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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   34261 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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At some point, however, the price will exceed the value of the work, and the work just won't get done.

Which is a perfectly acceptable business tradeoff.

You see this with minimum wage employees getting replaced by kiosks as the minimum wage goes up

Yes, and I have happily stopped any transactions I would ever have with these sorts of places. I'll still patronize my more local chains (in the vein of In 'n out but better), or even national ones (like Chick-fil-A) that don't treat their employees like cogs. Same with grocery stores. If a business can't cope with rising costs of labor than it deserves to go under.

at the top, I expect you'll simply see progress crawl to a halt (and no, that's not a good thing).

Gonna start an engineering smug war here, but as I see it "tech" progress has already meaningfully ground to a halt outside of LLM babble, and even that is debatable. Ever better targeted ads do not leave the world better off. Recruitment pitch to all of you young programmers stuck in FAANG limbo- go look outside to those clunky old manufacturing, transportation, energy, and industrial companies. They are desperate for good embedded systems engineers, and you can do some fantastically cool shit that will actually make measurable differences in the average person's life.

Recruitment pitch to all of you young programmers stuck in FAANG limbo- go look outside to those clunky old manufacturing, transportation, energy, and industrial companies. They are desperate for good embedded systems engineers, and you can do some fantastically cool shit that will actually make measurable differences in the average person's life.

It's also possible to work in embedded at a contractor where nothing you do will have any impact on anyone outside the company and their direct customers :)

Any tips for learning and breaking into embedded systems roles? Code monkey stuck writing web APIs and client wrappers for retarded jeets here, though I'm about to start my masters in comp sci. Mostly C# though I can handle Python, JS/TS, and Java and I'm starting to learn Rust. I know what the hell the stack and the heap are (and that embedded often doesn't have a heap) so I'd like to believe I'm at least marginally better than most based on that sad fact alone. Also watched Ben Eater's videos on building a modern 6502 and understood most of it, I've also written a CHIP-8 emulator before.

Basically just please help me get the hell out of this, it's soul-crushing having to explain basic crap to jeets every single day that refuse to read the documentation that I painstakingly wrote for them.

Edit: Also in response to your claim that tech has stagnated - even for LLMs writing code, I think just making more powerful developer tooling would provide most of the "benefits" we're seeing from LLMs. You've been able to stand up a bunch of boilerplate for decades now (like ASP.NET controller generators). Making tools like that more powerful would create tons of developer productivity, and you don't have to worry about it hallucinating a massive security vulnerability into your systems. That won't stop the JavaShitter webdev crowd from thinking it's hot new shit though.

Ever better targeted ads do not leave the world better off. Recruitment pitch to all of you young programmers stuck in FAANG limbo- go look outside to those clunky old manufacturing, transportation, energy, and industrial companies. They are desperate for good embedded systems engineers, and you can do some fantastically cool shit that will actually make measurable differences in the average person's life.

They pay for shit compared to FAANG, in some industries (e.g. automotive, or worse, aerospace) they have more red tape than you can shake a stick at, and a lot of them are worse than your average web shop at demanding experience on particular tools. Like particular point revisions of their favorite RTOS. Mostly they're desperate for good engineers because they wouldn't know one if he hit them on the head.

Which is a perfectly acceptable business tradeoff.

Sure, but not getting the work done makes everybody's life worse.

Yes, and I have happily stopped any transactions I would ever have with these sorts of places.

Which means you're paying more, they're getting less business, and the minimum wage workers are still unemployed. The same applies for deliberately raising the cost of labor (especially if some of that extra cost just goes straight to the government); you're just destroying value and making the country (and the world) poorer.

Sure, but not getting the work done makes everybody's life worse.

Does a delay on the next app update for AI-powered Dog Grindr to pick Daily Fantasy Sports lineups make anybody's life particularly worse, though?

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