I feel like this is something I've seen a fair amount in my career. About seven years ago, when Google was theoretically making a big push to stage Angular on par with React, I remember complaining that the documentation for the current major version of Angular wasn't nearly good enough to meet this stated goal. My TL at the time laughed and said the person who spearheaded that initiative was already living large in their mansion on the hill and didn't give a flying f about the fate of Angular now.

There are countless kidding-on-the-square jokes about projects where the innovators left at launch and passed it off to the maintenance team, or where a rebrand was in pursuit of someone's promo project. See also, killedbygoogle.com.

I think the hiring and reward practices of the organizations & the industry as a whole also encourages this sort of behavior.

When you reward people who are switching too often or only when moving internally/externally, switching becomes the primary goal and not the product. If you know beforehand that you are not going to stay long to see it through, you tend to take more shortcuts and risks that becomes the responsibility of maintainers later.

We have a couple of job hoppers in our org where the number of jobs they held is almost equal to their years of experience and their role is similar to those with twice the experience! One can easily guess what their best skill is.

Yes. People are incentivized to do very stupid things to grab this years bonus or promotion.

See Google intentionally degrading search results for example. The resentment and loathing for Google is at all time high.

Reward people based on (# who listed them * average salary of those who listed them).

What do you think these technical ladder climbers become..? Technical leadership. The truth is, there’s no one technical in big tech leadership. They pay lip service to “tech” to keep up appearances and to satisfy the pleebs that work under them. The only things leadership cares about is the stock price and profitability, literally nothing else matters. If anything the tech itself is a nuisance that pulls their attention from where they’d rather have it, which is anywhere else.

I work as if that ideal is true, and can’t stand playing the game. But others are still playing the game and eventually they win whatever B.S. position it is that they aspire to, and I get removed from the board.

If a particular kind of "career managers" hate this system (and perhaps thus quit): great.

Why does promotion need a new feature? Reward for maintenance over time. Build on existing features / components. Reward for helping and up-skilling others.

It seems to be more on a spectrum of 'Haha, only joking' where the joke teller makes a statement that is ambiguously humorous to measure the values of the recipients, or if they are not sure of the values of the recipients.

I think the distinction might be on whether the joke teller is revealing (perhaps unintentionally) a personal opinion or whether they are making an observation on the world in general, which might even imply that they hold a counter-opinion.

Where do you see 'kidding on the square' falling?

(apologies for thread derailment)

When companies do what the market expect we praise them. When it's workers, we scorn them. This attitude is seriously fucked up.

When companies start hiring based on experience, adaptability, curiosity, potential and curiosity then you get to complain. Until that, anyone doing it should be considered a fucking genius.

The game doesn't exist without players. I could make more money if I worked at Meta or Amazon, but at what cost?

I understand the realities of Game Theory, but then one could argue that being blamed and criticized for one's choices is also part of the game. "Mr Wolfcastle, how do you sleep at night?" "On a big pile of money with many beautiful ladies"

Worst one is the data pipeline we have. It’s some AWS lambda mess which uses curl to download a file from somewhere and put it into S3. Then another lambda turns up at some point and parses that out and pokes it into DynamoDB. This fucks up at least once a month because the guy who wrote the parser uses 80s BASIC style string manipulation and luck. Then another thing reads that out of DynamoDB and makes a CSV (sometimes escaped improperly) and puts that into another bucket.

I of course entirely ignore this and use one entire line of R to do the same job

Along comes a senior spider and says “maybe we can fix all these problems with AI”. No you can stop hiring acronym collectors.

Hmm. Can't say I agree here - at least not with the literal text of what you've written (although maybe we agree in spirit). I agree that _simplistic_ strong opinions about languages are a sign of poor thoughtfulness (" is good and is bad") - but I'd very much expect a Staff+ engineer to have enough experience to have strong opinions about the _relative_ strengths of various languages, where they're appropriate to use and where a different language would be better. Bonus points if they can tell me the worst aspects about their favourite one.

Maybe we're using "opinion" differently, and you'd call what I described there "facts" rather than opinions. In which case - yeah, fair!

(Mostly .Net, PHP and Ruby)

See, we can all generalize. Not productive.

Only thing I ever saw from Golang devs was pragmatism. I myself go either for Elixir or Rust and to me Golang sits in a weird middle but I've also written 20+ small tools for myself in Golang and have seen how much quicker and more productive I was when I was not obsessed with complete correctness (throwaway script-like programs, small-to-mid[ish]-sized projects, internal tools etc.)

You would do well to stop stereotyping people based on their choice of language.

That's pretty much another way of saying that stuff becomes a whole lot quicker and easier when you end up getting things wrong. Which may even be true, as far as it goes. It's just not very helpful.

