I would bet that anyone who's worked with these models extensively would agree.
I'll never forget the sama AGI posts before o3 launched and the subsequent doomer posting from techies. Feels so stupid in hindsight.
I'll never forget the sama AGI posts before o3 launched and the subsequent doomer posting from techies. Feels so stupid in hindsight.
Especially with the amount of money that was put into just astroturfing the technology as more than it is.
From a person who is responsible for delivering projects, I’ve never thought “it sure would be nice if I had a few junior devs”. Why when I can poach an underpaid mid level developer for 20% more?
Turns out some people suck, but most of them don’t suck.
Unlike AI, which gives me fake methods, broken code, and wrong advice with full confidence.
Yes it was just as well structured as I - someone who has been coding as a hobby or professionally for four decades - would have done.
I think I wrote -200 lines of code on my last PR. I may be doing something bad for that number to be negative.
The other part of my job is leading larger projects where I purposefully don’t commit to pulling stories off the board since I’m always in meetings with customers, project managers, sales or helping other engineers.
I might even then do a separate POC as a research project/enablement. But it won’t be modifying existing code that I didn’t design.
Even for a service I know is new, I can just tell it to “look up the official documentation”
Using ChatGPT 5 Fast
AWS CDK apps (separate ones) using Node
- EC2 (create an instance)
- Aurora MySQL Serverless v2
- Create a VPC with no internet access - the EC2 instance was used as a jump box using Session Manager
- VPC Endpoints for Aurora control plane, SNS, S3, DDB, Bedrock, SQS, Session Manager
- Lambda including using the Docker lambda builder
- DDB
- it also created the proper narrowly scoped IAM permissions for tfe lambdas (I told it the services the Lambdas cared about)
The various Lambdas in Python using Boto3
- Bedrock including the Converse and Invoke APIs for the Nova and Anthropic families
- knowing how to process SQS Messages coming in as events
- MySQL flavored SQL for Upserts
- DDB reads
In another project the services were similar with the addition of Amazon Transcribe.
When I ask for additional headcount, I’m looking at the next quarter since that’s what my manager is judging me based on.
I’m also a great teacher. That’s my $DayJob and has been for the past decade first bringing in new to the company processes and technologies, leading initiatives, teaching other developers, working with sales, CxOs (smaller companies), directors, explaining large “organizational transformation” proposals etc. working at startups and then doing the same in cloud consulting first working at AWS (ProServe full time role) and now working as a staff architect full time at a third party consulting company.
But when I have been responsible for delivery, I only hire people who have experience “dealing with ambiguity” and show that I can give them a decently complicated problem and they can take the ball and run with it and make decent decisions and do research. I don’t even do coding interviews - when I interview it’s strictly behavioral and talking through their past projects, decision making processes, how they overcame challenges etc.
In terms of AWS LPs, it’s “Taking Ownership” (yeah quoting Amazon LPs made me throw up a little).
My evaluations are based on quarterly goals and quarterly deliverables. No one at a corporation cares about anything above how it affects them.
Bringing junior developers up to speed just for them to jump ship within three years or less doesn’t benefit anyone at the corporate level. Sure they jump ship because of salary compression and inversion, where internet raises don’t correspond to market rates. Even first level managers don’t have a say so or budget to affect that.
This is true for even BigTech companies. A former intern I mentored who got a return offer a year before I left AWS just got promoted to an L5 and their comp package was 20% less than new hires coming in at an l5.
Everyone will be long gone from the company if not completely retired by the time that happens.
What? Of course it does. If that's happening everywhere, that means other companies' juniors are also jumping ship to come work for you while yours jump ship to work elsewhere. The only companies that don't see a benefit from mentoring new talent are those with substandard compensation.
To a first approximation, no company pays internal employees at market rates in an increasing comp environment after a couple of years especially during the first few years of an employee’s career where their marker rate rapidly increases once they get real world experience.
On the other hand, the startup I worked for pre-AWS with 60 people couldn’t, wouldn’t and shouldn’t have paid me the amount I made when I got hired at AWS.
Nominally, for the same reason that you pay taxes for upkeep on the roads and power lines. Because everyone capable needs to contribute to the infrastructure or it will degrade and eventually fail.
> My incentives are to meet my quarterly goals and show “impact”.
To me, that speaks of mismanagement - a poorly run company that is a leech on the economy and workforce. In contrast, as a senior level engineer at a large technology company that has remarkably low turnover, one of my core duties is to help enhance the capabilities of other coworkers and that includes mentorship. This is because our leadership understands that it adds workforce retention value.
> To a first approximation, no company pays internal employees at market rates in an increasing comp environment after a couple of years especially during the first few years of an employee’s career where their marker rate rapidly increases once they get real world experience.
That's why I mentioned it being a cross-industry symbiotic relationship. Your company may not retain the juniors that you help train, but the mid level engineers you hire are the juniors that someone else helped train. If you risk not mentoring juniors, you encourage other companies to do the same and reduce the pool of qualified mid level engineers available to you in the future.
> On the other hand, the startup I worked for pre-AWS with 60 people couldn’t, wouldn’t and shouldn’t have paid me the amount I made when I got hired at AWS.
While unrelated to my point, I do have a different experience that you may find interesting in that the most exorbitant salary I have ever been paid was as a contractor for a 12-person startup, not at the organizations with development teams in the hundreds or thousands.
On the government level, I agree. I’m far from a “taxation is theft” Libertarian.
But I also have an addiction to food and shelter. The only entity capable of that kind of collective action that is good for society is the government. My (and I’m generalizing myself as any rationale actor) goal is to do what is necessary to exchange labor for money by aligning my actions with the corporations incentives to continue to put money in my bank account and (formerly) vested RSUs in my brokerage account.
> To me, that speaks of mismanagement - a poorly run company that is a leech on the economy and workforce. In contrast, as a senior level engineer at a large technology company that has remarkably low turnover, one of my core duties is to help enhance the capabilities of other coworkers and that includes mentorship
The only large tech company I’ve worked for has a leadership principal “Hire and Develop the Best”. But for an IC, it’s mostly bullshit. That doesn’t show up on your promo doc when it’s time to show “impact” or how it relates to the team’s “OKR’s”.
From talking to people at Google, it’s the same. But of course Amazon can afford to have dead weight. When I have one shot at a new hire that is going to help me finish my quarterly goals as a team lead, I’m not going to hire a junior and put more work on myself.
I’m an IC, but in the org chart, I’m at the same level as a front line manager.
> While unrelated to my point, I do have a different experience that you may find interesting in that the most exorbitant salary I have ever been paid was as a contractor for a 12-person startup, not at the organizations with development teams in the hundreds or thousands.
As a billable consultant at AWS (and now outside of AWS) because of scale, I brought a lot more money into AWS than anything I could have done at the startup.
That’s why I said the startup “shouldn’t” have paid me the same close to 1 million over four years that AWS offered me in cash and RSUs. It would have been irresponsible and detrimental to the company. I couldn’t bring that much value to the startup.