I was about to answer something about “never” being a bit too absolute for my taste and try to give a nuanced perspective about it being OK to get back to an old job if you feel it’s better for you.
Then I realised I am just 100% projecting and creating excuses for myself, which whether I am right or wrong is a really bad basis for giving out advice.
I am leaving my current job in 3 weeks to go freelance, and I am definitely anxious about it. Somewhere in the back of my head I was keeping a door open to allow myself to go back in case it does not work out. Fact is, I know why I quit and it would indeed be a terrible idea to go back to the same company. So, thanks for helping me sort this out!
I agree with the general idea of the article, but there are a few wild takes that kind of discredit it, in my opinion.
“Imagine the calculator app leaking 32GB of RAM, more than older computers had in total” - well yes, the memory leak went on to waste 100% of the machine’s RAM. You can’t leak 32GB of RAM on a 512MB machine. Correct, but hardly mind-bending.
“But VSCodium is even worse, leaking 96GB of RAM” - again, 100% of available RAM. This starts to look like a bad faith effort to throw big numbers around.
“Also this AI ‘panicked’, ‘lied’ and later ‘admitted it had a catastrophic failure’” - no it fucking didn’t, it’s a text prediction model, it cannot panic, lie or admit something, it just tells you what you statistically most want to hear. It’s not like the language model, if left alone, would have sent an email a week later to say it was really sorry for this mistake it made and felt like it had to own it.