Because we’ve seen the technical artifacts? For example, they released their work open source and we saw the quality. What’s your point here? Redis, when released, was a single person effort, for example.
7,059 karma · joined April 10, 2013
Nah. There are those types of folks, but there are other folks who are clearly above the rest in terms of technical ability. See John Carmack, Sanfilippo (of Redis fame), 100s of others. Or heck even folks who deeply understand the entire stack like Casey Muratori.
To act like there aren't folks who are "rockstars" or simply better software engineers, and at some point it boils down to soft skills, impact and leverage is corporate bullshit. There ARE people who are simply more technically gifted.
The OP didn’t ask about how to become a staff engineer, they asked how to become a great programmer. Those are not the same thing.
Employees don’t have visibility into their peers actual performance. They see a silver of it and infer. This makes layoffs look random. Then, we rely on publicly reported “I was given a great review and still let go!” posts — which are all self-interested. No one wants to hire or refer someone who was doing poorly so there’s an incentive to fib or have selective amnesia.
The whole cohort of folks let go are incentivized to keep up the fiction that it was random.
All things being equal, there is no reason to layoff someone high performing over their less capable peer. I’ve never seen it done randomly, and I’ve sat in these meetings.
This is not to say whole divisions or companies haven’t been let go, but that’s not the same situation here. We’re talking about selective cuts across the entire company where core, or advertising lost some folks, while others remained. That is not random.
If you landed a job, do you think this new ability to implement a CS 101 data structure would let you keep it? Help in your performance in a measurable way? This is what I mean by superficial. The same applies to the LLM work. You studied enough to where you could buzzword it in a 45 minute interview.
My response, which I'll be more clear with: Maybe it's not that bad that we're more careful and these superficial techniques are no longer adequate to get someone a job in this industry.
> I'm not allowed to point out that this is the weakest I've ever seen the market in my decade or so of experience of it.
Don't think anyone is preventing you from doing anything.
Agreed. Creative, high performing people don't do well in a work environment that's structured like a regional bank.
Valve Software -- incredibly profitable, high performing and private company, did fun things like hire economists (and then later Greek prime minister) to study and simulate virtual, in-game economies [0].
Blizzard Entertainment had giant statues of orcs made and fan conventions before their downfall, ya know, in the ZIRP macro economic environment.
Google allowed their engineers 20% time. Before ZIRP.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis#Academic_care...
Are new features being added? Honest question -- I don't use the product.
Keeping the lights on for a product with 10% of the workforce isn't shocking or new. We do it in this industry all the time. Can you iterate and ship with 10% of the workforce? That's much more impressive.
You did two superficial things and are surprised you didn't feel more qualified? Practicing / memorizing leetcode and having a rudimentary understanding of LLMs (if I were hiring, we're targeting advanced degrees with a focus in the space) -- yeah, probably not sufficient. This is a feature and not a bug as the employment market moves back to sanity.
You didn't specify, but I'm going to assume you're not new in your career. It's just fine in the US for staff engineer+ experience level also. New engineers? Mid levels? Probably less so, and probably similar in The Netherlands.
Worth noting:
Most decisions are 2-way doors. Very few decisions are 1-way doors. It takes experienced folks to identify true 1-way doors and apply the brakes. Having a culture of thoughtful document reviews, for example, gives space for people to identify 1-way / 2-way doors and push back. Having institutionalized knowledge gained from 20 years of running the largest public cloud provider helps in identifying 1-way doors in software development too.
All of that is to caution... yes, Bezos says useful things, can you take it and apply it to your company? Maybe. Do you implement / have the rest of what made it work well for Amazon too?
Until they provide the "coming soon" features I can't imagine most companies will enable this. This feels like an insufficient guarantee: Neither we nor our N partners, who knows how we keep them accountable, will use your private source code and other data sent as context. Pinky promise.
Management made a lot of mistakes to get to this situation. It wasn't we tried a few things and it didn't work out, it was we burrowed too much money, spent too much money, and risked too much.
What other tech company has cut this deeply recently? You name their competitors, like Amazon and Apple -- is it happening there? 20% is not 2-3%.
Are we going to ignore that on average their US engineers costs significantly more than ~400K total costs and they have an engineering hub in New York City?
> 4. Their cloud bill would still be roughly 500 people based on that TC based on committed use alone.
And they paid Meghan and Harry 20,000,000 USD for a podcast deal that didn't work out. That's 50 engineers. Should we look at the Rogan deal too and go through everything that didn't work out in the last 3 years?
