I think your main point is right, but there are many Costco members who are NOT shopping for "weeks of groceries" at a time, and many of them live in suburban or urban areas with high density. For example, I shop at Costco once a week for just my girlfriend and I; we don't buy outrageous quantities. We live in a populous area.
Our situation is pretty common; it's just a normal grocery store in effect for lots of people. The weird stereotype of Costco shoppers driving for miles to buy huge carts of food just doesn't line up with the typical case for my area.
It is significant if you don't want to sit at a computer all day just to MAYBE get basic functionality, then find you've backed yourself into a corner because you didn't know some esoteric detail and have to spend another day doing a refactor, etc etc
I don't want to sift through docs and man pages and debug cryptic compiler and runtime errors in my spare time.
There are far richer things for me to do with my life.
I want to use my computer to get my tasks done and be done with it. Slogging through technical details an LLM could crush in minutes is a much better use of my resources.
IMO, it's a bit disingenuous in 2026 to argue that technical college degrees exist for the sake of pure education and that we're best suited to continue pretending as such.
The vast majority of students and employers treat them as vocational certificates in practice, and the profession would almost certainly benefit from adapting curricula to more closely match that reality.
Foundational concepts are still necessary, but I don't buy the argument that we should continue teaching like it's 1946.
I've been thinking along similar lines as you and really appreciate you posting this comment.
I, too, think it's important to put dreams out there even if they have holes in their implementation or are easily torn apart by naysayers. We can and should collectively dream of a better future if we want something worthwhile to aim at.
Thanks for taking the time to write such a high quality reply; this is something I've wondered about for a long time and I appreciate the thought and detail you've shared here. :)
Low barrier to entry and hard to get fired once you're in.
Rotten people put on a good face in the interview and then spread their misery around for decades to some of our most vulnerable. It happens in pretty much every unelected position in the public sector in my experience.
We don't need to know the exact boundaries of what's acceptable to recognize obviously harmful behavior and make efforts to stop it on a societal level.
This is the classic "perfect is the enemy of the good" type scenario.
Let's make imperfect progress if that is what we're currently capable of.
I was in an extremely good spot financially when I quit (years of runway) due to living well below my paycheck for years of working at FAANG.
I was terrified to do so, but the only alternative I could see at the time was killing myself if I had to continue as is (lots of mental illness prior to and greatly exacerbated by my time in tech).
It is the biggest leap of faith I have ever taken, and I do not have a big appetite for financial risk.
I went through the exact same thing as you, and I needed some time to explore different ways of living. I tried being a drone pilot, a kayak guide, and a paddleboard instructor and learned a lot in the process.
After those forays I designed and built a trailered coffee from scratch and now I run it on a public park that overlooks the ocean.
I am more fulfilled than ever, I can pay my bills, and I get to do WAY more "real" engineering than the bureaucracy of my past life at FAANG ever allowed for.
Your battery blower sounds like it's just not very good.
I can move piles of wet leaves easily with my makita blower that uses two 18v batteries. It's a pretty old model too.
Batteries can surge power and not risk fire hazard like AC over a long extension cord. Manufacturers know this and have to intentionally limit draw way below the 15A ceiling so a 100ft 14AWG cord doesn't trip breakers or burn houses down.
It seems very likely to me that the sensations experienced during exercise are highly variable among individuals.
I say this because my experience is very different from yours: I get a very perceptible "high" once I get into the rhythm of a good workout. Think mild euphoria, mood lift, and general feeling of "rightness" in my body once it's been well wrung.
This only happens if I'm in decent shape, though. If I've fallen out of shape it's a slog.
Edit: I can't remember the podcast, but I recall some discussion of emerging clinical evidence in exercise response variability along many dimensions that may help explain the disconnect.
You could easily scoff the same way about some number of API endpoints, class methods, config options, etc, and it still wouldn't be meaningful without context.
Credentials should only be provided at the application root, which is going to be a different root for a test harness.
Mockito shouldn't change whether or not this is possible; the code shouldn't have the prod creds (or any external resource references) hard coded in the compiled bytecode.
It's useful to get "glue" code out of the way while building, but to the point in the article it all becomes very difficult to debug and maintain once there are problems in the that layer.
Spring Boot and other similar frameworks come to mind; by forcing huge amounts of indirection you lose a lot of visibility of your call stack because the convenient "glue" code is now orchestrating everything at runtime, but that code isn't yours, and it isn't easily inspected or fixed.
Our situation is pretty common; it's just a normal grocery store in effect for lots of people. The weird stereotype of Costco shoppers driving for miles to buy huge carts of food just doesn't line up with the typical case for my area.