I briefly worked at an organisation where I was consistently and sustainably able to ship in two month blocks what other teams of 3-6 engineers at that organisation could not successfully deliver at all. I would consider myself around 75th percentile productive compared to the industry, but in that specific organisation I was at least 10x as productive as the median engineer - regardless of their seniority.

I think engineers tend to form clusters where everyone is roughly as intelligent/competent/productive as each other. Outliers tend not to join the cluster, or they leave quickly. I've seen this happen at the level of a company, but also in larger engineering orgs at the level of a team or group. High performers don't stick around when their median colleague is a low performer and vice versa.

Perhaps you've had the good fortune to work mainly in organisations with a high competency floor. Looking around, you may not see anyone who's 10x as productive as anyone else, but maybe you're ignoring that everyone is in the 90th percentile of the industry.

This is true of good articles, but the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia tends to lack citations or, worse, cites sources that don't actually support the stated facts.

If an account in good standing adds a cited sentence the likelihood that anyone will actually go and check the source to confirm it supports the sentence is low. It's more likely that the edit will be reverted for other reasons.

Citogenesis is also a real problem, and wildly under-documented.

And most people who read Wikipedia do not take the time to examine all of the sources (if they're even able to - just cite a book if you want to make something up), read through the edit history, and get up to speed on the article-specific politics playing out on the talk page.

Still, it's better than everything else out there.

Do your neighbors have parents nearby? I think this makes an enormous difference.

IME you can get great results from crappy prompts if the surrounding context is high quality, and you'll often get terrible results from great prompts if the surrounding context is low quality or non-existent. Same goes for the training corpus, I imagine.

I think success with LLMs is dominated by giving them a well-structured workspace, high-quality reference material, and strict tools with which they can check their work. Then you only need great prompts when venturing into parts unknown. But for that stuff you may as well write it by hand and get the LLM to fill in the gaps IMO.

Bell, Wang, Fairchild, Intel, Sun...

We used to expect training, mentorship, skill-building and effective job placement from employers.

If anything, unions should be lobbying employers to provide those things to poor performers.

I can think of _one_ product that allows you to set up low-friction access management, and AFAIK most users of that product don't set it up that way.

Software engineers _should_ be able to request access to dev resources JIT during their day-to-day work, have that access auto-approve in >99% of cases, have it auto-expire if they don't actually use the resources, and have all of that be subject to anomaly detection/approval escalations and other auditing.

Instead in most orgs it's like fill out a form, get your manager (who's always in meetings) to approve and then wait some number of days for a human to click-ops your request. At best you can open a PR and have the changes applied in an hour or two.

You _should_ be able to get access to things pretty much immediately if you need them and they're not sensitive. Then we could deny by default without cratering productivity.

Did we solve the ageism problem by mistake?

A loan is a liability, but you might take one out regardless because you know you can use it to make more money than you'll have to pay back in interest.

That said, I think it's more correct to characterise code as a depreciating asset, as another commenter did.

We've known this since close to the advent of computing and yet every generation of has taken us further away from this goal. Largely driven by jealous resource-guarding, particularly when it comes to data. Why don't I have a generic media player app that can stream Netflix, Disney, Hulu, etc? Those brands want control over my experience. They will continue to want that control indefinitely. That basic human desire for control won't evaporate with a "single unified codebase".

The specific incentives for starting a slop network are the promises of increased margins via reduced production costs (don't have to pay any pesky creative types) and more rapid growth via reduced production time (you can theoretically produce an episode in about the time it takes to listen to one, perhaps less).

I explored starting an AI slop network a few years ago. The tech wasn't quite ready at the time. My motivation was far more base: watching numbers go up.

All the process you described exists to maximise the amount of time your software engineers spend writing code[0]. You put this process in place because software engineers are among the most expensive employees in the business. Their time being wasted is meaningful to the bottom line.

Make the software engineers cheap enough and the need for a lot of this process evaporates. Companies that already _have_ these processes in place will be SOL because it's incredibly challenging to break a bureaucracy like that, but companies that either don't have these processes or manage to eliminate them will have a significant competitive advantage.

Which shouldn't be news. Startups have always competed with established businesses via speed of execution. What's new is the ability to maintain that speed for longer.

> At bigger companies, you're going to need to pass all sorts of reviews from other departments, like legal, privacy, performance, accessibility, QA...

These are all in the firing line. If the company could outsource their legal liability to an external provider of these reviews, they would.

[0] We'll just ignore the irony that much of this process ends up being foisted on the employees whose time you're hoping to save.

Some people get lucky and the first thing they try turns out to be their thing.

I think his name not being blasted everywhere has more to do with it being thoroughly uninteresting than any gentlemen's agreement.

As is showing your ID to a bartender.