Lately I've been fascinated by Yakutsk, the coldest large city on Earth.
About 350,000 people live there, and winter temperatures can drop to –64°C (−83°F).
And regardless of the temperature or time of year, they have shopping malls, restaurants, and everything else you might expect to find in any big city.
The outdoor market in that 24 hours video really got me. These women are just out here, selling very, very frozen fish, for hours at a time. Like... they didn't want to move that market inside?
Last year a company reached out to me about an interesting job on their Developer Experience team. What the company is building is super interesting, and DevEx is something I love and am good at.
In our second conversation, the hiring manager mentioned that they all work ten hours a day, five days a week, in the office. I guess you could call it a 975 schedule.
I don't think of myself as "old", but that kind of in-office schedule sounded grueling. So I declined continuing with further interviews.
A 996 schedule sounds like a great way to say, "older developers need not apply."
I'll second this. An external recruiter was under the (incorrect) impression that we are a 996 company. We found out because she said that no senior people she talked to were willing to work those hours.
Ultimately you can make a lot of short-term progress with 23-year-olds who are willing to live 5 minutes away from the office, have no life outside of work, and work 72 hour weeks. But you also end up with a product that was built by people who have no idea what they're doing.
> Regular branch banks have stuff go missing from the safety deposit boxes shockingly regularly. The locks aren’t particularly secure and various people are able to access them.
My late wife had a safe deposit box in the Almaden Valley (San Jose) branch of US Bank. Her key to the box was nowhere to be found. So I had to get the box drilled open.
This would normally require a hefty fee. But the branch was moving to a new location, so they invited customers to make an appointment to show up a Saturday with proper ID for a lock drilling party.
I showed my ID and the death certificate, and we went into the safe to have the lock drilled.
But there was no real drilling involved. The locksmith had a little handheld gadget that she pushed into the lock, gave it a little twist, and the door came right open.
The ironic part? All that was in there were a few pieces of costume jewelry, worth maybe $50 in total.
She was paying more than that per year for the box rental, and if I'd had to pay for the "drilling" it would probably be more than that.
Many years ago, I worked at a company with a product that ran on Mac and Windows. The Mac version was pretty solid, but the Windows version had some problems.
They had a talented team of developers who were mostly Mac experts and just starting to get a grip on Windows.
I was known at the time as a "Windows expert", so they hired me to help the team get the Windows version into shape.
My typical day started with "house calls". People would ping me with their Windows questions and I'd go door to door to help solve them - and to make sure they understood how to do things on Windows.
In the afternoon, I would work on my own code, but I told everyone they could always call on me for help with a Windows problem, any time of day.
One colleague asked me: "Mike, how can you afford to be so generous with your time?"
Then in a performance review, I got this feedback:
"Mike, we're worried. Your productivity has been OK lately, but not great. And it's surprising, because the productivity of the rest of the team has improved a lot during this time."
I bit my tongue, but in retrospect I should have said:
I got an HR meeting a couple of years back where they selected me to be laid off because I wasn't closing as many tickets off as the rest of the team. Every single ticket had been through another engineer first and they had failed to resolve it.
I was absolutely fine with this and didn't defend it because the enhanced payment I was going to get was huge. But alas they worked it out in the end and here I am fixing arcane shit still that no one else has a clue about or is defeated by.
I knew a person like you, two decades ago, in a laptop repair facility (my boss).
He was hired full-time (at like 4x my hourly rate) simply because he was the last person working there familiar with how the DOS-only headless terminals were installed (simple, but vital infrastructure). I didn't even understand what he was doing, but knew if I learned it I would have a lifetime solid-six-figure tech support job (two decades ago).
Bossman mostly just sat around and played WoW (seriously, half his hours "on the clock," waiting for next disaster)... but whenever a smug new vendor came in pedaling latest & greatest... he was often the saver of many times his salary. Nobody really liked him (I did — we'd smoke weed together and attend irregular heavy metal shows), but everybody knew he was important technically (e.g. no purchase orders could go through without his machine upkeep — multimillion dollar budgets).
People would literally turn away from him in the hallways so-as to not attract his comicbookguy inquisitions — particularly if you were a network troublemaker / idiot.
I miss his expertise / guidance / wisdom. Favorite bossman ever.
so they kept you aroumd then, eh? sounds like someone in HR with half a brain actually looked at the cost per ticket. those type of escalation tickets are ~3x more costly to resolve than non escalations. sounds like the total $$ per day of your tickets was higher than all your teammates.
Great story, and I feel it! A lot of companies, when they hire a senior person, say they want you to be a "force multiplier" but when you actually go and multiply your team's force, they turn around and say "bbbbuut, wait--your individual performance...."
This is why data driven decision making is a trap. Even if the data is correct, which it's usually not, its still not complete just by definition. It's instinctually a dumbed down, distilled, and one-dimensional view of the real world, of meat space, and you gotta treat it like that.
Here's what is scary. I have been looking at many job descriptions for a Developer Experience Engineer or similar positions. About half of them ask for experience with automated tools to measure developer productivity!
It is sad when the people who are in charge can't recognize such an important role. I'm so sorry this happened to you, and if you can, keep mentoring. At a time when juniors are struggling more than in the past you could be the one to really help.
