If others sing your praises, then you’re golden. To this day, I despise performance reviews and dread them every year and yet, every year they’re glowing reviews from my peers.

Being high-functioning often means you’re blind to your own contributions and more critical of your own work than others perceive. In time, I learned to accept the praise from others and blindly trust that things are ok even when every fiber of my being says I’m fucking up.

Sounds like you need validation more than anything. The points are bullshit if they don’t reflect the effort. Unfortunately, the corporate world is full of bullshit metrics to gauge productivity. I felt this at the bottom and nothing changed moving into “senior leadership”. It’s all bullshit and I encourage everyone to collect a paycheck and just go home.

I tell anyone entering the job market or is a young professional that absolutely no job is worth losing yourself over. Your skills change over time and will never leave you completely. I’m a competent designer, a reasonable developer but the most marketable skill that I didn’t actually develop until my late 20’s was soft skills—mostly developed by gently explaining to tech illiterate coworkers why what they wanted developed was impossible, impractical or just a bad idea.

I did this by treating every coworker as if they were the client. Be polite, professional and let them know that you want to solve their problems. It’s sounds stupid but people just put their guard down if you lead with, “I’m here to help you”. You can then have more honest conversation about all the bullshit keeping you from doing your job, provided it’s phrased as matter of fact and sprinkle in niceties.

The cruel irony is that this same disposition that started as a way to make me a more effective developer ended up pushing me into a position where I don’t get time to develop.

Over the 16 years since graduating, I learned that defining yourself by your career is often a trap. At least it doesn’t sound like you’re getting deep satisfaction from your work.

I burnt myself pretty bad going into the field thinking I was perusing a passion career and just kept getting kicked down for 5 years chasing a passion career until I found a work environment that paid decent and valued work/home life balance. In school I thought I’d never sell my soul, but now I’ve been working with the same people for a decade now and pretty happy about it, even with if the actual work is utterly boring.

Unless you’re a fortunate few that are truly passionate, driven, and lucky enough to land a career that fills your entire bucket, look for a job you can tolerate BUT with group of people that support you and your growth. In the end 2 years in is a drop in the bucket and you’ll see your career change directions over and over. You can always learn new skills or relearn them, so if this new job is something different to get you out of a slump, I say go for it. No one can answer for yourself but you.

The point is not to say all is lost so fuck it, but to highlight that maybe there are systemic issues with an unregulated free markets. Networks have consolidated into a handful of streaming services to a point where there are really no other options for consumers.

What are you going to do? Read a book? Go back to DVDs? They can afford the relatively few people willing to take an all or nothing proposition to squeeze consumers for all they got. They are also really good at lobbying to keep the law on their side to keep it that way.

Good concept in theory but consolidation of streaming services to a handful of providers in an $88 billion dollar industry means the reality for most is that you can culturally isolate yourself by not consuming or seek illegal means of getting your entertainment.

Voting with your dollars works for mom and pop shops, but a loss in viewership due to changes in fees was calculated and note in the ledger.

I also hear people make the same claims against Alexa, but I usually start explaining what cookies are and how ad networks collects your data to more effectively target you. It doesn’t make fiscal sense to do mass audio surveillance when you already freely hand over your data.

Yep, I spent a month refactoring a few thousand lines of code using GPT4 and I felt like I was working with the best senior developer with infinite patience and availability.

I could vaguely describe what I was after and it would identify the established programming patterns and provide examples based on all the code snippets I fed it. It was amazing and a little terrifying what an LLM is capable of. It didn’t write the code for me but it increased my productivity 2 fold… I’m a developer now a getting rusty being 5 years into management rather than delivering functional code, so just having that copilot was invaluable.

Then one day it just stopped. It lost all context for my project. I asked what it thought what we were working on and it replied with something to do with TCP relays instead of my little Lua pet project dealing with music sequencing and MIDI processing… not even close to the fucking ballpark’s overflow lot.

It’s like my trusty senior developer got smashed in the head with a brick. And as described, would just give me nonsense hand wavy answers.

I’ve definitely seen GPT-4 become faster and the output has been sanitized a bit. I still find it incredibly effective in helping with code reviews where GPT-3 was never helpful in producing useable code snippets. At some point it stopped trying to write large swaths of code and started being a little more prescriptive and you still need to actually implement snippets it provides. But as a tool, it’s still fantastic. It’s like a sage senior developer you can rubber duck anytime you want.

I probably fall in the minority of people who thinks releasing a castrated version of GPT is the ethical approach. People outside the technology bubble don’t have a comprehension of how these models work and the capacity for harm. Disinformation, fake news and engagement algorithms are already social ills that manipulate us emotionally and most people are too technologically illiterate to see how pervasive these problems are already.