You've provided no evidence that by not using the cloud Spotify would have made more money or prevented these layoffs. And costs is one thing: Could they have grown as quickly? Scaled as fast? Hired as easily? Without numbers, which you won't share (outside of "trust me I've seen it"), this becomes even harder to debate.
You extrapolated that costs meant cloud costs vs. them overhiring during the pandemic and investing in things like podcasts, which haven’t had the expected returns. You did this in an attempt to tie this back to some injustice that happened to you in a comment section far far away, which you’ve edited the post to remove now, thankfully.
> Spotify is cutting almost 1,600 jobs as the music streaming service blamed a slowing economy and higher borrowing costs in the latest round of redundancies at big tech companies.
It clearly states later that in a zero interest environment Spotify borrowed heavily and over hired, in this environment it’s no longer sustainable and they had to let employees go.
Did you just assume “costs” meant infrastructure costs like cloud?
For AWS are you aware of SAM for CloudFormation[1]? The CDK[2]? You picked the best representation of Cloudflare (via `wrangler.toml`) but the worst representation for AWS of the developer experience. `cdk deploy` is pretty seamless and similar to `wrangler deploy` [3].
1 - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/serverless-application-model/lat...
2 - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/v2/guide/home.html
3 - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/v2/guide/serverless_example....
What does this have to do with microservices?
I'm trying to debug my monolithic service:
Was it the database? My own business logic? The HTTP framework? The reverse proxy we run to terminate TLS? Was it an authentication or authorization issue? The network appliance in front of all of this? Did the queue fail to persist it at a layer above this? Was it the hosting provider?
You outlined any distributed service.
I work for a startup that's on the cusp of having an exit event valued at 70 billion dollars. Drama within the board, who I have no connection with, has reduced the probability of that happening to 0. There's a chance another company will hire me and my co-workers and match our total compensation in liquid stocks we can actually sell.
It's really hard to imagine why I or anyone else would sign a letter that turns back the decision impacting the exit event or join the company that'll actually let me cash out the equity portion of my compensation. It definitely reflects my feelings for the CEO and not my own self interest.
This is a real possibility and something I'm sure Ilya and the board thought through. Here's my guess:
- There's been a culture rift within OpenAI as it scaled up its hiring. The people who have joined may not have all been mission driven and shared the same values. They may have been there because of the valuation and attention the company was receiving. These people will leave and join Altman or another company. This is seen as a net good by the board.
- There's always been a sect of researchers who were suspicious of OpenAI because of its odd governance structure and commercialization. These people now have clear evidence that the company stands for what it states and are MORE likely to join. This is what the board wants.
> If investors decide not to give money to OpenAI because their leadership comes across as over their heads, how will they continue running?
I don't think this is an actual problem. Anthropic can secure funding just fine. Emmet is an ex-Amazon / AWS executive. There's possibility that AWS will be the partner providing computing in exchange for OpenAI's models being exclusively offered as part of Amazon Bedrock, for example, if this issue with Microsoft festers. I know Microsoft sees this as a clear warning: We can go to AWS if you push us too hard here.
I don't see how the partnership with MSFT isn't dissolved in some way in the coming week as Altman and co. openly try to poach OpenAI talent. And again, maybe dissolving the MSFT ties was something the board wanted. It's hard to imagine they didn't think it was a possibility given the way they handled announcing this on Friday, and it's hard to imagine it wasn't intentional.
They were, at no time, under any obligation to do anything except what they wanted and no one could force them otherwise. They held all the cards. The tech media instead ran with gossip supplied by VCs and printed that as news. They were all going to resign 8 hours after their decision. Really? Mass resignations were coming. Really? OpenAI is a 700 people company, 3 people have resigned in solidarity with Altman and Brockman at the time.
Sam had no leverage. Microsoft and other investors had little leverage. Reading the news you’d think otherwise.
“Staffers were ready to resign” really? Who? How many? The deadline passed hours ago, why haven’t we seen it?
See online pharmacies, health care, real estate (!), loans.
Extraordinary circumstances allowed you to stay remote during a pandemic. Now that it's over, it's fair and expected that they want you to come into the office. Your original contract with them was you being an in-office employee.
There is nothing wrong with them aligning on promotions being tied to you fulfilling your obligations.
If this is all too much, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from leaving and finding a truly remote workplace.
(Disclaimer: I understand some people were hired as remote, told they'd remain remote, and are now being forced to come to the office or relocate. That sucks, and I'm sorry it's happening).
Nike / Gucci / every high-end brand has resale laws?