Anytime I tried spec driven development, it produced total garbage, the problem is that the model usually swings too far, if they write unnecessary complexity, a nag about it and you risk it code golfing, this problem across 100 lines of specs and you're guaranteed it will swing too far on some segments you just wanted X slightly more than Y (usually for me it was reliability dropped for better readability since # users = # developers = 1)

Another thing I dropped is steering implementation design too early, start with the goal and nag in the direction you want, it works well for me but might not work well for big complex codebases.

For now I love LLM coding but I'm sure my opinion will change if I have to review code from a developer that does the 1 prompt = 1 PR without looking at the code jutsu.

Assuming the efficiency gains are real, I feel like something has to give, maybe worse quality due to aggressive quantization/kv cache compression?

But it was clear in this case that the interviewer just took a question from the company's bank of questions and was alt-tabbed for half the interview, I have felt the energy early and I was also half-checked out.

I'm aware I'm saying this post factum, but I had a very fun first interview with that company and matched well with the first interviewer so my expectations were high, and then I got hit by the big tech style interview when it was an early stage startup.

For the n-th percentile version, the obvious solution is sorting and it takes 10 seconds to get to that point, 5 minutes of implementation with tests. Good. It's all downhill from here.

Then you get hit with the "it's a data stream" and you realize you have to implement a balanced tree on the spot which I wouldn't describe as fun.

You may or may not be able to implement that. I did not. Blabbered something about Rust having sorted B-Trees and I don't think Python has them -- they do not on the standard library.

Then the interviewer leaned heavily on the "reduce memory usage" and I couldn't come up with a solution (no shit it's Ω(n) and he didn't even tell me to go fetch for a randomized algorithm). I later understood he expected the reservoir sampling solution which is basically keeping a representative group of size K that is a good proxy of the whole stream, it goes like this: keep the K first elements, any elements after that replaces any element of our sample at random.

What I did after 10 minutes of weird silence is to assume the data stream follows a normal distribution and computing the P-percentiles by computing the running mean and standard deviation.

I felt frustrated at the end of the interview because it really felt like a big gotcha of either you know the reservoir sampling "leetcode trivia" or you don't.

Mix that with heavy AI bills, there isn't a lot of budget left for hiring.

I don't think it was distinct enough from the Google culture like Android was at the start of the acquisition but it seems they had leeway to do their own thing.

e.g. https://github.com/zml/zml/blob/33ced8fa078b3c7c8c709bd526ae...

for a 100k paid by your employer, 46k goes to you after all taxes, 45k goes to social contribution, of those 20k specifically to paying current pensioners[1].

It doesn't look so bad, unless you take into account the inversion of the demographic pyramid, the workers will get progressively more squeezed as older folks enter retirement, and are unlikely to get themselves good retirement given that there isn't enough kids to support them when they will be old.

And so, the rational move is to save more to fund your retirement while already getting pressured by relatively low wages and low saving potential due to the taxes, and France doesn't really have a growth lever to pull to get us out of this situation as we're already at a very high debt-to-GDP ratio.

So that's why some workers are unhappy with what they call "fat pensions", what also doesn't help in France is that the country is very centralized around Paris and rent is now another channel where money flows from workers to (often) pensioners.

As 2027 elections approaches, it seems we have the options of being even more fiscally irresponsible (the extremes), and the center seems to lean for austerity measures (Edouard Philippe) and none of these are making me optimistic about the future.

[1]: https://code.travail.gouv.fr/outils/simulateur-embauche