1. I don't bother recruiting on the public market. They're genuinely too incompetent, and you'd have the issue you raised over and over. We sent exactly one candidate to a "normal" company and it was a total waste of time

2. For the remaining companies, I basically consult for free to help them smooth out their process. Places that are already very good but candidate-starved don't need this, but most of them could use a small hand. This is maybe non-trivial to replicate but I have a reasonable psychology background and that has given me some aptitude for feeling out cultural fits. Recruiters have set their rates so absurdly high for no service that I can do this, AND run two hour tech interviews personally with candidates AND undercut competitors and still hit that $1K per hour rate. It's just nuts

Happy to have a chat if you drop me an email.

(But for real, a good test suite seems like a great place to start before letting an LLM run wild... or alternatively just do what you're doing. We definitely respect textbook-readers more than prompters!)

I suppose that has little to do with the technical merits of the work, but it's such a bad look, and it makes everyone boosting this stuff seem exactly as dysregulated/unwise as they've appeared to many engineers for a while.

I met Sean Goedecke for lunch a few weeks ago, who uses LLMs a bunch, and is clearly a serious adult, but half the folks being shoved in front of everyone are behaving totally manic and people are cheering them on. Absolutely blows my mind to watch.

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vib...

"LLMs drastically decrease the cost of experimenting during the very earliest phases of a project, like when you're trying to figure out if the thing is even worth building or a specific approach might yield improvements, but loses efficacy once you're past those stages. You can keep using LLMs sustainably with a very tight loop of telling it to do the thing the cleaning up the results immediately, via human judgement."

I.e, I don't think he can relate at all to the experience of letting them run wild and getting a good result.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46508658

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I think Sean is right that, in the abstract, they prefer good software to bad software, but they won't make any sacrifices if those sacrifices require losing money or status. It's the same "do your what your manager wants" playbook, but run up to board level.

However, I think we've got some tactical disagreements on how to actually make society a better place. Namely, I think Sean is right if you have to remain an employee, but many people just don't have to do that, so it feels a bit like a great guide on how to win soccer while hopping on one leg. Just use two legs!

My own experience, especially over the last year, has been telling me that being positioned as an employee at most companies means you're largely irrelevant, i.e, you should adopt new positioning (e.g, become a third-party consultant like me) or find a place that's already running nearly perfectly. I can't imagine going back to a full-time job unless I was given a CTO/CEO or board role, where I could again operate with some autonomy... and I suspect at many of the worst places, even these roles can't do much.

Also Sean, if you're reading this, we'll get coffee together before March or die trying.

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/on-burnout-mental-health-and...

Hope that helps a little bit. It gets better sometimes!