BrandonM

But the bottleneck was never the code. It was always the human attention, the engineering judgment, the ability to hold a coherent vision for a system. We just didn't notice because writing code felt like the hard part.

I keep wondering what I’m missing in the AI enthusiasm, and maybe this is a big part of it? Writing code has never felt like the hard part to me.

In my 20s, I was excited about using a computer. AIM trained fast touch typing. I learned modal editing with vim. I learned all the common Unix commands to transform text files and filesystems in myriad ways. I learned to script and to create my own productivity keyboard shortcuts. I ran Gentoo Linux at home. Then I started my software career.

There, I learned git inside and out. I learned that IDEs all have vim keybindings, so you can have seamless language integration alongside speed-of-thought text manipulation. I became an expert in Java.

When I’m programming, if I know what I’m building, I’m moving at maximum speed. I’m not thinking about typing or syntax or using my mouse much. I’m learning the shape of the code I’m changing. I’m figuring out the right changes to make for myself and future work. When I pause, I’m pausing to think. Sometimes I realize the entire approach won’t work, but I learned something valuable, and I restart the work in a better direction with fewer pauses.

The code was never the bottleneck. Coding never feels like the hard part. When it does feel hard, I build a better abstraction or use IDE refactoring tools or craft a gnarly Unix pipeline with one or more sed invocations.

But this AI excitement is making me think perhaps this combination of skills is unusual. Maybe a lot of devs haven’t been exposed to great tooling or mastered the tools. If I put myself in those shoes, then coding seems much harder, and AI coding seems like a bigger win.

If I were in my 20s today, I might not spend so much time mastering the skills I take for granted. In that context, AI would feel like a magic productivity boost. For my part, though, I got excited about software engineering when I truly grasped that none of it was magic.

When you talk about the point or purpose of open source, what are you referring to? I think of Stallman, print drivers, and users owning their work, so your assertions about the point of open source ring false to me.

I live just west of Lake Michigan, and what you described would be a high-snow winter here. The lake effect is real. I grew up in the Cleveland area, and I was surprised how much less snow we get in Wisconsin. Longer, colder winters, though.

lurk in the middle of the road and make a left turn once oncoming traffic is stopped for the red

In the jurisdictions I'm familiar with, this is the proper way to make a left-hand turn. Many intersections are designed such that this is the only realistic way to ever turn left (high traffic, no left arrow).

Most red light rules are written against entering the intersection on red. If you're already in the intersection, you're allowed to safely proceed through and out of the intersection on red. That can be challenging, of course, if oncoming traffic is running the red light.

Just to add a counterpoint, I was hired as employee #3 in 2011. In 2020, I was able to sell 5.8% of my stake for $200K (as part of Series C). In 2021, I sold another 4.4% for $500K (Series D on terms too good to refuse). I still hold equity or options in nearly 0.5% of the company (which is still private).

My wife and I used about half the proceeds of those sales to buy a house (cash offer) in late 2021.

I don’t know what proportion of early employees get screwed, but people who do well are usually smart to avoid posting publicly about it (and I am apparently an idiot).

It would be worse than the nationwide average. Battleground swing states would swing way right. The Republican voters in the suburbs have passports at a much higher rate than the Democrat voters in the poor neighborhoods.

That assumes academic achievement should be the primary aim of childhood. What I learned in school was incredibly important—don’t get me wrong—but what I learned over the summer was arguably more important.

As a child of divorce, I cherished 6 straight weeks at my mom’s house (we only visited every other weekend during school). As a working class kid, I earned probably half my annual spending money over the summer.

My wife and I now have kids, and we’ve always loved to travel (and needed to just to visit family). Summer is the only time available for extended family trips (2+ weeks).

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a band selling merch that didn’t also have a tip jar.

Maybe to you, but I was broke during and shortly after college. If I could have picked up some gig work when I needed it, that would have been a huge help.

In addition to what others have said, daily demands on time and headspace can be overwhelming. My wife spends over an hour every day managing a chronic health condition. Raising kids well takes a lot of time every day. Some have loved ones with high needs that require care. Many spend 2+ hours commuting daily. Many work multiple jobs. Some spend a lot of time traveling away from home. Serious injuries can disrupt exercise routines and cause vicious cycles. Poor finances makes everything harder. Stress and depression can result from and exacerbate all of this.

