Piling up to the grateful comments, I've been using Sublime Text for years and still love it. It has never quite done it as an IDE for me as I'm used to more fully fledged ones like IntelliJ, however it is an amazing scratch pad and text manipulation tool. I pretty much have it permanently open.
This post made me realise I had never bought a license, it is now done. Thank you for it being fair, by the way.
> HN is not a hive mind. There are people here who love Firefox, people who despite it, and everyone in between. It’s tiring to always be reading your type of comment, as if everyone is a hypocrite. Maybe, just maybe, the people making those contradictory comments are not the same individuals.
I didn't mean to say that all of HN despises Firefox, but simply that it very often brings negative sentiments, so seeing the comment I was responding to so high up in the thread made me react. It was also a kind reminder that militating is as simple as using an alternative to Chrome.
> And it’s not like Mozilla is free from controversies, including several of betraying user trust. If every major browser maker is going to break your trust and sell your data, I can see why people choose their poison based on other factors.
> I use neither Firefox nor Chrome. Is Safari any better? Or Brave? In some areas yes, in others no. I don’t think there’s a single browser vendor which gets it unambiguously right.
And you're making my point about the perfect solution fallacy as well! Of course Firefox isn't perfect and has screwed up on several occasions, does that mean it's comparable to a piece of software that sends every single bit of information it can gather to its parent ad company?
> Chrome had the advantage for a long term because their dev tools were just so much better than Firebug in both features and performance. Even today, I can't pinpoint it to specific things because it's (relatively) little and subtle differences, but Chrome's dev tools feel way more polished than Firefox's.
My point exactly! You're talking about which browser to use for web development. That's not relevant for engineers not touching html/js/css, and for all non tech savvy family members whose computers we set up.
It's amusing to see this message heavily upvoted on HN when most mentions of Firefox here are welcomed with an avalanche of perfect solution fallacies.
I'm dubious about people becoming militant about this when the software engineering industry gave Chrome a red carpet by using it and installing it on their relatives' computers while knowing very well it's adware and when switching to the alternative is incredibly cheap.
This is definitely on my radar, and not just technical skills which have a diminishing return at some point. Mainly understanding business considerations (product, market, timelines, costs, etc.) to be a person deciders can bounce ideas off of when still considering and defining features.
I like the personal five-year plan idea. It will help setting clear expectations and action plans. Thank you!
Building some kind of steady, independent lifestyle business (that's how I interpret your answer, correct me if I'm wrong) is an option but stays a bet and nothing says it would survive through the years. Salaried employment feels like a safer bet, despite the doubts I mentioned.
There are several side projects I started, halted, came back to, etc. over the years, and I love them but none of them could actually pay the bills. I also struggle to be consistently productive when I'm not part of a team.
AI is a variable in the equation but it's hard to tell how much actual impact it will have. Many jobs in software engineering go beyond taking in requirements and outputting code such as understanding business concerns, technical limitations, trade-offs, maintainability, etc. Today AI is just barely okay at the outputting code part, who knows when and how much it'll be able to do the rest.
It's definitely a tool I use though, but as a centralised documentation. And I keep up with it to somewhat understand how it works under the hood. But even this does not answer the question of how to prepare should it actually help making most software engineering jobs obsolete.