Chris Routh (He/Him)Nov 16

So what are the career options for a senior engineer in the IT industry that avoid AI entirely in 2025?

I'm tired, boss. Tired of keeping my mouth closed about it at work. Tired of waking up angry that my employer and industry at large are:

* Pushing hard to adopt an absolute crap technology with very low accuracy and consistency, which additionally has had noticeable affects on certain co-workers ability to understand a problem and picture the solution (those who seem to be offloading their thinking to AI over the last year have notably degraded in these areas)
* Supporting the enrichment of billionaire fascists who want to manipulate and control the truth and control the population to make themselves richer.
* Supporting the re-ignition of coal power plants and burning significant amounts of power and water to fuel these inefficient garbage bots.
* Generally increasing affordability problems on all fronts while also accelerating the climate disaster that will be central to my sons future.

I wake up every day angry, stressed, and mournful that I am contributing the destruction of my son's future while begrudgingly going to work in the name of his present; in order to keep him clothed, fed, and try to eek out some chance of a better financial future for our family.

I'm not sure how much longer I can keep helping drive the engine of the very destruction I want to put an end to.

There must be some companies out there doing things without AI and making technology choices that are moral. They can't all be sycophants feeding the investor greed machine.. help me find them. I need to know there are some options.

Show threaddeechNov 17
@Routhinator I'm told slop clean up is lucrative but I have no direct experience.
Show threadStuart Longland (VK4MSL)

@deech @Routhinator Lucrative, but maddening.

I had a Python project landed on my desk written by a dynamic duo of non-programmer power engineers that thought they could write a comms driver with no design spec and minimal programming experience. The lack of experience makes me wonder if an early ChatGPT also had a "hand" in it.

- The driver spoke to a Siemens S7 PLC system
- It received RFID data from a number of RFID readers
- It married the data up between the two then stuffed it into a database

They decided that threads were the solution, big 1000-line functions that run a `while True:` loop in separate threads. To talk to the Siemens S7 PLC, they used the open-source `snap7` library.

Did they check whether said library was thread safe? Of course not!

I managed to get things to the point where it didn't corrupt memory and worked most of the time, and for a while it became "my" (very much unwanted) baby. I managed to break the monster functions into classes, with some common logic in a base class that meant I could unit test things, and got the code coverage up to something respectable… but to this day, there are things none of us understand about how that monolith of code actually works.

Nov 22 at 5:06amWeb
Show threadChris Routh (He/Him)Nov 22
@stuartl @deech that sounds like the ultimate "spaghetti" code, but in this case the noodles are threads.
Show threadStuart Longland (VK4MSL)Nov 22
@Routhinator @deech If only they had used their noodles and done some proper design-work up front, and maybe sought out some advice.