I will have forgotten almost everything by the time something inevitably breaks in a few years. Unless I am constantly recalling the knowledge and applying it, I don't find it worth it. And I _don't_ want to be constantly recalling this knowledge. I want it to just work.
OMZ has been working steadily for me for the past 8+ years. Autocomplete, syntax highlighting, and a concise prompt--really all I need.
I mean you learn things about the shell ans shell scripting in general which you do retain. Also shell config is one of those rare things that doesn't "inevitably break." The only stuff that breaks are related to program settings which omzsh isn't going to handle anyway. You end up learning a bit and have a much lighter config. Case-in-point, you had to spend some time combing through and learning all the aliases it defines you when you could maintain a small few that you actually want. Also, zsh has plugins natively.
AWS is very heavy on Rust internally for core services.
EC2 (lots of embedded work on servers), IAM, DynamoDB, and parts of S3 all heavily use Rust for quite a few years now already.
We can move really fast with Rust as compared to C, while still saving loads of compute and memory compared to other languages. The biggest issue we've hit is the binary size which matters in embedded world.
Linux has added support for Rust now. I don't think Rust's future supremacy over C is doubtful at this point.
AWS might honestly be the biggest on Rust out of all the FAANGs based on what I've heard too. We employ loads of Rust core developers (incl Niko, who is a Sr PE here) and have great internal Rust support at this point :). People still use the JVM where performance doesn't matter, but anywhere where performance matters,I don't see anyone being okay-ed to use C over Rust internally at this point.
Just a single data point against this. I got interviews with 4 companies out of 30 or so I applied to. Cleared all the onsites. Think FAANG, famous hedge fund, popular data analytics platform, and defense. 4 different industries. Job market's not the best, but it's also not that bad if you have 5 YOE+. Offers were good, ~$50-100K over my current pay.
So many people are using AI during the interviews to cheat, as long as you don't use AI and are good at leetcode, probably not that hard to snag an offer. I also interview people at a FAANG, and #1 reason to reject people these days is AI use. If you don't use AI and can leetcode and system design, you're pretty solid and will stand out from other half-baked candidates.
Was this very recent? The job markets for software engineers has been horrid, at least from mid 2022 to mid 2025. Maybe it’s changed now?
Anecdotally, I know a few engineers with 10+ YOE in NYC, Seattle, and California, all with actual FAANG or FAANG adjacent work experience, who couldn’t find jobs. One of whom even took a minimum wage job, and another who nearly did the same as well.
Maybe the tax code change is kicking off an industry revival?
My friend that left cruise got a 2.3x pay bump (post-ipo) moving to Figma in Feb 2025. He also had interviews at Meta and other FANGA (where he used to work).
If tier3 companies are paying $540k-$1.5m for staff in 2025, then I assume the market is turned around.
Let me guess, you went to an elite university and you worked in Big Tech? I think you should be proud of your success, but it's not indicative of the larger American economy or the tech industry in general. There are reports that new grads in CS have higher unemployment than philosophy majors. Something is structurally unsound, even if the kernel of the industry composed of people like yourself is sound.
I'm finding it really hard to detect who is using AI and who isn't for leetcode questions. I'm not even sure its a big deal because as soon as they start they get all the AI tools anyway. I try to talk more about their work experience now.
There is a very simple solution to AI cheating and I'm not sure why it hasn't made a comeback - fly candidates in for in-person interviews (which btw, if people remember, was the norm before COVID).
Not the OP, but I interviewed a candidate for a remote position. He was kind of halting in his responses, until he suddenly wasn't. Borderline erudite, and I recognized some LLM speech patterns. I told my manager I thought he was using an LLM, but we hired him anyway.
After a few months on the job, he hadn't done any meaningful work. His responses to support tickets were clearly written by an LLM and offered only the most generic (and therefore unhelpful) support. He was eventually let go, and deservedly so.
For every candidate who gets accused of using an LLM and is actually using one, there are five candidates who get accused but are not actually using any LLM.
I know your comment is mostly in good faith, but I wish people considered whether it's worth it to use terms like "right wing commentators" instead of the simpler "commentators".
The "right wing" label will just shun around half of Americans from taking your comment in good faith. Is the point to snark or to convince people to change their minds?
I sat with your comment, and here's the thing: if there are "left wing" commentators saying that these tariffs make sense or that America can spin up a manufacturing economy in a few weeks "or just stop buying stuff", I haven't seen/found/heard them.
In other words, it's a genuine false equivalency, at least in this case.
I am most definitely not suggesting that all left-leaning commentators are smart or good-faith actors. The left gets plenty wrong.
