dasil003

Context is everything. Ultimately you have to use your own judgement about what makes sense because no one can see all ends. Generalized advice from someone without skin in the game is at best a weak datapoint for any significant life decision.

That said, let me give mine. Persistence over generally pays more dividends that constantly chasing quick wins. The modern information economy has cheapened success and skewed perceptions of how much effort and luck is behind outlier winners. The success I've had in startups was not quick, was not a straight line, and honestly probably didn't net me as much as if I had joined Google or Facebook early career, but the benefits in terms of broad skills and success that I can credibly claim on a personal level are actually more valuable to me than a larger number in my bank account.

I agree on the cause of waste, but I'm skeptical AI will move the needle on a solution. The longer I work in big companies the more I realize that things happen because someone has the strength of will combined with the right levers and incentives to make it happen despite organizational inertia. AI is potentially a powerful tool when judiciously used by those who understand what they're doing, but it can also be an amplifier of noise that filibusters real progress when hands-on leadership and good judgement is in short supply.

I wonder how much this is a factor of the widespread mental health malaise that is often attributed to tech these days? Certainly plenty of factors to go around, but consider the connotation of "scrolling" and how common it is a default replacement to boredom in modern life and suddenly it seems quite insidious.

Huh? Blocking senders as you surf the web based on what you want to see is a completely different problem from blocking requests to your server based on what the intent of the requester is. I can think of no way these problems are similar except in the very narrow technical sense of maintaining a blocklist and attaching it to a request cycle, which is really not the hard part of either of these problems.

Poe's law notwithstanding, this is brilliant satire. This line alone cracked me up:

> Satya Nadella is a brilliant man - visionary, strategic, empathetic, yadda yadda

It’s odd to me that someone who reached E9 at Meta seems so unaware of the capriciousness and political aspect of promotions at high levels. These are coveted and extremely rare roles that many talented and ambitious people are earnestly working towards and most will never achieve just by the numbers. I see nothing wrong with ambition but to measure your career by level is a reductive perspective that can undermine the specific accomplishments and relationships you have built.

This obsession with levels is something I see with many junior engineers who have gone through school chasing shibboleths of success. Stanford, MIT, always chasing the well-defined carrot. But often failing to understand there’s a pretty low ceiling to success on the well trod path. Real value comes from solving novel and ambiguous problems without anyone telling you how to do it. You have to realize those levels are meant to capture something about how the most effective technical leaders operate, it’s not a roadmap or a checklist for you to cargo cult. The things that matter are the quality of the work you do and the perception thereof by those in power. “Levels” are just secondary HR structure to manage the masses of employees in large corporations, and if you think too much about them you’re taking your eyes off the ball.

> We've all experienced that stare when talking to someone who does not have sufficient depth of understanding in a topic.

I think you're really putting your finger on something here. LLMs have blown us away because they can interact with language in a very similar way to humans, and in fact it approximates how humans operate in many contexts when they lack a depth of understanding. Computers never could do this before, so it's impressive and novel. But despite how impressive it is, humans who were operating this way were never actually generating significant value. We may have pretended they were for social reasons, and there may even have been some real value associated with the human camaraderie and connections they were a part of, but certainly it is not of value when automated.

Prior to LLMs just being able to read and write code at a pretty basic level was deemed an employable skill, but because it was not a natural skill for lots of human, it was also a market for lemons and just the basic coding was overvalued by those who did not actually understand it. But of course the real value of coding has always been to create systems that serve human outcomes, and the outcomes that are desired are always driven by human concerns that are probably inscrutable to something without the same wetware as us. Hell, it's hard enough for humans to understand each other half the time, but even when we don't fully understand each other, the information conferred through non-verbal cue, and familiarity with the personalities and connotations that we only learn through extended interaction has a robust baseline which text alone can never capture.

When I think about strategic technology decisions I've been involved with in large tech companies, things are often shaped by high level choices that come from 5 or 6 different teams, each of which can not be effectively distilled without deep domain expertise, and which ultimately can only be translated to a working system by expert engineers and analysts who are able to communicate in an extremely high bandwidth fashion relying on mutual trust and applying a robust theory of the mind every step along the way. Such collaborators can not only understand distilled expert statements of which they don't have direct detailed knowledge, but also, they can make such distilled expert statements and confirm sufficient understanding from a cross-domain peer.

I still think there's a ton of utility to be squeezed out of LLMs as we learn how to harness and feed them context most effectively, and they are likely to revolutionize the way programming is done day-to-day, but I don't believe we are anywhere near AGI or anything else that will replace the value of what a solid senior engineer brings to the table.

