As to customers, customers value stability. They don't want the UI changing every week, they don't want random changes of the data model that corrupt their content, and so the traditions of quality, strong testing and integration pipelines, and so on are just as important in established products - in some ways more important than ever, as there are plenty of opportunities for your competitors to burn user trust and drive them away.

I have yet to encounter an established product demonstrating a massive improvement in velocity due to AI. Being able to spit out prototypes doesn't matter all that much.

I'm handling the AI wave by holding on to my sanity and skills and working to establish a reputation in preparation for big paychecks fixing the messes everyone else is creating with their tokens.

Reputations with who? The VPs who rotate in and out every few years (if you're lucky enough to go a few years between reorgs) for a new title and salary bump?

> there will be high turnover, good engineers won't transfer in,

On the contrary, many people want to work on the team that gets visibility where people can actually get promoted rather than having to justify their existence constantly

Even when you can, you can't prove the impact. As a real example, our team has extensive presubmit infrastructure to catch and block some classes of configuration error that have caused customer data corruption in the past. There have been CLs which were caught by those presubmits and meant that we didn't have outages, but there's no dollar amount tied to an outage that didn't exist.

Meanwhile, team X did something similar that caused data corruption, had N customers affected for such a period of time, scrambled to root cause, roll back, and restore from backups, getting customers back up and online. Look how responsive and great they are!

This makes it easier to query and show what you've done in a time period. It makes it easier to go through the list of your assigned tasks and understand where it fits in the priority order.

It does not work for large corporations with pools of billions of dollars and various incentives to staying within the ecosystem. It's impossible to measure the contribution of one feature team to perception and retention of something like "Microsoft Intune" or "Google Chrome", and without the ability to measure that no effective check on those teams.

> Second, preventing or mitigating an incident early (even by just knowing the right feature flag to turn off) can save huge amounts of money: both immediate lost revenue during the incident and future lost revenue from customers who would have pulled their business or refused to sign pending contracts.

Time and time again at many companies, including well-reputed ones, I have seen that preventing issues gets you no recognition, but building a giant pile of kindling and then putting out the inevitable fire will get you recognition twice. Even in "good" orgs.

I've never been able to commit to the game theory politics enough to intentionally ship garbage fast and take that credit - I take too much pride in my work - but I have spent 5+ years managing and growing a framework designed to eliminate classes of issues that plagued the last version of our product and watched as partner teams who ship garbage code and cause outages get public credit for fixing those outages and my team, despite attempting to advocate, get no credit for not having such outages because you can't measure that.

Not long ago I walked from downtown SF up to the Golden Gate and walked across and back. My feet were tired and I didn't want to walk back downtown. It took me long enough to figure out where buses pick up that I missed one; at that point my decision was something like "70 minutes to wait for bus, take bus, transfer or walk to my hotel" or "23 minutes + $20 to get a Waymo" and I consider that a great value for my money.

I am a huge fan of public transit and try to avoid driving whenever I can. When the public transit goes approximately from where you are to where you want to be, or when it comes frequently enough that transfers don't cost you half an hour if you miss a connection, it's great, but there are so many edge cases.

I've never needed to call a taxi/Waymo in London, and in NYC the only time I did was getting from the airport to Manhattan the first time I went (every other time I know how to take AirTrain to public transit). In nearly every other city I've taken a Lyft/Waymo/Taxi at least once because the system isn't good enough to be universal.

It's not about new technology for the sake of new technology, it's about taking pride in one's work and what that person created.

Honestly, the American obsession with "everyone should think of what the customer wants" is exhausting verging on toxic. The people who talk about that point loudest are inevitably owners saying "you should all care more to make me richer". If you want your employees to care about the customer more than their own personal satisfaction, give them significant equity and significant autonomy such that they can see how their actions have direct impact. Saying they should think of the customer and then treating the employees as an interchangeable cost to be minimized is insulting and won't lead to anyone focusing on the customer.

Customers want features as fast and as cheap as possible. I derive joy from solid test suites that avoid me getting paged while on call and team processes that don't allow config changes on Friday so pages don't happen on the weekend.

Very few craftspeople derive their joy from the customer experience. An electrician isn't happy because their work allows me to watch TV. A carpenter isn't happy because a new set of stairs lets me get to the basement faster. They're happy because of their perception of the quality of their work. This goes away when the visible or fun parts are no longer "their work"

One of mine got left outside in the garden for an entire winter. One side of the enclosure is sun bleached and I had to replace the blade, but otherwise it still gets used every week and works fine.

[1] This one. None of them have ever failed, I just keep 3 of them in different locations and physically lost (maybe loaned out) one a few years ago. https://www.stanleytools.com/product/10-179/hi-visibility-re...

Meta has never been a place for people with empathy to thrive or succeed. They literally enabled a genocide. Despite being warned by internal employees, profits were more important.

If you're prioritizing other costs, then prioritize those. You don't have an inherent right to consume everything in history.

FastRawViewer, DxO, Affinity, Darktable, Capture One. Those are just the ones I personally have installed. There's also RawTherapee, a number of camera OEM-specific tools, and more.