However, if you're going to force me to take a side on who is currently winning at stupid, I suppose my cards are on the table.
This is a really good link. Will definitely refer to this when making a car purchase in the future. Thanks!
It seems like Volvo's reputation as one of the safest car is still well deserved after all. I don't own a Volvo--too expensive for me, but good to know.
> They really don’t require you to know the latest frameworks, databases, Kubernetes, etc
The latest "framework, databases" are constantly changing. Being good at leetcode and system design is a better signal (ofcourse, not perfect) than knowing specific tools.
Being good at system design implies you are aware of tradeoffs across various systems, and that coupled with willingness to grind means you can at pick up new tools and probably deliver on projects. I have used 13 languages and an equally absurd amount of tools across 4 orgs in my 5 YOE at FAANG. It's constant learning, or you're out basically. Doesn't make sense to quiz on anything specific. The interview process is quite fair actually.
Leetcode is only a useful problem to ask if the candidate has not encountered that problem before and has not practiced leetcode. Otherwise it is exactly as good a signal as knowing some arbitrary framework or database.
"Grind" just means "memorize a bunch of stuff for later regurgitation", which is the same thing as is demonstrated by memorizing the API for some arbitrary database or javascript framework.
Willingness to "grind" is a positive signal for people hiring developers in the same way that low critical thinking skills is a positive signal for people hiring law enforcement officers, and results in a team of similar quality.
Leetcode is a standardized test that shows your ability to write code, grind and pattern match in a very complicated space. It is not possible to memorize solutions to all problems. There are way too many problems in this space. All the people complaining about leetcode are a prime example of this. It takes a lot of time and background knowledge to learn all the algorithms, data-structures, and problem-solving patterns... to get good to the level where you can ace FAANG and trading interviews with a high probability. It's a more useful metric than memorizing specific APIs which is not standardized, has basically no/simple pattern matching, and does not really test coding skills. There are also too many frameworks, and this just doesn't stand the test of time. People would need to constantly re-learn frameworks for interviews.
Most companies have been using leetcode and system design for dozens of years for a reason. It's not changing anytime soon.
Also, leetcode can be really fun :) if you remind yourself to be truly curious about the problem.
I don't mean to spread FUD, but as an interviewer at a FAANG in the US, I have mostly been interviewing candidates in LATAM (Brazil and Mexico). Same for some of my other coworkers.
I used to work at a SF startup before the FAANG about 4-5 years back. All the engineers there have unfortunately been replaced with those in LATAM too. LATAM engineers were making like $80-$90K in USD, which is apparently really good money there, whereas US engineer asked for base pay twice that. So it seems like a win-win deal for the cofounders and LATAM engineers.
This was unsurprising when American employees decided to use the significant power they gained over the pandemic to insist on WFH.
Whether working collaboratively in an office was beneficial or not, employers certainly believed it to be so. They believed it so much that employers, pre pandemic, were willing to hire employees a single time zone away from SF, and then pay them a significant one time amount along with a much higher annual salary to relocate them to SF.
This belief in higher productivity when teams were geographically collocated was the entire basis for which employers were willing to pay American employees several multiples of what they would pay employees abroad.
But the same employees who were benefiting from this decided they didn’t want to keep that advantage anymore.
And now since WFH has become the norm in the US, employers are realizing there’s no need to pay to keep employees in the U.S. and outsourcing to significantly cheaper locations instead.
> And now since WFH has become the norm in the US, employers are realizing there’s no need to pay to keep employees in the U.S. and outsourcing to significantly cheaper locations instead.
“Whoa we can do this cheaper in another country???” is not a new phenomenon. Companies have been trying to do this for literally decades at this point. The reason so many jobs still exist in the US is because it doesn’t end up working that well. I’m not _that_ old and I was around at IBM for two separate rounds of “outsource-it-to-India-no-wait-bring-it-back” and IBM was and still is very keen to ship everything overseas.
I’m not saying it won’t eventually stick, but I think it’s important to dispel this notion that WFH made everyone have this sudden epiphany that US workers aren’t necessary anymore. It’s been going on for ages.
It goes in cycles, often depending on the business focus at the time.
Right now (and back then), primary focus was on cost. Got to juice those margins somehow, and it isn’t going to happen by opening new markets (probably!).
When outsourcing is less envogue, it’s usually because there is some big growth opportunity and they are trying to get things moving as fast as possible. That tends to require higher end (but more expensive!) staff working in closer communication with management/execs.
It’s the difference between trying to improve margins on an existing product, and trying to grow the top end of a new product.
