I can't wait to buy one and finally be able to open more than 20 Chrome tabs.

I've been on the other side of the table recently, and I agree it feels like a buyer's market. But it still took a while to find good candidates, and a lot of candidates showed up to interviews weirdly unprepared on even the basics.

If it's a drought for you, then I'd have to add: It seems like an especially weird drought, as well. Supply and demand seem to be doing odd things.

(And, for the spectators of this comment thread, I can confirm: Yes, 2 people with 3 anecdotes each is enough to speculate wildly about an entire industry.)

Well, there's your mistake right there. You're supposed to be riding an ox.

All this talk of oxen and horses got me curious about the PDF, so I went and took a look. It's really far worse than you've described.

I couldn't stomach it for too long, but here's some highlights:

(1) The first ~65 pages are about "requirements gathering." Page 60 offers up this gem of insight:

    Priority = ((Value * (1 - Risk)) / Cost

I couldn't make it through the whole PDF, in all honesty. But I'm quite certain the soul of software engineering is nowhere to be found in there; they've eliminated it entirely and replaced it with stamp-collecting and checklists.

To add a data point that will sound snarkier than it is:

I used to say very similar things. It is a really wonderful sound bite, and you can get together with all the other starving founders to say things like this to each other.

Looking back on it, I think this philosophy is actually a really important part of the startup-industrial complex. If you can just make it "not cool" to go get a job, and starting a startup is all about "freedom and adventure," then it becomes really easy for VCs to normalize things like "founders paying themselves subsistence salaries." That means the pipeline of new startups will increase in quantity and decrease in unit-cost -- which is exactly what the VCs want.

What they won't tell you about, if you want to chase the founder dream, is the opportunity cost. It turns out that maxing out your 401(k) is pretty great, as is having an infinite supply of sparkling water and spending your days building software with a whole bunch of other brilliant people.

I'm still not going to RTO, though. That part is just dumb, and I think every serious company that truly values engineering productivity will agree.

FAANG (and a few FAANG-adjacent) companies are the only ones paying close to decent wages, and even they've been making frankly egregious cuts to their protein-bar budgets lately.

Let's not sit around manufacturing skewed datasets that give people the wrong idea about what software engineers should get paid.

I think it's actually the exact opposite.

This reads to me like a very kind sentence. It can be very helpful to spell things out like this for such an audience. It is clear, simple, and direct.

I'll also note the sentence doesn't contain any sort of added emotions or judgment. (For example, the author could have made it worse by saying "If you decide to engage in" rather than "If you engage in," as it's currently written.)

So it really is just a straightforward statement about things that are usually never discussed at all. And, even better for this audience, the information is provided plainly, in a safe setting, with time and space to process things.

"When art critics get together, they talk about form and structure and meaning. When painters get together, they talk about where to get the best turpentine." (Picasso, supposedly [1])

To be generous to OP, I think their point is about how to communicate in an elevator pitch, or a resume bullet point, or the first few minutes of an intro call. And in those contexts, OP is pretty reasonably correct.

What it comes down to is details.

The person citing numbers about growth, hiring, or whatever is proving they know the details of the work. And that's a great start.

The next step for the interviewer comes in following up to find out whether they actually know the details of how the work was done, why it was done that way, what was good or bad about how the work was done, and why it's good or bad.

A good follow-up question would be something like: "Great, please walk me through the story of how you took ${METRIC} from A to B, what you think went well, and what you think went poorly." That should yield a solid 10-15 minute (or more) discussion where the executive candidate can prove they have the ability to handle both minute details and grand strategy at the same time, as well as the discretion to know when they're supposed to be doing which one.

Failure to do this on the part of the interviewer is how a company ends up with so many sub-par executives. And a failure on the part of the executive to push themselves in this way, in the first place, is how our industry has ended up with so many sub-par executives.

[1]: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/10/20/turpentine/

Well, obviously. Every guy wants a woman who's got some depth to her sole.

An exaggerated/anonymized version of a recent one I got, from an otherwise-really-strong senior engineer: "Of course when I said we would put a button there, it also meant we MUST build an entire UI framework from scratch, with full test coverage for the entire thing!"

...actually, that's not even that exaggerated. Shipping software at big companies can be unreasonably difficult, sometimes.

One possible reason could simply be there's a lot more future impact to granting someone the final title. If you proclaim someone a "Maestro of C++," then suddenly all the other C++ laborers will get a clear signal that whatever that person is doing is implicitly also what they should do, if they want to move up the ladder.

Beyond that, the top jobs usually comes with required work to train the next generation. So this person would heavily contribute, both implicitly and explicitly, to the future of the C++ guild.

Considering that impact in combination with how hard it would be to undo the decision, it's not surprising that many organizations might be cautious about deciding to hand someone that title.

> clear guidelines, training, testing and certification.

This makes sense, too. For any organization that wants to stay in the business of handing out these titles for the long-term, meaningful transparency is a good way to go about it.

It's not even that complex to do correctly. Usually, it's about 30 seconds of work to just go to https://http.cat/ and pick out the relevant cat.

I've been the same, ever since I learned to always keep a good towel around.

Another big area of hype is "prompt engineering." That one seems to have calmed down slightly, but for a while, there were large swaths of the Internet who were amazed that the set intersection of "talk like a decent human being" and "be precise in your communication" could generally lead to good results.

In many ways, "AI" right now is magic marketing sprinkles that you can put on anything to make it more delicious. (Or, if you're inside a big company, it's magic prioritization sprinkles.)

It was an eye-opener for me, too. I use `R` a little more often ever since then, but -- like a lot of others here -- my mental model defaulted to more of a `cw` approach.

Maybe there's just two types of vim users. This could be the latest new Silicon Valley personality test.

This is just fine, but it's not enough.

The purpose of writing a proper mission and vision is to say something about how. There should be some coherent strategic guidance, some notion of where the company is and/or wants to be in the marketplace or in customers' minds, and so on and so forth.

If you have that (and it's actually backed up by reality), then the OKRs emerge organically across the portfolio of investments the company is pursuing. Land N more deals with this existing customer segment, experiment with new features in pursuit of that other customer segment, staff a team to ensure customers aren't lost for reason X or Y, etc.

The real magic, of course, is that every person in the company can then make a clear statement about how they're contributing to the broader mission and vision of the corporation. When it all lines up, it really is a beautiful symphony of capitalism.

It's important the slide deck be polished for all the people who want to come learn about the project, so it makes sense to spend at least a month preparing it.

And the neat thing is that all this work will get you lots of suggestions from executives about how you could address all the velocity issues that your project seems to have all the time! So you'd better budget 2-4 weeks after the presentation to follow up, have stakeholder meetings, and make sure everyone really feels heard.

With just these few simple techniques, you too can get your engineers moving at the blinding speed of an average FAANG engineering team.

I did confess to my girlfriend once that I'd never thought of getting her flowers, and that every time I had bought her flowers in the past was actually just the output of a Chinese room. [1]

She said it was fine, and she liked the flowers either way.

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

It's incredible to imagine there are people out there just thinking in language as they go about their lives.

I wonder how it must work. Are they literally lining up one word after another in their minds? I guess it has to work that way to feel like some sort of "consistent internal monologue"?

At scale, though, imagining a roomful of people thinking in single-threaded monologues does explain a lot about why some teams take forever to get anything done.