We were working on control systems for large industry that had to work reliably and with minimum intervention. A lot of these systems were being renewed but the plant was often 30+ years old. We were also dealing with quite limited hardware.

Haha, this is exactly my experience.

I'll never forget the best candidate I ever interviewed - my feedback was to absolutely hire him and put him on the most interesting and challenging problems. They put him in a marketing team tweaking upsell popups. He left after 2 months.

The difference, I think is:

- Code factories where everything is moving fast - there's no time to think about how to simplify a problem, just gotta get it done. These companies tended to hire their way out of slowness, which led to more code, more complexity, and more code needed to deal with and resolve edge cases introduced by the complexity. I can count many times I was handed directives to implement something that I knew was far more complex than it had to be, but because of the pressure to move forward it was virtually impossible to push back. Maybe it's the only way they can make the business case work, but IMO it undoubtedly led to far, far more code than would've been necessary if it were possible to consider problems more carefully and if engineers had more autonomy. In these companies also a lot of time was consumed by meetings trying to "sync up" with the 100 other people moving in one direction.

- Smaller shops, open source projects, or indie development where there isn't a rush to get something out the door. Here, it's possible to think through a problem and come up with a solution that reduces code surface area. This was about solving the largest number of problems with the least amount of complexity. Most of my time at this company was spent thinking through how to solve the problem and considering edge cases and exploratory coding, the actual implementation was really quick to write. It really helped that I had a boss who understood and encouraged this, and we were working on safety critical systems. My boss liked to say "you can't birth a baby in less than 9 months just by adding another woman".

I think most of the difference is in team size. A larger team inherently results in more code to do less, because of the n*(n-1)/2 communication overhead [1].

Recently I learned the Navy SEALs saying "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast" which I feel sums up my experience well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

The people who did continue to administer shocks were attempting to focus on what they thought was the most important part of the task (pressing the lever), but internally the unconscious effort to habitually dissociate from their own discomfort led them to make more mistakes.

Combine this dissociation with a desire for power or status and you get the world we live in today.

> The only social stuff I interact with anymore is a private forum that's paid

Im curious when you say private, do you mean you can only post if you’re a member, or is all post content viewable only by members too? And if the latter, how did you discover the forum, and how did you decide to join?

It’s kind of hidden on their website but you can grab it here:

https://hub.sync.logitech.com/options/post/logi-options-offl...

That said I think this will be my last Logitech device. They’re just not very durable products and die too quickly

    We can build out discreet systems of brain cells and use them for the purpose we want. They're not going to have traits like consciousness, and we're able to test and assess for that, and build away from it if there is that risk.

From their marketing website [2]:

    Neural compute on demand: We continuously monitor neural health and performance, ensuring optimal conditions and continuous access to an always-on network of living neurons.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-03-05/cortical-labs...

[2] https://corticallabs.com/cloud

Authority provides the illusion of a sense of control, predictability, certainty and orderliness, and it's like we gravitate toward that even when it leads to bad outcomes for us.

For most of us the fear of being out of control seems to be greater than the fear of being controlled.

- it adds superfluous logic that is assumed but isn’t necessary

- as a result the code is more complex, verbose, harder to follow

- it doesn’t quite match the domain because it makes a bunch of assumptions that aren’t true in this particular domain

They’re things that can often be missed in a first pass look at the code but end up adding a lot of accidental complexity that bites you later.

When reading an unfamiliar code base we tend to assume that a certain bit of logic is there for a good reason, and that helps you understand what the system is trying to do. With generative codebases we can’t really assume that anymore unless the code has been thoroughly audited/reviewed/rewritten, at which point I find it’s easier to just write the code myself.

Even what we consciously experience as the brain is really only a tiny part of the brain.

The little language centre and the capacity to imagine are only a tiny subset of a multitude of brain functions and yet we believe that those two functions make up “me”. Actually it’s just those two functions telling a story that they are me.

Another trick that I’ve noticed on the Reddit app is that the tappable area is much larger for ads than normal posts. If you tap even near the ad it will visit the ad

Chiming in to say I’ve experienced the same.

A coworker who became a good friend ended up on a PIP and subsequently fired for “not performing” soon after he helped build a non technical team a small tool that really helped them do their job quicker. He wasn’t doing exactly as he was told and I guess that’s considered not performing.

Coincidentally the person who pushed for him to be fired was an ex-Google middle manager.

I’ve also seen so commonly this weird stigma around engineers as if we’re considered a bit unintelligent when it comes to what users want.

Maybe there is something to higher ups having some more knowledge of the business processes and the bigger picture, but I’m not convinced that it isn’t also largely because of insecurity and power issues.

If you do something successful that your manager didn’t think of and your manager is insecure about their own abilities, good chance they’ll feel threatened.

But if they don’t use web tech it would be too expensive to build the start menu in a way that works cross platform!

Oh wait

I just had a discussion the other day with somebody who outright told me that they think humans are inherently evil and must be managed under a system to keep in order. I don't think it's an uncommon belief and nor do I think it's a bleak world because that belief exists, it's just a mistaken belief.

I would argue that you see the belief raise its head far more when people are interacting with others who they don't consider in their "in-group".

Another example of such a belief is that "humans are inherently evil" which seems to have been planted in Western society by the concept of original sin. Interestingly the idea that sin was about our inherent badness didn't really arise until the struggle against Gnosticism [1] hundreds of years after Jesus died.

Now the belief is pervasive in secular society thanks to stories like "Lord of the Flies".

It's fascinating how even though we can call ourselves non religious we can still carry these beliefs around.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin

Maybe for the most mundane, repetitive tasks that's true.

But I'd argue that the code is the full specification, so if you're going to fully specify it you might as well just write the code and then you'll actually have to be confronted with your mistaken assumptions.

"Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts."

Spoken 85 years ago and even more relevant today

Agreed and I think this is a result of a naive belief that we humans tend to have that controlling thoughts can control reality. Politicians still live by this belief but eventually reality and lived experience does catch up. By that time all trust is long gone.