jongjong

I'm kind of glad now that I had some really bad experiences in my career and experienced negative-trust environments.

When I told my parents some of what happened to me in my career, initially, I don't think they fully believed me because people in my stories behaved so differently than they're used to. My parents lived in an environment where they could expect reciprocity and money wasn't so difficult to come by that it would be worth risking prison time.

I kind of believe that a lot of people are essentially forced into fraud. I don't believe that they are necessarily bad people. A lot of people are just trying to get by.

So it's very important to convey to family members what kind of world we live in. I think most of my family members are essentially conspiracy theorists now.

100%, don't argue with your boss. Sometimes, depending on how they phrased a statement or proposal, you can present contradictory facts but never claim to have the answer.

Either the boss wants to hear your opinion or they don't. You need to look at body language, tone and wording to decide. In any case, they must decide.

Disagreeing in front of other employees is especially risky... It can work in your favor sometimes, but only if it serves the boss... For example, you might be providing the boss with an opportunity to demonstrate humility over a topic which they don't pride themselves on. If the boss switches and agrees with you, can improve your image in front of other employees and the boss gets to look like they are a good listener and rational decision maker. Everyone wins.

It also rests heavily on the boss' personality. Some people always have to be right, else they hate you.

Funny.

Older Claude models used to frequently say "I think you've identified something real here" and "This cuts through the heart of..."

Newer models are more negative and say stuff like "where I'm going to push back..." and "however, the real load-bearing..." and "Your point about ... is doing a lot of work here, however..."

>> What will be left for us to work on?

Ourselves.

For me, success always matters because achieving success is what I love doing most.

Unfortunately, it's been over 10 years since I last experienced success... And that was minor success. Most people wouldn't even consider it success. I feel like I've had essentially zero control over my career since then.

I agree, a free market would work that way... Yet 'fail upwards' and zombie companies seem to be the default. Personally I don't believe that what we have in the west is a free market. I think these days, it's probably less free than the one in China. The market here is completely smothered by regulations.

For example, about a month ago, I saw a video about people farming frogs in China... To collect secretions for medical use. At first I thought WTF. But then they mentioned how much it sells for and I thought "Wow. We have a lot of cane toads here everywhere, it would be a great business to do here." I actually started thinking of doing this... This is really out there for me because I'm a software engineer; but I started seriously considering this. But guess what? I did my research and turns out it's illegal to do it in my country (Australia) because the frog secretions would be considered an illicit substance and you need to go through some expensive process to obtain a license. Yes, you need a license to farm frogs...

A few weeks back, I read news about someone who got arrested for farming cockroaches (as reptile food for zoos)... It's like all the entry-point business opportunities have become illegal.

Every time I heard of a case like this where some really good niche business opportunity is illegal in Australia, I asked my AI if this practice is legal in China and the answer is almost always yes.

The other day, I was watching a documentary about Philippines and I saw a kind of makeshift resort built literally on top of a coral reef. Really amazing looking. They seemed to be getting good reviews and actually making money... This would NEVER be allowed in my country. At best, you could purchase a ship for millions of dollars then apply for expensive licenses, then you'd have limits on how many people you can take at a time, etc... So many constraints and regulations. Such artificially high capital requirements. It would be a worse experience and less profitable; and you'd have to be filthy rich just to get a chance to engage in that highly constrained, mediocre business activity.

In most of the west, technically talented people are fully subjugated to suits so I'm not surprised.

Sometimes, there are brief moments when technical people are given the control they need to deliver... But after a few years, they are again subjugated to MBAs in suits again and the capacity is lost.

I see this constantly nowadays. As a technical person, there are many companies/roles where the constraints set you up for failure from the beginning. I've delivered some very complex projects but I've also worked at jobs on far simpler projects where I knew since day 1 that the project wouldn't pan out due to counter-productive technical constraints being imposed... but you know the company is well positioned in the financial system and that the outcome won't matter; so you take the job anyway. You still get the high pay and the prestige from the brand name. There are many companies like this where people seem to keep failing upwards and stock price always goes up.

Why do you assume I have access to such opportunities? This whole argument rests on the idea that everyone has equal access to opportunities. Which is incorrect.

Firstly, it's trivial to prove that the hiring process is broken and discriminatory. Secondly, history is not an indication of future performance. Just because it's been working out for big tech over the past few decades, doesn't mean this will continue. Especially when you look at the socio-political environment today, the risk profile is incredibly high... For a vanishing return.

For me to become a millionaire through big tech, starting from today, the previous batch of tech bros would have to be pushed into the billionaire bracket... That's how much the stock would have to go up from where it is now to make me a millionaire. There would be hundreds of thousands of big-tech ex-employee billionaires? Made billionaire purely because they were lucky enough to be offered an opportunity at the right company at the right time. That's just not fair, nor realistic.

So getting access to an opportunity to take a tech test from a big tech company is just the first hurdle. And the tech test isn't even a good measure of skill!

Should a rank-and-file mediocre developer who joined Microsoft 10 years ago who has since been fired due to poor performance become a billionaire passive Microsoft shareholder?