In the corporate world ecosystem and fungibility of programmers are the top priority. The only way Elixir will get traction there is by Elixir companies literally growing to Fortune 500 size and showing the language/ecosystem is viable at that scale. Even then I doubt the advantages of Elixir will move the needle for that type of company because once you scale up the challenge is 99% people, teams, and communication; the elegance and efficiency of the code and ops don't matter much in those types of environments.

He didn't say inertia, he said mature. It take a while for a language/platform to develop a solid ecosystem and stabilize. That absolutely has value, and is something you can't get out of a new system no matter what novel problems it solves.

As far as new apps go, yeah I think it's still pretty optimal for a huge swath of web apps, especially for early incubation when you have <20 engineers and you need to move quick. Not if you need web sockets, or other concurrency / performance critical applications though.

Sure, but there's no single person that believes engineers must be all those things, you're conflating many opinions to form an impossible litmus test. In reality as the GP pointed out: great engineers don't all fit the same mold, and frankly neither do all jobs and hiring manager expectations.

I agree with the quote as stated, but I would refactor it for a more powerful insight.

I do believe order of magnitude improvements in productivity and reliability are possible, but they don't come from technology or management technique, they come from simplicity. The simplest possible thing that gets the job done can be infinitely more reliable than whatever baroque contraption comes out of typical fog-of-war enterprise environments. The trick is having the judgement to understand what complexity is essential and how to distill things down to the most valuable essence. This is something AI will never be able to do, because the definition of value is in the eye of the human beholder.

That line jumped out at me as well as being weirdly specific and reductive compared to the rest of the article which read as pretty broadly truthy.

My take as a middle manager in medium sized company (but who came from a startup background) is that some structure is necessary as a company scales just for people to know how to do their jobs. You can design it lots of different ways from light to heavy, but once you go beyond Dunbar's number you can't just rely on common sense and informal communication. If you really really hate "process", you can push things pretty far, and I guess Steam would be the canonical example here, but even there you see that it heavily filters for certain personality types and the politics can be brutal if you're not part of the in-crowd.

Sure, I get it, but I think it's a pretty powerful observation that the internet has enabled a proliferation of markets for lemons by lowering the bar so much for distribution, and raising the bar so much for baseline marketing, that it has eroded previous signals for quality across innumerable domains and jobs-to-be-done.

I don't disagree that business will always try to drive down labor costs, but this is kind of a weird take given west coast tech companies are the ones that normalized $500k-$1m total comp for the rank and file software engineers with 5-10 years experience. East coast, let alone the rest of the world never even sniffed that until FAANG set the standard.

> Things don't get more complicated the higher you go, they get easier, precisely because you're in the position of power and the influence, real or shadow, to actually have your words have meaning

Spoken like someone who's never been in a position of leading others. I'm not here to defend "leadership", there are good leaders and bad leaders, but scaling and influencing in a large organization is not a simple thing and if you don't acknowledge that then you're living in a fantasy world.

Yes thank you for inflation lesson, I spent part of my childhood in Brazil in the late 80s and early 90s, so I understand inflation better than most Americans.

For reference, I earned $26k at my first full time programming job.

This is an easy reaction to have in an internet forum, and of course it will get a lot of support because it resonates with the rank and file, so you'll naturally get a lot of internet points at places like HN and LinkedIn.

But as you rise in the org chart things get more nuanced and complicated. First, you have to pick your battles. You can stand up for precisely as much as your reputation allows, and in a large corporation that is always pretty small when it comes to ingrained culture or explicit leadership mandates.

Second, business realities and the end of ZIRP are something that a whole generation of software developers have been sheltered from, but is nevertheless a real thing that is not purely a result of greedy management. I started working in 2000, and had a decade under my belt leading teams and becoming CTO of a Web 2.0 era startup before I made as much money as new grads expect to earn today fresh out of school.

I am thankful for that time though, because being in a small company truly flattens and aligns things so every single person understands the business stakes because it's an open book. At scale, leadership empathy and rank and file business understanding inevitably break down, and middle managements job is to satisfice between them as much as possible while still recognizing what pays the bills. Ultimately as an employee of a large company you have to see past the cognitive dissonance and corporate speak, and make a call on whether you believe in the leadership or not. If you don't, then your best bet is to move on, grandstanding for the sake of reputation with the burnt out and the jaded doesn't actually benefit anyone.

Of course less famous people also had good work ethics we just don’t have their quotes immortalized.

So all you’ve really done is subsumed any discussion of the merits of the idea itself into a hand-wringing fest about privilege that was inevitable from the beginning and could equally apply to any famous quote from history. I really don’t see the value in this kind of hand-wringing.

I disagree, agentic coding is a very different skill set. When you are talking about maintaining massive corporate code bases it’s not a instant-gratification activity like vibe coding a small prototype, a lot of guardrails and frankly a new level of engagement in code review becomes necessary. Ultimately I think this will change the job enough that many folks won’t make the transition.