The work force abroad has caught up a lot though. Online learning has made it much easier to improve skills and their English has also improved. And since everyone has become more used to remote work, communication is also much better now. One reason a lot of outsourcing efforts in the early 90s failed was also because the Indian teams weren't properly kept in the loop.
Core issues haven't changed, though. major timezone differences, still some communication gap for technical discussions, and (for some cultures) a different approach to how to work and deliver on tasks. And of course, American suits still go for the cheapest bid instead of focusing on quality and efficiency.
That doesn't explain why many execs were keen on RTO. If it was reducing costs, you would thing they would've wanted to draw out WFH for as long as possible. But there a clear rush to end WFH as soon as possible and implement unilateral mandates to get everyone back to office.
The explanation is that they wanted the (perceived) productivity back. Alternatively, they may have wanted to push overall compensation down (e.g. having some employees quit and only luring back the ones they actually like). Of course, it varies a lot from market to market, depending on how hard it is to reduce headcount in the first place (e.g., in Germany, it is much harder than in the US).
It’s really hard to see what a team/people on it is actually doing if people are remote.
It’s also much harder in general to communicate less formally and form deep relationships.
For execs and managers, this can be a big problem.
If it isn’t possible to do it the ‘old way’, remote work can and does work (albeit in different ways and with different constraints). But if doing remote work, why not do it somewhere else?
> It’s really hard to see what a team/people on it is actually doing if people are remote.
If you're totally disconnected from the work, sure. But for someone actually paying, it shouldn't be that hard to see whether the list of priorities for this month is actually getting finished or not.
Beyond the most trivial work, that really isn’t simple or straightforward without watching everything like a hawk.
Outsourcing manufacturing had the same problem - people thought they could send drawings to China, and with some straightforward checks, could get what they wanted cheaper. That was not at all the case, however, and there is a LOT of QA, additional checks, additional data leakage and competitive risks, etc.
For instance, if in the US people might actually follow the law around things like NDAs and non-competes most of the time, what about the jurisdiction you’re outsourcing too? How would you even know? How would you enforce consequences? How about data security?
>Beyond the most trivial work, that really isn’t simple or straightforward without watching everything like a hawk.
Sounds more like a personal problem than a technical one. Besides, if it was actually enough of an issue there wouldn't be so much outsourcing. I just see it as more smokescreens to cut costs.
> It’s really hard to see what a team/people on it is actually doing if people are remote.
Only if you are thinking like a McDonald’s shift manager. Measuring software developers by time-in-seat is tacitly acknowledging that your managers aren’t doing their jobs up to the C-suite.
Exactly. That’s around salary for senior engineer at big corp according union tables in Germany. If you’re really good or a manager, 110k is in there. More is doable at senior manager/director level or in key position in a company led by owner. US faang salaries sound here like science fiction.
Yes, 90 to 110k is pretty much TOP. A lot of seniority and experience. If you want to go higher, you have to go management path (even lower management is included in the union)
If you look at the table of salaries of a big union [1], you can multiply that number by about 13.5 to get the annual salary. Can vary a little %, but a good estimation.
The salaries in the EU stagnated in the last years, whereas in USA they were moving.
Currently the going annual salary for a senior developer in Bulgaria (Eastern Europe) is somewhere between EUR 50k - 75 EUR net, with 25-30 days of paid time off. The gross will be about 25% more (income tax is 10%, social security around 40%, but there is a cap on the salary base, so effectively it is less). For freelance senior developer, the (B2B) daily rate is in the range EUR 350 to EUR 550, depending on the technology and project complexity. Of course, there are rare examples outside of these ranges (e.g. top talent in ML, BigData etc). Leadership roles are usually at 10-20% premium.
The boring reality is that the price of labor roughly reflects the productivity companies typically get. Because if there is ever some clear win in some location, people start hiring there, and things start to balance out again.
You can replace software engineers with anything else here. Most VPs and higher leadership I see at FAANGs (who're arguably the ones recognizing opportunity) come from a PM or other non-software background. As much as I'd like to believe we're special, it doesn't seem like we are any special. We have no protection.
It's best to start hedging and learning other skills. Or focus on making as much money as possible ASAP so you have some financial safety net to fall back to as AI and Trump/Musk and offshoring has increased in recent years. All of us need an escape plan ready.
I don't mean to spread FUD. Just hedge please. I assume I have at most a decade of tech career left in the best case. A couple years in the worst case.
OMZ has been working steadily for me for the past 8+ years. Autocomplete, syntax highlighting, and a concise prompt--really all I need.
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