I’m scanning resumes and portfolios for little prototypes that exhibit taste, empathy, and principled thinking.
As a hiring manager and a manager of engineers across the seniority spectrum… yeah, I think these traits now matter more than raw coding skill. They always did at senior levels, but now juniors need to start picking that up sooner because the ability to get code through the system is no longer a common bottleneck. Now matters of taste are far more obvious, and consequential.
The ability to understand the interactions between systems still matters a lot. Unfortunately AI does hit walls, and how well you can handle when it does is a big productivity differentiator. I consider myself lucky to have paid my dues well before coding agents entered the picture, and I feel for the people who are only just now entering at ground level because we really have no idea how to teach our discipline anymore.
One important distinction was that the previous one was voluntary retirement and was offered to people nearing the ends of their careers. The people taking these offers were likely tired of their jobs and taking the escape hatch to retire (or change jobs in a minority case) a bit earlier than originally planned.
I suspect this VBO will see a lower acceptance rate because there will be a lot of eligible people in their early or mid careers, and unless you are one of the people who won't have trouble finding a new role, or you expect to be fired/laid off soon, or you're are already on your way out, you probably don't want to be starting the job search right now.
On the other hand, the 2nd round of buyouts this year brings certainty. Microsoft laid off 4,800 employees after the 1st round.
If you don’t take the deal now, you’ll spend your remaining days at Microsoft wondering if you’ll be included in the next round of involuntary layoffs, possibly with worse terms and timing.
Will the job market be that much better for you in a year or two?
If you’re worried things are bad and not getting better, you’re probably better off keeping your job and cutting all expenditures you can, so that you can maximize your savings before the job ends, and maybe you will even look out and not end up being laid off.
I gathered what you are saying. As someone who has done that, and been miserable, I do not recommend it.
I'd take the deal before it gets worse, and get a head start on hunting before there's even more people you're competing against. While you're at it, cash out some stocks before the index gets worse.
It helps to be able to learn as you go, because the end product is motivating, and the learning is fun.
I will corroborate that AI and pressure even in hobby spaces (like game modding) to ship faster if only to preempt a crappier implementation from gaining traction is making it harder to feel motivated to make something because there’s no time to also enjoy the technical puzzle or to really pay attention to excellence in the details.
I’m not really lamenting a bygone era, just saying that the feeling of programming for a hobby has also changed and the parts that are fun don’t line up as well anymore, so I do less of it now.
I still don't get where the pressure comes from. Ultimately, the only target audience of a hobby programmer is themselves. There is never a reason to rush things, because your only stakeholder - yourself - is fine with whatever your only developer - also yourself - does. You always have all the time you'd ever want for the technical puzzles because there are never any deadlines except self-imposed ones.
Unless you mean your hobby is other people using your software, rather than programming for the sake of programming in the literal sense. In which case, yeah, sucks to be beaten by AI on all fronts at the same time.
> Unless you mean your hobby is other people using your software, rather than programming for the sake of programming in the literal sense. In which case, yeah, sucks to be beaten by AI on all fronts at the same time.
For my case (modding games), yes, a big part of my reason for doing it vs. any other software project is experiencing others enjoying my work.
I also have projects I make for myself for personal practical reasons. In those cases very little has changed, because whether or not I use AI only affects me.
> Ultimately, the only target audience of a hobby programmer is themselves.
This is true when you don't share it with others.
I don't share most things with others anymore, I just make things with LLMs, and then use them for myself. When I make something to share with others, I pay closer attention. But for myself, I don't really appreciate the process of learning so much, because that's how I end up stalling out and never finishing the project. Maybe it resulted in useful skills anyway, but it really sucks for my mental health.
You can share your work with others while still not caring about the others when working. Others using AI to duplicate your work only matters if you care about people actually using your software, as opposed to getting some likes when you publish your project etc.
Most of what you said is already how it's done today, at least in the pharmaceutical industry.
