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Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

Maybe they should fire these kids and replace them with REAL engineers.

And I know some of those kids probably read Hackernews, so here’s the advice: put away ChatGPT and learn what the fuck you’re doing.

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> Maybe they should fire these kids and replace them with REAL engineers.

Nah, they'll want reasonable pay, reasonable hours, and won't confuse their boss for a living god. They may even have some self-confidence and morals, which would be a total deal breaker.

Most importantly, they will refuse to participate in the administration's regular human centipede rituals.

Did you mean to say humancentiPad?

Sadly you're both right.

The one good thing about them all being so young is it explains why I never got an interview; at 28 I was too old to ever get a job there

Why would you apply to work in this debacle. Ever.

To move slow and break DOGE?

You can criticize it all you want but I'd be working directly for the President and the richest man alive, doing incredible LLM-powered work that's basically never been done before. Not only would all the work be innovative (and thus fun), but it would look incredible on a resume

“Incredible” is far from a given. If DOGE doesn’t provide enough benefits to cancel out the billions if dollars of economic disruption it’s causing, or if the purported savings turn out to be misrepresentation instead of real, you look like a political hatchet man instead of an engineer. A reputation for making mistakes (like making your web site world-writable) and jumping to conclusions probably isn’t what you want.

Take it easy, he was just following orders.

> If DOGE doesn’t provide enough benefits to cancel out the billions if dollars of economic disruption it’s causing,

The point of DOGE is the disruption. It's a propaganda and political orthodoxy operation under a paper thin pretext of efficiency.

I agree, but I was pointing out that the promised benefits of working there were not a given but rather highly contingent on delivering serious savings. If that fails or turns out to be a pretext they never planned to deliver, the engineer who thought they were doing something good is going to be left with all of the blame and none of the money the billionaires in the room seek to gain.

> If DOGE doesn’t provide enough benefits

But if it does, people involved will be the part of unique historical turnaround of a falling empire, and their names will be written in gold.

"Falling" according to a literal shit posing car salesman

I mean if DOGE was closed up tomorrow it would still be incredible resume candy. The fact you know multiple billionaires and a president means any VC fund would give you money to do anything, and you could get interviews at pretty much any startup. While I’m sure an insurance software salesman won’t be as impressed, it would look good for any fun job, and you’d have a set of skills nobody else has. You could probably make a living consulting, using AI to find corporate waste.

> The fact you know multiple billionaires and a president means any VC fund would give you money to do anything

It might give you some contacts, but that’s far from a given. Just because Musk found you useful doesn’t mean he’s going to show loyalty to you, and that’s especially true if the venture blows up politically and you are one of the scapegoats. People don’t get to be billionaires by giving away money to everyone they meet.

> but it would look incredible on a resume

working at doge? your resume would be straight in the trash if i came across it.

50% of the country might support this. The software industry, especially the lower levels like engineers and managers, leans left politically.

Even putting the politics aside, a DOGE engineer experience on a resume would send me the message that you're the type of person who is too cowardly or corrupt to stand up against unethical and illegal assignments. Perhaps that's a good fit for some hiring managers, but it's potentially a big red flag for many others.

I really hope this is an outlier and the median smart guy like you has a bit more of a moral compass and doesn't seem to willing to sell their own country for a cool line on a CV.

Those Doge kids are likely going to be scapegoated and sent to prison in a few years.

Yup. At 28 you’re going to have way more things in your life distracting you from the job, you’re probably prioritizing work life balance which is a red flag.

These are ideologues, not earnest professionals.

You need someone who is

1. Good experienced engineer

2. Without ethics

3. Happy to be paid below market rate of a good experienced engineer without ethics.

Not just below market rate… my understanding is a number of DOGE “employees” are actually volunteers.

It would be interesting if government moved toward some kind of open source contributor model where any engineer could just pick up some issue and solve it.

The Constitution as a wiki?

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