A small startup usually has little-to-no "junk" or "fat" to trim.
But as orgs grow, and since we have imperfect knowledge and communication systems, more an more "junk" or "connectivity" roles emerge.
Microsoft: 223,000 employees
Alphabet / Google: 198,933
Apple: 150,000
Oracle: 141,000
Meta / Facebook: 75,472
I tried to stay way from companies with retail or warehouse workers like Amazon and Walmart (though Apple likely has a lot of retail).
I don't see HOW companies get to that size without some "junk DNA" that keeps it operating.
Maybe in the next few years we'll have AI-powered knowledge bases and communication lanes that smooths things out, but - how do we 'quantify' what "Steve, the guy who has been there for 22 years and works as the company phonebook and knows who to refer you for the thing you need"
Or worse, you removed the workers and left the 'telephone' people.
In my anecdotal experience, MOST companies don't take any time to understand what they are cutting.
They kill "Project X" so the easy answer is that everyone involved with Project X must go. Regardless if they were useful or could be useful elsewhere.
My layman understanding of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is that you are correct. It states that there are things that are true but no proof can exist (providable by human or AI provers).
They could have just taped it to the inside bottom of a full tissue box, and as long as they got it before the tissues were mostly empty I bet it would go undetected. Put a hand sanitizer next to it for extra camo.
Which made me wonder: in the future a microphone/camera combo fits in a grain of sand and costs a cent so everybody can basically see everything ... curious what the world would be like, is there a black mirror episode on this yet?
Where fruit flies carry cameras around? That's scary.
Likely at some point regular people just aren't given access to such edge tech, though. Even with infinite knowledge from an LLM, you probably couldn't build it without access to a factory either.
Or hijack the TV's already always on mic. Just forward a copy of the audio to your server in addition to the one sent to Samsung or LG. WebOs and Tizen shouldn't be that hard to crack when you have access to unrestricted frontier models.
This so much. Throw it in some cabinet or put it in middle of some wires under the table... Any place where there is naturally lot of other stuff or no one never looks and if they look they don't look throughly.
> the critical part of the backend where a new 300ms delay will cost the company millions then yeah.
If it is so critical, why don't we have tests and benchmarks for it?
Oh right, because "Greg the super-coder" never wrote any of this down and it lives in his head so he can be the arbiter of change.
It was toxic before agentic coding, it's still toxic now.
Document your systems. Add tests and benchmarks for what is important.
We've always known this, we have a dozen or more textbooks written about it. But we always gave it a pass because "Greg the super-coder" was producing more value than he was hurting.
That's no longer the case. Your best coder is now Opus or Astra
> I can have an agent mass-produce security bug fixes
I can't figure out what you're trying to say here. Are you saying that this is acceptable? Because I very much don't think it is. You'll have twice the bugs after you're done, and they'll be inhuman ones that you have little chance of catching.
> But how many changes are actually serious?
I mean, "security bug fixes" are not on your list of serious changes? What is?
As a total side tangent, but I really like the following flow: focus follows mouse but focus doesn't raise the window, clicking on the top bar, or Win+Click raises it (notice how neither of these 2 results in an interaction).
Unfortunately, of the popular DE's, this is only supported in Xfce (?), and it's not supported in Windows or macOS afaik.
Those are rookie numbers.
I've been doing that for 40 years
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