SuperHot VR rises above tech demo (but only somewhat). It is very fun controlling your body movements to make time travel at certain rates. Surprisingly tiring!

I’m white so whatever I write here should be taken through that lens. I also work in programming.

Your situation honestly does suck. I’m not going to tell you to have a more holistic view of yourself because I know what it is like to really value a few talents you have. Giving that up is psychologically difficult and probably not the easiest way to address the situation.

Being talented and having decent opinions are basically orthogonal traits. Both extremes exist; people I know IRL can talk thoughtfully for hours about all sorts of topics but are demonstrably fucking useless at executive functioning to the point where they should not be in any position of leadership. And some people are just very talented but have absolutely shit opinions. However, the Dr. House style brilliant asshole archetype is not a desirable thing to be.

So for programming, we have this rather idiotic idea that our profession is about “hitting the high notes” or something and you either have the talent to do it or you don’t. Junior developers (I don’t know what phase of your career you’re in) are heavily inundated with this messaging. You have to be absolutely cracked, you have to be a hacker experimenting with all this random shit in side projects, whatever. The reality is very different. There is way, way more worthwhile work in this field than we have the labor power to do (speaking in terms of “software that I dream should exist” rather than present labor market conditions). If you’re an absolutely cracked programmer you can maybe do a few times as much work over your lifetime as someone else. Maybe even ten times; I’m not a denier that in particular contexts, some people are ten times more productive than their coworkers. I’ve been on both sides of that multiplier!

However, vanishingly little work in this field requires you to “hit the high notes”. The sort of work that does require it is largely sorted away for PhDs and researchers to handle. Even then, researchers are usually not anomalously talented; they’ve just worked at & thought about something for a very long time.

The world we try to address & automate with software is so unbelievably complicated that there is no substitute for just grinding away at the problem for a long time and addressing all the unforeseeable issues that arise. If you engage with a problem for long enough you will match or surpass your coworkers’ talents in this domain. Maybe they’ve just been wrestling with the problem for long enough that they have a brute force encyclopedic knowledge of all the possible ways things can go wrong. That’s the real thing you want to acquire, and you will acquire it. It comes over time.

As far as the injustice you feel with the present state of things, where your racist coworkers are more knowledgeable than you: understand that you have the same capabilities as them, and your knowledge will fill in with time. That is probably not much of a comfort. But truly, they are not inherently better than you in a way that matters.

Good to know, I edited the title thank you!

Oddly enough the stroke turning him zionist is not a unique phenomenon. A friend who works at a local hospital reports the same thing happened to their department head. Used to be a well-liked extremely empathetic lady, had a stroke, boom turbo-zionist right as the Gaza genocide started kicking off in earnest. Not saying all zionism is due to brain damage but it certainly seems to help!

contrary to his portrayal in the movie we’ve all seen this guy is not really very thoughtful and runs his mouth about a lot of things

I’ve decided to stop selling shovels to this gold rush and use all my shovels to rush for gold myself. This is going to work out great!

Depends on a few things.

• Does the definition of “tech sector” broaden to essentially the entire economy? Hard to think of a large company that doesn’t have some kind of tech department outside of IT at this point. However, when people say “tech sector” they’re mostly talking about the big FAANG (or whatever the acronym is now) companies where you make lots of money working for a somewhat prestigious brand. Safe bet is the number of jobs requiring tech skills will increase overall, but probably won’t pay as well.
• Does AI actually pan out well enough to replace coders within the next few years? If so it will eat entry-level programming jobs first, but I think it will be quite a while before AI is effectively writing OS or database code further down the stack. Thus the task for tech workers becomes specializing faster than AI can. However, the issue with specialized jobs is that there are fewer of them. And they are more difficult, technically.
• People are bad at predicting markets and are almost always cursed to become “bagholders” (here, of a CS degree presumably) perpetually waiting for the market to hit again. Psychologically it is very difficult to break out of this state and accept the good times aren’t coming back, due to the FOMO of bailing right before the long-awaited gigantic green candle. However, the analogy breaks down here because while skills do decay with lack of practice, the fundamental programming skill is more like riding a bike - you don’t forget. Thus if you retrain as an electrician or something it isn’t unthinkable you could switch back to programming when times get better.

“have been considering going vegetarian” wow what a commitment lol