The amount of corruption which would have to take place to make this happen is unfathomable. They'd need to release all the criminals from US prisons and hire them to work as gate keepers for big tech.

This is beyond retarded. It's not a loophole, it's too f stupid to count as a loophole. This interpretation is a violation of the law. They should jail every EU parliamentarian who claims that this is a valid interpretation.

Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

It completely perverts the entire system. With this approach, any law can be passed by a minority; just phrase as a negative.

I propose a new law: "The EU is hereby not not not abolished" ohh look, it failed to gain majority vote! EU is over! Everyone go home! Look at how clever I am finding loopholes!

Maybe. Probably. It's hard for me to perceive sarcasm these days. I'm becoming just like the neoliberals I used to criticize who gets triggered at the slightest thing haha.

That said, I do think a lot of cynical engineers have a "Rat race" worldview and not the "Hamster wheel" one.

From my perspective, it's like if someone made a joke about genocide. My sarcasm detector switches off. This topic and this game is traumatic to me.

Also, the amount of money which is needed to retire in the game is huge! $1.7 million! I'm not even expecting to reach that at retirement. The fact that someone believes they can get this in a few years of grinding reveals a very cushy worldview...

What I would do for that kind of money...

I've been grinding like insane, nights and weekends for almost 15 years and my net worth is like $200k, 30% of it illiquid in a retirement fund. I never got a bonus, in spite of being called "the best engineer at the company" to my face by the company founder. After asking for a raise, they offered a 2% salary increase... This was a cryptocurrency company with a lot of money to spare.

On the end screen, it shows "Shareholder value created" with some huge number.

I find this unsettling because it hints that the people who built this game are more naive than I am. And this is a game about a cynical topic.

It reminds me of the narrative "No matter how bad you think it is, reality is worse."

The idea that the engineer is creating "shareholder value" is part of the conditioning. They're creating complexity and literally running a hamster wheel. Even more so than the game suggests. Lighting fires and putting them out. They are lucky to have this job where you can get away with this kind of pure performative engineering. Seriously, Netflix looks exactly the same as it did years ago. Same with Facebook. The fact that they have so many users and make so much money has nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with attention monopolization and incentive structures among investors to circulate money between companies that they have a stake in.

Working for a bootstrapped startup; that's real value creation because there is enormous risk involved and no engineer wants to take that risk.

Of course the value creation goes away as soon as the startup raises funding because then they become part of the club and the risk is taken out.

Working for FAANG is more like being appointed to the king's court. The king's fool is not creating any economic value for the average working citizen... And the line for that job is long. Being chosen is not based on skill or talent. Talent is abundant. It's a kind of lottery.

In 5 years, every car will need to include a pack of adult diapers.

Absence of problems is definitely a major factor but I like to think of 'maintainability' as being the main marker of quality. Maintainable code has fewer problems because it makes problems easier to solve.

My car would start beeping randomly and one day it wouldn't stop beeping. Turns out it was because we have a baby seat in the back on a window seat but it would slightly touch the edge of the middle seat. The solution was to clip in the seatbelt on the middle seat even through there was nobody sitting there.

It's a matter of time before someone invents sunglasses with eyes painted on the lenses.

The term is not very useful since most humans are stochastic parrots... At least most of the time.

Not suggesting that I don't say stuff on autopilot sometimes but for many people, it's their only mode of operation. They never actually think about anything from first principles. Their whole approach to language is just chaining catchphrases together. It's how a toddler thinks; it seems like many people never moved past that stage of development.

As a developer, when some company says that some platform is end-to-end encrypted, you know that it means "the default client provides encryption, by default" but you know very well that they could selectively turn it off for anyone, at any time and it may be impossible to know that they did this this unless the target was tech savvy and actively monitoring their network packets during the brief period that encryption was turned off... Especially on the web, they could just serve a different JavaScript library with a backdoor to a specific IP address only and the target would have no idea.

Articles like this remind me that non-devs think "end-to-end encrypted" means it's always the case and they can't turn it off at will. This is not the case.

It sounds shocking because it's one sentence which delivers two surprises; Oxford is older than expected and the Aztec empire is more recent than expected.

I've come to dislike hacker culture. Worst part is that when the hackers succeed with their objectives and take over systems; they become the authority coordinating others and they are often 10x worse than the authorities who came before them. They just focus on extracting money for themselves, pulling up the ladder behind them and building moats instead. There's nothing anti-establishment about it at the end of the day, they just join the establishment and make it much more oppressive for the next generation.

Yes and my perspective is that GDPR has harmed EU startups and helped US companies by virtue of them being incumbents and having the resources to dedicate to compliance. Probably can't be fixed as easily now because of corporate culture around standards like SOC2 and ISO27001... Which I think are more harmful to security than helpful as they create complacency and hinder progress by creating barriers.

This is where I disagree as a software engineer who has seen EU products built and not adopted... I've also built products myself which were fully functioning and scalable but not widely adopted. Building is not the bottleneck.

It feels like there is a limit on distribution. Just getting people to try a product is incredibly hard. Very hard to reach them and ads feel like they're only served to bots.

Yes. A lot of people have a very loose definition. Which is strange to me.

