I work at a FAANG adjacent company as an EM and the 4x engineers who’ve recently been PIPd all went off the deep end using agents to write huge amounts of convoluted or unsuitable code.
One of them has decades of experience coding and even devised our onboarding training for using Cursor and Bedrock at the company but they too were called out for building a wholly unsuitable and unmaintainable service which could have been more simply solved with some common libraries and Docker micro services rather than 10k+ lines of custom code.
We all receive a copy of Cursor and IntelliJ + Copilot on joining and I just keep seeing engineers (surprisingly the more experienced ones so far) footgunning themselves with these tools.
So sorry to hear you went through that heartache. I'm glad life (and of course your efforts) gave you some fortune.
For me - going through burnout and depression, my brain felt almost like it would hit a wall any time I wanted to learn something new. At the time it felt like it was energy or sugar deprived.
Took a month of no work and just relaxing, playing video games (I joke sometimes that Witcher 3 healed me) and doing the core things, exercise, talking, spending time with my family and friends and sleeping/eating right slowly pulled me away from that raw feeling of apathy.
Everything else followed once I started basic self care, but boy did it take time to feel somewhat 'normal' though I still feel 'different' following the experience.
Thanks.
It's hard to connect to self-care when you are in a tech grind. You are expected to grind it out and I enjoyed that but at some point in my life that didn't work anymore. Taking even a month off can help. By the way I went back to work about 3 weeks after my spouse died. It wasn't the wrong thing to do. But a couple years after that I needed a real break.
The government is entirely capable of funding itself through printing money but as the PDF above describes - this will cause inflation. Taxes exist to reduce circulating currency and prevent run away inflation.
This is why the US as the reserve currency can sustain greater debt to finance itself before seeing inflationary pressures and the UK (and other countries) cannot.
Really? In my Amazon interview last month for a SWE position they asked a LeetCode style question after the initial phone screen about writing a social network data structure (a directed graph) and then asked me to write a method to traverse it to n-depth.
When buying my child her first iPhone we went through so many used devices at the local phone store which had all been refurbished or repaired using sub standard 3rd party screens.
Being able to see Apple’s warning on the iPhone 11 and up "Unable to verify this iPhone has a genuine Apple display” meant we were able to find a phone which was still stock.
I’m a big proponent of the right to repair but in this case Apple’s repair deterrence feature had a big benefit for us.
Expensive. Here in North Virginia (just outside of DC) it was $26k OTD for a 2021 Camry LE. We pay $223/mo in car insurance for my wife and I and $1k/yr in property tax for the car.
Both held a license for 20+ years, both in our early 40s with no accidents in that time.
Car maintenance cost varies - haven't had to deal with that yet.
Depending on the study you look at it costs an owner $8 876 per year and society about 1/3 of the lifetime cost in supporting the vehicle (in the form of roads, pollution, infrastructure etc.)
I never had a car in London (where public transport is used by all regardless of income and background). Here in the US we have a long way to go before we level up our public transportation system.
That said, Washington DC's Metro is very good indeed. I hope they extend it further and further out.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/i-feel-sorry-for...
https://www.cps.gov.uk/london-north/news/two-youths-jailed-b...
https://people.com/what-happened-in-the-july-7-london-bombin...