Tags / Startup & career
Career
- Do Chinese people still need English in the AI era? I want outsiders to weigh in A Chinese parent asked on V2EX whether kids should still grind English now that AI can translate anything. Almost nobody said “quit because of AI.” The real fight is cram school vs. school-pace learning. Here is what the Chinese thread argued — and a direct ask for non-Chinese readers.
- thisFeelingNeverGoesAway: the title comforts; the comments audit what’s left A ProgrammerHumor meme about the eternal coding feeling blew up. The top comment wasn’t “same”—it was “then his son discovers AI.” Read next to an earlier essay on accelerating vs replacing thinking: output rose; where did the aha go?
- AI panic: is our intelligence locked in? A game developer with 30 years of experience says everyone he asks feels they are getting dumber; on V2EX, people say programming is dying and even "hard work" no longer makes sense. The real difference is not whether you use AI, but whether you use it to accelerate your thinking or to replace it.
- Good tech doesn't mean making money: the most common startup mistake A SaaS salesperson on V2EX wondered why bosses who know nothing about tech make a fortune. Not one of 39 replies took his side. Getting paid is a chain, and tech is one link.
- Does raising kids bring a joy nothing else can? After a cousin's wedding, a V2EX user asked why anyone would create a "little tyrant" to serve for decades. Parents in the 51 replies said the joy is irreplaceable. Three studies suggest it is unique, but it is more meaning than daily happiness, and it comes with conditions.
- Fixing a contrarian habit: start with yourself, then learn to handle the contrarians around you A V2EX user noticed he contradicts everything people say, and 100 replies offered remedies. The habit can only be fixed from your own side; with other contrarians, it depends on how much the topic matters and whether you can walk away.
- Small-town kids in the AI era: info is free, people aren't A V2EX parent asked how kids in a small county town can broaden their horizons. The 194 replies argue hard, but they describe four layers of the same thing: information, judgment, exposure, and hands-on work. AI has nearly closed the information gap, but not the gap in who you know. Drawing on CNNIC, PNAS, the World Bank, and Chetty, here is which layer small-town kids should work on now.
- What can programmers still do now that AI writes code? Two popular V2EX threads in one week: one user had Codex add ray tracing to their engine on the first try and asked if AI is replacing skilled programmers; another asked how many will still live off writing code in five years. 200+ replies and Stanford employment data say the squeeze is on entry-level jobs and on coding itself. Programmers can still do five things, and they were always most of the job.
- V2ers on Lying Flat: Meta Build, or Move Back to a County Town? Two V2EX threads, side by side: a slogan post about “four nos,” and a concrete case with ~¥2M savings, a kid, and a rural house. The real fight is definition vs constraints.
- When Everyone Uses AI, How Do You Judge a Developer? A V2EX career thread distilled: shared tools do not equal equal skill. Interviews should weight direction, course-correction, architecture, and delivery.
- AI cannot replace lived experience After an AI conference, what stayed was not a demo. It was the part of being human that can't be compressed: showing up, colliding with the world, living it.
- The 35-year-old programmer crisis — and how to get out An eight-year programmer after leaving big tech: the profession is a sinking Titanic and most people are still fighting for first class. And a way off.
- When a 45-year-old paper is flagged as AI An AI detector scored a 1981 paper as machine-written. Humans are now stuck proving they are not a model. This is not science fiction. It is happening.
- AI didn't 10x your output. It 10x'd the work. A Silicon Valley engineer on the real numbers: 93% use AI, throughput rose ~10%, one study found it made people 19% slower. AI fatigue is structural.
- A programmer's survival guide in the AI era AI isn't here to take senior programmers' jobs. The 35-year-old crisis story flips: experience gets more valuable, if you can decide, constrain, and verify.
- Software engineering is splitting into three layers When implementation cost falls toward zero, the bottleneck moves from coding to judgment. The market is splitting into three layers of work, not just of pay.