This perspective is more of a confession about the current state of employment in big-tech, less so than engineering in general.
There are plenty of places outside of FAANG where you can just be a butt-in-seat, completing tasks.
I met plenty of principal, staff engineers in defense and medical device companies who were just amazing engineers who knew how to complete tasks and dispatch them.
> That stack of tasks you have to do? Your manager or your tech lead could finish those in much less time and with much less hassle than it takes to help you through them"
I wasn’t trying to say one was better or not, just different. Californians wrap up a large amount of their retirement savings in their houses though, so keeping those home prices high is important to them and that’s a reason for stalling development.
I think Californians do, a lot of time, retire with a higher net worth. But most of them do that because they’re more relatively house-poor during their lives - they take out larger mortgages, and save more into their net worth.
As opposed to Texans, who have higher disposable income since they have smaller house payments. It’s less incentive to save so they may spend more.
So that’s a partial advantage to California - the expensive homes force a higher savings rate, naturally.
But, at retirement age, a lot of their net worth is tied up in their home. So to unlock a lot of those savings they need to move to a lower cost of living state like Arizona, Nevada, Florida, etc.
While the Texans can just stay in their paid-off house.
So yeah it’s just different.
Texans are just paying off their home throughout their life and staying in it. They have larger disposable income to go towards other stuff (kids, lifestyle) while Californians gotta pay that mortgage
>For most Americans, A house is their primary savings account
This is true for California, where people (foolishly) rely on their home value as their retirement plan, which further incentivizes NIMBYism.
But in places like Texas (and other areas with affordable housing), the house is just treated as something you pay off to have a low housing cost in retirement. And your investments are your retirement+savings account.
Many people here might be in a similar situation to me, but I took an online masters program that allowed for continuing education following completion of the degree. This has become one of my hobbies; I can take classes at my own expense, not worry about my grades, and just enjoy learning. I can push myself as much as I want and since the classes are hard, just completing 1 assignment is enough to force me to "think". Just sharing my experience for people who might be looking for ways to challenge themselves intellectually.
So much of my professional SWE jobs isn't even programming - I feel like this is a detail missed by so many. Generally people just stereotype SWE as a programmer, but being an engineer (in any discipline) is so much more than that. You solve problems. AI will speed up the programming work-streams, but there is so much more to our jobs than that.
I would agree. While we are seeing all this creative work get automated by AI, how big of an impact would that really have on the economy?
Fully-functional autonomous driving will have a much larger economic impact - and that's just the first area where autonomous robots will come into our lives.
There are plenty of places outside of FAANG where you can just be a butt-in-seat, completing tasks.
I met plenty of principal, staff engineers in defense and medical device companies who were just amazing engineers who knew how to complete tasks and dispatch them.
> That stack of tasks you have to do? Your manager or your tech lead could finish those in much less time and with much less hassle than it takes to help you through them"
Ehhh.