The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
The new $30,000 side hustle (News)
Mon, 13 Jan 2025
Bloomberg reports on a concerning new trend in tech hiring, Sean Goedecke has a lot to say about large established codebases, Jacob Bartlett thinks Apple is ruining Swift's original vision, Ahmed Khaleel built a cool tool for turning GitHub repos into interactive diagrams & Bridget Harris goes deep on the potential of crypto stablecoins to disrupt Visa and Mastercard's duopoly.
Full Episode
What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, January 13th, 2025. One way folks pinch pennies these days is by downgrading their streaming subscriptions to the ad-supported plan. But just how many ads might you have to endure from any given streamer?
According to some Sherwood News research, Disney Plus will likely subject you to more ads than anyone else, eating up about 13-16% of your watch time. Netflix, on the other hand, shows you ads about 3-4% of the time. These numbers are different depending on what you're watching, and they may change at any moment, but I found them interesting nonetheless. Okay, let's get into this week's news.
The new $30,000 side hustle. Bloomberg reports, but I link to Megan McDonough's commentary on LinkedIn because paywall, that employee referrals have become a lucrative side hustle for tech workers. Quote, platforms like Blind and Refer Market are connecting job seekers with company insiders willing to offer referrals for a fee. End quote.
I'm not surprised that this is a thing, but I'm certainly disappointed. How can you feel good about making money by referring a complete stranger for a position? I guess you get over it because it's an easy 30K. Crazy times. While this phenomenon is likely rare, it is indicative of a job market that is way out of whack.
The $30K income referenced in the headline is one individual who produced more than a half a dozen successful hires for the company after referring more than 1,000 job candidates to his employer. Mistakes engineers make in large codebases.
Shahan Godeki has spent a decade working on large, established codebases, which he defines as having single-digit million lines of code, like 5 million, somewhere between 100 and 1,000 engineers working on the same codebase, and the first working version of the codebase is at least 10 years old. I can't say I've ever worked on a code base in this category, so I'll have to take Sean's word for it.
And that word is, quote, there's one mistake I see more often than anything else, and it's absolutely deadly. Ignoring the rest of the code base and just implementing your feature in the most sensible way. In other words, limiting your touchpoints with the existing codebase in order to keep your nice, clean code uncontaminated by legacy junk.
For engineers that have mainly worked on small codebases, this is very hard to resist. But you must resist it. In fact, you must sink as deeply into the legacy codebase as possible in order to maintain consistency. Apple is killing Swift.
Jacob Bartlett tells the brief history of Swift and why he believes, and its creator, Chris Lattner, seems to agree, that it has fallen from its original great vision. Quote, End quote. Jacob describes Python's BDFL roots, Rust's community-driven roots, and Kotlin's corporate-backed roots. Then he compares these to Swift, which he calls corporate dictator for life. Quote,
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