Not from australia, but I remember EEVBlog talking about his power rates and it was really shocking how high they got, which justified the solar panels easily.

(“I heard it on youtube” might be the “but I did stay at a holiday inn express last night”, mind you :P )

I recall Australian power prices already being insane years ago.

Gotta admit, young me got a lot wrong about what my future held. I’m glad he was wrong, because life wouldn’t be that great if he was right about everything. :P

Yeah, wages have been generally stagnant since the 1970s while per capita productivity has continued to rise.

The fact that the CPI around the world is a blatant lie doesn’t help either. Anyone who doesn’t have their butler buying groceries knows that.

So I agree that we shouldn’t trust central banks to do the right thing. Even if you think raising interest rates is the right thing to do, they’re almost certainly going to do the wrong thing along the way anyway because they don’t work for us, they work for themselves, the governments, and the banks.

In an allegorical sense, start dressing for the job you want.

Part of that would be getting some project management training, but also start acting like a leader to Junior developers. Instead of just focusing on getting the job done, focus on helping them become better developers. Being in management is partially about being in meetings, but it’s also partially about growing your talent and building relationships with your team and your customers. That’s going to do one of two things, either it’s going to prepare you to move up in the company that you’re in right now or it will give you some ammunition to go for the job that you want in another company.

Remember that relative to previous examples of elevated inflation, interest rates really aren’t that low. Ask a boomer about the 80s and 90s – ask them what a mortgage looked like back then. Double digit interest rates.

The bigger problem is that the entire world was following terrible economic practices for a decade. Interest rates near 0 and super lax lending standards meant tons of bubbles in particular in housing. that’s one reason why so much housing is insanely expensive. Then, because the fundamentals of life like housing are so expensive, people need massive wages to live. Then, because people need massive wages, the price of everything goes way up.

“Robodebt ran from 2015 to 2019, lobbing false debt notices at 443,000 welfare recipients.”

And the ombudsman knew. And PwC knew. But nothing was done.

Everyone in any part of government remotely related to this was fully to blame.

So the interest rate is fixed for 30 years, or it takes 30 years to pay it off?

Unpopular opinion, but if future generations are going to be able to own a home in the lands of their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents, rates need to continue to rise and debt costs need to come way up so people start using money instead of debt.

Does Australia have long long term mortgages like America’s 30 year? In canuckistan over 90% of mortgages are 5 years or less because a 10 year has a couple percent premium and by the time you hit 20 years you were looking at like an 8% rate when you could get 5 years for like 2%.

If Australia is similar to canada in that regard, the real scary part will be when the fixed rate mortgages taken out during the pandemic reset in about 2 years.

Either just leave and find another job altogether, or see if you can find a bunch of ultra small organizations and go into business for yourself doing a bit of work for a bunch of companies.

If you have other work then it becomes easier to negotiate, but there may just not be any more money in the company in which case it’s time to do a capitalism and find more money yourself.

If your skill set is just getting up to speed, that seems limiting to me.

I know I’ve ignored many resumes with people who jump jobs every 2 years because those first 2 years you’re getting paid to be varying degrees of incompetent and useless within a team. Moreover, someone who leaves every 2 years will never be in a position where they actually have to deal with long-term problems.

If you don’t think you’re getting paid enough, well enough go out and do some capitalism. But going into any given job with the intention of quitting almost immediately to optimize your pay, I don’t think that’s necessarily the right way of doing it either. Employment is actually a 2-way street in good companies.

I feel like you should be careful trying to just optimize for the most money.

2 years seems really short, like your boss would just finally have you producing good code and knowing all the specific pitfalls of a certain codebase and then the door slams shut behind you.

I come from a different culture, but I’ve found 4 years is the right cadence for me. If you’re keeping your nose to the grindstone and doing what you’re supposed to, it seems like about every 4 years everything ends up changing.

Doesn’t even mean leaving. Often it means advancement.

Over time you’ll realize Chatgpt has giant holes.

As a developer you do use tools every day – you probably use a rapid gui tool, you use a compiler, you use APIs, and they’re things you probably couldn’t build on your own. Even under MS-DOS, you’re using bios or msdos interrupts. The PC also handles lot of stuff.