> Some may consider it extreme, but, in my view, in an ideal world, people would treat testing in animals almost like testing in humans.
I don't consider it an extreme view, as lots of people share that view. But within the scope of pharmaceuticals, as opposed to cosmetics, I disagree with it because I think that's an impractical guideline to follow. Animal testing happens because there aren't good alternative ways to get safety data (on a per-treatment basis) without putting human lives at risk, and it's already a tiered system designed to balance scientific need against animal welfare. This is also why in standard medical trials proving safety comes before proving efficacy.
> The researcher should first ask "would I feel comfortable testing this in a voluntary human test subject?" Non-human animals would still be the first line of testing, since harm/death in a rat/mouse/chimpanzee is less morally bad than in a human, but I think this should be the mindset.
The problem is: how do you as a researcher become comfortable testing on a voluntary human test subject? You need safety data. How do you get the safety data? Right now, the main way is a tiered system that starts on a petri dish and eventually passes through mice, monkeys, etc. before humans.
> The problem is: how do you as a researcher become comfortable testing on a voluntary human test subject?
I don't think you and GP are actually saying anything different. I interpreted their statement 'The researcher should first ask "would I feel comfortable testing this in a voluntary human test subject?"' not to mean don't test on animals if you wouldn't on a human, but to use your reaction and feelings to that to guide your judgement, and help judge what type of animal testing you're at, not to be a binary switch of whether any animal testing at all should be done.
> The kind of expectations I have is that people do their best and I expect people to understand what they are doing.
> But that understanding has very little to do with what tools they use.
> And quite honestly, in my experience, the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools.
He’s saying that understanding or competence are more about the person than their AI use. I think that’s a reasonable argument, even though I disagree on the basis that it’s at least a little correlated in the shortcuts in understanding the many devs I’ve seen (not all, but a nontrivial amount) seem to be taking.
To be clear: I believe that it's entirely possible to use LLMs to amplify understanding and competence, but that in practice LLM usage is anticorrelated with understanding and competence. This is about empirical reality, not logical entailment.
> If this is the right mental model, you should expect to see:
> An unusual amount of in-house harness building on both the build side and the sell side
Yup.
> Org structures and individual roles being reshaped around their place in the business harness
Not yet, this is the one I am most skeptical about because it's still way too easy for the harness-driven processes I've seen to go off the rails, so it's still very much human SME-driven. However, the number of butts in seats required is going down.
> AI-native startups beating incumbents in domains where the “moat” can be easily harness-ified
In most cases I've seen the "moat" is not easily harness-ified, and increasingly the money and energy seems to be going into getting to the starting line.
> All software a software company uses (on or tied to the core build or sell paths) needing to be headless so the outer harness can run it
Tech companies are definitely doing it, but I don't think this is actually realistic yet for companies whose core competence isn't software. But this feels like a matter of when, not if.
I am watching completely non tech companies using AI to replace entire weeks of work and effort. The customer makes a phone call, and it is AI from the intake to discovery to documents to contract and negotiations to AI delivery to the notary. That work is a week of back and forth replaced with a few agents and $30/month.
But they greatly, greatly overestimate people, that for the most part, are burnt out and have real life priorities that supercede monitoring whatever the fuck an agent swarm is. Obviously. Those people delegate to young people
The need for more compute, in the orders of many multiples in magnitude, is still needed before we even get anywhere near there. And the cost is still too high for what it is now, which is basically a science experiment after the first threshold of complexity.
Many businesses are going to be more about who accepts liability for work product than who makes the work product. You can't sue codex for breach of contract when your customer database wipes.
It's definitely not for everyone. I'd equate the feeling to knitting, where progress is mostly slow and deliberate and the meditativeness is by design.
It's also more fun on a server with friends, where it can be more about hanging out and doing something together, rather than a solo creative exercise.
