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Comment by dlisboa | Hacker News Reader

There should be a concept called "engineering privilege".

I see some companies do things that are widely out of their core product and engineers there just having fun with a bunch of different stuff with seemingly no commitment to bring in revenue. They'll re-invent/re-write things constantly, write a new compiler/package manager for their chosen language, create new frameworks, new open source projects unrelated to their companies, etc.

It must be awesome to be able to work in these conditions and still get paid. I'm not hating on it, it's how we get a lot of the good stuff we use.

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And the cherry on the cake: you get paid to work on your engineering project, get traction around it as opensource and if there is enough traction, leave the company and spin-off a new one to sell the same product to other companies!

It's surely a lot of work but you get basically the discovery phase til market fit with your ass covered. Kudos to the engineers that pull that out, I really mean it!

That’s why nowadays every company will require that they legally own projects you work on during work hours unless explicitly asked. And many ask you to sign non compete clauses so you don’t take all the knowledge you acquired on the job to the competition, including your own projects, through this is quite hard to really enforce.

As long as you convince them to MIT license it doesn't really matter though right?

That seems to be common sense, is it not the default? That should be the norm if it isn't, it's like being a freelancer and being hired and publishing the project in your own name, that's borderline criminal imo.

A lot of companies were founded by one or a group of people leaving a company and opening a competitor with the knowledge they gained while working for them. Anthropic, as I understand it, is an example (from OpenAI). Even the company I work for was founded by people who used to work at the "old" industry giant and today we compete with them directly. This is not criminal unless you signed a contract forbidding doing that, though you may certainly claim it's morally a gray area. But yeah, it's very common. You don't get lots of domain knowledge, which is required to start most kinds of businesses, until you've worked in the area for someone else for a long time.

> They'll re-invent/re-write things constantly

Re-invent is fine, that's how we actually get the good stuff we use.

Re-write (frequently) is usually a sign of bad power dynamics in the team, code rot and generally bad engineering management, in my experience.

That's why most React shops end up in this vicious cycle of constant re-writes of a perfectly fine working system for this reason. Yeah, must be really nice getting paid for it too.

Ah, but with re-writes you get to post those blog posts for Reddit and HN front page to drive traffic to the company's site, isn't that great?

Sometimes I feel like the software field is just begging to be "disrupted" by AI. So much bad management and useless wheel-spinning, all with salaries far above what is typical for any given area.

It's like taxis and Uber. Yes it's probably bad long-term that local taxi companies have been replaced by a mega-corporation. But there were so many bad taxi companies with rude dispatchers, lazy drivers, cars that show up 30 minutes late, drivers that don't run the meter, artificial supply restriction in NYC (medallions), etc. If taxis didn't suck so much, they might have been able to fight back better, and got more sympathy from the public along the way.

You see similar claims leveled at certain unions like the ILA and police unions.

Are there any fields where you feel managers and workers don't suck?

No but rarely are they as well compensated as software developers.

Also I think engineering team quality is bimodal, essentially a mixture of "good" teams "bad" teams. As with taxi drivers, only the "bad" ones really deserve to get disrupted.

That is mostly an US SV thingie, in many European countries, it is a comfortable office worker salary, just like the other folks on the office having jobs with any kind of degree above standard high school.

My favorite example was from Joel Spolsky's company, where bright engineers got bored with working on bug tracking software so they wrote their own C# compiler.

You mean wasabi or whatever it was called?

It may seem weird nowadays but at the time it made sense since wasabi was "transpiling" VBScript (on which their existing codebase was written since they were all into Microsoft products at the time) to other languages in environments where VBScript didn't exist (e.g. IIRC they could transpile to PHP - and there isn't "one" PHP).

They were basically making shrink-wrap software running on an environment (the web) that wasn't made for shrink-wrap software (especially at the time) and came up with a technical solution to it.

FWIW they weren't the only to attempt something like that. HaXe is basically the same idea and was used to port a ton of games from Flash to all sorts of platforms and Monkey was another similar attempt (i think most people aren't aware of these two because they were gaming related and really limited to indie games).

Yeah the big driver for it, from memory, was them offering on-site deployment.

I remember thinking the same about a bunch of friends I know who were working at early GitHub. What are you all doing build a replacement Campfire? Omg, now there's a team building an IDE because they don't like Textmate? And dozens of similar ones I've forgotten over the years. But both of those lead to Electron, and Atom, and ultimately VSCode. Which given they ultimately ended up at MSFT probably didn't hurt when the acquisition conversations started.

Well, some of these exact people are who built Zed.

> But both of those lead to Electron, and Atom, and ultimately VSCode

You just gave an example of 3 unprofitable projects.

That's pretty much my point: great that we got all of this stuff out of it but in any company not propped up by massive amounts of VC money you can't pay tens of millions of dollars in engineering salary for no immediate gain.

They're projects where there's not a payment page to buy a copy sure, but VSCode especially has I'm sure indirectly led to a ton a of profit - its the natural home of Copilot, integrated with Github (including in their paid product Codespaces), and has I'm sure led to a ton of standardisation and productivity increases across the company.

Indirectly, maybe 8 years after Electron was first started, and not for the company that first invested in Electron.

My point yet again: only companies with money to burn can take that gamble.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the company that invented Electron was Github, and you could argue that Github's technical investments did all pay off very richly.

Greatness cannot be planned.

Because every company may have different needs that are not fulfilled by standards software. We have seen the large number of companies whose goal is to make custom software for other companies So is not always that reinventing is fun, but it may actually be needed.

The same logic also applies for software that is used internally. It's not always that developers want to rebuild stuff, but that they need to rebuild or alter software to fit their / company needs.

We have not even talked about cost or licensing or other issues.

Yes except a lot of it isn't even fit for their purpose and they don't rely on it. Facebook switched from Cassandra to HBase because "eventual consistency is a difficult pattern". No shit, really?

It’s not out of their domain at all IMO. I‘m only using Zed now (despite its non existent GH integration) because it works with Codex.

I used to call this developer indulgence.

> Every change is linked to the agent conversation that produced it. From any line of code, find the conversation. From any message, jump to the code it touched.

This is how Zed leapfrogs the field and becomes a centicorn.

If you can train a model to operate at a higher level and with looser requirements, you've gotten rid of engineers in the loop and built a system for the automated synthesis of high quality software.

You're training systems to produce higher quality chain of thought across the entire software development lifecycle.

This is training data for the next stage.

It's not just a step, it's a leap towards real productivity that your agents will actually use!

Well this will certainly be an interesting test of your unbounded faith in a singularity based on word generators.

When do you expect them to become a ‘centicorn’ based on this fabulous technology?

I’ll have what you’re having.

One piece of load-bearing coming right up

You're absolutely right! Would you like me to generate that piece of load-bearing now?

<Accept> [Decline]

This is right at the seam of the possible and the dream and it poses several honest questions.

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