jdbernard

> Their goal is to make as much money as possible

This isn't a nitpick. It's the point under contention. Companies setting core values like Hashicorp has are ostensibly saying "we're not just all about profit, we care about how we obtain that profit." Positioning companies as having a singular goal of "making as much money as possible" is not a universal absolute. It's a choice we make. Let's choose differently.

For example, I'm not in business just to make money but because I think that what my company does is important, valuable to our customers, and good for the world. I also want to get paid and feed my family, but I have options and will walk if I feel like leadership at my company no longer cares about the values they established. I stay because I trust my leadership.

How does that square against every real-world example of communist government?

I'm in management, have been for about 5 years. I've never found it difficult to judge the productivity of my team members. Even in the 15 years I was primarily an IC it was obvious, to me, who the most productive people on the team were and who were the least. If you are actually involved in the work the team is doing, and if you take even a little bit of time to have an actual relationship with people, it is not hard. What to do about it (besides the lazy "fire them") can be very hard. Helping people grow can be very hard, depending on the people. But my team doesn't work "for me," they work with me. I'm as much responsible to them as I am for them.

As another comment points out, the people that use these tools would never give their reports the same data about their own "productivity." Employers try not to even let employees know about this kind of surveillance because it directly undermines any supposed "team culture." They have no place in an equitable relationship. When management uses these kinds of tools they make it clear that they don't care about those being managed. They don't care enough to be honest with them, to be accountable themselves for how they manage. The obvious message these tools send to those under this kind of management is that that management does not see them as respected colleagues and team members, but rather cogs in the machine, "resources" to be exploited.

I agree with the author's broader point about being more open to alternative paths into UNIX/hackery/etc. However, I'm not sure that I agree entirely with this statement at the end:

> I’m pretty confident that someone who practices programming strictly as a hobby, less than ten hours a week, will eventually get just as good at it as one of these "fledgling hackers" who doesn’t do anything else with their spare time.

I'm not sure. Maybe, if the fledgling hacker isn't able to use their time effectively and the hobbyist is. But that assumes that very thing the author discussed in the beginning: the hobbyist has some prior foundational experience that allows them to be more effective with their time than the fledgling.

In my experience if you want to excel in any discipline, you have to spend some time at some point deeply-focused on it. If we assume the path to mastery is linear, 10 hrs/week for 10 years (~5000 hours) leaves less time for mastery than 60 hrs/week for 2 years (~6000 hours). In my experience mastery is not linear and makes this calculus even worse for the casual learner. Learnings compound and not all hours of practice are equal in efficacy. The more experience practitioner is likely to be getting more out of the time that they spend.

I do believe, emphatically, in the value of consistent effort over time. I've spent a few years picking up piano, but its 4 hrs/week. My goal with piano is to "be good in 10 years." But still, this to me highlights the gap between casual progress and dedicated effort. One of the main reasons I feel like I'm able to actually make progress with only 4 hr/week is because I have the prior experience of reaching a fairly high level of proficiency playing bass after 20+ years. There were times earlier in my musical study where I spent 30+hrs/week with the bass and built a foundation of musical knowledge and discipline that allows me to be more effective with a lesser time investment on piano now. Even with that prior foundation I don't expect that with 10 years of 4 hrs/week effort that I will be comparable in skill or knowledge to a professional pianist.

I think, based on my experience, that immersing yourself in a subject and making it a major pursuit in your life, taking up a large portion of your waking hours, is qualitatively different than the same amount of time invested over a longer horizon. You make connections faster when the study is top-of-mind. You notice patterns and build up intuitions that you miss when it's more spread out. The path of learning is extremely non-linear, in my experience. Slow and steady is effective, but let's not kid ourselves. If it is sustained, fast and steady is more effective.

One of the many ways management benefits from having hands-on experience prior.

I'm not sure I would include that in "cost of living."

When the company lawyer is teaching management how to manage, the company culture has lost all positive vitality. As a first-line manager, my reports and my boss understand that my job is to align in both directions. We're in this together. At times I have to help our team understand that they need to make some sacrifice for the sake of the business, and at times I have to help my management understand that the business needs to make some sacrifice for the sake of the team members.

I'm trying to build a culture of loyalty where we take care of each other and where people can stay and continue growing for a decade or more. The day my management tells me the company's bottom line matters more than the people who deliver that bottom line is the day I'm out the door, and my team with me if I can swing it.

As a manger myself, I try to be careful about what I ask for this reason. I can easily ask a lot from a team member, but I often don't have the ability to really reward them beyond a set limit. If I'm not in a position to adequately reward them for that extra effort then I'm not going to ask for it.

Our position straddles the fence. We have to support the company and our team members. Ideally we do that by keeping incentives and compensation aligned. But corporations are usually structured to have a predictable limit on the ways we can compensate employees, but rarely any limits on what we can expect from employees. We should be careful there to be fair.

