1,282 karma · joined October 3, 2015
We seem to love creating stories about why so-and-so is rich, but, I suspect the most common answer is “time, patience, and no major bad luck”.
In some sense, what seems important is a business culture that has a mission or meaning to exist other than make shareholders money. I'd wager their employees will absolutely geek out about what the companies do throughout the organization. A lot of corporations these days, once you get above a couple of layers of management, is all fluff. I can't think of the last time I talked to a mid-level or above "engineering" manager in a tech company about any nuanced or interesting discussion about technology.
I'm reading this book because, well, that's the kind of place I'd like to work. I think it makes sense to get a feel for how these places think, in order to really identify job opportunities
Edit: here's a Wikipedia page on the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions
"When I get to write or read on a screen that’s reflecting the sun back at me instead of needing to be shielded from it, I get a dose of this feeling that this is what all computing could feel like. I want so much more of this in my life."
I have the DC-1, and where I've used it in direct sunlight, it's a great feeling. However... it's rare that this matters. But... it's winter. And so I'm inside because it's f*king cold out. I'm holding onto hope that this will bring me outside to read and note take a bit more eventually.
My iPad is still king for my "tablet computing". Especially note taking, drawing, design tasks (like CAD), casual gaming and entertainment consumption. I don't see the DC-1 replacing my iPad use any time soon. The app ecosystem, screen, sound, etc, are just not good enough to replace my iPad. Frankly, I just don't see anything that can really compete with the iPad, which sucks, because I feel like Apple continues to underestimate what the iPad could be. (It should be more like a mac and not like a phone. The hardware can do this, the software can not.)
... but anyhow, the DC-1 makes me excited to be able to, say, go to the park and read and note a design doc. Etc. Like, this device could be a lifestyle changer... when it's nice out. Or it might be a device I read documents on and take notes on the iPad. This is a second use case I'm just starting to figure out.
So I'm going to keep onto mine, and I'm optimistic and excited. But it's early.
Sadly, I think this is happening at some places. Like Salesforce. Sigh
https://www.ktvu.com/news/salesforce-cutting-1000-jobs-hirin...
I do think you could do some analysis to associate code with implementers and create graphs, where you account for additional things like time. I could see LLMs being helpful in maybe doing part of that analysis. But I would use that to see where the biggest "bus factor" is, i.e., finding subsystems where there's really only one active contributor.
For planning or task assignment, it might just help to say "ask X for more detail" when there's no other docs or your LLM is spewing jibberish about a topic
> Most programming should be done long before a single line of code is written
I would say “most engineering should be done before a single line of production code is written”.
Formalizing a “draft process” is something I’m really trying to sell to my team. We work in an old codebase - like, it’s now older than most of the new hires. Needless to say, there’s a whole world of complexity in just navigating the system. My take: don’t try to predict when the production code will be done, focus on the next draft, and iterate until we can define and measure what the right impact will be.
The problem is that there’s a ton of neanderthal software engineering management thinking that we’re just ticket machines. They think the process is “senior make ticket, anyone implement ticket, unga bunga”. What usually happens here is that we write a bunch of crappy code learning the system, then we’re supposed to just throw that in a PR. Then management is like “it’s done, right” and now there’s a ton of implicit pressure to ship crap. And the technical debt grows.
I haven’t quite codified a draft process, but I think it’s kind of in line with what Chris here is talking about: you shouldn’t worry about starting with writing production code until you’re very confident you know exactly what to do.
Ah well, it’s a fun list of opinions to read. Chris’ WIP book is an interesting read as well
So… I’m not shocked at the timing. Sales have tanked, and proved the CEO couldn’t be relied on to right the ship.
It’s just one example of how long serious problems can fester in an organization. There’s likely deep cultural problems throughout the company’s decision making apparatus. We’ll see, but I don’t see Sonos capable of being a trusted brand again.
Recently, my company has tried to introduce a “cloud IDE” (the development environment runs in the cloud somewhere). Initially, it only supported VSCode. The only engineers that bothered using it were junior; once people had about 5+ years of experience, they just found it tedious. Once the company included IntelliJ for that cloud IDE, usage spiked massively. (To the point they are restricting usage due to cost.)
These “classic Java IDEs” just launch with features useful for understanding large systems, like, fast navigation and debugging capabilities. Things like “where is method used” or “what implements this interface method” is fast and accurate - i.e., not based on text search. Or the interactive debugger that lets you inspect stream state, track objects, etc.
JetBrains probably won’t be focusing on using AI simply for writing code, but for enhancing all of these other capabilities. This is where I’m not sold on Cursor or Zed replacing these truly language-specific IDEs… yet.
