And that includes London, it lists "excluding London" as £65k.
People overestimate how much senior devs in the UK earn, even after knowing they're not well paid, my usual response to hearing we should be earning £90k+ is, "well give us a job then"!
A friend is making about £180k / yr in London, and they bought a house recently in London. I think that's a lot, and his wife also makes a similar amount, slightly more. That seems to be the minimum, otherwise you're a renter for life. Pretty nuts.
A salary of £180k put you in the 98th percentile of UK salaries in 2024 (99th percentile was only a little higher at £207k) [1]. With a household income approximately doubling that, i'd suggest your friend is in an even smaller minority.
The average house price in London in July 2025 was £565k [pp33 - 2].
There is not being able to afford something and then there is not being able to afford exactly what you want.
Partly depends on what you mean by "London". I don't want to work for FAANG/AI/finance/gambling so our combined salary is well under the 180 figure. Yet we bought a 2-bed terraced house with a garden and driveway in south-west London (technically Surrey, but a London borough) just over five years ago. It's still 20 mins to Waterloo and most of central London is under an hour away. As we pay off the mortgage we should be able to further upsize over the years. It's not ideal, but it works.
That is an extremely high salary, and very far from the minimum required to buy, even on your own. A dual £350k income is truly astonishing. You could buy most houses in London in cash after saving for 5 years.
What? No that will not allow you to buy "most houses in London in cash after saving for 5 years" unless you live far out of town in a tiny place and eat plain rice for 5 years, and even then it'll be long odds.
First, you'll take home slightly over half of that net of various taxes and deductions, but let's be generous and say your take-home is 200k. You live very frugally, don't go out, don't really buy anything and keep your costs at 50k a year, including rent (!). That leaves you with 150k a year, so after 5 years you have 750k. This allows you to buy a modest 2-3 bed row house with a postage stamp sized garden in one of the less desirable areas of the city.
If you want something that doesn't look like a shed, you are looking at 1 million pounds and up, more like 1.5 million. If you want in a nice area and large garden, make it 2 million.
What are you smoking? The median house price in London is 500k. At 750k you can afford 77% of houses and at a million you are in the top 10%. 50k per year is also a preposterously high expenditure. Rent will be your leading expense by probably a factor of 10. You could put aside 3k a month for rent (again, totally preposterous number) and not touch the sides.
The only thing I can think of that would even come close to making a difference is having children. Then all bets are off, they can cost as much as you like.
But it sounds like it's not even a harness issue if they have a process where they send a reset email to an address that isn't associated with the account.
This isn't (just) a validation issue, and shouldn't be at the harness level.
I'm saving this comment, thank you for a great explanation of what it is like.
I was in my late 20s when I realised I was "face-blind", but I should have realised a lot earlier, I remember reading in a book as a child about how "people can recognise a person by their face from a long distance, but find it difficult to recognise a voice", and I could not relate whatsoever to that passage.
I thought I regularly struggle to recognise someone until they start speaking, but it wasn't until a decade or two later that I read about prosopagnosia and then suddenly a lot of things made sense.
Your explanation is so much better than the rubbish illustrations of blanked or blurred faces, because it isn't like that at all, indeed sometimes I might rely on a detail about their face to recognise someone.
It's why face-blind isn't a great term either, because it's not a kind of blindness, I can see just as well as anyone, it just doesn't trip the automatic and instinctual recognition that I understand most people have.
Probably still does not work. Assume a request takes X ms and let us look at what you will observe depending on where within a tick period it arrives.
If it arrives anywhere from 0 ms to (20 - X) ms after a tick, it will complete before the next tick, so the measured duration will be between X ms and 20 ms. If it arrives later in the tick period, it will miss the next tick and have to wait an additional tick period, so the measured duration will be between 20 ms and (20 + X) ms.
If you make N repetitions, you would normally see a spike of density 1 at X. With the 20 ms tick wait, you will see a uniform distribution of density 1/20 between X and (20 + X).
You would have to perform each request and then return the result exactly 20 ms after it was received in order to mask the request duration. But that just creates a new target, your timers and queues to delay the response. Or making the load so high, that requests take more than 20 ms.
Or you can run postgres on the same machine as the application, which lets you much more easily migrate if the time comes when you need to scale to multiple application servers.
There's a world between "local file" and "network DB server", running a DB server locally has lots of benefits from being able to easily query from outside if needed to forcing you to consider concurrency without the latency overhead of a network hop.
This decision tree doesn't make much sense to me. Why you someone forego performance today in favor of adding a completely unnecessary network layer to every DB query in order to "satisfy" future imaginary "scaling concerns"?
