jitix

I like this idea. Do you have any middleware in your current setup that added the contents of this directory to the agent prompt?

I meant the “grind”, short term profit mentality of SWE market has become similar to professionals in those fields, not that any of these fields are similar.

I used to love getting to know the interviewer and doing things like that but IMO the market has shifted fundamentally on both ends for this to be effective anymore for most SaaS roles. This is anecdotal for US/Canada tech market over the past 10 years so YMMV.

Developers Side: Since developers don't have job security anymore (at least for those who work on common languages like Go, Python, Java and Typescript) they are better off learning and keeping in touch with leetcode and system design questions, looking for new opportunities and interviewing in "batch mode" when looking for a job. The idea is to clear as many interviews as possible using the same concepts, get in and make money asap before you get laid off. No incentive for collaboration or for fulfilling but esoteric stuff like Haskell and Scala. Career security > Job security.

Companies Side: On the other end software companies have less trust in developers staying long term so they want to make the interview process as quick and risk free as possible. In essence they are betting that by perusing 100s of resumes and hiring someone who seemingly knows CS concepts they can get some value out of them before they leave. Standardized tests/vetting > team fit.

TLDR; The art is gone from this job, its become akin to management consulting or investment banking. Quality and UX seems to be regressing across the board as a result.

All the while there are numerous issues with Firefox on M1. They simply ignore or close them as “works for me” [1] while I personally have encountered at least half of these issues as of last month.

IMO they should first focus on being a good cross platform browser that works well on desktop arm before doing anything else.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=M1

IMO for many people a laptop means highly portable, wire free 'desktop' computing experience that you can't get on a tablet. Therefore the comparison for mobility is with a tablet and not a powerful Windows laptop.

Plus many people working in tech have specific systems for specific tasks; I use a spec'ed up Windows laptop for heavy lifting and games, and an M1 Air as my main computer.

Thanks for highlighting that! I think in the new economic cycle we should judge companies in a holistic manner, including the CEO’s personality and character because such things often affect how they provide value or screw over customers.

I don’t see the advent of generative art any different than when we moved from paper to photoshop.

For those unaware the vast majority of graphic artists start their projects with assets and base images that they themselves don’t create. With generative ai you’re simply going one step further and have another new tool create a more polished version that you can edit to remove extra fingers, etc. It’s simply moving the baseline from 20% done to 60% done, which will result in artists producing even higher fidelity and more detailed art.

For example an artist could generate a bunch of scenes using Sora and create a collage of them for a larger piece of art, something that is prohibitively time consuming right now.

I went over the list and IMO the omission of any verification center at the airport creates a huge friction in your app's adoption.

Just looking at the locations, it's a 2-3hr cab ride in Mumbai/Kolkata between the airports and the transcorp centers during rush hours, and 1-2hr trip in Delhi. Also credit cards are widely accepted at most places except roadside stalls, etc.

This service would be beneficial to visitors and NRIs (like me) if cross-sold with SIM cards or in currency exchanges at airports, otherwise I fail to see a valid use case due to the sheer inconvenience of having to take such a long cab ride in traffic. Also a lot of international flights land at night so visitors would have to dedicate at least half of next day to go verify their identity.

I 100% agree with you and the ability to scale workforce up and down is a key factor in market competitiveness. But offer rescinding is equivalent of a first responder taking off your tourniquet and simply refusing to put another on, leaving you to bleed out. If you can't afford another tourniquet maybe don't take off the one that's holding things together.

IMO hiring be done with a more medium term (6-12 months) mentality based on available runway, and sending out an offer and then rescinding on it usually is a symptom of bad organization where department heads are hiring without CFO buy-in. Maybe just freeze hiring and do layoffs when runway goes below certain level?

This seems like short term reactive thinking but I'm sure every programmer worth their salt will research "<company x> layoffs/rescind/return to office" before accepting an offer. I recently went through the interview gauntlet and past layoffs and policy changes were a key deciding factor for me.