So it’s just another tool, and it doesn’t do everything so you need to use it as one thing in your pouch. Don’t rely on it too much, and be mindful of IP concerns – ai is like a monkey with a camera legally, you can’t copyright whatever it creates.

I love giving ideas room to stretch their legs. My social instance has a max post size of 60k characters!

I agree on all counts.

People misunderstand “we need to chill out” to think it means being a total dick is ok. Obviously it’s not, and we need to be careful as human beings to recognize cognitive biases including overbroad generalizations about people based on any attribute (and to give the devil his due, that includes generalizations that all generalizations are always wrong!)

That being said, there’s people who fell down the rabbit hole years ago, and it makes me so sad because there are so many people who were fun, intelligent, funny, creative, evocative people and artists who could make themselves and the world happy and actually improve the things they care about, but traps like Twitter have them screaming at paintings on a wall for years and years.

But pathogens that big spread, and even people not looking at the paintings are in some way corrupted because it sure looks like those people screaming at the wall are screaming at them! Then some people scream back and soon everyone is screaming and saying terrible things they think they mean but if heads could cool a bit they’d realize they don’t really mean and it’s just been a long escalation of screaming at each other.

Speaking to another of your points, I think it’s naive to think this outcome was an accident. Seeing the levels of civilizational unity I’ve seen in my life (in a friendly way, not a “everyone chanting ‘Hammer! Hammer!’” way), it makes a lot of sense that powerful people would want to drive us apart because once everyone lines up behind a common vision they’ll start to ask hard questions about why our leaders arent delivering on promises. “Say… You spent a lot of our money in the past 20ish years. Why are we all doing so much worse and your buddies are doing so much better?” Or alternatively, because it’s in social media companies best interest to turn the world into the Jerry Springer show and either paint monsters or find them (and in the process help create them) and match them up with enemies through the algorithm. Finally, it’s in political parties’ interest to hammer on wedge issues because the more you think the people you vote for are your only hope to save the world the more likely you are to vote for me and not vote for him.

I really like my fbxl social because it lets me just scroll past people I disagree with, and if it’s someone I fundamentally won’t get along with I just make sure I don’t follow them so I stop seeing it. Fight averted. Algorithms will either say “we need to give this guy more of that!” Or “we need to give this guy the extremist opposite of that!” But in the real world you see people you don’t care for every day and it’s just a matter of figuring out how to coexist.

(Anyway, I gotta stop wall of texting … But I like writing to help figure things out sometimes)

A lot of the people sounding morally outraged are well and truly addicted. Witness a lot of people resolutely screaming “I’M NEVER GOING BACK TO TWITTER” only to quietly go back to twitter almost immediately.

If Australia banned twitter, you’d have celebrities wandering the streets, “Anyone! Does anyone have a hit of twitter? I’ll sell my house and car to you, just let me angrily tweet about one thing!”

Not usually. It’s a business process, so it’s often done on paper or something. “Write down how you plan to stop sucking so badly, we’ll come back in 6 weeks and review your progress”

Honestly, that’s usually how things work out and it’s just one of the seven circles of Hell a manager need to put you through to finally get you out the door, but people do occasionally get out of PIPs with their jobs intact.

Unfortunately, you’re also entering into big tech at a time when most big tech companies are laying people off. It’s going to be a highly competitive time.

Personally, I’d follow the process, put my nose to the grindstone, and work hard to improve. It’s about all you can do, since you’re playing in their sandbox. Don’t take your paycheck for granted, put money away for a rainy day.

If anything does happen (and I’m not going to sugar coat it, the PIP is definitely the first step out the door), remember that not everyone is a fit for every job, but it doesn’t mean you’re not going to be able to do tech work. It might just mean you need to find a less competitive job outside of the highly competitive big tech field.

My first job wasn’t a good fit for me. I’m a doer, and that job was about planning things that might never get done ever. I’d just put a plan together and they’d tell me to put it on the shelf and start on the next one. Spent a lot more time on reddit than I’d like to admit, I found it hard to get motivated. My next job was much more immediate, things I did would be rolled out immediately once testing was successful. I found that it was a much better fit for me, and I did very well in that job.

Personal Improvement Plan. It’s a nominally a management tool for getting underperformers to get up to where they’re expected to be.