a lotta racket so I greased it.”

What he actually meant was, “I sprayed the entire motherboard with WD-40 because I don’t know shit about computers OR lubricants.”

I gave it a bath in electronics cleaner and it actually fired right up after that.

When it’s the right tool, it’s incredibly useful. When it’s the wrong tool, and it often is, it racks up tech debt at an incredible rate.

The problem is that it’s not just software. Shareholders and corporate “leadership” have collectively decided that they are willing to sacrifice any and all future success in order to make stock prices go up today. They don’t know where the business will be in five years and frankly, they don’t care. Virtually all of the big names have completely stopped innovating. Cramming “AI” into their shitty products and trying really hard to pretend that’s it’s something different or “new” when it’s just the same shit but with more bloatware.

Manufacturing isn’t much different. I worked at a specialized industrial tool manufacturer for a few years. They were trying to add a new “smart tool” line and demoed it at an international trade show only to get completely excoriated by their customers who were all like, “Don’t even talk to me about ‘smart’ tools when the [very expensive] tools you already produce don’t fucking work.” But that’s how it goes when your business is built on acquisitions and the way you make your stock price go up is by coasting on your brand portfolios past success while simultaneously eliminating the people who made that success possible.

I once worked with an SVP at a huge corporation that liked to engage in “bike shedding”. This guy is like seven rungs above me on the ladder and is trying to tell me what fields each SQL table should have.

Then we got a new department director who was very good at keeping upper management distracted and off our backs. Lots of people in middle management don’t justify their own salaries but I would argue that he sure did.

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