Legal marketing specifically. Weirdly, my work had more impact, respect and longevity there than the place where I'm a much more senior engineer supposedly directing the work of a whole organization of engineers. I had it better where I was a 1 of 2 than a leader among hundreds.

I've been at a place that is basically microservices slop (several dozen services per engineer). They're all poorly maintained and at least a solid 40% of all this code that they've written could have been just a traefik or nginx configuration/container.

When you have a lot of inexperienced (relative to industry) and overworked software engineers, the solution to every problem becomes to write code and writing new code should be a last resort.

Worse still, there's just a poor general understanding of the internet protocols they're working with and of how to do distributed systems right. Unfortunately with LLMs I've been seeing this get worse, not better.

They use the LLMs for code generation but not architecture review. Bad ideas are getting fully-baked quickly before anyone with good sense can intervene.

Not to be overly harsh but the problem is with seeing those who don't share their interests as people equally worthy of attention. IT nerds typically have trouble meeting people where they're at instead of the other way around. And most of the time it's because they've never made any effort to do so.

That's why I say it's not super hard.

It's also becoming more of a societal problem in general as younger people spend more and more time isolated and socializing in bubbles. I think it's a serious and growing problem that people don't have friendships outside of their immediate peer group age-wise.

My brother's kid is in her early 20s and her and most of her friends don't see people at 30+ as people. They don't value their opinions and it has all sorts of negative effects on their lives like they struggle to obtain/keep jobs, etc. That's not a blanket generalization though -- we have some team members in that age-range and they're great.

90% of the engineers I've worked with in bigger companies wouldn't know how to find someone in the company outside of their direct reporting structure.

Honestly it's pathetic. The rest of the organization can't work like that and these are table stakes social skills IMO.

I seriously think the "headphones on, get into flow" trope is the most damaging meme in our industry. Management also takes huge advantage of the low-information environment that engineers seem comfortable in. Most of them don't even (really) know what our product is or how it's sold and marketed.

IMO one of the worst decisions we've ever made because 80% of the time the interns we take on and then hire are absolute superstars.

And even before we ended it we had a couple of years where we stopped competing for talent from Waterloo. I guess Trump made that harder but yeah bad decisions all around.

Some things stuck out at me: - They were all in their early 20s. - They were all incredibly checked out. Honestly they still seem like an outlier to me decades later. - They partied hard. Yes, with drugs. - Most of them were in rotating intimate relationships with each other and unusually open about it. Office scuttlebutt was literally "who is fucking who this week". - They seemed busy for maybe two or three weeks out of the entire year and then it was long stretches of Minesweeper/Solitaire.

I filed this away in my head as "provides no value" and that was decades ago. If the industry itself is worse off today I can't imagine how much worse it actually is from my experience.

Can you do it and sustain hundreds of people? I doubt it. At least they're here to be potentially observed. You don't have to _totally_ wing it. People living like that through history had bigger day to day survival concerns than documenting the finer details of sustaining their continued existence to us.

The last closest analog we have to them would be the Hadza people and they've had agriculture since 500 CE...

We may need a close connection to that way of life again and not have to relearn it from scratch.

This strikes me more as one of those things that is shocking to hear but not incorrect. People get more upset that someone said it without actually having a counterargument.

He's not saying that we _should_ live that way but that we might need to.

I have very close Mormon and ex-Mormon friends and have dealt with lots of Scientologists via community involvement in music and science fiction...there is no difference.

A married couple that are friends of mine had minor questions of faith and their entire large extended families with immediate no-contact. It was bitter, brutal and painful even as a bystander seeing it happen in real time. Their young children were cut off as well and their families hounded them and made their lives miserable via institutions (police calls, anonymous complaints to their schools & jobs, etc.). The behavior was beyond the pale and this couple are literally the nicest, most loving and reasonable people that I have ever met.

They switched to a different Christian denomination and raised their kids that way and couldn't be happier about their decision. In hindsight. The family wounds 20 years later are still very visible and real.

Also I'm someone who did move from NY to Miami during COVID along with maybe 1/3 of my peers (work and social). Not all to Miami but mostly to either the southeast, texas or non-LA socal.

It's people who use their money to generate more value and employ lots of people that are, consistently, leaving. That means that thousands of jobs for the lower middle class are leaving and going to somewhere with a more favorable business environment.

And that's not good (well, it's good for the other city).

It's easy for people in tech hub cities to think that's never going to change but history shows boom towns going bust repeatedly. Sometimes they come back (Seattle). Sometimes they don't (the whole Rust Belt + Upstate NY).

And once the talent pool from a few large companies moves to another metro, whole industries relocate their offices to chase it.

If your org has anywhere north of 100 engineers across separate teams, intelligence gathering and relationship/trust-building is the only way to effectively do work that crosses the boundary of your team's area of responsibility. It's also the only way to protect your team from stepping headfirst into hot bullshit cooked up by clueless product managers, junior executives and other engineering teams who've unilaterally decided your area of responsibility is in their critical path.

> Instead of two middle managers needing to do 1:1s with no clear need for years because other middle managers got vibes

This isn't actually how this happens in practice. These 1:1s happen after their teams consistently have to share ownership over something or their work conflicts. It's more of a standup saying what your team is doing and what you're concerned about than a typical 1:1. You also calibrate the frequency as needed. For most of these it's a QBR but for some teams this will be monthly or even weekly. It's not "because vibes".

The right work just doesn't get done without staff engineers and architect types having frequent conversations & meetings as well as constant code reviewing. Or long-term ICs effectively doing this role without the title and expectations/responsibilities (raises hand). You can identify these people because they ask questions relentlessly. Always well-considered ones, but even the ones that might make them look stupid in a meeting.

Coding is a small percentage of the work but also just as important. That's the sweet spot. The "non-stop meetings/socializing" people and the "headphones on & grind PRs" types are both two extremes of behavior that are boat-anchors in any organization and will bring productivity/customer-impact to a screeching halt if it goes unchecked for long enough.

And it's _always_ those stupid-seeming questions that uncover showstopping problems that would have bit you if left ignored.

Edit: Not to greenlight anything Palantir is doing, but in my opinion the FDE/FDSE model is probably everyone's near-future if your company is B2B. You can't be an "ignore meetings" type of person and do that.

I would like to move on but also given the current climate that seems ludicrous.

People I talk to in similar places are in the same boat. Hiring is frozen, there's not enough people to manage everything we have, and everyone remaining is hanging on for dear life.

Both are true. Pulling off some of these moves in real world situations is absurdly hard -- much harder than other techniques you could be learning. But also the reason people throw themselves is because for some of these moves the alternative is the damage described. It's more complicated than that -- every traditional martial art has its issues.

I stress again that I'm not throwing any shade at it. It's one of those things that's poorly understood by outsiders and even most modern practitioners. There are Aikidokas out there who can absolutely whoop ass in a standup fight -- it's just that the level of nuance and understanding within the art form to get there is immense (comparatively). But then that's defeating the point. The whole point is about _not_ fighting. Spare everyone the damage. If that's your guiding philosophy and you're still intent on training, Aikido is for you.