User Profile

[willendure]

I think stop trying to compete with the work that is going off-shore. There is a lot of work going on in public sector right now, and I find more of that tends to be on-shore. I would say 50%+ of roles I see are asking for security clearance, which of course is the chicken and egg problem, but trying...

[willendure]

I've had similar answers after doing very well on tests too - its just coded speak for "we didn't choose you, we chose someone else we liked better, and now we just need to give some reason why so ...". It means nothing really....

[willendure]

Yup. And its laziness on the part of the interviewer thinking that some coding test they found online is going to differentiate the candidates. Much better if they present some problem, that reflects a real aspect of the actual work they want you to do, and then get you to describe how you would go...

[willendure]

Because you will be doing that a lot once you get the job.

I built a brilliant AI agent prototype in response to a take home pre-interview exercise. They really like it, and it really showed I could do the job they wanted (design and build a good agent). Then in the interview I flunked...

[willendure]

Seem to have about 3 more interviews lined up, after a week or 2 of quiet.

Dunno if this part time contract is going to happen or not, all quiet on that front. Hopefully I don't have to care if one of the new interviews goes well.

[willendure]

I would not say "never". AI is a pretty big prize to fight over, and there something of a winner takes all dynamic to it. For example, suppose OpenAI failed financially, the competition with deeper pockets might pick up the pieces - presumably Microsoft since they have the biggest stake already....

[willendure]

One thing I can say for certain is that there are a lot of people talking very loudly about how much they know about AI (look on LI), and most of them know just about sweet F/A....

[willendure]

I think this is true for devs.

The way I see it, AI is still new and changing rapidly, there is no manual. Businesses are busy and have not really had the time to catch up, and catching up is getting to be hard work.

So there is a growing demand for AI consultants, this is...

[willendure]

Just like the dotcom bubble - the internet didn't go away just because the bubble broke. AI has reached the point where it is useful so its not going to go away.

Its just that all of the US GPD growth over the recent times has become concentrated in a tiny number of hyperscalers, and its...

[willendure]

In which case, make use of your ISA allowance of £20K. I don't put all my savings in my SIPP even though it is the best deal, I also invest some in an ISA for flexibility, and to hedge rule changes.

I think when the AI bubble pops (inevitable), falling tax receipts could mean severe financial...

[willendure]

I didn't make my point very well. I do love to have a really good test suite. The compiler I am writing at the moment has > 500,000 unit tests. Why so many ? Because I separated test logic from test cases. A test logic is some piece of logic that tests something like - this code type checks. And...

[willendure]

True, but thats why you write tests. So that any data a system will accept cannot put it into an incorrect state, and any data that could gets rejected. Domain modelling 101 and property based or fuzz testing.

I just built a realtime application layer network protocol for some projects...

[willendure]

I hate writing scripts and tests and config files. Get AI to do the boring part so you can do the real engineering....

[willendure]

Yup. All you can really do is shove as much as you can towards you pension for the tax relief, and even then we are going to still pay NICs, is it starting in 2029?...

[willendure]

They obviously never heard of "parse don't validate". Reject malformed data at the system boundary. FFS.

[willendure]

There was an article recently written by AI about predicting how AI will change the economy by 2030. I think the tldr was that knowledge workers will be squeezed out and we will need a lot less of them. It also said that the slack will be taken up by more manual jobs. What a load of tulipe....

[willendure]

"We are hiring a _senior_ Developer for AI Development & Engineering to design, build, and operate production AI systems end to end. You will work across the full AI stack: classical machine learning, deep learning, and modern generative AI (LLMs, RAG, and agentic workflows). You will turn...

[willendure]

Since November last year, but... I have been working on my own project since then. I only started looking for a new contract at start of July....

[willendure]

Thanks - it doesn't feel like much of a win. Lowest rate I have signed on for since 2013, and that is before even thinking about inflation. I feel strangely depressed about it and at the same time just going forward in the hope of it developing into something more...!

I looked around for...

[willendure]

Anyway, after about 6 or 7 interviews it looks like I might have gotten one ass cheek off the bench. Been offered a part time contract, outside, not brilliant day rate, but I liked the people I spoke to, work looked interesting, and it could well develop into something more substantial. Got nothing...