There is a difference, I think, between consequences resulting from your actions and being prevented from taking those actions at all. With regard to speech it's not a clear line, certainly, but the distinction matters, I think.

The problem is that inevitably "but they're morons" becomes the excuse to deny them agency and freedom. And then it's just a matter of who gets to decide who is "smart" enough to deserve freedom. Every single time we've gone down that path it's led to oppression and abuse.

I'm glad we didn't have to worry about Mozart or Beethoven trying to bury their previous works so that they wouldn't have to compete with their previous titles. This seems like a perverse incentive unique to modern creative works.

I don't think so? It sounds like the state of the app is being persisted via the chat history:

> We represented the state of the app as a json with some prepopulated entries which helped define the schema. Then we pass the prompt, the current state, and some user-inputted instruction/API call in and extract a response to the client + the new state.

It seems like there is a lot of disagreement and discussion about the role of SRE vs Devs. My team is responsible for our own operations (we are Dev and DevOps, no SRE team), this is a great list of questions to ask ourselves during the planning and estimation phase before we build our new stuff.

I have found myself in a similar position for most of my career. I also got into for the love of working with code. But I've stayed in the industry largely because it enables me to provide a comfortable lifestyle for my family.

I am still passionate about writing software, but the software I like to write doesn't pay the bills. It's avocational. The tech industry afforded my family the lifestyle I desire, but it didn't really ignite my passion, it was just lucrative.

I've since shifted into management. I'm finding new fulfillment in creating the kinds of teams I wish I had as an IC, that lets individuals work in ways they find fulfilling.

I'm sure they'd be happy to give you a refund. :)

This isn't really JetBrains fault, but the track record of products making full redesigns is bad enough that we do tend to assume that the priorities, values, and considerations of UX professionals run contrary to developers/users priorities, to the point where the result is often less useful/ergonomic than what it replaced.

To be fair, this tendency to prioritize your own values above those of your users is not unique to designers. For example, Linus' insistence that kernel developers "don't break userspace."

I don't know that I'm convinced of that point though. I've been developing software professionally for almost 20 years and my usage and reliance on a debugger has decreased over time. At the moment, I think it's been probably three months since I've last used one.

I am similar. I have a very good memory, and am ability to hold a lot of detail in mind, but my recall is horrible. It can take me hours to get my head back into a subject, but once I'm there I can easily go deep. As you can imagine, context-switching can completely destroy my ability to engage meaningfully on any pursuit.

What I've found useful is creating index files that have just the highlights for the major "blocks" of thought. Then it's like skimming my thoughts. I just need the triggers to prompt recall. If I can get the pump started with the main ideas, or key information, the details will flow.

I also tend to take copious notes about everything, but I don't pressure myself to actually use them. They serve a different purpose. Because it takes conscious effort, the act of note-taking convinces my subconscious that the information of important, and improves my recall, at least for a little while.

Not the same process as above. The index files are optimized for reading and to promote recall. The detailed notes are optimized for writing and to promote retention in long-term memory

I guess, to the article's points, I feel like note-taking is a personal endeavor. If you're doing it because you think you "should," it's probably not useful. But as you are trying to know your own mind and develop your own productivity, it's a tool that can address some specific challenges. What it ends up looking like should be very tailored to your mental processes.

You're right, but the difference is that I don't think most people know it's coming, despite how much we try to shout about it.

I'll second this recommendation, as I've found it very pleasant to use as a developer laptop.

Well, given that people make pretty good money baiting companies that don't respect their opt-out, I'd say it's working fairly well. It's not scammers we're battling here, it's companies that need to play by the rules.

If there is actually legal force behind our ability to say no, then this is not a bad place to be.

Ideally we'd include in the law the provision to say no once for some extended period of time. CAN-SPAM is a precedent for this, I believe.

Well, it's a choice that we get to make by shaping our own work environments. The more senior we get, the more impact we have to shape the culture of our workplaces. In my experience technical contributors underestimate the amount of leverage they have to impact these kinds of cultural matters. We often think about the power we have to leave, but we don't use that power to change, or we assume that the organization wouldn't value our input without any attempt to validate that assumption. I have found it valuable in my own career to be more vocal about the kind of organization I want to be in, the kind of team dynamics and politics we choose to enable, etc. I wish I had done so sooner.

The intractability of the coordination problem at scale is the reason the original article is valuable. At scale, you do need management that focuses the majority of their time on the overall coordination of the work in order to protect the time of those doing the work. Because of that scale you can't involve everyone in every conversation. So you start needing to have conversations that abstract to a higher level, and which cross levels of leadership. Hence "How to present to executives" But even as a company grows, it can choose to maintain a culture of collaboration and transparency, even if the practices that enable them have to change to adapt to the larger scale.