I could imagine that in a bull market candidates would ask for offer acceptance bonuses before quitting their current jobs as a form of assurance. And this issue is even more severe in countries where 2-3 month notice is the norm.

This is a general issue across all fields - blindly following other companies or people is never a good idea because you don't know all the internal and external variables that the person/organization was working with. In fact in business schools they often teach you to scrutinize established patterns and norms and apply various frameworks in conjunction with statistical analysis to draw conclusions.

What your employees and customers observe and perceive is the reality, not what Google, Martin Fowler or Bill Gates prescribe.

Having worked at smaller companies (~ 500 people) in different stages (series-A, unicorn and post IPO) I very much like the idea of a lean platform team that defines the interfaces that are used to control interaction between different modules, and with external services.

Yes it creates friction and reduces velocity at ticket level but it prevents misalignment errors in UAT and production. This can be solved somewhat by having dedicated product owners in each module but it's often not feasible for smaller companies and brings in too much non-technical chatter.

For example, if your product acts as a metadata repository as well as a task execution engine it is important that the execution engine modules access the metadata only using streamlined (and maintained) internal APIs and not hit the database or maintain duplicate metadata for different engines. This way you actually improve velocity at milestone/release level because you're free to make changes to the metadata codebase without breaking features in various downstream execution engines.

In my experience, with a well-scoped platform team, the integration phase of a release gets significantly smoother with fewer defects. YMMV based on product type and company size.

Good point, but in my experience siloed teams (often if different continents) usually don’t standardize on error messages and codes, and a vague message like “Invalid name” doesn’t indicate which layer the message is coming from.

From operations’ point of view the bug will be pinned on the owner of the service that is returning the JSON to the client/app and it’s up to them to trace it down the layers. A hierarchy of wrapped exceptions helps with that. Kind of like saying “I can’t do it because XYZ didn’t do what they were supposed to do”. So low key corporate blame game in code.

I know that the usual HN crowd doesn’t work at/know about companies that follow this, but this pattern is way more prevalent in the broader “IT” industry esp among offshore centres.

You’re both right and wrong. Checked exceptions slow down development, make code ugly and in my theoretical opinion are an anti-pattern that should never be used.

However in small to mid sized enterprise software companies with average developer talent it’s important to keep boundaries (and blame) clear.

In the scenario in question, the CTO will blame OP and make them work the weekend to diagnose/fix it, so wrapping the other exception and throwing their own SomeModuleException will cover their ass.

Java is popular for all the wrong reasons. Believe it or not there are hundreds of such companies in the US alone heavily using Java in this manner and then there is the whole offshore development segment.

I think ChatGPT and LLM models in general are more suited for "What is xyz" or "How is xyz done" family of questions. Basically a smart search engine.

Beyond that it will simply have the output/personality of a person with rote-memory.

Exactly! This is a strategy that works even for markets without network effects. It just gets even more amplified (and profitable) when network effects exist.

In todays terms the equivalent would be an invite to a closed Gillette page/group/discord that has exclusive videos from the latest influencers (or whatever teenagers like and talk about).

For example OOP could get their daily cat based dopamine fix from a myriad of online sources, most open or easily bypassed but they want to see this one particular cat which is behind Meta’s wall and requires additional payment (in terms of data) from them.

I understand how the market works and how the Gompertz curve looks for new product lifecycles. I have a (professionally useless) masters degree in that.

My question is, what’s your solution?

The shareholders/stock market (largely represented by the board) will replace any CEO who doesn’t employ patterns (dark, fu, whatever) to maximize revenue. And private companies can’t raise capital easily nor can they give Options/RSUs to employees.

We are in the current state due to market equilibrium driven by people’s willingness to pay, and since I personally don’t like meta or Zuck I use Reddit on Brave + Mastodon + Dev.to for my social media dopamine hits. OOP could do the same.

