> My hunch: vibe coding is a lot like stock-picking – everyone’s always blabbing about their big wins. Ask what their annual rate of return is above the S&P, and it’s a quieter conversation
Had someone higher up ask about something in my area of expertise. I said I didn't think is was possible, he followed up with a chatGPT conversation he had where it "gave him some ideas that we could use as an approach", as if that was some useful insight.
This is the same people that think that "learning to code" is a translation issue they don't have time for as opposed to experience they don't have.
Shonan Beach FM, based in Japan. 'Lofi Japanese jazz', I guess? When I lived in a house with a HomePod I had a shortcut hey Siri, Shonan Beach! that was activated most mornings. This was on all day as a low-volume background track. Love it.
During ZIRP the incentives for employees were completely disconnected from the underlying business, leading to entire careers being built around and rewarded for the wrong outcomes. People have built entire careers while completely missing/ignoring why they're doing the job and how their work is supposed to fit and contribute to the overall business - because in a lot of cases there was never a viable business to begin with, and the founders themselves were playing the "career startup founder" card and enjoying the mismatched incentives set up by a distorted funding market.
Now we're seeing a readjustment as the "free money" is gone and companies realign the incentives to actually make a profit on all that manpower, and are suddenly realizing they either have way too much of it, or ended up with the wrong kind of manpower due to over a decade of mismatched incentives. Thus layoffs and a jobs market flooded with candidates whose skillsets no longer match the current demands.
The good times for the career software engineer - the kind that aces LeetCode, optimizes for career growth and collects the right buzzwords on their resume has indeed come to an end, but there's still plenty of good times to be had to if you are a career problem solver. Being able to get machines to do your bidding is still a very useful skill to pretty much all business, and what matters now is delivery and solving the business problem in a profitable manner - how many tech buzzwords you have on your resume is no longer relevant.
This isn't to say it's anyone's fault - I don't blame anyone for playing the game and I myself took part in it at one point. But you need to realize it's a game and plan your exit. The danger is that there's an entire generation that started their career in this game and did not realize it was a game at all, and are now caught off-guard.
Really resonated with this, reminded me of the journey I went on over the course of my dev career. By the end, my advice for every manager was roughly:
* Don't add process just for the sake of it. Only add it if seriously needed.
* Require ownership all the way to prod and beyond, no matter the role. (Turns out people tend to really like that.)
* Stop making reactive decisions. If something bad happened on a total, extremely unlikely lark, don't act like it's going to happen again next week.
* Resist the urge to build walls between people/teams/departments. Instead, build a culture of collaboration (Hard and squishy and difficult to scale? Yup. Worth it? Absolutely.)
* Never forget your team is full of actual humans.
Dan Morena, CTO at Upright.com, made the point that every startup was unique and therefore every startup had to find out what was best for it, while ignoring whatever was considered "best practice." I wrote what he told me here:
No army has ever conquered a country. An army conquers this muddy ditch over here, that open wheat field over there and then the adjoining farm buildings. It conquers that copse of lush oak trees next to the large outcropping of granite rocks. An army seizes that grassy hill top, it digs in on the west side of this particular fast flowing river, it gains control over the 12 story gray and red brick downtown office building, fighting room to room. If you are watching from a great distance, you might think that an army has conquered a country, but if you listen to the people who are involved in the struggle, then you are aware how much "a country" is an abstraction. The real work is made up of specifics: buildings, roads, trees, ditches, rivers, bushes, rocks, fields, houses. When a person talks in abstractions, it only shows how little they know. The people who have meaningful information talk about specifics.
Likewise, no one builds a startup. Instead, you build your startup, and your startup is completely unique, and possesses features that no other startup will ever have. Your success will depend on adapting to those attributes that make it unique.
If anyone's interested and wants to hear more, I have a mix of 92/93 era Jungle [1]
Some rough mixes here and there (especially the first one) because it was live from a NYE event. But it suits the style of music, that era was so raw and fresh, the future was being invented right there! Very happy days :)
When the US was making leaps in technological and computing advancements around the 60s, one third of Europe was under the iron curtain and its economic stagnation. The other two thirds had just about finished rebuilding their infrastructure and amenities after World War 2.
The Marshall Plan led to the establishment of very strong trade relationships between the US and Europe, and it was a time of economic boom in the US. The Cold War led to technological advancements in computing, communication, and aerospace, where the US government funded much tech the like ARPANET to stay ahead of the Soviets in all these fields.
