mattchamb

Possibly overly cynical, but I think a lot of people who are getting forced to shoehorn LLMs into their applications don’t have a choice about NOT using an LLM for the required use case.

Testing and validation kind of imply that it won’t ship if it isn’t fit for purpose, which isn’t an option and most devs will know it’s kind of junk already.

That’s not to say there aren’t good use cases, but when forced to add an LLM somewhere it doesn’t work, and you have no examples of “correct” output anyway, validation is usually an afterthought.

Haha that’s a great idea and perspective on tackling it.

Ugh I am dealing with an amazingly productive platform team who churn out so much stuff that the product teams just can’t keep on top of all the changes to tools and tech.

That one team is super productive at the cost of everyone else grinding to a halt.

Everything is a cycle.. for example I am using graphql at work and being heavily reminded of the WSDL and WCF of old

I have to work with a DBA who has decided that nothing new gets developed using Postgres and is confident that our use cases are best served with a document db… all without knowing any of our use cases, requirements or constraints.

Now I just don’t involve him in anything unless forced.

Honestly this is a concern for me in a non boogeyman way. I joined a company to work on their edtech product for kids and got assigned to work on their AI product. I have no idea how to be confident and prove that the gen ai won’t tell the kids harmful things. We can try all kinds of things but I don’t know how to PROVE it won’t.

My uninformed take as a Kiwi is that most cars here are second hand imports from Japan, so we need imported EVs from Japan to pick up.

Also, most people dont buy new cars, and the temperate climate means old cars live a long time, so our rate of replacement must be pretty low.

The company I work at is using step functions heavily and I hate it. Instead of an if statement they make it a new step with the conditional in json, so following the code required you to jump around between files.

It has also been built by contractors who have no incentives to make it run locally or be easy to manage in production, but that isn't specific to step functions, and more due to poor leadership.

To interpret your example in another way, a page working in IE is doing it right. So first you do it, and structure it the way you think it should be done with "correct" markup. Once you have that, you can then do it right and get it working properly in IE. After that, doing it better would be restructuring things so maybe you dont need as many hacks.

I've seen it go wrong where there is a design system, but none of the designs that come in actually match it, so we need to extend the standard components or create whole new ones; but timelines are set as if it's all off the shelf stuff.

Not sure if related, but my 2020 M1 macbook air bricked a week or so after upgrading to Sonoma. I was suspicious if this was related to the update. Luckily the logic board was replaced for free under warranty laws here, though it put me off switching to iphone which I was a day away from doing.

We have a deadline and estimates, now all we need are the requirements...

I came up with a template that would help me guide the conversation

Maybe it's just a different style, but when I was a manager my 1 on 1s with my team was their chance for them to set the agenda. They had 30 mins of my undivided attention to discuss what THEY wanted to talk about. Except in rare cases, anything on my agenda was fit in at the end or I booked separate time for it.

I am 2 weeks back as an IC after 3 years of management, so I went through the same thing. Take it slowly, youll have some management instincts that are hard to kick. I am really enjoying logging off and being uncontactable at the end of the day.

I experienced the exact same things. I have never before felt so accountable for decisions that I have such little input on.

I don't think that changes much. To oversimplify; by telling you how to do it, the team lead is taking responsibility for the outcome of your output. You are just responsible for doing it how they said.

I have one week left as a manager before I start a new job as an IC. I am so excited to change back to being responsible for only my own output.

I went from a being a manager with a good boss, to a manager with a bad one. It is such a different experience, and is making me change back to an IC role for my own sanity.

I just started learning guitar at 34 with absolutely no musical experience, and it's such an amazing new world to learn.

I pay for youtube premium so that I dont see ads.

I also want to say thanks for exactly the same reasons expressed above. I learnt a lot from your writing when I was a junior developer just starting out in 2010.

You shared a lot of insights that made the internals of the systems we build upon much more accessible to me and helped shape my relationship with all programming languages I have used since then.

Maybe I have been in enterprise development for too long, but I chuckled at it starting with saying a medium scale project and then clarifying that to mean 4 weeks. I struggle to get the stakeholders to agree on goals in 4 weeks, even for the smallest project we consider.

I prefer to have some separation between my home life and work life. It isn't about the amount of space, but being able to achieve that mental separation for my own mental health. Previously that was achieved by having a company provided office space that I commuted to.

The company decided unilaterally that they no longer want to provide that space and are now altering our existing deal to force that cost on to me.

I have asked about these options, and I am pushing for something; but the company was recently acquired by PE so they are tight with every dollar.

My company just closed our local office and forced everyone to work from home permanently. I rent a room and do not have a dedicated office space to make WFH comfortable. In order to make remote work viable, I will have to find a new rental and spend an extra $800 per month for an office. These are extra costs the company has forced on me.

This is not quite what you're asking for, but it's in the spirit of what you want: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen_I/O

In the case I am most familiar with, private equity is involved. They want to get rid of the expensive people and replace them with people in cheaper locations because they view people as interchangeable.

It is going about as well as you can imagine.

I've seen companies in similar situations stop issuing RSUs but also not increase cash comp in order to encourage people to leave as their RSUs vest.

Microsoft TFS has exclusive checkout and this is exactly what happens. Someone locks a file and forgets about it.

This is biting me right now and quality will suffer as a result.