These new upstarts need to improve the ability to navigate and understand. Right now, they only seem to focus on writing, which I don’t think is what’s going to gain traction. I also don’t see any of them doing much other than just fancy autocomplete, which can be awful on a large legacy codebase. So… we’ll see.
This could be generational, I’ve definitely seen poorer DevEx win simply because they gained the attention of younger engineers and lasted long enough.
But this has led me to wonder if there will be gradual pressure to build on top of LLMs, which, in turn, will really only be useful with the tried and true. Like, we’re going to be heading towards an era where innovation means “we can ask the LLM about it”. Given the high capital costs required to train, I wouldn’t be shocked to see LLMs ignoring new unique approaches and biasing to whatever the big corps want you to do. For “accuracy”.
I just sense were about to hit an era of software causing massive problems and costs, because LLMs are rapidly accelerating the pace of accidental complexity, and nobody knows really how to make money off them yet.
This is what I actually expect to happen to the table saw market - they all become expensive, and the sub-$1k market (which is huge) goes away. Yes, you can find an RAS but it's about 10x the price of what they used to be.
I found a RAS from Sears from 1995: $499, which is around $1000 with inflation. https://archive.org/details/SearsCraftsmanPowerAndHandTools1...
So I stand by my statement: they're effectively non-existent, demand is gone after the 2001 recall by Craftsman, and most of the major manufacturers have stopped producing them. I expect the same thing to happen to table saws.
I tend to agree with Jim Hamilton, Stumpy Nubs on youtube, who was quoted in this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxKkuDduYLk
Bascially, mandating the more expensive blade brakes instead of standards around blade guards will eliminate cheap table saws from the market. And yes, this has happened before with radial arm saws - they are now basically non-existent in the US.
So it definitely benefits SawStop to give away this patent, as their saws will look a hell of a lot "cheaper" than competition.
Nothing like seeing how arbitrary layoffs are to seeing how shallow leadership decisions can be.
This is the period that actually defines good leadership. A good leader, at least to me, won’t be led by investors to making largely short term decisions. They will define how their organization needs to evolve and challenge them to make it happen. But what I mostly see, are leaders doing stupid things like RTO then layoffs (goodbye, loyalty!), and then shrug and whine about having to maintain margins while cutting money losing projects that shouldn’t have been started in the first place. And then turn around and say “the future is AI” without really having much of a plan.
The leadership BS really stinks during these times, and it’s something that the younger generations haven’t really experienced.
Wave financial is only 350 people according to wikipedia - I doubt that’s 350 engineers. I know only of Google and Meta that can even operate with a massive monorepo, but I wouldn’t call their architecture “simple”. And even they do massive internal tooling investments - I mean, Google wrote their own version control system.
So I tend to think “keep it simple until you push past Dunbar’s number, then reorganize around that”. Once stable social relationships break down, managing change at this scale becomes a weird combination of incredible rigidity and absolute chaos.
You might make some stopgap utility and then a month later 15 other teams are using it. Or some other team wants to change something for their product and just submits a bunch of changes to your product with unforseen breakage. Or some “cost reduction effort” halves memory and available threads slowing down background processes.
Keeping up with all this means managing hundreds of different threads of communication happening. It’s just too much and nobody can ever ask the question “what’s changed in the last week” because it would be a novel.
This isn’t an argument for monoliths vs microservices, because I think that’s just the wrong perspective. It’s an argument to think about your social structure first, and I rarely see this discussed well. Most companies just spin up teams to make a thing and then don’t think about how these teams collaborate, and technical leadership never really questions how the architecture can supplement or block that collaboration until it’s a massive problem, at which point any change is incredibly expensive.
20+ years of experience as a software engineer.
How about commercial IDEs? Cloud environments? A lot of developer environments these days include a ton of stuff that likely doesn't make sense to check in, usually licensing config is annoying, or because you're relying on runtime services. And all this time engineers spend on their own machines is basically time wasted, which isn't really a great solution to pitch to a business.
Side note: I used to work for Perforce until the private equity sale. If there was a platform to vendor everything like this, it would be Perforce, because you could already do this kind of thing for years. AFAIK not many Perforce customers ever did this, and I don't think it was because Perforce wasn't capable. It's just a subtly wicked problem. Getting this right - just check out and go across different software development stacks - requires a lot of investment. It does look like Perforce has been acquiring many other aspects related to the application lifecycle, so in theory, they should be better positioned to be the "vendor everything on our stack" solution, but I'm not convinced this is going to work out well.
