OPs timeline is somewhat off. They posit a golden era for the 1980s-2007 but that’s not right. Tech CEOs have often been hard-charging salespeople and businessmen. Look at early Wired magazines and there was much celebration of random rich guys in suits, as much as the nerdy tech creators. This was the “suit/hacker” dichotomy.

Google was the company that really exploded that paradigm, from their rise to prominence circa 2002 or so, to their IPO and post-IPO halo, around 2005-2007.

Now the nerds didn’t need the suits. They would run their own company.

They were shockingly wealthy and powerful but it was made to seem as a kind of distraction from their true nature. They marketed their own virtue and renunciation, both to the public, and to their own staff. Their business model rejected the previous search engine paradigm (backroom deals and paying for placement) in favor of a new one (complex math to produce the best results). They told the public and their staff the famous “don’t be evil”, and also “focus on the user and all else follows”. There was even a pronouncement that Google would never do such tawdriness as horoscopes.

The theme was that nerdiness was a kind of incorruptibility because a nerd was honest, unconcerned with social status, and unworldly. Let them into your life and they’ll make it all better. Larry Page and Sergey Brin cultivated that image, holding internal and external events where they made themselves look ever nerdier than they actually are, even wearing lab coats.

Now, this didn’t last and was never true. Soon after the IPO, Larry and Sergey bought themselves not just a corporate jet, but a commercial airliner. They justified it as something that was “good for the world” because they could use it to get entire teams of NGO workers on missions of mercy. It actually became a party plane, as far as I know.

I feel it made me better and other people worse.

GOOD:

I feel that I’m producing more and better code even with unfamiliar and tangled codebases. For my own side projects, it’s brought them from vague ideas to shipped.

I can even do analyses I never could otherwise. On Friday I converted my extensive unit test suite into a textual simulation of what messages it would show in many situations and caught some UX bugs that way.

Cursor’s Bugbot is genuinely helpful, though it can be irritatingly inconsistent. Sometimes on round 3 with Bugbot it suddenly notices something that was there all along. Or because I touch a few lines of a library suddenly all edge cases in that library are my fault.

NOT GOOD:

The effect on my colleagues is not good. They are not reading what they are creating. I get PRs that include custom circular dependency breakers because the LLM introduced a circular dependency, and decided that was the best solution. The ostensible developer has no idea this happened and doesn’t even know what a circular dependency breaker is.

Another colleague does an experiment to prove that something is possible and I am tasked to implement it. The experiment consists of thousands of lines of code. After I dig into it I realize the code is assuming that something magically happened and reports it’s possible.

I was reflecting on this and realized the main difference between me and my current team is that I won’t commit code I don’t understand. So I even use the LLMs to do refactors just for clarity. while sometimes my colleagues are creating 500-line methods.

Meanwhile our leaders are working on the problem of code review because they feel it’s the bottleneck. They want to make some custom tools but I suspect they are going to be vastly inferior to the tools coming from the major LLM providers. Or maybe we’ll close the loop and we won’t even be reviewing code any more.

But I'm not sure if anyone at AWS needs a bulletin that things have changed. It's obvious because their growth was so high in the early years, and there was more focus on shipping. Like all organizations they will inevitably shift into managing their success.

I'm struggling with my current job, and the problem for me is that we never have had that explosive growth. We have had slow but consistent growth over five years. That growth has very little to do with our founders or executives' competence, who have mostly flailed around or been AWOL. But we attract a highly dedicated community and quite a few excellent engineers, amidst a lot of insane mismanagement. I often compare it to early Twitter, which grew mostly despite its management.

When should I leave?

Negatives: Options are probably meaningless now; not learning very much except how to deal with our own mounting tech debt; perennially incompetent management.

Positives: I like my co-workers; job does no harm to the world; pays okay; 100% remote; very few meetings; low standards for productivity mean I have great work/life balance. Also I'm significantly older than most working programmers and at least here, I don't suffer ageism.

Wildcards: starting in 2024, some of the incompetent management has finally been removed and we've hired some people with experience at tech giants. Will that be good or bad? Totally unclear.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38944258

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

Anyway, I don't even know if he has moved on from Adjoint.

I agree there's something odd about this, but I've also seen how people who are vocal critics on the internet have to be less public about their associations. Not sure what to think about it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180220171955/https://www.steph...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFlu61wJe2Y

He seems to have been interested in smart contracts but found the current implementations appalling. He wanted to use functional programming, particularly Haskell, to create something like a smart contract with better guarantees. But he is also careful to say that a smart contract doesn't imply a blockchain; he's talking more generally about code that executes over distributed databases.

This stuff is scrubbed from his website, and Adjoint doesn't even appear on his LinkedIn profile. But I can easily see why that might be the case if he's decided the whole field is rubbish and left the industry, or if his work is being misconstrued.

That said, having examined blockchains in depth gives him more credibility, not less. And it would be a rather bizarre business model to continually decry blockchains if he was actually working on one.

