Comment by arthurfirst

> You learn lessons over the years and this is one I learned at some point: you want to work in revenue centers, not cost centers.

The problem is that many places don't see the cost portions of revenue centers as investment, but still costs. The world is littered with stories of businesses messing about with their core competencies. An infamous example was Hertz(1) outsourcing their website reservation system to Accenture to comically bad results. The website/app is how people reserve cars - the most important part of the revenue generating system.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32184183

I would go further and say that even at software companies, even for dev that goes directly into the product, engineering is often seen as a cost center.

The logic is simple, if unenlightened: "What if we had cheaper/fewer nerds, but we made them nerd harder?"

So while working in a revenue center is advantageous, you still have to be in one that doesn't view your kind as too fungible.

This is golden career advice. Heed it well.

>> even when mine (that they had already approved) would save them 400K a year You learn lessons over the years and this is one I learned at some point: you want to work in revenue centers

Totally agree. This is a big reason I went into solutions consulting.

In that particular case I mentioned it was a massive risk management compliance solution which they had to have in place, but they were getting bled dry by the existing vendor, due to several architectural and implementation mistakes they had made way back before I ever got involved, that they were sort of stuck with.

I had a plan to unstuck them at 1/5 the annual operating cost and better performance. Presented it to executives, even Amazon who would have been the infr vendor, to rave reviews.

We had a verbal contract and I was waiting for paperwork to sign... and then Feb 2020... and then crickets.

I work as a consultant and tend to focus on helping startups grow their revenue. And what you're saying here is almost word for word what I often recommend as the *first thing* they should do.

In many cases I've seen projects increase their revenue substantially by making simple messaging pivots. Ex. Instead of having your website say "save X dollars on Y" try "earn X more dollars using Y". It's incredible how much impact simple messaging can have on your conversion rates.

This extends beyond just revenue. Focusing on revenue centers instead of cost centers is a great career advice as well.

>> Going with the flow seems like a bad advice. going Analog as in iRobot seems the most sane thing.

I've been doing a lot of photography in the last few years with my smartphone and because of the many things you mentioned, I've forgone using it now. I'm back to a mirrorless camera that's 14 years old and still takes amazing pictures. I recently ran into a guy shutting down his motion picture business and now own three different Canon HDV cameras that I've been doing some interesting video work with.

Its not easy transferring miniDV film to my computer, but the standard resolution has a very cool retro vibe that I've found a LOT of people have been missing and are coming back around too.

I'm in the same age range and couldn't fathom becoming a developer in the early aughts and being in the midst of a gold rush for developer talent to suddenly seeing the entire tech world contract almost over night.

Strange tides we're living in right now.

If I had gone with the flow in 1995 I would have got my MCSE and worked for a big government bureaucracy.

Instead I found Linux/BSD and it changed my life and I ended up with security clearances writing code at defense contractors, dot com startups, airports, banks, biotech/hpc, on and on...

Exactly right about Github. Facebook is the same for training on photos and social relationships. etc etc

They needed to generate a large body of data to train our future robot overlords to enslave us.

We the 'experienced' are definitely not their target -- too much independence of thought.

To your point I use an old flip phone an voip even though I have written iOS and android apps. My home has no wifi. I do not use bluetooth. There are no cameras enabled on any device (except a camera).

I have worked with a lot of code generation systems.

LLMs strike me as mainly useful in the same way. I can get most of the boilerplate and tedium done with LLM tools. Then for core logic esp learning or meta-programming patterns etc. I need to jump in.

Breaking tasks down to bite size, and writing detailed architecture and planning docs for the LLM to work from, is critical to managing increasing complexity and staying within context windows. Also critical is ruthlessly throwing away things that do not fit the vision and not being afraid to throw whole days away (not too often tho!)

For ref I have built stuff that goes way beyond CRUD app with these tools in 1/10th of the time it previously took me or less -- the key though is I already knew how to do and how to validate LLM outputs. I knew exactly what I wanted a priori.

Code generation technically always 'replaced' junior devs and has been around for ages, the results of the generation are just a lot better now., whereas in the past it was mixed bag of benefits/hassles doing code generation regularly, now it works much better and the cost is much less.

I started my career as a developer and the main reasons I became a solutions systems guy were money and that I hated the tedium boilerplate phase of all software development projects over a certain scale. I never stoped coding because I love it -- just not for large enterprise soul destroying software projects.

Everything that we know and love is reducible to a basic CRUD web app

Quick note that this has not been my experience. LLMs have been very useful with codebases as far from crud web apps as you can get.

How old is said bullshit?

No train, no gain.

I earned their respect over many years of hard work -- hardly a freebie!

I will say that being social and being in a scene at the right time helps a lot -- timing is indeed almost everything.

>I'm not for/or against a particular style, it must be real nice if life just solves everything for you while you just chill or whatever. But, a nice upside of being made of talent instead of luck is that when luck starts to run out, well, ... you'll be fine anyway :).

This is wildly condescending. Holy.

Talent makes luck. Ex-colleagues reach out to me and ask me to work with them because they know the type of work I do, not because it's lucky.

Also wtf did I just read. Op said he uses his network to find work. And you go on a rant about how you're rising and grinding to get that bread, and everything you have ever earned completely comes from you, no help from others? Jesus Christ dude, chill out.