Some people think of the postman who brings them letters as "helping" but I don't consider it that way as they're being paid.

The people who volunteer to charities are helping, I guess... Though some of them may just be looking for future leverage/opportunities; e.g. padding their resumes...

Some people, especially who have money, tend to struggle to isolate the monetary incentive and discount the value of money being given to the person in exchange.

The thing is, the pie feels as though it is fixed in tech sector due to monopolization. It's fixed in terms of who can have a slice at all. So while the size of the pie and people's slice can grow, who can sit at the table feels fixed.

Also, I wouldn't frame the person who provides electricity as helping you if you're paying them. It's an exchange since you earned that money. This isn't the definition of help I'm pushing against.

Also, help might be OK and even necessary in a different system for example, but it doesn't work in the current system IMO. My view is context dependent based on my experience in the current system and how it seems to consistently weaponize help and altruism.

It feels like they've been paid to sell out the users themselves, not just the data. It's weird that EU is so dependant on US tech when it comes to media platforms... While there are alternatives out there. In a lot of related areas in tech, it feels like suppression.

It's incredibly difficult for me to ask for help because I was raised to always pull myself up by the bootstraps. This attitude has seeped into my moral framework. If I get help, it's special treatment; it's an unfair advantage that I'm getting which will harm other people who have to compete against me.

I wish people would just stop 'helping' each other (as it is currently). Help should only be given to people who are in dire need and it should only be enough to allow them to stay afloat. Helping someone to become a multi-millionaire is not 'help', it's injustice; it only exacerbates the problem. It creates a system where success is impossible without receiving help. This, in turn, creates a totalitarian system where people are just trading favors with each other since everyone who succeeded helped each other to various extents and everything they're doing is balancing favors.

'Paying forward' really means; giving favors to someone new in order to obtain favors from them in the future. It's not good for anyone.

Also, no real trust is being built here. It's not trust if you need to keep paying. It's dependency.

Quitting is a bad move. You should just quiet quit and start acting and don't take anything too seriously. Probably all your colleagues feel the same way anyway. Everyone is just hustling and bullshitting at this point. Everyone is laser focused on how to maximize their lock-in factor whilst putting in as little effort as possible. Because it's what works.

You can't avoid the bullshit unfortunately. Whatever company you join, it will be the same thing. If the company REALLY provided value, they would have gone bankrupt. There's no avoiding the bullshit. You must embrace it.

You just shouldn't take anything too seriously. I used to resent being paid by the hour instead of based on deliverables.

But nowadays, in the current environment, I am extremely glad that I get paid hourly. It's a different skillset. There's a lot of acting and sometimes drama involved but thankfully I'm good at both engineering and acting... Also, I kind of like drama. Anyone who cares about their work, in this economy, is delusional (probably had it easy) and it's a matter of time before reality gets to them as it did to me and many others.

I feel kind of bad for colleagues who take their job too seriously though. I can feel their pain but I can't tell them to relax because I have to also act my part and pretend to feel passionate.

However, my real passion these days is money hitting my bank account. Puts a smile on my face. The less hard I worked, the happier I am. And I'm paid by the hour. So logically I need to create situations to maximize my lock-in factor, above all else.

If you can keep up the pretense for 2 years, then that's enough to keep you employed perpetually. So engineers should focus more on acting skills and other soft skills and less on technical stuff.

Look at all the people in management roles who made big money, none of them have technical skills. It's all about acting. If they built their entire career out of bullshit, surely I can build the second half of mine out of bullshit also! By the time I retire, I'd still have contributed more value than them!

It's a systemic issue unfortunately. When some of these unethical CEOs say that they feel like they have no control and that if they didn't do it, someone else would, I believe them and it makes sense. That's why they should try to reform the system.

Great article. I think the problem though is that people changed, fundamentally.

In the day of the crappy forum, people actually cared about interesting ideas, thoughts, experiments, community. You could join a forum and after a few months, the community would embrace you as one of their own and remember your username. Each user would have their own personality and they would bring a certain quality; humour, creativity, experience, wisdom, intellect... to discussions.

Now with social media, you're just a consumer. If you share something, it feels like nobody sees your comment and nobody cares. If you don't have a lot of money and aren't famous, nobody cares what you have to say. No matter how interesting your life and career has been, your unique personality, humour, intellect, experiences; they're all worthless now.

Social media became popular because people changed. Or at least, the average person online changed... But look at me, I'm using social media too and I don't go on forums anymore; clearly even I changed.

Now only money matters and nothing else. Every person is judged purely through the lens of how much money they have and how much others approve of them. Intrinsic qualities have lost all their value.

"The proof was only as good as the spec." Is the sentence which will go on the tombstone of Formal Verification.

The spec has always been the problem. Whether the flaws in the spec arise from the customer or from the developer filling in the gaps in the spec incorrectly.

If I built an entire system and the spec does not mention access control logic, then formal verification will neither prove nor disprove that the software is secure. It's just not in the spec...

You have to know exactly what security properties you want. By the time you've written them down succinctly and correctly as a spec, you might as well have written them down succinctly and correctly as code.

The spec has to be just as detailed and will be just as error-prone as the code itself.