---

EDIT: Found an interview where he distinguishes cryptocoins from other technologies sometimes labelled web3, like IPFS. https://www.coywolf.news/podcast/episode-12-stephen-diehl-in...

I think it's fair to say the guy is not an indiscriminate hater. On the other hand, I also personally was already convinced that crypto "currencies" are terrible but IPFS and decentralized organizations might be cool, so I guess I like him more now.

Values are important to me, so people recommend that I try `keyvalues.com`. But that site is basically matching what you think is important to what the company is willing to say about itself.

Values are expressed through choices. It's nice to say "we value representation", but if you had conflict between a superstar jerk and an underrepresented minority junior, who would be dismissed or reassigned? If you make a choice for one or the other, there's evidence for what you actually value.

I drew up a list of things that might be determined empirically, if you were somehow omniscient about what the company did.

- demographics of who works there

- how decisions are made, maybe with evidence and standard codes for how it works out.

- what software processes are you currently using and how effective are they?

- how often do you release?

- retention period

- salary

- general worker happiness

- company growing

- customer happiness

- customer promotion

- impacts and externalities on the world, generally

Would this be feasible? Would companies be willing to go under the microscope like this, even allow anonymous polling of their employees?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30693049

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

As far as I know, there are no "crisis actors", in the sense of a conspiracy that pays protestors. At least not anywhere that has a functioning free press. While protests are sometimes organized by shady groups concealing their true funding, protestors tend to be actual people who believe they're gathering for some cause. Anybody paying protestors directly could be easily exposed.

In my experience engineering at successful startups is often subpar. A successful startup engineer is above all productive, flexible, creative, and ships often. Their code gets the job done but probably wouldn't pass muster at a corporate job.

Management at startups is always flailing about. If things aren't working, then you should be taking random stabs at doing something else. If things are working, you probably have many more problems you did yesterday and you should feel under-resourced.

Your original post mentions something about laws being passed to outlaw your business model. That seems much more concerning.

But in any case, here's what I'd look for

* Is there a market for the thing we're doing?

* Is our iteration fast and are we learning from what we do?

* Do I trust the people I work with? Do they seem ethical?

Even if someone here wants to oppose the idea of an ethical business, consider that there are about 10,000 ways to get screwed over as a startup employee and you want the people in charge to resist doing those things to you.

A person working at a well-known devops vendor reached out to me repeatedly because my company is in the news. Then called me on my personal phone. I texted him back to stop and he was still quite perky and persistent. Eventually I realized I was dealing with an AI - saying something like "Hey, 'Scheduling a meeting with you today at 2pm' is a thing I would never agree to", would result in the schedule being generated. I ghosted on that meeting and then the AI pinged me again saying he was sorry he couldn't make that meeting since his grandmother was ill.

Just this morning the same thing happened. I'm feeling a bit ill and against my better judgment agreed to a call with a recruiter who cold-emailed me. The job seemed relatively specific and tailored to my needs, and even included a salary range which would be a decent bump for me. The recruiter had a long history on LinkedIn, although they seemed to have switched industries from writing for travel websites to recruiting. Plausible. When I got on the call, the person was not "Jason" (who had reached out) but "Jay" who proceeded to say that Jason was too new, so he didn't let Jason handle the actual calls. I asked why Jason wasn't on the call; wouldn't this be a great training exercise for him to shadow us? "Jay" started speaking slowly as if he was figuring it out in real time, and said "...yeah, sure, Jason could join us, if you want... if he's not on another call right now...?" I terminated that call right away.

What the actual f?? What is happening out there?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897428

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

    Zvi Mowshowitz is a former professional Magic: The Gathering 
    player who also held a developer intern position at Wizards
    of the Coast Magic R&D. He is known for having created 
    innovative and sometimes game-breaking decks TurboZvi and 
    My Fires.

Do we need informed amateurs? Yes. But the crucial test is still whether they are accepted or promoted by the professionals. Zeynep Tufekci was vocalizing concerns that many professionals had, which is why her criticisms of health policy worked out.

In contrast, I have an extremely nerdy friend who has thinks it's her job to explain things to people, and thus writes deeply researched, well-footnoted blog posts about COVID, which are quite often wrong.

I for one can't tell what sort of person this is. But I also know that I'm not good at tagging facts with epistemic certainty. If I read a thing in a blog post it will probably stick, but I'll forget where I got that. So the simple solution it to not read it.

I think when it comes to writing explainers, it's 2021 and we have a wealth of resources and can wait for the professionals, including scientists who blog part time. I suggest that more people should be like me, and ignore the laypeople, indeed even most of the journalism, at least during the initial stages.

There could be a sort of vicious circle there. If you respond to short-term failure by putting more pressure on yourself to be outstanding, you end up being the sort of person who lives inside a dream of changing the world that they can never realize.

I'm not great at finishing my own projects.

How can I get better at this? I've frustrated managers and even friends.