FWIW I very much share your exact thoughts on Rust skewing metrics because it makes things too easy and because stuff almost immediately moves to maintenance mode. But that being said, we still have some tasks where we need something yesterday and we can't argue with the shot-callers about it. (And again, some personal projects where the value is low and you derive more of it if you try quickly.)

Those people, if they really exist, are right.

Hard to take you seriously when you do such weird generalized takes.

While it's a sad fact that fanboys and zealots absolutely do exist, most devs can't afford to be such and have to be pragmatic. They pick languages based on merit and analysis.

I am especially valuable because I am fine reading and writing any of the languages involved. The management likes that, but there's a lot of difficulties solving the tribal problem, as the leads are basically all crazy zealots, and it's not as if purging one or two factions of zealots would avoid further zealotry from the survivors. The fact that I can work across all their tech doesn't make me many friends, as my work across systems shows their arguments have little merit.

For most work, in most cases, most languages are just fine. The completely wrong tool for the job is pretty rare, and the winning argument in most places is "we have the most people that have experience with tool X, or really want to try exciting new thing Y", for whatever the problem is, and whatever X might be.

You should search for headlines on HN that say "written in Go" or "written in Rust" and then compare that to the number of headlines that say "written in JavaScript" or "written in Kotlin."

I’ve seen the more cynical hype-driven stuff, but it’s inevitably superficial on first glance, where I have seen some real curiosity and exploration in many “Project X - Built In Rust/Go/Cobol/D/Whatever” and I think they’re exploring the dynamics of the language and tooling as much as anything else.

" Version 0.2 - Unstable/buggy/slow unless you use exactly like the example - not going to get updated because I moved on to something else"

Rust is another programming language. It's easier to write code without a certain class of bugs, but that doesn't mean version 0.2 of a casual project is going to be bug-free.

Rust projects immediately become “done”??? They don’t also having changing requirements and dependencies? Why aren’t everyone at the best shops using it for everything if it massively eliminates work load?

It's easy to have no defects in functionality you never got around to writing because you ran out of time.

Doesn’t look like a con to me :)

Learning new technologies on the go is pretty much the standard, but it's something that employers don't understand.

I'd love to know if my superficial impression of Microsoft's culture is wrong. I'm sure there's wild variance between organizational units, of course. I'm excluding the Xbox/games orgs from my mental picture.

Zune, Games for Windows Live, Skype, Encarta, CodePlex, Windows Phone, Internet Explorer.

https://killedbymicrosoft.info/

However, their documentation and support is really scant.

Google kills off projects because the legal liability and security risks of those projects becomes too large to justify for something that has niche uses or gives them no revenue. User data is practically toxic waste.

Even good honest motivated people can become checked out without even being aware of it.

The alternative is to lay off people as soon as they hit 1.0 (with a severance bonus on the scale of an acquisition). This would obviously be worse, as you can’t take advantage of their institutional knowledge.

You can go the hatchet way - I am strongly unconvinced it is indicative of anything resembling good management, mind - but most people and companies cannot rely on banks or investment firms loaning them 40 billion dollars and accepting passively a mark down of their mone~ to 1/4 of the value they loaned down the line. CEOs are ousted by investment firms for a far smaller drop in value all the time.

Congratulations, you’ve invented the HR department in corporate America.

The better the pay, the more you will attract the people who are there for the pay first and making good products ... second or third or never. How do you combat that?

No one works for any BigTech company because they think they are making the world a better place. They do it because a shit ton of money appears in their bank account every pay period and stock appears in their brokerage account every vesting period.

I personally don’t have the shit tolerance to work in BigTech (again) at 50. But I suggest to all of my younger relatives who graduate in CS to “grind leetCode and work for a FAANG” and tell them how to play the politics to get ahead.

As the Dilbert author said, “Passion is Bullshit”. I have never been able to trade passion for goods and services.

It's always the same. People trying to make things better for the next developer, people prioritizing delivers instead of ego-projects or ego-features by someone playing politics, developers wanting a seat at the table with (dysfunctional) Product teams, people actual good intentions trying to "change the world" (not counting the misguided attempts here).

You are 100% correct, you gotta play the politics, period.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who work at big companies for precisely this reason (or at least, with that as _a_ reason among many).

Yes, much of the prestige has worn off as the old guard retired and current leadership emphasizes chasing AI buzzwords and cutting costs. But still, big companies are one of the few places where an individual really can point out something they worked on in day-to-day life. (Pull out any Android phone and I can show you the parts that my work touched.)

And it takes a while for a young dev to register that the goals that the larger organization pursues are going to win out in the end anyway.

