Very reasonable other side to this story, which doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Too bad it didn’t hit the front page.
People went WAY too far WAY too fast on this. There HAS to be urgency to this, the software supply chain is presently, undeniably, under attack.
Frankly, everyone blasting RubyCentral the last few days should feel shame and embarrassment. These aren’t evil suits at Microsoft, they’re normal people invested in maintaining a critical piece of infrastructure for the good of all who love and profit from Ruby.
Aren’t supply chain attacks caused by package maintainer accounts being compromised? I suppose too many people with keys to the package repository itself is also liability, but those accounts being compromised just hasn’t been what is happening.
It wasn’t mid-question, but I once left an interview loop after the worst 1hr session of my life. The interviewer put some React question in front of me then said “okay I’m going to go work now.” ???? I was already there and it was an easy question so I just did it, but after that I emailed the recruiter to say “no thanks” and moved on with my day. Still felt pretty good!
Having now experienced such Java codebases for the first time in my 15 year career… no, the Java code is much, much worse. Over engineered and otherwise poorly written Java code is SO much worse than other over engineered code I have worked with.
I like my comments, they’re little droppings of my thoughts at the time that I can go back to. I delete many of them, if they get a single downvote, or if I think about them for 10 minutes after and decide not to have them permanently recorded. They don’t run my life, and it’s only HN and lobsters I leave them on. I just don’t assign much of my life’s purpose to these farts in the wind, and turns out it’s fine.
I’m a little confused, because first you challenge me, but then come to the exact conclusion that resumes are largely unreadable. I’ll look for something they claim to have done to dig deep on, see if it’s BS or not, but I’m not reading every X by Y% with my jaw on the floor. FWIW I’m generally on the back side of the process, where someone at the front (is supposed to have) vetted the person already.
Maybe a good point, but honestly, interviewers barely read resumes, they’re very, very likely not going to read your blog, or remember “hey it’s the person from that blog post I ready 7 weeks ago.”
TLM role has always sounded like a trap to me, I would never say yes to it personally. I’m sure it’s sold as an expected 50% code, 50% management but everyone I’ve talked to who has been near it says the expectation is more like 80% code 80% management.
All of which is pretty reasonable, especially for shorts, which are meant to be thrown directly in the trash after being used to collect some ad revenue anyway, right?
So much of the channel consisting of Hot Spicy Take content really turned me off from hearing anything else he has to say, which is unfortunate, because I liked his music theory videos when I was learning about that.
Lots of very hateful, negative content too. It didn’t take me long to find the video “why this new artist sucks.” Another find, what I assume is an overblown small quibble turned into clickbait videos, was “this record label is trying to SILENCE me.” Maybe, somehow, these two things are related.
TDD works if know what 100% of the inputs/outputs look like, AND you know the implementation will be complex, terse, whatever. Write tests, then twiddle a bunch of regex until the tests pass. This situation rarely comes up in real software jobs, but when it does, yeah use it!
> For the AI, you want to give it some room to generalize/bullshit.
Totally! In my mind I’ve been playing with the phrase: it’s good at _fuzzy_ things. For example IMO voice synthesis before and after this wave of AI hype is actually night and day! In part, to my fuzzy idea, because voice synthesis isn’t factual, it’s billions of little data points coming together to emulate sound waves, which is incredibly fuzzy. Versus code, which is pointy: it has one/few correct forms, and infinite/many incorrect forms.
I’d say it was worth throwing down some cash for, because we get cool new things by full-assing new ideas. But… yeah… a TRILLION dollars is waaaay too far.
Isn’t it obvious that the confidently wrong problem will never go away because all of this is effectively built on a statistical next token matcher? Yeah sure you can throw on hacks like RAG, more context window, but it’s still built on the same foundation.
It’s like saying you built a 3D scene on a 2D plane. You can employ clever tricks to make 2D look 3D at the right angle, buts it’s fundamentally not 3D, which obviously shows when you take the 2D thing and turn it.
It seems like the effectiveness plateau of these hacks will soon be (has been?) reached and the smoke and mirrors snake oil sales booths cluttering Main Street will start to go away. Still a useful piece of tech, just, not for every-fucking-thing.
This meshes nicely with another comment that resonated with me about how it’s seniors that need to act like what the article talks about.
The senior ICs are the squad leaders on the frontline with the rest of the team, knee deep in the same shit they are. It’s really THOSE people doing the constant day-to-day trust building, team leveling, shit getting done-ing, repairing…
And so yeah, a good manager lets those seniors just go be good at that, not bogging them down with work that is a complete waste of their potential. It’s a bit of a symbiotic relationship really, because a manager with no such seniors on the team won’t have the firepower to crush goals, and a senior without a good manager will never be allowed to excel.
As well as the “two-way street” point made in a sibling comment, I feel like a good interviewer would say “this is great, I would keep it simple too, but I am testing your knowledge of $thing right now.” If the person won’t stop talking about the wrong thing, that’s a bad sign of course.
In my (software) experience, the terms are basically interchangeable. Some people will violently defend “architect right, design wrong” and others the opposite, So uh, pretty hard for me, a normal person, to care much about which word is right for the “you sit down and think before you build” part of software engineering.
I’ve never once seen “come back and fix with deadline” work. It’s really only the “with deadline” that does not work. Good teams will constantly be judging if now is the right time to fix the thing, and that fluid process works pretty well. Setting deadlines for tech debt just leads to the people setting the deadlines getting upset and quitting when they are inevitably missed. Save the urgency for when it’s warranted, like discovering a time bomb in the code, a scaling limit that is about to be breached— people will take you more seriously, you will be happier, they will be happier, hooray.
By all means, shoot for absolute perfection on your own projects. I work very, VERY differently on my own code than I do on work code, and I get different types of satisfaction out of both (though of course massively prefer working solo).
Wow that’s insane, had no idea. What the fuck does my behavior at 14-18 have to do with my professional capabilities at 36. I had a terrible programming class experience in HS but was otherwise obsessed with computers. Hated programming until I took a CS class at community college with a great professor, starting my obsession with programming. One year out of high school. It’s been non-stop since then.
To be fair, 1. They made the training themselves, it’s just that it was made mandatory for all of eng 2. They did start out more like just allowing access, but lately it’s tipping towards full crazy (obviously the end game is see if it can replace some expensive engineers)
> Do they also post vacancies asking for 5 years experience in a 2 year old technology?
Honestly no… before all this they were actually pretty sane. In fact I’d say they wasted tons of time and effort on ancient poorly designed things, almost the opposite problem.
As part of the AI insanity $employer forced us all to do an “AI training.” Whatever, wasn’t that bad, and some people probably needed the basics, but one of the points was exactly this— “use negative prompts: tell it what not to do.” Which is exactly an approach I had observed blow up a few times already for this exact reason. Just more anecdata suggesting that nobody really knows the “correct” workflow(s) yet, in the same way that there is no “correct” way to write code (the vim/emacs war is older than I am). Why is my bosses bosses boss yelling at me about one very specific dev tool again?
GitHub was such a cool product of its time, the complete epitome of ridiculous SV tech companies. The Oval Office. The whiskey library. A room full of swag. A product ubiquitously known by every nerd in the bay, then, world. I didn’t work there, but it was cool to be around it in SF at the time. Always sad to see them fall apart (yes yes I know it’s been happening for a long time)