Any question asked would be edited beyond recognition (and usually into brash rudeness). Half the answers were demanding ever increasing proof of work, and the other half told the OP that they shouldn't even be trying to do what they're doing. The only useful thing were opinion based posts from people with domain expertise, and SO kept trying to ban and remove those. It was the least helpful place online, but the most accessible, and it survived for lack of alternatives.
I'm no AI booster, but answering simple questions about well understood topics is a perfect fit for it. Good riddance to StackOverflow.
Yes. In the beginning they didn't ban opinion based posts (that's why you can still find some of them that were left up for "historical value").
I liked Joel on Software, I liked Coding Horror, and I liked the idea that two internet guys could just identify a problem like that, start a company and fix it.
There was a Goldilocks period of several years where contributing answers was fun. I joined in 2010 and was most active until about 2016. It felt good to help people and since it was in the open, it felt like a resume booster as well, like having an active GitHub profile.
Absolutely! It answered so many questions I had. I remember when it was relatively new, and I'd just heard about it, it profoundly changed how I found answers to programming questions. Suddenly I could find people having similar problems that I had, who had asked the question, and had actually gotten a useful answer from someone who knew!
It wasn't perfect, of course (nothing is), but it was orders of magnitude better sifting through crap blog posts and confusing reference material. (Not to mention sites like experts-exchange.)
Stack Overflow was a nice experience for me because I was able to hit 2k reputation fairly quickly, in just 30 days of posting and 6 weeks calendar time. That being said, it never had the community feel of places I spent during my formative years, which were more on forums and IRC.
Here's a conference talk I gave on how to gain Stack Overflow reputation from back in 2018, selected out of 5 submitted talks. It's amazing how fast times have changed from before, during, and now after.
I had a pretty good time asking a question about Prolog. It was a really interesting experience knowing that there's someone out there that high proficiency in a very niche language, patiently explaining to me an issue that they have probably heard a million times from yet another imperative programmer. They even have their own website advocating for Prolog, etc.
Now, I could imagine an LLM would be able to do the same. However, I understand that this is only possible because of people like them. I don't think the youngins that started with LLM directly would appreciate the humongous amount of data and discussions online that enables that. The internet is so much bigger than just Google, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter.
I did originally, when it collected a bunch of obscure knowledge and made it searchable and useful. It was fun and rewarding to put things you knew into the common knowledge pool, and everyone celebrated a successful competitor to Experts Exchange. The SO model had a few major flaws that became impossible to ignore after it was entrenched. First, the reward scheme rewards the exact opposite of what it should incentivise: common questions are hit by many users and therefore attract lots of upvotes while answering the really hard stuff often meant you didn't even get your answer marked as "accepted" (because the OP had given up and stopped checking the site). Second, the site deliberately cultivated an "editor caste" in the Wikipedia style before the failure modes of that model were well-known: well-intentioned newbies get shut down by miserable yet untouchable people who play (and sometimes help write) the site's rules. Third, the stated desire to identify canonical answers to questions had no clear way to handle the evolution of the software people were talking about. So you'd have highly upvoted answers that might have been referencing deprecated libraries, and it was very hard for the newer answer to gain traction via either internal or external search.
It was also unfortunately before the retro boom of the 2020s, so questions about older arcana were often vulnerable to being closed instead of answered.
It was good for finding answers. But as a community to actually participate it was horrible. You couldn't even answer questions, because if you didn't get enough likes they would block you from answering any more.
I was unable to post answers to the questions within my domain of knowledge, because I didn't post answers (and get likes) outside of my domain of knowledge.
There's a minimum threshold of likes ("reputation") necessary to post in many parts of that service.
No. No there's not. If you get lots of downvotes on answers you might get banned from answering further questions until you improve your reputation score, but there's nothing like what you describe.
I always thought it was a perfectly fine service for lookup. Asking a question though required a very specific confluence of circumstances to actually be a useful thing to do, so I only did that like 1-2 times in many years of reading it from google.
I thought StackOverflow was pretty great. This is an unpopular opinion but I think a lot of the questions that were closed really deserved to be closed. Otherwise it would have been a firehose of the same basic questions over and over again. For every person who posted a question and got mad that it was closed, there were probably 100 people who googled something and found a useful StackOverflow answer that was relevant and useful to them although they never posted their own question or even made an account on the site.
Yes. People forget it was a response to abominations such as Yahoo Answers, which quickly devolved into a cesspool of mouthbreathers, haha. Also expert-sexchange/quora which tried-to/often-did hide the answers.
Without its "tough love" Stack would have had a similar trajectory. Maybe a few policies here and there were problematic but overall it was and continues to be a huge benefit to the developer/IT community.