I've tried a lot of personal time management techniques.

I think I'm even good at identifying the critical steps forward for success. In group meetings, I'm lethal at cutting unnecessary work.

But somehow, when I go off by myself to actually do it, little gets done. Something in my brain seems to generate lots of complications to the tasks I am doing, and I lose enthusiasm and self-confidence.

I would pay for a coach, if they were familiar with this specific problem and not just general emotional support.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29164713

Points: 60

# Comments: 31

I think it's evidence for "Billionaires Build", which is an apologia for billionaires. pg seems to think we are in a moment where billionaires don't have enough cultural respect.

I think pg is trying to show us that billionaires, at least the kind he funds, are just better people, or are at least more tenacious. The binder of credit cards is supposed to inspire admiration for their dedication (rather than horror).

And I think he's congratulating himself for being able to spot them. By extension, spotting billionaires (helpful, tenacious, people who love to build) and helping them - well, is he saying that he's a great person, squared?

He noticed that doctors can get through the bullshit because they have contact with patients. It's anecdotal of course, but it seems common in caring professions. Why else would anyone be an underpaid grade school teacher?

But Slava doesn't come up with an exact parallel for programmers. He suggests studying the history of technology, and reacquainting oneself with the sheer fun of building things. These are maybe good, but he doesn't seem to be telling a story of how he recovered from disillusionment. At best he's speculating that these are things that might work. I suspect they won't, because they miss something important.

Nobody is sincerely thanking us for doing these things.

Unlike doctors and grade school teachers, if programmers had more contact with end users, they'd probably get burned out faster. The things we build rarely make anyone happier.

There are ways you can justify the work - creative destruction ideology, or maybe you can delude yourself into thinking that mashing together APIs is somehow getting the world closer to some better future. And maybe they are even right.

But are people really meant to work this abstractly? This detached from outcomes? There's nothing to propel you through the bullshit.

As is increasingly the case, the core of pg's argument is a variant of the Appeal to Authority: the "impressive people" that pg personally knows. And there is also an Ad Hominem; one doesn't want to be anything like the nasty people who are continually mean to him online.

It is certain that pg does know some very impressive people, and that he attracts a lot of attention from Twitter leftists looking to score cheap points.

However, this argument is vague and dependent on faulty assumptions. Not only can it be easily dismissed, it probably proves the opposite of what he intends.

I think we can assume those impressive people are likely all drawn from the small coterie of technology startup founders and investors. From this and other essays, it's become clear that pg believes that success at becoming a startup founder (just like pg) is almost identical with being an impressive person.

But it's well-known that this group already comes from a relatively narrow slice of humanity. Upper-middle-class or upper-class, likely white, likely gone to a university in America. It would not be surprising if their opinions were roughly in alignment.

Even so, the "impressive people" have not taken public stands that we can verify. We only have pg's assessment of their stances as being roughly centered around a mean, and we only have pg's assessment of where the mean is. (It's rare indeed for someone to self-identify as an extremist!)

This is an informal essay, so perhaps asking for even one example is too much rigor. And, as pg often reminds us, his friends have all kinds of interesting opinions they can't reveal in public any more, due to political correctness. Luckily we have pg who valiantly is willing to stand up in public and allude to a large number of people who agree with him, but are just off-camera.

Anyway, since we are left to merely imagine, let's also imagine that we asked pg's interlocutors about other topics. What would their opinions be on, say, technology startups and business? They'd probably say they were good for the world, and good as a career path. There might be a relatively univocal assessment of taxes as being too high, the barriers to founding businesses as too onerous, and that some ideas popular outside the tech industry (like mandated key escrow, or fact-checking social media posts) are all ludicrous and counterproductive. All defensible opinions, but my point is, we can imagine them all being in close agreement on issues relating to their industry.

So let's take pg at his word that if we have a cohort of people who have self-selected an industry and risen to success, their opinions about that industry are both informed and in close agreement, and their other opinions might be defensible, but randomly scattered around a mean. Is this really that surprising?

pg wants us to believe that the relative moderation of his impressive friends proves something. That not only is moderation a virtue, but the virtuous are moderate.

But accidentally, he may be revealing that technology startup success is more random than he thinks. That it selects for people with some narrow range of skills, but success is awarded with a high degree of randomness.

And since there is no reason for this cohort to be in alignment on any other matter, they are more or less randomly scattered around the median opinion of an upper-class American university technology student.

...

PS: pg started his career as an essayist with "Beating the Averages", and now he asserts that being average is actually good!?

Okay, maybe that's a cheap shot, but we're all looking to justify ourselves and be loved, I guess, and as we pass through different stages of life that doesn't change. pg used to write about the hidden virtues of high school nerds, minority programming languages, and young founders who weren't from California. I found it easier to be a fan. Today he mostly writes about the hidden virtues of the Silicon Valley elite. While that might actually have some merit, it's a bit of a harder sell.