I don't know. While I'm not completely against the points the OP is making, something about this statement "you should go into meetings only if you know in advance what their outcomes will be," really rubs me wrong.

In my view, in a healthy organization, the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration. Otherwise it's a waste of time. This culture of behind-the-scenes-go-betweens also creates a lot of opportunity for opacity and malicious miscommunication (deceit).

Meetings are not the only collaboration point, probably not even the most effective. OP's advice is good advice for increasing communication and building consensus leading up to a meeting, especially if done with an eye towards transparency, as I assume they intend. Ideally you're able to get everyone aligned beforehand and can cancel the meeting. But if someone walks into a meeting blindsided by a predetermined outcome, that's a red flag that you've created an adversarial environment rather than a collaborative one. If a colleague is important enough to be in the meeting then their opinion is an important enough to affect the meeting.

I'll add my data points as well. I've had several bikes, one with a loud aftermarket pipe installed by the previous owner. Of all of them, the one that was noticed the most was the larger sport-touring bike with relatively quiet stock mufflers. Visual presence seems far more impactful than increased volume.

Fixed cost to create, sure. Not fixed cost to keep up to date, running on the current version of OS, hardware. The basic design of a simple wheelbarrow has not needed to change since its invention. A wheelbarrow made 30 years ago will still work just fine. Almost no software written 30 years ago will still work on modern systems without someone doing additional work to support it. And for the few that do, no one wants to run the 1990s version. They want to run the 2020s version.

The problem is that assumed knowledge is so implicit. If you're not familiar with the norm, it's easy to get confused about what someone actually did. Add to that the inherent desire of our ego to over-inflate our own importance, and misunderstandings don't get corrected.

Personally, I prefer to call out leadership explicitly: "lead teams who built out four data centers."

Everyone is focused on work-life balance because so much of the article praises the idea that dedicating your life to work is what makes companies "incredible sources of community and self-actualization."

Imagine you are a young adult with a young child, and your partner also works. How is any of the following tenable?

"Everyone stayed for dinner every night [..] there was no way I was going home before my neighbor was."

What about a family?

"my manager asked me to reconsider the vacation I had been planning because my team needed me. “If you go, who will cover your work?” I looked around at my colleagues who were also regularly working 15-hour days and decided to stay put."

What about your family? What about your colleagues' families?

"Call me masochistic, but I have to admit that it felt good to care about anything that much."

But this only works if you don't have other pursuits in life that you care about that much.

"But I am still nostalgic for a time when the gravitational pull of work was strong. For me and everyone around me."

As a husband and a father, as a manager, I want to create a place that allows people to do their best work, and then go home and give their best to their families without feeling pulled constantly back to work.

"It’s more about missing that universal agreement that it’s really, really cool to devote yourself fully to your work."

10 years from now most of us are not going to be working for the same company. 10 years from now most of my kids will be grown and I'll have lost the opportunity to invest in their lives and our relationship. I'm devoted to my work, but not at the expense of my wife who I promised to share my life with, or my children who I literally brought into this world. If I'm not there for them, present in their lives, who will be? I want to build that community. I want children who take to me when I'm older. I want a family that shares values. That only happens if I surge enough time with them, over time, to know what they value, to show what I value, to grow together as they change.

How many of those coworkers will we be sharing and creating close community with ten years from now? Are we really building a lasting community around this mission?

You say:

Forget work -- think about a side project, a hobby, a sport -- anything that you've applied yourself to.

And I agree with you about the value of having a performance oriented community focused on a meaningful mission, but if we work the way the author is advocating through her examples we won't have time/energy to apply yourself to any other pursuit.

Right, but Ubisoft's actions here still undermine trust in Steam. It sucks because it's not Steam's faint, but I think OP is right. This may ultimately be training people to distrust platforms like Steam and return to piracy.

This irks me:

> We — the programmers, designers, product people — collectively decided that users don't deserve the right to code in everyday products.

Nope. People chose the simpler platforms and tools with lower barrier to entry (no need to code) and the strange, fun, weird things were choked out or relegated to the unseen corners of the Internet. For a brief period you had a lot of people learning to code at some level because it was the only way to engage with the Internet at all.

It wasn't developers, designers, etc. that decided things should no longer have access to the tools, it was the consumer base at large who consistently chose the smoother, simpler, easier-to-use, less flexible, locked-down products.

People still have access to the tools. The Internet has an extremely low barrier to entry. It is accessible in a way most serious technology isn't. My son has been publishing his own page, full of weird little games and odd styling choices, etc. since he was nine.

Most people don't want products like MySpace. They voluntarily chose Facebook.

I hope this company finds a successful niche. I'm glad for any tools that encourage people to invest in their own creativity. But I doubt they are going to achieve mainstream success. Hopefully I'm wrong.