Case in point: Tesla/SpaceX meets your first criteria: "I want a tech company where people are there to make good products first and get paid second."

Google meets your second criteria: "And the pay should be good. The lifestyle comfortable. No grindset bullshit."

Other than small time boutique software firms like Fog Creek Software or Panic Inc(and thats a BIG maybe) you are not going to get this part of your message: "But I am confident that if you only employ passionate people working their dream jobs you will excel."

There are tradeoffs in life and each employee has to choose what is important to them(and each company CEO has to set standards on what is truly valued at the company).

Tesla has never been a good product.

https://insideevs.com/news/731559/tesla-least-reliable-used-...

https://www.carscoops.com/2024/11/tesla-model-3-comes-bottom...

https://www.topspeed.com/tesla-reliability-and-repair-costs-...

Not to mention the infotainment system is much worse than CarPlay/Android Auto compatible cars

This is too funny to post alongside saying “Tesla has never been a good product.” Like “everyone that bought it loves it be car expert Joe from South Dakota ranks them very low.”

Common sense also runs very much against this nonsense narrative - you just simply do not sell that many cars, at those prices especially, year after year after year, if the product is subpar. Don’t fall for this “experts” bullshit. The CEO is the biggest tool this Earth has ever seen but cars are awesome

On another note, Apple also sold millions of MacBooks with butterfly keyboards.

And Tesla sells are declining, losing market share worldwide and sells 1/5 the number of cars as Toyota

I guess it's human nature for a person or an org to own their own destiny. That said, the driving force is not personal ambition in this case though. The driving force behind this is that people realized that OAI does not have a moat as LLMs are quickly turning into commodities, if haven't yet. It does not make sense to pay a premium to OAI any more, let alone at the cost of not having the flexibility to customize models.

Personally, I think Altman did a de-service to OAI by constantly boasting AGI and seeking regulatory capture, when he perfectly knew the limitation of the current LLMs.

Nadella might have initially been caught a bit flat footed with the rapid rise of AI, but seems to be managing the situation masterfully.

Whatever is there doesn't work half the time. They're hugely dependent on one partner that could jump ship at any moment (granted they are now working to get away from that).

We use Copilot at work but I find it very lukewarm. If we weren't a "Microsoft shop" I don't think would have chosen it.

They got access to the best AI to offer to their customers on what seems to be very favorable terms, and bought themselves time to catch up as it now seems they have.

GitHub Copilot is a success even if Microsoft/Windows Copilot isn't, but more to the point Microsoft are able to offer SOTA AI, productized as they see fit (not every product is going to be a winner) rather than having been left behind, and corporate customers are using AI via Azure APIs.

Product confusion, inconsistent marketing, unnecessary product renames, and rushing half-baked solutions has been the Microsoft way for dozens of products across multiple divisions for years.

Does *anyone* want "Copilot integration" in random MS products?

Third?

If I recall correctly, Microsoft’s agreement with OpenAI gives them full license to all of OpenAI’s IP, model weights and all. So they already have a SOTA model without doing anything.

I suppose it’s still worth it to them to build out the experience and infrastructure needed to push the envelope on their own, but the agreement with OpenAI doesn’t expire until OpenAI creates AGI, so they have plenty of time.

So hopefully if (when?) this AI stuff turns out to be the colossal boondoggle it seems to be shaping up to be, Microsoft will be able to save face, do a public execution, and the market won't crucify them.

LLMs are a commodity and it's the platform integration that matters. This is the strategy that Google, Apple embraced and now Microsoft is wisely pivoting to the same.

If OpenAI cares about the long-term welfare of its employees, they would beg Microsoft to acquire them outright, before the markets fully realize what OpenAI is not.

I mean, they have been doing platform integration for a while now, with all the copilot flavors and teams integrations, etc. This would change the backend model to something inhouse.

This would be the case even if OpenAI weren’t a little weird and flaky (board drama, nonprofit governance, etc), but even moreso given OpenAI’s reality.

If you like TypeScript, and you want to build applications for the real world with real users, there is no better front end platform in my book.

1) Cost -- beancounters got involved

2) Who Do You Think You Are? -- someone at Microsoft had enough of OpenAI stealing the limelight

3) Tactical Withdrawal -- MSFT is preparing to demote/drop AI over the next 5-10 years

How many critical “parental decisions” have you made in the past week? Probably very few (if any), but surely you did a lot of reinforcement of prior decisions that had already been made, enforcing rules that were already set, making sure things that were scheduled were completed, etc.

Important jobs don’t always mean constantly making important decisions. Following through and executing on things after they’re decided is the hard part.

See also: diet and exercise

This is hard to automatize.

Would definitely rather have a single postdoc in a relevant STEM subject from somewhere like Imperial for less than half the overall cost than an LLM all in though. And I say that despite seeing the quality of the memes they produce with generative AI....

