This article could have been a sentence: a senior engineer does engineering and does the work of the PO/PM too.
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I am pretty sure they will be able to monetize it. But there is a big difference between "generating revenue" and "generating profit". It's way cheaper to put ads between posts of your friends (like FB started out with ads) then putting ads next to the response of an LLM. Because LLM responses has to be unique, while a holiday photo of yours might be interesting for all of your friends, and LLM inference is quite expensive, while hosting holiday photos is cheap. IMHO this is the reason why the 5th generation of ChatGPT models try to answer all possible questions of the world in one single response, kinda hoping that I am going to be happy with it an just close the chat.
Even worse, they train their model(s) on the interactions of those non-paying customers, what makes the model(s) less useful for paying customers. It's kind of a "you can not charge for a Porsche if you only satisfy the needs of a typical Dacia owner".
There are only two types of ppl: "the wrong kind of crazy" and "the right kind of crazy". Why would I want to connect with the wrong type of crazy? Ok, I don't work as a waiter.
Every time a surveillance system and violation of privacy rights is advertised in the EU as a solution against child abuse and trafficking I ask myself how such a system could have changed the outcome of a case like Dutroux. Would have been the dozens of witnesses and police officers involved in the investigation suicided a way sooner, later, more silently, or at all? We will never know...
...and you dentist cuts you hair and your hairdresser pulls your teeth. Because everything is a trade what can and should be learned, except if it's related to writing and selling software.
To be fair, you did not say that marketers ship working and maintainable code, salespeople answer technical questions without backup the correct way. Therefore you might be right, thought.
Version A: find 100 LOC which can be reduced to 50 LOC without changing the functionality. Then ask the author to go through the PR making sure it's not bloated. Repeat.
Version B: find hidden bugs. Ask the author to fix them. Repeat.
Keep them occupied saving your face. I would also fine tune an own agent to automatise this kind of work for me.
Bending Spoons has own teams taking care of the acquired companies. I read about it here a while ago. I am pretty sure the re-design was done by one of those teams. It's pretty close to the new design of MeetUp. I am talking about those ppl.
This sounds like "doing a major redesign" would be something positive. I'm a paying customer since ages and use the app on daily basis. The new design adds nothing except confusion, at the same time they broke the app on my smartwatch. I'm pretty much thinking about switching apps because I don't see myself buying a new watch just because of this.
Some companies would be better off with less bored designers. This is exactly the same situation like a couple of years ago, when Spotify every week rearranged the GUI and every week I had to relearn how I can reach the same functionality. Back then I had to use the App Store to give feedback, but I see now I can do the same directly in the Komoot app. They're gonna have something to laugh about...
This whole discussion has the same vibes like digital photography 15 years ago. Back then some people spent more time on discussing the tech spec their cameras than takin photos. Now some people spend more time on discussing the pros and cons of different Python environment management solutions than building real things.
The last time I had to touch one of my dockerized environments was when Miniconda and Miniforge were merged. I said the agent "fix the dockerfile", and the third attempt worked. Another time, one dependency was updated and I had to switch to Poetry. Once again, I said the agent "refactor the repository to Poetry" and it worked. Maybe because all my Python package versions are frozen and I only update them when they break or when I need the functionality of the new version.
Whenever this topic pops up in real life, I always ask back what was the longest time they managed the same Python service in the cloud. In the most cases, the answer is never. The last time someone said one year. After a while this service was turned into two .py files.
I don't know. Maybe I'm just too far away from FAANG level sorcery. Everything is a hammer if all you have to deal with are nails.
> Get answers about any cell in seconds: Navigate complex models instantly. Ask Claude about specific formulas, entire worksheets, or calculation flows across tabs. Every explanation includes cell-level citations so you can verify the logic.
this might just be an excellent tool for refactoring Excel sheets into something more robust and maintainable. And making a bunch of suits redundant.