The #1 skill good devs need to develop is self-marketing. Would that all managers could recognize talent by output alone but alas we all know that's not the case.
Technologies: Python, Ruby, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, PowerShell, Flask, SQL, PostGIS, Shapely, Unity, Unreal Engine, multiple assembly/machine languages, Windows user code and kernel drivers, Google Maps and other map APIs, geographic and airspace data
Hi, I'm Michael Geary. I've programmed in many languages and environments over the years. Some of my current interests are:
• Developer experience. I love helping my fellow developers solve problems, and building tools to make their jobs easier and more enjoyable.
• Aviation and geographic data. For example, airspace and obstacle data importers for Wing; election results and voter information maps for Google; many interactive maps for other companies.
• Hardware interfacing. In a way, I am a "full stack" developer, but my stack may involve a front end to a piece of hardware rather than the cloud. I first got into programming via ham radio, so RF hardware remains an interest.
• Designing and building APIs. Too often an API is designed by exposing the internals of whatever system provides the API. My philosophy is the opposite: start with the apps. I like to build a series of sample apps before starting on the API. This way I can imagine what API will make those apps and others like them easy to build.
• Talk with users! I don't like to sit in a back room cranking out code. I want to make sure it's the right code for what my users need, and that it's easy to maintain and improve as we learn more about what they want.
> Unfortunately, this might become something like the em-dash—where artists start tweaking their work to look less like the AI’s that are copying them.
So true! (And yes—I see what you did there.)
It's even happening to photos now. A few months ago I posted a "Bot alert!" on Nextdoor warning people about the latest scambot.
One person replied "It's funny to see a bot reporting a bot."
I asked how they discovered I was a bot.
"It's your profile photo. The facial expression is too good, and the smoothness of the background is too perfect. Has to be AI."
For the curious, it's the same photo as on my LinkedIn:
What they didn't know was how I took that selfie. I set up my Micro Four Thirds camera on a tripod in the front yard, with the world's best portrait lens: the Olympus 75mm f/1.8. I stood some 10-15 feet from it (this lens is equivalent to a 150mm lens on a full frame camera, i.e. a moderate telephoto) and used the remote control to take a few dozen shots as I let my face relax into various expressions.
I picked out 4-5 favorites and asked a friend about them. She said "This one. It has gravitas."
I don't even think it's that great a photo. But I suppose the "gravitas" makes it look like AI.
For a photo that really shows off what that 75mm lens can do, check out this one of our late dog Brownie, titled Pumpkin Brownie:
I do find it interesting to see how people interact with AI as I think it is quite a personal preference. Is this how you use AI all the time? Do you appreciate the sycophancy, does it bother you, do you not notice it? From your question it seems you would prefer a blog post in plainer language, avoiding "marketing speak", but if a person spoke to me like Miss Chatty spoke to you I would be convinced I'm talking to a salesperson or marketing agent.
(How did I do with channeling Miss Chatty's natural sycophancy?)
Anyway, I do use AI for other things, such as...
• Coding (where I mostly use Claude)
• General research
• Looking up the California Vehicle Code about recording video while driving
• Gift ideas for a young friend who is into astronomy (Team Pluto!)
• Why "Realtor" is pronounced one way in the radio ads, another way by the general public
• Tools and techniques for I18n and L10n
• Identifying AI-generated text and photos (takes one to know one!)
• Why spaghetti softens and is bendable when you first put it into the boiling water
• Burma-Shave sign examples
• Analytics plugins for Rails
• Maritime right-of-way rules
• The Uniform Code of Military Justice and the duty to disobey illegal orders
• Why, in a practical sense, the Earth really once *was* flat
• How de-alcoholized wine gets that way
• California law on recording phone conversations
• Why the toilet runs water every 20 minutes or so (when it shouldn't)
• How guy wires got that name
• Where the "he took too much LDS" scene from Star Trek IV was filmed
• When did Tim Berners-Lee demo the World Wide Web at SLAC
• What "ogr" means in "ogr2ogr"
• Why my Kia EV6 ultrasonic sensors freaked out when I stopped behind a Lucid Air
• The smartest dog breeds (in different ways of "smart")
• The Sputnik 1 sighting in *October Sky*
• Could I possibly be related to John White Geary?
And that's just from the last few weeks.
In other words, pretty much anything someone might interact with an AI - or a fellow human - about.
About the last one (John White Geary), that discussion started with my question about actresses in the "Pick a little, talk a little" song from The Music Man movie, and then went on to how John White Geary bridged the transition from Mexican to US rule, as did others like José Antonio Carrillo:
It's really an interesting insight into people's personalities. Far more than their Google search history. Which is why everyone wants their GPT chats burned to the ground after they die.
This article links to a previous one on the earlier history of air traffic control. If you find this kind of history as interesting as I do, definitely start with that one for background:
About 350,000 people live there, and winter temperatures can drop to –64°C (−83°F).
And regardless of the temperature or time of year, they have shopping malls, restaurants, and everything else you might expect to find in any big city.
Here are a few recent videos I enjoyed:
24 Hours in the Coldest City on Earth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-WGGDRyf68
How We Live in the World's Coldest City - Typical Apartment Tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikUSFU7TlYc
How We Heat Our APARTMENT at -64°C| -83°F
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHbsYYELV94
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