[raw_anon_1111]

I haven’t stayed relevant and able to find jobs quickly for 30 years by being the old man shouting at the clouds.

I started my career in 1996 programming in C and Fortran on mainframes and got my first only and hopefully last job at BigTech at 46 7 jobs later.

I’m no longer there. Every project I’ve had in the last two years has had classic ML and then LLMs integrated into the implementation. I have very much jumped on the coding agent bandwagon.

[LogicFailsMe]

Started mine around the same time and yes, keeping up keeps one employed. What's disheartening however is how little keeping up the key decision makers and stakeholders at FAANNG do and it explains idiocy like already trying to fire engineers and replace them with AI. Hilarity ensued of course because hilarity always ensues for people like that, but hilarity and shenanigans appears to be inexhaustible resources.

[raw_anon_1111]

I very much would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever work at BigTech again even knowing the trade off that I now at 51 make the same as 25 year old L5 I mentored when they were an intern and their first year back as an L4 before I left.

[LogicFailsMe]

If you have FIRE money, getting off the hamster wheel of despair that is tech industry culture is the winning move. Well-played.

[raw_anon_1111]

Not quite FIRE money. I still need to work for awhile - I just don’t need to chase money. I make “enough” to live comfortably, travel like I want (not first class.), save enough for retirement (max out 401K + catchup contributions + max out HSA + max out Roth).

We did choose to downsize and move to state tax free Florida.

If I have to retire before I’m 65, exit plan is to move to Costa Rica (where we are right now for 6 weeks)