awkward

Software engineers hired for custom, in house work are not building a fixed piece of software with the intention of letting it loose unchanged for the next five years.

Software engineers hired to build product are not exclusively building a finished product, and are increasingly necessary as part of the expense of operating that product long term. Industry trends have gone towards combining and blending developement, security, operations, and design.

Eastern Massachusetts calls it a bubbler as well.

Economic OR status gain is putting a lot of work on the or.

We've put into place a context for intellectual achievement at scale. Why shouldn't status be apportioned to someone who is recognized by a panel of peers and teachers to have useful insight into their field?

What's the force that you see keeping those days numbered? Many ollama models are runnable on a local laptop, and models like deepseek even more so. Aside from open source interest, there are many large state and corporate actors who would like to see models commoditized.

In the 2000s at least, many cubicles had at least one Dilbert up. If you worked there for a while, you probably knew the story and it could get a chuckle out of you. Some people had two. More than four visible Dilberts, however, was a terrible sign.

The end of ZIRP coincided with some reorganizing of the tax code that wasn't favorable to developers, as well. Both hit after a year or two of windfall profits and massive hiring due to covid.

AI is a very convenient way to tell that story as being about an ascendant new technology, rather than a post covid decline for the tech sector.

Exhilarating on site work often doesn't line up with needing to be a full time caretaker for family, unfortunately.

Yup. The trust issues around overemployment or straight up fraudulent candidates have made remote work rare and have lead to companies offering a premium for hybrid or fully in person roles. I don't think WFH only is line you can afford to draw anymore if you're on the ropes and leveraged.

> 7) Do not over-talk.

> 72) A positive mental attitude means evaluating circumstances based on their capacity for self-development.

Contempt is corrosive, and if you're fixing debt in response to business needs that's putting the turnaround on real business needs at risk.

Goldbricking and polishing turds are definitely pitfalls, but the benefit of a low debt codebase is insanely fast turnaround. If you want to optimize for that, you need to do some fixes in anticipation of need, and sometimes those will be wrong.

Rewrites should bring a lot of skepticism, and are often worse than turd polishing. If it's gotta happen people should be able to take that on evidence rather than respond because they've developed feelings for the turd.

This is solid and necessary. The alternative to an objective measurement of debt is debt expressed in contempt. Even putting things in deep backlog to get commented on every couple months is better than letting these decisions on priority go completely unacknowledged.

AI excitement is all supply side. Lots of people are excited to automate their own labor and smooth out production. Very few people want to accept raw AI generated slop.

That isn't pure doomerism - there's plenty of room for AI assist, and people like using AI experiences themselves. AI as a product is here to stay, but the second order of products openly using AI is showing it's limits.

Chrome exists entirely as a power play. For a while, it aligned pretty well for consumers to get a browser that was produced by their search engine. However, it really only exists because google wanted direct control over their main medium.

If you stuff something covered in egg yolk in there it's coming out with egg yolk on it. If you don't scrape whole chunks of potato off the plate, you're rolling the dice with whether you pull it out of a filter or out of the thin hose between the dishwasher and the drain. The dishwasher's not magic - if it takes a scrub to get it off, you need to scrub it.

I don't know about handwashing after it comes out though, that's crazy.

I may just know a much lazier segment of mechanical watch owners.

For accuracy? It's probably a little worse than quartz. The escapement will have a longer overall lifespan, and may need servicing every couple decades, as opposed to a new battery every couple years.

Oh for sure, they fill huge and consistent gap between most databases and most programming languages. The issue is that they are fundamentally a compromise. That means it's not damning to hear that issues crept in with scale and complexity. It's also rarely practical to take on the project of making a slightly different set of compromises from first principles.

Not to get too off topic, but ORMs are bags of design flaws. They are definitional technical debt, the kind that gets you from proof of concept but needs to be reworked once you get to your target scale.

There are a large number of fundamental impedance mismatches between relational data and object based data. Any ORM can fix some of them at the cost of ignoring others, but the fundamental character of ORMs is such that taking an opinionated line on tough tradeoffs is as good as you can hope for.

This is why ORM guy is wasting everyone's time - his problem is almost definitely not going to have a unique or even valuable perspective on all of those tradeoffs.

OpenAI had a publicity cycle around how tuned their image generator is for this particular style in the same week that google released a major rev for Gemini. That kind of social media dominance against a major competitor is incredibly valuable.

It really goes both ways. Attempts to completely supplant all rote math education with exercises to build intuition haven't had good results.

Intuitive understanding of math and similar processes gives you access to these bits of symmetry and beauty. "Rote" and process based understanding lets you take in and use processes and algorithms that are outside of your intuitive reach by treating them with a little bit more rigor.

By the definition of Ponzi Scheme being used here, is there any capitalist country that is not running a Ponzi?

I suppose if you're doing one you're not doing the other - the promise of future horizontal scale definitely justifies a lot of arguments about premature optimization.

However, they aren't necessarily opposed. Optimization is usually subtractive - it's slicing parts off the total runtime. Horizontal scale is multiplicative - you're doing the same thing more times. Outside some very specific limits, usually efficiency means horizontal scaling is more effective. A slightly shorter runtime many times over means a much shorter runtime.

Of course it's just macroeconomics, but AI is serving as an "optimistic" reason for layoffs and cost cutting. It's not the same old spreadsheets putting out different results, it's a new era.

The new form and layout are what the business wants and can easily articulate. What they need is people who understand whether the new form needs to both be stored in the local postgres system or if it should trigger a Kafka event to notify other parts of the business.

The AI only world is still one where the form and layout get done, but what happens to that data afterward?

Optimizing what I do to give the team and decision makers optionality has been a big one for me. I don't want to have a fragile plan that minimizes my effort if it forces things to be done in sequence. Multiple independent changesets solve the problem faster and better.

Reduction of coupling is a related concept - it's always better if two things can be two things, not one interconnected hairball.

In my career I've split time between startups, fintech, and consulting. Last year I've had a few interviews with VC funded startups that went to second and third rounds, where I would be told outright that developers who worked at larger companies weren't as "Velocity Focused" as what they were looking for.

I think there's some active memes in the startup community about not hiring people from finance specifically.

Wasting it is the same as just keeping it unused forever, the other use for heal spells.

There is an exact and correct amount to care. It varies job to job. It's mostly a matter of just turning the big dial inside yourself until you get it in the sweet spot for where you are now.

It's definitely possible to do it in a way that's less invasive but still effective. The question is whether that will actually happen.

This has been consistent across four organizations including one I participated in setting up. They don't seem to have gone far out of their way.