I think this is a side-effect of the old product management process adapting to AI. We (as an industry) were never very good at defining features rigorously, because there was a smart human in the loop who had to implement the feature and could push back on sloppy definitions.

Whereas security bugs are easy for the LLM to define and fix.

We saw the same during the dot com boom - lots of companies trying to become "dot coms" because that did good things to their share price and they could answer investor questions, but no-one actually in the org knew wtf they were supposed to do to make the company an actual dot com. Trying to define what a "dot com" actually was, was difficult enough. Then the bubble collapsed and investor pressure on change relaxed, and a quarter of a century later we're pretty relaxed that some companies exist almost solely on the internet, and others don't. Both for reasons that mostly make sense.

It'll be the same with AI - the bubble will collapse, the pressure will relax, and we'll go on to have some companies almost entirely built out of AI, and others not.

But the poor management folks who have to come up with some answer about how to make their organisation "AI native" immediately - you could not pay me enough to do that job.

This is classic Streetlight Effect [0]. Just because it's easy to test leetcode, and it appears to have something vaguely to do with coding, it gets used.

Like I said in other posts, I would use the "pick a bug and fix it" method. But I'd also screen down from 100 candidates to ~20 or so before getting into technical interviews.

And, again, I don't think leetcode will scale well to 100 interviews either. You need technical staff in that interview room, and if you subject your team to 100 technical interviews using leetcode they're not going to be happy about it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

What if we knew that Maccas could have made $20 billion, but ignoring qualitative data reduced their profits to $8.563 billion. Do those decisions still look smart?

Seriously, the best blog post on this subject has to be Ludicity: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-glo...

The "pick a bug and fix it" scales better, though still not to 100 applicants.

Though I'd say putting 100 people through leetcode interviews would still break a talent acquisition process. I've been part of this kind of process before (though with arbitrary code problems not leetcode) and it was hell for the entire team going through it. Nothing got done for weeks while they were dragged into endless tech interviews.

Your friend would have spent three weeks practicing their sketching, right? And they would have made a decent drawing at the interview. And that would have the exact same ROI as spending those weeks on practicing leetcode.

The point is not that studying leetcode is good ROI. The point is that large orgs are testing for something that isn't relevant to commercial coding.

The best interview method I've seen is getting the candidate to work for a day or two alongside the team. The second-best was picking a bug from the current repo and working it out together with the candidate, getting them (or in this case, me) to work out why the bug was happening, work out a solution, code up the solution, and commit it back to the repo as a PR.

I realise this might be a skill issue.

I prefer models that are less "smart" but faster. Do the thing I asked you to do, immediately, and if you can't tell me and we'll work it through. Iterate faster not smarter.

> mean this isn't true, formatting is the most trivial part. And so many languages have an opinionated formatter these days (e.g. Black)

I don't think this is correct

I used to smoke a lot, and every time I went to smoke outside I'd think about what I was coding and find some stupid mistake just from thinking about it away from the keyboard.

Now I go for a walk and 9 times out of 10 it's the same, I write better code because I thought about it away from the keyboard.

This also works with vibe coding, I find - I think of better approaches to the codebase when I'm not in front of it

And yes, messing about with skills is the new messing around with setup. It's a rabbit hole.

I'm a massive, massive, believer in The Cult of Done [0] especially "the point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done". Allowing myself to finish something badly so that I can move on to the next thing was a game-changer for me. And, of course, I found out that it doesn't have to be what I would call perfect for others to appreciate it. Getting something shipped is way, way more important than getting something perfect, and often my procrastination around the fear that it wasn't perfect was stopping either.

[0] https://medium.com/@bre/the-cult-of-done-manifesto-724ca1c2f...

The whole "90% of my time as a coder is spent typing, so I should optimise my ability to type fast" is so, well, wrong. 90% of our time should be spent thinking, and most of that reading.

Are journals just too slow, hidebound, and predatory to be useful to this industry any more?

I wouldn't frame it as moving the goalposts in a bad way, though. We understand more now than we did then, so we have a better idea of what the actual goal is, and moving the goalposts to frame that goal is more rational than insisting the goalposts stay where they were ten years ago even though the entire pitch has changed since then. I'm straining the analogy, obviously.

We're told a relatively benign version of our history. You kinda have to travel to the countries involved to get the real version.

There were no clear objectives when the war started, but the Trump administration has waffled since about:

Regime change - hasn't happened. The current regime is still running the country.

The end of the assumed nuclear program - hasn't happened.

Destruction of Iran's military - hasn't happened. Iran is still sending drone strikes against US bases in neighbouring countries.

and more recently, opening the Hormuz Strait to commercial shipping - hasn't happened.

Not a single identified US objective in the war has been achieved, and the USA has lost massive respect from the rest of the world because it has been unable to achieve any of its objectives against a third-rate country. It has also drained its interceptor reserves in a way that might have material effect on future conflicts (e.g. Taiwan)

As for Iran, it didn't start the war so it doesn't get a checklist of objectives. However:

Iran is selling oil that it was previously unable to because of sanctions. The on-again-off-again US blockade of the strait isn't really affecting this.

The regime has a much tighter grip on power than it had pre-war, there are no mass demonstrations and it is not shooting its own civilians any more

It has confirmed control over the Hormuz strait and looks likely to be able to charge tolls in the future.

It has seen the Middle East pull away from the USA and pull together, a strategic benefit for it.

There is no reading of this war that makes the USA look good here. It was a mistake in the first place and it's been a colossal cock-up ever since.