DragonStrength

Now I get corporate-speak tech docs in addition to irrelevant internal comms. AI doesn't magically make your coworkers put in more effort. It just puts a veneer of professionalism over the same output.

There’s a difference between using and sharing. I don’t want to see your notebook. I want to see the finished document. To some of us, the difference is intuitively obvious, so we’re offended by what we’re getting at work these days.

Well, they can serve it that way. Based on my experience, everyone knows who the person always serving slop on the team is except the person serving slop.

I've worked with amazing people from all parts of the world. I'm a bit uncomfortable with bucketing my coworkers' abilities by ethnicity like this though.

But I am American: most of us couldn't even guess our own ethnic origins after a couple generations, especially if our ancestors weren't affluent. That fundamental difference in worldview makes all these discussions so difficult.

Were they on H1Bs? Most I knew from similar countries in the Bay Area wouldn’t have been.

But these visas aren’t about best, btw. They’re about none available. The goalpost has moved to “none available for my price in the most expensive place on earth.” In my experience, the overall effect of these policies was hiring foreign masters students who were more exploitable over American undergraduates who would require the same training. The graduate pipeline, where domestic students were being warned off during the early 2000s already due to poor working conditions, became a credentialism excuse which was also exploited by researchers.

Again, we keep coming to these tertiary arguments which don’t deal with the issue: domestic born Americans are unhappy with their outcomes. Immigration is about the dumbest solution to Americans not being able to afford kids I can imagine. If that’s Silicon Valley’s best solution to a biological imperative, I expect things to only get worse. No, dorm-style housing that requires two tech incomes is not the American Dream. Please look at housing costs in San Jose before asking for more exploitable labor.

Comparing getting an American to uproot themselves from their entire community to move to the Bay Area for a job vs. someone on the other side of the world who is looking to get into America just aren't the same. Ultimately, H1Bs are used to lower the working standards of Americans and enrich tiny pockets of existing regional capital holders.

Regional wealth inequality in America has not gotten better as Silicon Valley has gotten richer and brought in more foreign labor. At some point, the people making money hand over fist need to show how they're improving the situation for Americans instead of just saying "trust us, bro."

The AI discussion hasn't helped Silicon Valley seem more in touch with "flyover" states either. It's pretty clear there's a lot of disdain and hostility from Silicon Valley towards the "average" American.

Yeah, maybe Open AI did some bad engineering instead of this being AGI? What's the consensus on the engineering level at Open AI, again? Every anecdote I hear is a bunch of children discovered fire and can barely keep the lights on from a business perspective. Maybe if they ban others from competing with them they can find a business model... I think that's suspicious, personally.

That so few people are asking for the requirements given shows how much we want to be God that created Man. It's so silly.

Oh, this one is super easy: they told them to. They set poor requirements and gave them tools which enabled "monkeys with a typewriter" to hack rivals. I mean, this is just so uncomplicated it isn't funny. We are too smart to give human beings this level of liability shield.

It took us how long to poke holes in the corporate shield just for them to roll out the AI-liability shield? Unreal. Stop letting these zealots anthropomorphize the latest tech (17th century Watchmaker God, anyone? Do we still read books?) and hold them accountable for the consequences of their actions. This is so silly in a country built on rule of law and individualism.

The HDMI cables are a lie anyway with how many versions I've owned. I'm sick of squinting at the writing on the wires. Just buy new ones.

I don't know if much has changed based on my professional experience. For me, the code was always the fast part. The hard part was figuring out what to do. Maybe others had more mechanical coding jobs, but I've been pretty baffled by those who think producing more text (email, code, or docs or whatever) with less understanding is any sort of gain. Seems like the same sort of braindead thinking that would make someone think the fast typer is the the best programmer.

The context from working in a Valley startup funded by YC and run by one of their former executives is they are not seeing the talent they once did despite mining the same sources. There is little self reflection to consider the Silicon Valley offer has changed versus the talent itself.

I literally said, "we're all adults here," and I was corrected. The new batch of Cal grads are children, they said -- which is an indictment of all US graduates and not just Cal for some reason. Or maybe the startup funders are just like the ancient Greek writers who complained kids today don't want to work.

My grandfather’s career was in decline before my father hit adulthood (autoworker, electronics), my father’s career (nuclear control systems engineer) was in decline from the day he established it, and I’ve never expected my new-fangled software career to be there for the next generation, but there’s a rhyme probably.

