The global tech labor arbitrage trade has matured since its start in the Clinton era.  We've witnessed real estate in places like Mumbai and Singapore appreciate to levels rivaling NY and London.  The rising tide lifts all boats.  As global tech labor costs have flattened somewhat, software has gotten more expensive to produce and maintain.  The market is betting that AI will largely alleviate this by supplanting much of software engineering as a practice.  However, until this plays out, being judicious about when and how to use software is more important than ever.   While it's constructive to build software systems as "black boxes," it's folly to view them as crystal balls.  Increasingly, software is operations .  That engineer who knows the code like the back of his hand is your foreman.  Code is not static, it's constantly evolving to meet business demands and improve efficiency.  "Software Engineering is programming integrated ov...

      "When will we ever use this in real life?!"       When I asked my father about Trigonometry, I got a surprisingly tangible answer.  From an elevated vantage point he observed a friendly position come under rocket fire.  He radioed them for a vector, triangulated the source, called in artillery, and put an end to the attack. Triangulation is a trusted technique employed by the military, civil engineers, etc.  It involves sharing perspective of a focal point between two observers and using the full information to establish a more accurate lay of the land. We can observe a wide variety of analogous systems extending and generalizing the concept of triangulation.  Human vision accomplishes depth perception using two eyes instead of one.  Juries and arbiters act as objective third parties to bring impartiality to the legal process.  Financial exchanges enable standardization or their contracts by using an agreed upon conve...

    I used to work for a Global Mega Bank.  During a long visit to their NYC office, I went to lunch with coworkers at the company cafeteria and as mundane as any other lunch was charged somewhere between 10 and 20 dollars.  To my surprise though, when I handed the cashier a $20 bill, she replied, "We don't accept cash," to which I quipped, "Sorry, I'm fresh outta wampum." The cafeteria required employees to use cash, credit, or ATM to charge a proprietary Global Mega Bank Cafeteria Card that you could (only) use to pay for lunch at any NYC Mega Bank location (they have several offices).  Minimum charge amount was $20. I felt uneasy with this arrangement and for the next several months tried my best to game the system to maintain the minimum possible balance on my card.  Despite optimizing my meal choices around this approach, I typically carried somewhere between a $15 to $25 balance. If each of Mega Bank's 40k to 50k NYC employees carries an average ba...