What a cynical and dismissive take, of no value to anyone.

Are you saying that no one of color in that era made any worthwhile contribution to the world? Or are you saying that every white person of the era should hold themselves to the standard of achievement of Thomas Jefferson since that is the power of the privilege they held?

I think the idea was that LLMs can allow someone who has no idea how to code, to write a prompt that can in fact output some working code. This is greatly raising their skill floor, as opposed to a senior where at best it’s doing something they already can do, just faster.

The elephant in the room being that if you aren’t senior enough to have written the code you’ll probably run into a catastrophic bug that you are incapable of fixing (or prompting the LLM to fix) very very quickly.

Really it’s just the next iteration of no-code hype where people dream of building apps without code, but then reality always come back to the fact that the essential skill of programmers is to understand and design highly structured and rigid logical systems. Code is just a means of specification. LLMs make it easier to leverage code patterns that have been written over and over by the hundreds of thousands of programmers that have contributed to its training corpus, but they can not replace the precision of thought needed to make a hand-wavy idea into a concrete system that actually behaves in a way that humans find useful.

This is a wild statement to make so matter of factly.

Do cases guarantee your screen won't break if you drop your phone? No. Do they dramatically diminish the likelihood of cracked glass in the most common scenario of phone falling on flat concrete? Absolutely.

Simon Sinek is far from the worst of the genre, but these aphorisms are much easier to say than they are to exemplify in practice. I’ve worked with more than one LinkedIn influencer with millions of followers, and their primary talent turned out to be saying inspiring things. They had enough experience and the sheen of big tech credibility to be taken seriously by aspirational juniors, but when you actually had hard stuff to solve they are not who you’d want to be in the trenches with.

How do you take a “long exposure” screenshot? Isn’t every screenshot a perfect digital copy of a single frame or a full on video?

Impure software engineering funds your paycheck

This is true in the lower rungs, but you'll hit a glass ceiling where this starts to work against you. At a certain point your reputation with those whom you have worked closely matters much more than interviewing skills.

Yes there is a common theme of not “bringing people along”.

I don't think this is particular to cloud infrastructure. Even on a single server you could make the same argument about using flat file vs sqlite vs postgres for storage. Yes, there is a lot of powerful and reusable software, both managed and unmanaged, with good abstractions and great power to weight ratios where you pay a very small complexity cost for an incredible amount of capability. Such is the nature of software.

But all of it comes with tradeoffs and you have to apply judgement. Just as it would be foolish to write almost anything these days in assembly, I think it would be almost as foolish to just default to a managed Amazon service because it scales without considering whether A) you actually need that scale and B) there are other concerns considerations as to why that service might not be the best technical fit (in particular, I've heard regrets due to overzealous adoption of DynamoDB on more than one occasion).

Sorry, can't agree with this. The hiring manager's decision carries the most weight yes, but saying it's biased towards the screen is over-generalizing. I'm sure sometimes it is, but as someone who interviewed thousands and hired hundreds over a quarter century career at many organizations large and small, I can tell you unequivocally that technical feedback can and does regularly override my screening signal.

Yeah I think this is a great mental framework. Getting rejected hurts, it's natural to want to find a reason, and with some self-reflection it definitely can help one grow. But you gotta be very careful about over-indexing on any one interview where the reasons for rejection may or may not have anything to do with what you did and said during the interview (let alone your personhood).

Frankly, if you want to get better at interviewing, it's better to do more general research on what hiring managers and companies want, and then do more interviews to practice communicating that you have the skills and temperament to deliver value.

One specific piece of advice to the OA: this kind of post might feel cathartic, but it doesn't get you closer to your goal. Sure, it will resonate, people will commiserate, and you'll get some dopamine and internet points—but if your goal is to work at a top tier company like Anthropic then such a post can only hurt you. The reality in fast-growing, ambitious companies at the forefront of the AI bubble is that expectations are sky high, and getting things done to attempt to meet those expectations is incredibly difficult for a hundred different reasons. In this type of environment, whatever technical skills you have are not enough. To be successful you need a sustained and resourceful effort to solve whatever problems come your way. One of the most toxic traits is having a victim mentality. Unfortunately it's a common affliction due to the low agency that individuals have in big companies and late stage capitalism in general, but you've got to tamp it down and focus on what you can control (which in practice is often more than you might think). While this post doesn't directly demonstrate a victim mentality, it suggests internalizing the rejection ("My best wasn't good enough. I'm not good enough.") in a way that is adjacent and something that would give me significant pause if I was a hiring manager evaluating for a role in a chaotic company.