I find this comparison to printers arbitrary, precious, and specious. Aren’t the armies of software engineers in tech more akin to the line-level autoworkers than artisans? The numbers would certainly suggest so. But it’s also silly to pretend such a new profession is anything akin to a generations-old trade. But maybe those tradesmen aren’t such victims either in this context? How privileged to be able to pass your profession down to the next generation! No one in my family has had that since farming, when only the oldest benefited.

Sounds like your brain was cooked by sound bites over reason and statistics! Culture war indeed!

In fact, we see this now in Silicon Valley where 80% of workers are foreign born. Not a representative group of Americans by any stretch, and we see a lot of negativity towards folks Silicon Valley will never interact with as a result. And who are the wealthy bigots? Not the richest people in the history of the world. No, those other bad folks in the poor states who deserve it. They aren't under-represented.

Well, yeah, management sees a weak labor market and imagines the ability to fire all those troublesome engineers. Remember, especially in recent years, tech management is made up predominantly of grads from a select set of "elite" universities, whose caliber is determined mostly by how rich the parents are. It's no surprise we're in a moment of extreme labor disdain. The idea engineers with years of education are as fungible as manual labor has been tried again and again with the same results. LLMs won't change that.

15 YOE, here: Well, I just interviewed between October - Decemeber of last year, and since then, the company I joined has gone full vibe-coding and is changing to AI interviews. So...

It's funny because Apple said on stage Lightning was their connector for the next decade in 2012 then shipped it for exactly a decade, despite being the first to ship a USB-C device. When they switched to Lightning in 2012, the peanut gallery complaint was Apple making everyone buy new cables and accessories. Either too fast or too slow for their critics with the same timing.

Jeff Bezos started Amazon with family money. Sure, there were richer folks, but few have parents capable of giving them hundreds of thousands of dollars for a business venture.

If you can point to single product he has made through his "vibe-coding" that isn't for "vibe-coding," I think they would all relent.

I see a lot of folks lamenting how Yegge has ignited a fire under leadership for egoless, factory worker style engineers. I don't think many would care much otherwise, but his post here is lamenting AI is not enough of a factory worker yet. On a site mostly populated by folks who put most of their lives into becoming skilled professionals, hearing "we think your work should be the kind of work we send to the cheapest, least-developed places on earth" like factory work is disheartening. Of course, it mostly seems like Yegge is here to make money off meme coins and selling Dolt plus his vibe-authored book, so why would anyone take this seriously?

I mean, he can't explain what he's building except pickaxes to make more pickaxes, so it's a bit suspicious. It's just incredible how much impact he has had with this little hustle, given his products are basically turtles all the way down.

Every Yegge post about AI reads like a Music Man style con job, but he’s got Silicon Valley startup founders salivating and pushing his book to their employees.

I know plenty of engineers with expensive trucks used to carry their families around during the week and haul their hunting bounty home on weekends. In that scenario, the Cybertruck is a total failure. Where's the exposed bed for a deer? How about hauling the boat to the lake?

Cybertruck is a product management failure.

BINGO: the folks buying these things are doing so to virtue signal their politics. If you need a truck for work or hunting, you're still buying a truck, not some Silicon Valley concept car like the Cybertruck.

Open up an Amazon media app and navigate around enough, and you'll encounter a page with all their "Third Party Software Licenses."

For instance, here's one for the Amazon Music apps, which includes an FFMpeg license: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

There are no empty slots for med school in America. We turn qualified kids away.

As my manager at Amazon once told me, “Amazon prefers H1Bs because they take more abuse.”

Exactly. The difference is doctors were able to cap the number of doctors graduated, and now we have a shortage. Welp, I know the solution to that.

This article is saying the slowdown started as early as a year ago. That of course opens up the discussion of whether this new revision is political cover for the current administration since they just removed the BLS head.

Amazon's hallucinating a fake 1-800 number for me to call is both peak Amazon and peak AI bubble.

Yes, but when Marc Benioff says he laid off thousands of customer service agents, the reporting is "Salesforce cuts tech workers using AI." The narrative in media is a total mess right now, and there are many in VC and AI-related companies ready to help muddy the waters further for their own benefit. Obviously, many small companies follow the media narrative.

From the subhead

> Money earmarked for semiconductor company under Chips Act could be converted into equity

They’re already getting federal money.