"No? Oh well, I didn't want her anyway, she'll just cause trouble along the way. But that way I can trick the boy into thinking I did everything I could."
There are some companies as bad as Apple (John Deere comes to mind), but it's certainly not the norm.
User-replacable standard m.2 SSDs are bog standard and non-standard formats are really rare. Apart from Apple I can not think of many companies that do that. IIRC Red Magic cameras, and Synology NAS but that's the only ones I can think of.
GrapheneOS without any invasive apps is really bare-bones and limited, that's what I wanted to say using hyperbole, but I guess figures of speech are too advanced for some people.
That's my issue with AI. I go to AI after my skills, the documentation and google failed me. Then I go to ChatGPT to get lied to, because ChatGPT doesn't know either.
And almost without fail, AI doesn't help me there.
The only thing where AI helps is AI autocomplete in die IDE, if I am doing something very simple and monotonous, then it helps me to sometimes reduce my typing speed a little bit compared to regular autocomplete.
But typing time is like 0.5% of the time I spend developing stuff.
Inflation went up due to the knock-on effects of the sanctions. Specifically prices for oil and gas skyrocketed.
And since everything runs on oil and gas, all prices skyrocketed.
Covid stimulus packages had nothing to do with that, especially in 2023, 2024 and 2025, when there were no COVID stimulus packages, yet the inflation was much higher than at any time during COVID.
Surely it is not too much to ask that people remember what year stuff happened in, especially if we are talking about things that happened just 2 years ago.
It's been a while since I was a student. When I was in university, I actually had one project that was then used in a real world context for at least a few years - by university students.
But most of my colleagues never did anything like that. Here are a few reasons why (and also why I didn't do more):
Lack of experience
Making an actual useful real-life application is hard. You quickly get into things like security, device-model-specific bugs, support for users using the thing wrong, because you have no idea to do proper UX and so on.
Moving from making toy prototypes to real programs is not simple at all.
Lack of mentoring
University teaches you stuff, but only the very broad-strokes basics. When you get your first real job you are usually in a team with some more senior people and they can help you move the university basics into a real-world context.
Lack of funding
Most people can't afford putting hundreds or thousands of hours of work into a project without anyone paying the bills.
Lack of time
Most people have to finance stuff like rent themselves. They are already balancing university, work and life. There's not a ton of time left for a third thing.
Not a lack of ideas
Every programmer I know has more ideas than they will ever finish in their entire life. And every programmer has a bunch of MBA people who tell them every time they meet about their amazing app idea ("You know, an app where you can buy things, but you buy by swiping right! It's going to be the next Amazon! If you implement it, you can have 10% of the profits!").
If anything, having too many ideas leads to switching your side projects once your last side project becomes too annoying.
In 2010 Stackoverflow was amazing. Tons of information, everything was up-to-date, great.
And then they close every new question on a similar topic as duplicate, ensuring that if you look up e.g. a Java question you can be sure it's about Java 7. Because we all know I everyone in 2025 is using Java 7.
And of course, neither the questions nor the answers require version tagging and thus hardly any of them have anything like that.
And now they want to take this pool of outdated garbage and feed it into a garbage processing unit AI to make it somehow cooler.
You're not wrong, and I feel like it was a developing problem even before AI - everybody wanted someone with experience, even if the technology was brand new.
True. It was a long-standing problem that entry-level jobs were mostly found in dodgy startups.
Tbh, I think the biggest issue right now isn't even AI, but the economy. In the 2010s we had pretty much no intrest rate at all while having a pretty decent economy, at least for IT. The 2008 financial crisis hardly mattered for IT, and Covid was a massive boost for IT. There was nothing else to really spend money on.
IT always has more projects than manpower, so with enough money to spend, they just hired everyone.
But the sanctions against Russia in response to their invasion of Ukraine really hit the economy and rising intrest rates to combat inflation meant that suddenly nobody wanted to invest anymore.
With no investments, startups dried up and large corporations also want to downsize. It's no coincidence that return-to-work mandates only started after the invasion and not in the two years prior of that where lockdowns were already revoked. Work from home worked totally fine for two years after covid lockdowns, and companies even praised how well it worked.
Same with AI. While it can improve productivity in some edge cases, I think it's mostly a scapegoat to make mass-fireings sound like a great thing to investors.
That said, even if you and I will be fine, it's still bad for the industry. And even if we weren't the ones pulling up the ladder behind us, I'd still like to find a way to start throwing ropes back down for the newbies...
You are totally right with that, and any chance I get I will continue to push for hiring juniors.
But I am also over corporate tears. For decades they have been crying over a lack of skilled workers in the IT and pushing for more and more people to join IT, so that they can dump wages, and as soon as the economy is bad, they instantly u-turn and dump employees.
If corporations want to be short-sighted and make people suffer for it, they won't get compassion from me when it fails.
Edit: Remember, we are not the ones pulling the ladder up.
You can do that with any app you like, they can all be disabled that way. Beware though: if you disable critical system components (like e.g. your last launcher, keyboard or systemui) you might not have a great time using your phone afterwards.
"No? Oh well, I didn't want her anyway, she'll just cause trouble along the way. But that way I can trick the boy into thinking I did everything I could."