Comment by kypro
6 days ago
> 3) At this point, a lot of students have complex side-projects to a point where everyone's resume looks the same. It's harder to create a competitive edge.
This one of the things that breaks my heart personally.
I have personal projects I am so proud of that took me years to build or considerable effort to reading through papers and implementing by hand.
I used to show these in interviews with such pride, but now these are at best neutral to my application, but more likely a knock against me because they're so easy to vibe code.
I guess it would be like if you spent the last decade writing novels which you were really proud of and felt was part of the small contribution you've made humanity, then overnight people decided they were actually awful and of zero value.
Everything I ever wrote – all the SWE blog posts, tutorials, books, github repos. It's all useless now.
You put this well, now that you mention it, I sometimes find myself trying to defend my earlier work as "Pre-ChatGPT," as if that even matters. Relegating future such work to some sort of romanticized "artisanal craftsmanship" feels hollow. That being said, I'm more productive than ever and finally got projects that have stalled out going again, and these projects have made my own life easier as a result. More utility from the result than from having walked the journey perhaps.
Everything returns to dust eventually.
Your contributions are part of what helped humanity to get to where it is now.