Do they really get paid that much these days?

Computer science is rate 5, so 73kCHF the first year, 78kCHF the second, then 83kCHF onwards.

You can reliably assume that PhD wages must eventually converge to the rent of a studio apartment nearby + a little bit (which may or may not be enough to cover all other expenses. Going into debt is common.)

But you are not getting a PhD worker for 20K with "AI", that's just marketing.

That said, the trade-off is that you're basically hiring consultants since they really work for OpenAI :)

edit: I see we're actually in agreement, sorry, I read the indentation level wrong.

Does that include all overheads such as HR, payroll, etc?

Humans typically work 1/3rd duty cycle or less. A robot that can do what a human does is automatically 3x better because it doesn't eat, sleep, have a family, or have human rights.

2. How many such PhD people can it do the work of?

Do you have to pay all sorts of overhead and taxes?

I mean, I don't think it's real. Yet. But for the same "skill level", a single AI agent is going to be vastly more productive than any real person. ChatGPT types out essays in seconds it would take me half an hour to write, and does it all day long.

Of course $10k/mo sounds like a lot of inference, but it's not yet clear how much inference will be required to approximate a software developer--especially in the context of maintaining and building upon an existing codebase over time and not just building and refining green field projects.

We were hiring more devs to deal with a want of $10k worth of hardware per year, not per month.

They could also just be trying to cash in on FOMO and their success and reputation so far, but that would paint a bleak picture

You can't claim it's even comparable to a mid level engineer because then you'd hardly need any engineers at all.

It points to an article on "The Information" as the source, but that link is paywalled.

My understanding is that this isn't really true, as most of those "dollars" were actually Azure credits. I'm not saying those are free (for Microsoft), but they're a lot cheaper than the price tag suggests. Companies that give away coupons or free gift certificates do bear a cost, but not a cost equivalent to the number on them, especially if they have spare capacity.

There is a moat in infra (hyperscalers, Azure, CoreWeave).

There is a moat in compute platform (Nvidia, Cuda).

Maybe there's a moat with good execution and product, but it isn't showing yet. We haven't seen real break out successes. (I don't think you can call ChatGPT a product. It has zero switching cost.)

Look at Coca Cola, Google, both have plausible competitors, zero switching cost but they maintain their moat without effort.

Being first is still a massive advantage. At this point they should only strive to avoid big mistake and they're set.

Ironically if AI companies are actually able to deliver in terms of SWE agents, Nvidia's moat could start to disappear. I believe Nvidia's moat is basically in the form of software which can be automatically verified.

I sold my Nvidia stock when I realized this. The bull case for Nvidia is ultimately a bear case.

In consumer markets the moat is habits. The switching cost for Google Search is zero. The switching cost for Coke is zero. The switching cost for Crest toothpaste is zero. Yet nobody switches.

1. The switching cost from Google Search is certainly not zero, it implies switching from Google, which is virtually impossible because it's tied to Chrome, YouTube, Android and Gmail

2. I don't know many people who are dedicated "Pepsi" fans, they just grab whatever drink is available Coke/Pepsi..

3. I've also not heard many people who are never willing to switch from "Crest".. People will just grab the next available option if Crest is not on shelf. No one is pre-ordering Crest.

> 1. The switching cost from Google Search is certainly not zero, it implies switching from Google, which is virtually impossible because it's tied to Chrome, YouTube, Android and Gmail

Google Search is a product. Not the whole company. Switching to most other search engines is $0. Naturally no one is honor bound to use anything else you listed either.

The size of a moat befits the size of a castle it protects. Coke absolutely has a moat, but it's not big enough to defend Coke as a trillion dollar company.

The question isn't whether OpenAI has a moat or not, it's if its current moat is big enough to protect a trillion-dollar company.

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/management/e...

Just look at how much money Google lost in that failed AI demo from 2003.

The stock would be worth 50% less if the invested nothing in AI. Even the founders are back because of it.

If anyone has moat related to Gen AI, I would say it is the data(Google, Meta).

It's not an act of will or CEO dictat. It's about hiring and incentivising the right people, putting the right structures in place etc all in the face of competing demands.

Nvidia have a huge head start and by the time AMD have 'caught up' Nvidia with it's greater resources will have moved further ahead.

There is as yet no indication that AMD can match Nvidia's execution for the very good reason that doing so is extremely difficult. The head start is just the icing on the cake.

Taking code that runs against one hosted LLM and running it against a different backend LLM is... not generally a big deal. So OpenAI being ahead—in the core model, at least—is just being ahead, its not a moat.

OpenAI brings absolutely nothing unique to the table.