Appreciate your health and time and focus and good habits while you can, and may you keep them as long as possible.

What is more important, the law, or the typical employee experience? If you're in a strong market where workers are in demand (evidenced somewhat by higher compensation), then workers will tend to be treated better for fear that they will leave for another opportunity (remember: "at will"). If workers have fewer opportunities, then how much can the law really help?

Are there specific protections that are lacking in the US that you would expect to result in worse employee outcomes?

I wish I could suggest something for you. My path was moving to the Bay Area 13 years ago to work for a small startup, helping to grow it, then going remote after a few years. Startup is a B2B with an ethical technical founder, and it had a credible business model from day 1.

US software engineer. I have 24 days of PTO, 15 company holidays, and 9 sick days. 10 weeks for parental leave (16 for moms). $240K salary, $400-600K in annual vesting equity. That’s private paper equity, but I’ve already been able to cash out $700K and buy a house with cash.

Fully remote. I can expense $120/month for phone and internet, and a few lunches each month, too. I can get a new laptop and/or monitor sent to me just by asking.

When I do visit the office, the trip is fully expensed. Free daily lunch. Coffee and drinks and snacks everywhere, free. Private desks in a semi-open office with couches scattered around. Lounges with hundreds of board games, nearly all of which have seen table time during work hours.

Primary projects are tracked in a knowledge-sharing system, but I can mostly work on what I want to. I’m encouraged to merge small fixes and refactors without any ticket-pushing at all. Yelling by managers or anyone would not be tolerated.

“At-will” is more FUD than reality in my experience. Most companies, when firing or laying someone off, give something like 2 weeks of severance for every year of service.

In the past, I would have also found it strange to see tech blowing up in a tight job market. After a decade on the team-building side, though, I feel different.

Interviewing and onboarding are a huge distraction. Interviewing and onboarding done well require hours of attention from the more senior folks on your team.

When a company is hiring, the senior folks involved might be spending 6 hours a week interviewing. For example, I might have 4 45-minute interviews, another 15 minutes prepping for each interview, 15 minutes writing up feedback for every interview, 30 minutes in hire/no-hire discussions for candidates who are close, and another 30 minutes in hiring or interview meta-discussions.

Onboarding takes even more time. If I'm a new hire's onboarding mentor, I'm likely spending their first couple of days close by to answer any and all questions. After that, my work is frequently interrupted for a few weeks as I help them through issues (totally legitimate issues, BTW). We'll be spending extra time pairing with the new hire during the feature development process. Code review for new hires' code takes a lot longer, too.

When you factor all that in, a hiring freeze can realistically free up 10 or more hours of experienced employees' time every week. These are some of the most productive employees on the team.

In that context, it's not especially surprising to me that giving the most productive engineers 33% more productive time would lead to rapid improvements for tech companies, in the short term anyway.

Of course, in the medium-to-long term, a company that's not hiring is building up a huge "personnel debt" that is going to come due eventually. The product improvements will lead to new business, more clients will require more support, the new business will lead to more feature requests, and some employees will move on. The company will find itself without enough personnel to make headway on their product. Then they will have a hiring blitz where they wreck everyone's productive time and the team culture. The new, bigger team will make some headway, but they will still look less productive than the team was during the hiring freeze. The business will stagnate. The company will enact a hiring freeze, or perhaps even lay off team members. And then we're back at step 1.

Does the LUG have 50M MAU?

For vulnerable teachers, we need better mitigations than mandated vaccines for their students. Vaccinated individuals can still catch and spread COVID. Even if the rate is lower, we might be talking about a teacher who is in close proximity (same classroom) to 200+ students every day, and more students than that in the building.

I don't believe mandated student vaccines is enough for these people (or for the parents of vulnerable students). Instead, we have to do the hard work of allowing appropriate accommodations for high risk individuals. Unfortunately, vaccine or not, much of the responsibility for derisking will inevitably fall to vulnerable individuals themselves, ideally with as much societal support and backing as possible (e.g., plexiglass enclosures for vulnerable employees? I'm not the expert here).

Nothing else we've done so far seems to move the needle much. The stakes aren't personally high enough for everyone else in society to maintain the necessary vigilance for years on end.

I am operating from an assumption that COVID-19 is bad and kills people. Unlike the other mandated vaccines, though, vaccinated individuals still catch and spread COVID at high rates. But the reactions to me very much sound like, "We must do something, and this is something."