I don’t know how old you are but growing up in the 90s I certainly remember (parents) paying for many of these things we now take for granted. The net negative result is that independent journalism is dead.

Great point, in the 90s people used to spend a fortune (relatively speaking) on taking, sharing and discovering pictures, consuming media and getting their news.

Now everyone wants everything for free, but won’t give anything in return. And they also want market returns on their stocks, 401ks, etc at the same time.

That being said, Meta/Google could implement a guaranteed privacy-first, ad-free option for something like $10-20 a month to give people the option to be a “customer” instead of “product”.

And as you said there is the whole mastodon/pixelfed/lemmy network that people could use, although many mastodon instances seem to be running into financial problems lately.

This is not new, Gillette used to give out free razors to get people used to their ecosystem and get recurring revenue.

It’s just more “in your face” now.

What you’re saying is only partially correct - Yes, for more exploratory programming for a new product with full US/EU/CANZUK based dev workforce it makes sense to prioritize maintainability.

For a company complaining about infrastructure costs for a product that has been cloned many times over, and which is large enough to hire offshore devs, the cost equation favours rewriting in something like Go, Rust or even Java. These are quite tailored towards Reddit’s current use case and many companies including Twitter did that rewrite.

I will probably do too but much less frequently. Apollo increased my reddit engagement, without it mu usage will likely fall back to the occasional scroll 1-2 times a day.

Might not be a bad thing tbh

Having lived in both the US and Canada I could see the difference very clearly. Poor Canadians have it much better than equally poor Americans.

I don’t know what’s the income level that divides better/worse but there are fewer innovative companies and slightly higher taxes so net salaries are relatively lower in tech and other STEM fields.

I still think it’s a good trade off since the society is better off as a whole since its quite common for humans to fall into hard times due to external factors beyond their control.

If it somehow happens I hope Apple follows with allowing side loading of (signed) apps as a competitive response. One can only dream..

Caste based discrimination is illegal in India, but erstwhile lower castes are given academic and job reservations as a form of socio-economic equity. But as with a lot of government schemes this provision gets abused to some degree and many upper caste people claim that as "discrimination".

That being said, there is no enforcement of the "no-caste" policy so in many smaller towns/villages the caste system is still widely practiced and lower caste folks discriminated/beaten/killed/etc.

No government forces you to have kids. If you’re up to the task then do it perfectly and enjoy while doing it; if not don’t bring misery upon yourself, your baby and potentially the society by raising a kid without catering to their emotional needs because you’re too busy.

However my views are based on the economic/societal/parental expectations in (progressive) North America and it’s certainly different elsewhere.

Edit: Added specificity

So it's a selfish choice that doesn't necessarily take into account the child's wellbeing. I don't know your religious/cultural motivations but maybe don't do something that makes you miserable and severely disrupts your life?

See the co-sleeping debate is never ending and highly dependant on family genetics but the statistics referenced above are related to the parents' perception and well-being and not the cognitive development and well-being of the infants themselves.

N/A

Your car, heater, air frier, lawn mower, etc all have the potential to kill you. I’d even argue that the probability of a car killing someone due to technical malfunction or user tinkering is way higher than a farm equipment that operates in a large open area.

If all of these things were locked down following John Deere’s logic our daily lives would become very expensive and inconvenient.

We as a society have more than enough legal and insurance frameworks to mitigate any of the risks that you’ve mentioned.

This legislation is more akin to allowing you to repair your PC and replace a damaged RAM module.

I don’t think any farmer is looking to tinker with the control software, and even if they want they should be able to tinker considering it’s their property and their farmland and only they themselves are liable for any damages caused to neighbours or otherwise.

John Deere is just trying to create artificial barriers and extract more value from existing customers.

They specifically adapted to survive on that diet due to both group level isolation and individual upbringing (gut bacteria development). Different socio-cultural groups often have different tolerance for common food items.