This video was extremely well done. It features a recently-married Chinese dev who’s living in an illegal structure on top of a building in Chengdu, Sichuan , barely surviving working contract development work and doing food delivery. Beautiful camera work and extremely raw, vulnerable thoughts from the dev.
If you have 20 mins to watch it let me know what you think – if this dev were born in the US or Europe do you think he’d be doing significantly better, or is the market that tough for people like him who refuse to work for big employers in the west, too?
Very intersting! This had me speechless as to the living conditions in that apartment. They are putting their life at risk. Leaving that aside he seemed happy enough with the freedom. It is about trade offs. Even if he worked in a big corporate in the West he may be the sort of person to enjoy freelancing and being his own boss.
Some AI startups are taking the workplace back to the dark ages, adopting the Chinese “9-9-6 work schedule” in which employees toil from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. six days a week from Monday to Saturday.
With the way technology is advancing, I don’t think devs will be needed to do the sort of work that is available now.
Entry level used to mean little or no experience. Now it means between three and five years experience, nearly full-stack, proven track record of projects, baseline knowledge of cloud deployments, with AI knowledge and experience.
In summary an intermediate, with the expertise of a senior, for the price of an intern.
Not to mention needing more years of experience than the programming language itself has existed for. Apparently no programming language creator is qualified to apply for jobs that use their programming language.
But, someone will be needed to fixup the slop that is generated, so there is still hope.
Very true the standards seem to only get higher. That’s all. Today I started working on fixing an ai slop project and found a lot of the code to be non usable so… there’s that. I noticed a lot of non technical people think ai can do absolutely anything but the LLM has no idea how to stay to a strict logical boundary. It hallucinates so much math
Part of the problem is AI is trained on dirty datasets.
If the quality of public repos was better, or AI companies took the time and resources to create cleaner datasets, I think things could be a lot different.
I am not even joking I don’t think I can read the slop and it stressed me out so much but my new starting from scratch project makes me rest easier . Also for some reason the slop generated them an app that was not scalable at all. Soooooo I gotta come up with solutions myself which is something I love anyway
I can relate a lot to going down the freelance path in my 20s instead of the traditional 9-5 path. Back when I was a full time musician and not in the tech industry yet, I was working 80-90 hours a week. Starting multiple business ventures and taking whatever gigs I could get to survive.
If I did work 40 hours, that would be considered a slow week for me at the time. It was a hard adjustment when I switched to tech and worked a regular job the first time. It was hard to get used to doing others peoples assigned tasks at assigned times instead running my schedule.
I hope more financial success comes this guy’s way because he deserves it
. Also for some reason the slop generated them an app that was not scalable at all. Soooooo I gotta come up with solutions myself which is something I love anyway 