I'm only asking for models here. Is the CA legislation based on scientific models showing that mandating COVID-19 vaccinations for all school-aged children will meaningfully impact health outcomes at the society level? Or is it motivated by a desire to overcome COVID by all means necessary, even ineffective ones?

It’s to protect teachers, staff, peoples families...

The article says otherwise:

“We need to make sure schools are safe so that all parents are comfortable sending their children to school,” said Pan, a pediatrician whose legislation has strengthened oversight of vaccine exemptions in previous years. “And we want to keep schools open.”

There's already a long list of required vaccinations for school... is this one any different?

To me, the answer is a clear Yes. Every vaccine on that list, to my knowledge, results in a much more complete immunity profile than the COVID-19 vaccine. The diseases on that list also impact children in rather devastating ways.

COVID-19 vaccines seem to be more similar to the seasonal flu/cold vaccines than to any of the vaccines on that list. Respiratory diseases circulate around schools every year, and we haven't mandated vaccines for those.

Do we have scientific models showing clear benefits for mandated COVID-19 vaccines for school-age children?

From the article:

    this.downloadService.fileWithProgress(url, 'POST', 'download', body);

    ...

    public fileWithProgress(url: string, reqType: RequestType, actionType: ActionType, body: ...): void {
        ...
    }
    ...
    export type RequestType = 'GET' | 'POST' | ...;
    export type ActionType = 'download' | ...;

And urban Americans only survive due to crops produced in rural areas.

My 10-year path at a 4->400-person startup has been Lead Software Engineer -> Director of Infrastructure -> Principal Software Engineer. I’m making more total compensation today than ever, with no reports.

I lead complicated initiatives and advise a lot of feature work. This means a lot of meetings, document-based collaboration, and process-oriented thinking. But I still program, and I don’t feel accountable for others’ work output or behavior or morale the way I did when I was a manager.

I thought the same. For anyone seeking more info on those career tracks, https://staffeng.com/ is a great resource.

The poster seems to be trying to draw a parallel between his comment and an infamous post that I made nearly 15 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224), or maybe just to make me feel bad. I personally don’t think the tones of the two posts are comparable at all. My post has been quoted out of context for the last decade or so, though, so it’s not surprising to me. (Ask yourself, what did “app” mean in my comment?)

Several people seem to expect that I would be embarrassed by my comment or regret making it, but it honestly doesn’t bother me at all. I, HN, and even the world have changed a lot in 15 years.

Anyway, I’m pretty satisfied with where life has taken me. I’m certainly not going to sweat someone combing through my post history in a vague attempt to dunk on me after pointing out that they’re being a bit of a shithead.

One of you is trying to help these people find their next job.

I'm very sorry for your loss. May their memory be a blessing.

I mean, what would you prefer?

I would not choose to be the star. Observing substance (ab)use and suicide among celebrities and the affluent, it seems clear that a “starring role” in life is not an automatic ticket to happiness or fulfillment.

For me at least, a lot of the meaning in life comes from dealing with cold hard reality. Updating my strengths and my belief systems to be more aligned with a disinterested external world. Connecting with, learning from, and sharing with other humans what it all means and what it’s like to be part of this whole thing, to get a more complete understanding of the human experience.

Consider—if we were one unified consciousness with total understanding existing in absolute bliss, what would there be to do, to discuss? We might produce a limited world like our own to make existence more meaningful.

You have a bazillion replies sprayed across this whole thread. Many of them are extremely confrontational, baselessly accusatory, and certainly not convincing. What do you think you’re accomplishing?

I got the vaccine. Still, I can easily come up with like a dozen good faith, non-selfish reasons to avoid getting it. Are you unwilling to brainstorm a little, or are you just being disingenuous?

What do you mean “not temporarily”?

I’ve done both, too. Both the treatment and the pay is better in office jobs. When I worked labor, though, I could think about whatever I wanted to during the day. White collar employers own our thoughts for 8 hours a day and often beyond. The wages are exceedingly decent, but that doesn’t preclude us from demanding more from our employers, who are making even more than that off our thoughts and creative output.

I’m not making any particular argument here, just adding color to your fair points. My dad worked labor his whole working life until it broke his body at about 50 (now on disability). Now I’m working in part to send him money every month, but also building toward my own early semi-retirement. I’m happy I got into programming, but I’ll be happier to have my thoughts back.