48 karma · joined July 16, 2021
Currently working on https://logql.io
I've been doing that for years and really happy with the result.
But in reality there were many issues: - there was a culture of launching "project/initiative" to justify more hires and promotions, rather than improving on the key issues we had (that nobody wanted to tackle). - People were often switching team after a promotion, for example leading a new team, and leaving their problems behind. - On the technical-side it was extremely tedious to contribute, we started with a monolith, then moved a micro-service architecture (with k8s, kafka etc). There was a push to do things properly, but it translated in over-engineering parts (for the cool stuff) while the valuable not-so-cool stuff was left to rot. At the end we had to maintain multiple things and the engineering effort to do all these migrations was huge, and took us away from doing more valuable work.
Eventually the company couldn't sustain its workforce and we had multiple round of layoffs.
My key learnings are: - Unless you are looking for a promotion before leaving (pump and dump), hiring a lot of people in a short amount of time is bad. - Even in best scenarios, having more employees make things harder and slower. People are competing for projects, there is a need for more communication, more processes, more tools. Having a lean workforce as long as possible, focusing on what's really important is best. - It's okay if we can't do everything we want. Not so many "ideas" are valuable and employees cost - Before hiring for a new project, can't we move other resources? Is this project really important or just a distraction?
>What features could make it more ethical?
You should think the other way around, start with an ethical base, and only add features that keep it ethical.
Both for "when do you introduce in a supervised setup" and "when do you let them use in an unsupervised setup".
LLMs are new to us, but for them it's not more new than the rest of the internet. It can be harmful, but probably less than social media.
It's more likely the number of jobs at all level of seniority will decrease, but none will disappear.
What I'm interested to see is how the general availability of LLM will impact the "willingness" of people to learn coding. Will people still "value" coding as an activity worth their time?
For me as an already "senior" engineer, using LLMs feel like a superpower, when I think of a solution to a problem, I can test and explore some of my ideas faster by interacting with it.
For a beginner, I feel that having all of this available can be super powerful too, but also truly demotivating. Why bother to learn coding when the LLM can already do better than you? It takes years to become "good" at coding, and motivation is key.
As a low-dan Go player, I remember feeling a bit that way when AlphaGo was released. I'm still playing Go but I've lost the willingness to play competitively, now it's just for fun.
I'm surprised to see "mathematicians" here, but what do they refer to? Mathematician as an academic position? As teacher? As consultant?
Also to be available it must first be enabled by a workspace admin, then by the end user.