You take a stable business environment not disrupted by world wars, a government showering businesses with free hand-me-down technologies, and a huge economic boom fuelled by a whole continent of people suddenly looking to buy your products (some of which are computers), and you get Silicon Valley just a decade later.
When Woz was tinkering on the first Apple computers with Jobs, their peers in East Germany were looking for ways to go around the Berlin Wall. The economic circumstances and business opportunities couldn't have been more different.
Believe it or not, in the 1970s and 80s when Apple and Microsoft were born, Europe didn't have many of the consumer rights protections that it has today. It was largely focused on protecting its people from the USSR. In many European countries, consumer rights came into political focus only in the last 20 or so years.
Today things are different. European Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft all exist and I believe are incorporated in Ireland. These companies do a large portion of their business in Europe. And if you consider today's tech, EU is very competitive with the US. In fintech, Revolut, Klarna and Adyen have similar user numbers as US alternatives. In AI, Google DeepMind is and has always been a UK company, and Graphcore makes NVIDIA's specialised AI chips. In the EV space, you may have heard of Volkswagen, Porsche, Land Rover, etc. In the business environment, SAP dominates ERP worldwide. And in games, you may have heard of Ubisoft, CD Projekt Red, Arkane, Playground Games, and many other European companies. The list goes on and on.
The argument that Europe didn't form Silicon Valley post WW2 because of its current consumer protection laws is inane. Or that Europe doesn't have the same FANGMAN companies that operate in the US, or that it doesn't have strong tech competitors in the global space on the scale of FANGMAN. There were much larger forces at play than being able/not able to delete the App Store in the formation and development of tech hubs around the world.
Agreed. But keep in mind that is not perfect either, some games that use a clock feature depend on a small battery in the cartridge which is depleted after a decade or so
I think Musk's behavior (and the behavior of a lot of public figures, really) makes more sense if you assume that he's not saying things to express ideas, but instead regards words as noises that you make with your mouth that cause other people to do or think things; if they stop having the intended effect, you have to change the noises.
It's not hypocrisy, it's the natural outgrowth of seeing other people as a collection of vague moving objects that either do things for you or cause problems for you.
>I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore".
It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company. Sure, Twitter's product is twitter.com the website, but most criticism of it and ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running: they revolve around 'product' features and sociological ideas on how to organize the community of users, what kind of content to allow/promote and what to censor.
Likewise, when people talk about the value they see in Twitter, nobody talks about the great distributed system that runs behind the scenes, because its only role is to provide users with the actual product: people go on Twitter to keep up with the news, see funny posts, feel connected with other people during major events or while watching a TV show. The tech is only relevant in that it allows this to happen. By that logic Walmart is a tech company because I can buy stuff on their website.
Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas.
Sure, if you want to build new features fast you'll need software developers working hard, but much more importantly, you'll need people who understand the product and the users (in their various different communities and habits). That expertise is much harder to quantify and it seems clear that Musk deems it irrelevant, at least judging by the rollout of his most recent features and the utter failure of Twitter Blue
My mother told me to not care what other people thought. She also told me that words can't really hurt people ("sticks and stones..."). She also believed its "mean" to have any preference about people, calling it a version of "keeping score". In fact, "keeping score" was one of the worst things you could be accused of in my household.
Her advice fails to accept the reality of social and emotional needs. It also fails to address the (sometimes severe) downside of non-conformance. This advice made me an Outsider whether or not I wanted to be. I now believe that these were tools she formed to get her through her own family and social trauma, which she falsely assumed would be generally useful, and did her best to arm her children with her best tools. I also believe there are upsides to the approach, but the trade-offs are real and cannot and shouldn't be swept under the rug. I imagine others had similar experiences with religious parents.
Advice is dangerous. It has built in moral hazard. Advice is too often given in well-meaning ignorance and pride - but ultimately advice gets someone else to test your hypothesis for you. So if you've not gotten any life-changing advice, be glad!
My theory is that Shakespeare is full of old jokes and old metaphors, for which we don't have an earlier written version. He is this one person that is so often quoted and repeated that it seems unbelievable that he could come up with so many memorable lines. It may be that he was the person who made the works of art that preserved the cliches of his era.
Best summary I've heard so far