Long ago in undergrad I took a retail marketing class and we did a field trip to Costco; the GM told us it was part of their policy to rearrange parts of the store occasionally so that you had to browse the entire place to check off your shopping list. This increases the likelihood that you stumble across new products. So it’s this combination of “best price/quality without decision fatigue” plus some impulse buying that works for them. The fact that they are figuring out the price/quality trade off for you up front probably also makes it easier to impulse buy with fewer regrets.

Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects. You occasionally see a heartwarming post: “California adds solar panels over a canal” and it just looks cute and kind of sad compared to the massive, ambitious, and technologically superior build out of Chinese renewables.

This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression. But anyone paying attention can quite clearly see that China is winning and the US is sacrificing their global superiority at the altar of fear, ignorance, and religious nationalism.

ECT might seem barbaric and unsexy compared to dosing some psilocybin and listening to some ambient music in a cozy room, but that doesn’t reduce its clinical value for people with serious, treatment resistant disorders.

At work, the devs up the chain now do everything with AI – not just coding – then task me with cleaning it up. It is painful and time consuming, the code base is a mess. In one case I had to merge a feature from one team into the main code base, but the feature was AI coded so it did not obey the API design of the main project. It also included a ton of stuff you don’t need in the first pass - a ton of error checking and hand-rolled parsing, etc, that I had to spend over a week unrolling so that I could trim it down and redesign it to work in the main codebase. It was a slog, and it also made me look bad because it took me forever compared to the team who originally churned it out almost instantly. AI tools are not good at this kind of design deconflicting task, so while it’s easy to get the initial concept out the gate almost instantly, you can’t just magically fit it into the bigger codebase without facing the technical debt you’ve generated.

In my personal projects, I get to experience a bit of the fun I think others are having. You can very quickly build out new features, explore new ideas, etc. You have to be thoughtful about the design because the codebase can get messy and hard to build on. Often I design the APIs and then have Claude critique them and implement them.

I think the future is bleak for people in my spot professionally – not junior, but also not leading the team. I think the middle will be hollowed out and replaced with principals who set direction, coordinate, and execute. A privileged few will be hired and developed to become leaders eventually (or strike gold with their own projects), but everyone in between is in trouble.

What you’ve described is an incredibly expensive and inefficient genetic algorithm with a human review as the fitness function. It’s not the flex you might think it is.

Let’s call all of this what it is: parasites leveraging their insider positions for profit. The ruling class is ripping the copper out of our walls and selling it for scrap while we all choose to look the other way.

I’m talking about inbounds from recruiters, for senior level roles, where you have a long trail of quantifiable accomplishments and a good network. I am not looking for a job, but I do often take calls just to see what’s out there, and I am rejected every time. It makes me curious (and also sympathetic to people actively seeking).

I have numbers to back up my accomplishments, too. GitHub stars, citation counts, exits, etc. I talk to hiring managers who are leading tech areas that I have direct, quantifiable impact in from past experience. They might even be building on tech that I developed! I have a screen and maybe don’t answer a pop quiz perfectly, but you can look at the numbers and see I’m not bullshitting.

Is the hiring process really so detached from reality now that no other factor but your interview performance is the determinant?

I know what they say about every room smelling like shit… but I have never had bad relationships with my colleagues. So I’m not sure if that’s it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47081967

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# Comments: 4

I don’t understand why taxation is so off limits to this crowd. We seem to live in a death cult where avoiding a slight inconvenience to 100 people is more important than providing a decent standard of living for the other 345 million people. You can invent whatever clever little solution you want in the meantime but eventually the chickens will come home to roost.