Dunno, once muscle memory kicks in, sorting the inventory, selecting recipes etc. all happens seamlessly without much though for me and my 6yo kid. I prefer playing on pc because of performance and visuals, but since most of minecraft gaming is done on the tv on a console, I'd say that after some playing one can become 90% as efficient as on pc (subjective ofc). Building blocks with mouse is more precise of course with a mouse nevertheless.
Consistently, at scale, and in a durable way: I doubt it. However, I have seen many localized cases of extreme excellence in the places where the company knows it really matters.
I will readily admit that even when I know my counterpart is neurodivergent, I still have issues adjusting my expectations and reactions. Without practice with repeated interactions over time it’s hard to mentally pivot. Sometimes I find it’s easier for me if we have the same conversations over a voice call where the body language element is removed entirely.
Agreed with what you said, when you're only considering security and usability you're often not at a Pareto optimal state, but once you add cost into the picture you see a lot more cases of being on the Pareto optimal boundary, or at least in case where the next improvement only comes with significant effort (by re-platforming, for example).
I guess that makes sense. as you get to higher dimensions, most points sit very close to the surface. So if we're trading off N things and N >> 1, expect to basically always be at the pareto boundary.
On the other hand, we should recognize that, to put it plainly, not all dimensions on the frontier have the same level of importance.
Any technological and societal progress is going to have negative consequences. To give just one example, completely curing cancer will put many doctors (and other healthcare professionals who aren't paid as well as doctors are) out of a job. It will definitely cause at least a few children to go hungry. It will probably cause a few suicides when some oncologists start to "feel useless." This does not mean we shouldn't cure cancer if the opportunity arises.
Our society, driven by clickbait, rage and social media hot takes, tends to overweight the dimensions at which new technology makes things worse. There are many news stories about social-media-fueled teen suicides or AI datacenter water use, very few about how talking to family abroad no longer requires astronomical long-distance bills.
For one we need to start talking about taking off the weights from security dimension, because it's becoming ridiculously overemphasized for things where it frankly doesn't matter much for. All at the cost of "usability", which is a fancy word for saying people's time and effort, which is literally the only truly non-renewable, priceless resource we have.
My experience has been that security is mostly treated as some contractual obligation that has little benefit and just costs money so the minimum amount of effort that prevents charges of gross negligence is put in. But I’m glad to hear that apparently there are places that take it more seriously.
Passkeys, 2FA being deployed the more intensely the more trivial and non-critical for users a site is, mobile platforms getting absurdly locked down, naive takes on "lethal trifecta" sucking out whatever little air in AI discussions that was left by IP apologists". In the real world, everyone in this industry seems to be showing off pointing out potential vulnerabilities and security considerations in any new idea or concept that appears - as if that were something to be proud of, instead of a solemn duty that more than likely will just prevent a nice thing from existing in the first place.
From where I stand, the industry is obsessed with security, way past the point of rational thought.
Yes, I don't mean to imply that this is some sort of clear majority situation or anything. I just mean that I've definitely both seen on HN and participated in real life in some conversations in which it was taken as given that we must give up one thing to get another when nobody had in fact established that we were on the Pareto frontier. Or, considered from a local point of view, whether the tradeoff really was inevitable. I have had cases where we could have had both, with no difficulty.
I’m very high dimensional spaces as they occur in real life projects with difficult to measure dimensions (eg how much does implementing something cost and how much does not implementing something cost) it seems very difficult to determine where you are in your space. Most companies run their product mostly on feels because anything else would quickly lead to analysis paralysis.
As a hiring manager and a manager of engineers across the seniority spectrum… yeah, I think these traits now matter more than raw coding skill. They always did at senior levels, but now juniors need to start picking that up sooner because the ability to get code through the system is no longer a common bottleneck. Now matters of taste are far more obvious, and consequential.
The ability to understand the interactions between systems still matters a lot. Unfortunately AI does hit walls, and how well you can handle when it does is a big productivity differentiator. I consider myself lucky to have paid my dues well before coding agents entered the picture, and I feel for the people who are only just now entering at ground level because we really have no idea how to teach our discipline anymore.
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