StackOverflow was great when I was a very junior dev working on JavaScript apps. Anytime I ran into a roadblock, there was often a relevant post there to help me. As I become more competent though, I realized that reading the documentation directly was usually a much better way to get answers to my questions, and I stopped visiting.
I was just thinking to my self the other day how it's nice I don't need to stop what I'm doing to make a question that's answerable by someone else. Ai can answer my question without me spending time recreating the problem and stripping out all of the irrelevant context
It was pretty dang useful when there was no alternative, and I’m sure that many people physically could not have performed their jobs without copy-pasting from it.
But yeah, I don’t know how anyone could have any affection or nostalgia for it, people were massive jerks and it was not a pleasant place.
I left it around 2014 and the graph does show that. I think what happened is that around d 2014, it gets so many people from search that it could simply abuse users left and right and still have tons of new questions everyday.
Yes, I liked it. When it debuted it was a massive improvement over expertsexchange, who had previously dominated the Google searches with bait and switch previews.
It may not have aged well but to say it was always crap is rewriting history.
I have found StackOverflow useful on rare occasion, but the friction, idiotic moderation culture, and high noise-to-signal ratio usually made it somewhere I didn't want to return to.
For me the main problem of SO isn't even the moderation or human interaction. Even if a question is answered successfully, the entries have a short shelf life because modern APIs move and break so quickly. For example, I tried learning Ansible only through books and SO, and it was just frustrating. ansible_sudo_pass was deprecated for ansible_become_pass, but there are still many books and SO questions that still reference ansible_sudo_pass.
In the Good Old Days (or my rose-tinted memories of them), Java/C books and answers will always work even if it's not idiomatic, and JS/Python material might break once in a decade over a major migration like Python 2 to 3. Now I look at Ansible or Zig, copy a simple toy program from SO or GH, and just find that it doesn't work, because `sudo` became `become` and `fs` became `io`. There is simply no way for books or SO to keep up.
Java and C are older languages which have either solidified (C) or are very careful about breaking compat (Java). Most languages nowadays are indeed in the "move fast and break things" mode.
Ouch! They are down to ~1,300 questions per month. If we assume a user asks 1 question per year, and we assume 50 lurkers for every one who asks a question, we're at 800K monthly visitors.[1]
That is tragically low!
[1] 1300 x 12 x 51 = ~800K. x12 because every month, 1 user out of twelve asks a question, and x51 because there are 50 lurkers for each poster. I'm sure my assumptions are questionable, and curious about corrections, but we're still at very low numbers.
This is why you never pay $1.8 billion for a social media company.
It never ends well for the new owner. Not just Stack Overflow but also Tumblr, Vine, MySpace, Twitter, and more. Instagram might be the only exception.
Good job on the founders for selling at the peak though.
Insta and YT were bought fairly early on the ascent and then pumped hard with some resources and autonomy before being folded in completely. WhatsApp is a legit counterpoint though.
They were made into social media, but when they were aquired they were just video hosting and sms replacements with little (no?) social engagement aspect.
The crazy thing is AI uses stackoverflow, certain parts of reddit, and other forums for a reference and without it will soon become unable to keep up with modern technology. And they are all dying.
The risk is that beyond hobbyists technology will stagnate. It’s already much more productive using one or two frameworks over the rest of what’s available, and without training data it won’t be able to advance beyond those current popular frameworks.
A lot of companies don't hire at the end of the year because of holidays breaking up schedules, coupled with strapped budgets by that point. New year starts, budgets are refreshed, everyone is back to work so hiring pipelines can roll again. Get hired in early February, on-board for a couple of weeks, really start to dig into work at the end of February and early March. You don't want to look like you don't know anything, so instead of asking your coworker sitting next to you or just a Slack DM away, you throw a question up on Stack Overflow and hope to get an answer that gets you unstuck.
Both before my time. These days it seems like every site is able to withstand pretty much every controversy. Facebook should have died about 5 times by now but the company is as strong as ever.
I can relate to being distracted for a time before a meeting and unable to focus on something else in preparation for it, but these lines stuck out in a way I can't relate:
> unpleasant if I end up not liking the person
> Their tone, manner of speaking, their emotions. That can ruin my whole day.
Why should this person demand that they like or are liked by everyone, and why should it ruin their day to keep things professional? That sounds extremely highly-strung.
I've been getting this too, authenticator prompts saying "logged in" and asking for confirmation, but no history whatsoever when I went to security to check.
It freaked me out the first time, I went through all the security settings I could find, but it was if it never happened.
I just ignored it the second time, but it's a bit unsettling, because the default authenticator flow also has the chance of accidentally hitting the right number.
Weird to come back to a terminal running edge unprompted and the auto classifier waving it though as 'safe".
My reaction was also, "I need dev containers ".
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