Cloud development environment vendors seem to be the best positioned as a product for solving this problem, because there is less of that "go figure out your DX" aspect left to the customer. But the right CDE would have to have a lot of enterprise-style controls. This is so new that I'm not sure who will get it right first, but my guess is that we'll get to a more "development to delivery" integrated environment, and away from a hodgepodge of tools managed per project.
When companies just try to take, say, a round-robin update meeting and move it online, it’s usually a waste of time. Or a 50 minute presentation where someone’s just winging it with a PowerPoint.
I wouldn’t even bother an online course where they just setup a web camera in class and follow a lecture.
It’s like videoconferencing has gotten so cheap and easy, it allows for sloppy planning and presentation. I dropped several classes in college because the lecturer didn’t bother even learning how to present with a mic, speak clearly, etc.
Companies should just ask for quick anonymous feedback after meetings just to set up an improvement loop.
Social circles are indeed shrinking: https://www.americansurveycenter.org/why-mens-social-circles...
I've read in multiple places about the tendency to seek out instant gratification on the phone instead of just allowing yourself to get bored, and seek out doing something with other people.
Relying on apps for finding a love connection seems like a facet of this somehow. Instead of spending the time around other people, building up a social circle, most just try to "see what the app brings" because they've just lost the ability to find connections other ways.
So, yeah, vulnerable, but mostly because we suck as an industry at understanding and managing people as well as we manage money. If we were good at it, there wouldn't be such over-hiring and layoffs that cause me to see articles like this: https://hbr.org/2022/12/what-companies-still-get-wrong-about...
Linda Khan's article here is, IMO, one of the best overviews of why: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...
What's frustrating is that this requires legislative change, which, given the current political climate, seems like a sisyphean task.
It hit me hard at first, but I was very young, just out of college, and adjusted quickly. The market was dead for a while, and I ended up being rehired after 6 months to sweeten the startup right before acquisition (for pennies on the dollar - this startup was seen as a success because it didn’t just fold).
The biggest aftermath is the mental shock of losing employment. I definitely got depressed due to the uncertainty of, well, everything. And when there’s a general glut of people searching, even being contacted by a prospective employer turns into a gamble. There’s a hopelessness that can set in that takes its toll.
I haven’t found much of a stigma from it, socially or professionally. There’s a pretty decent chunk of people who have been unemployed at some point due to a layoff.
A few years ago, I wrote a load generation application using Kotlin’s coroutines - in this case, each coroutine would be a “device”. And I could add interesting modeling on each device; I easily ran 250k simulated devices within a single process, and it took me a couple of days. But coroutines are not totally simple; any method that might call IO needs to be made “coroutine aware”. So the abstraction kinda leaks all over the place.
Now, you can do the same thing in Java. Just simply model each device as its own Runnable and poof, you can spin up a million of them. And there isn’t much existing code that has to be rewritten. Pretty slick.
So this isn’t really a “high performance computing” feature, but a “blue collar coder” thing.
Of course, at my job I’m now surrounded by junior engineers on a very old legacy product. These juniors are very much not equipped, and struggle. I mention this will take months of training and mentoring, challenging the teams ability to execute on product in any case. It appears protecting a head count matters more than real results.
It’s saddening to watch these silly management trends take over in the industry, but, it just looks like the big companies are due for being challenged.
Part of me wonders if that's just broad inflationary concerns and uncertainty about the world economy, pushing for profits over everything else.
Really seems short-sighted, but, so did the "hire everything that breathes" era in the 2010s, too.
Any tricks or issues you've had to figure out while pairing? My thought was just "assign a couple of people to a non-trivial ticket and see what happens". But I'm curious if that's really naive.
My biggest wish, or obstacle, is finding a team that truly values writing. So many times I've sat in meetings where the discussion largely focuses on everyone just clarifying their own ideas. Or status meetings. It's led me to believe that a lot of "in office is better" folks just value the instant gratification of face-to-face conversations.
I suspect HN's a community of early adopters, but I'd be curious how that actually plays out over time.
And it's even more unclear is who would do that more generically where it could be used on a platform like usenet
i.e., I've seen a lot of comments like this that makes me think this is going to be a real problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/comment/...
Personally, this is what bothers me the most; subreddits that are strictly moderated are usually useful, and ones that aren't are just not worth regular time.
This is also why I'm not really sure about usenet or any other replacement, because moderation is still the hard problem to get right.
I guess the shift from "mono to micro" just isn't very interesting to me. You can usually change your definition of either concept to fit your architecture. This just seemed like the team did the math and revised their approach. Good for them!