I learned one approach that sometimes works: Figure out what they want and give them what they want. But with the condition they change their behavior. From your post, it sounds like this guy wants to be promoted.
If I were you, I would talk to him like this:
“Look, you are good technically. You should be promoted. But higher levels here mean more than just code. It means mentoring, working closer with peers, hiring people, training them, helping management. We have a career path in place, let’s make a plan for you.”
In big companies it’s even easier. Use the promotion track. Show him what’s expected. If he wants the title, he has to play the role.
Three things can happen:
He rises to it: He starts acting more professional, helps others, builds trust. You win, he wins, team wins.
He tries and fails: He’s exposed higher up. He has direct reports. He’s in meetings with management. He can’t hide his behavior anymore. Eventually, they’ll act.
He says “no thanks”: Then it’s clear. He just wants to stay where he is and make your life harder. At least now everyone sees it.
This puts the pressure where it belongs. On him, to live up to what he says he wants.
[Edit]: You can also tell him that if he wants the promotion, he has to start acting like someone at that level. That means following the principle: “There are no mistakes, only lessons we learn from.”
Tell him: "There was an outage. OK. Then step up. Take the lead, organize a post-mortem, and work with others to find real measures that prevent it in the future. Not to assign blame, but to help the organization improve."
Maybe you don’t even join the post-mortem, let him own it. Just make clear: this isn’t about finger-pointing, it’s about building a culture where problems lead to better systems.
Me too. But in all these cases, sooner or later, I realized I made a mistake not giving enough context and not building up the discussion carefully enough. And I was just rushing to the solution. In the agile world, one could say I gave the LLM not a well-defined story, but a one-liner. Who is to blame here?
I still remember training a junior hire who started off with:
“Sorry, I spent five days on this ticket. I thought it would only take two. Also, who’s going to do the QA?”
After 6 months or so, the same person was saying:
“I finished the project in three weeks. I estimated four. QA is done. Ready to go live.”
At that point, he was confident enough to own his work end-to-end, even shipping to production without someone else reviewing it. Interestingly, this colleague left two years ago, and I had to take over his codebase. It’s still running fine today, and I’ve spent maybe a single day maintaining it in the last two years.
Recently, I was talking with my manager about this. We agreed that building confidence and self-checking in a junior dev is very similar to how you need to work with LLMs.
Personally, whenever I generate code with an LLM, I check every line before committing. I still don’t trust it as much as the people I trained.
Over time, they usually get what they want: they become the smartest ones left in the room, because all the good people have already moved on. What’s left behind is a codebase no one wants to work on, and you can’t hire for it either.
But maybe I’ve just worked with the wrong teams.
EDIT: Maybe this is just about trust. If you can’t bring yourself to trust code written by other human beings, whether it’s a package, a library, or even your own teammates, then of course you’re not going to trust code from an LLM. But that’s not really about quality, it’s about control. And the irony is that people who insist on controlling every last detail usually end up with fragile systems nobody else wants to touch, and teams nobody else wants to join.
I remember back in 2004, my first project was testing a teleconferencing system. We set up a huge screen with cameras at one of our subsidiaries and another at the HQ, and I had a phone on my desk with a built-in camera and screen. Did the company roll out the system? No, it didn’t. It was just too expensive. Did they make a fortune from that experience? No, they didn’t. But I’m pretty sure all companies in the knowledge industry that didn’t enable video calls and screen sharing for their employees went out of business years ago...
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I'm a hands-on data science team lead who is specialized in pattern recognition in tabular data. My first ML model went into production in 2005. In my current position at a Munich-based startup, I have built the entire data infrastructure from scratch and scaled up the data team to 4 FTEs. Here's what I bring to the table:
- Diverse experience across industries such as retail banking, telco, e-commerce, loyalty or social networks
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Considering something to be "state of the art" is highly subjective, therefore nothing else than an opinion.
you just described the ad retargeting industry, like Criteo