I am so over it, its not interesting and none of the people participating in it really have any noteworthy skills. I spend more time lurking in lobste.rs these days than here.
I think the most telling example of this is ilya himself being confused about why the "economic impact" of these ultra smart models is lagging where he thought it would be.
All the silicon valley pie in the sky elites seemingly completely missed the innately HUMAN nature of our systems. The system was never predicated primarily on raw logic or intelligence. Its always been primarily about people.
Enormous amounts of money could be saved with plain old Python and shell scripts anybody could learn… but then management wants you bolt on telemetry for a dashboard nobody will look at to prove it’s a good idea. Then they want you to promise your work is in their GitHub. Then their idiot CISO who can’t program has to pretend he’s auditing your work. Then the change management council needs a say… then you decide that profitability and efficiency isn’t your problem and you hobby code for toy problems.
This is the most delusional comment i think i have ever read on this site. It didn't make sense until i read the part about "Founders and CEOs" and realized it was not a post about any serious software enterprise.
I wonder if the difference here is age/experience or what you're working on/in.
When I was 20, writing code was interesting, by the time I was 28 it became "solving the problem" and then moved on to "I only really enjoy a good disaster to clean up".
All of my time has been spent solving other peoples problems, so I was never invested in the domain that much.
Yeah, I used to enjoy writing code but after a while I realised I actually more enjoy creating tools that I (and other people) liked to use. Now I can do that really quickly even with my very limited free time, at a higher level of abstraction, but it's still me designing the tool.
And despite the amount of people telling me the code is probably awful, the tools work great and I'm happily using them without worrying about the code anymore than I worry about the assembly generated by a compiler.
Trust me, I have many days where I wish I had your relationship to this. I wish it were as boring as watching paint dry. But it triggers that part of my brain that wants more, and I have to be very careful about that.
Ironically my favorite use of claude is removing caring about jira from my workflow. I already didn't care about it but now i dont have to spend any time on it.
I treat jira like product owners treat the code. Which is infinitely humorous to me.
Horrible degrading take. Be the change you want to see. Don't fuel the fire that's burning you.
If something's not happening, something else's making it impractical. Saying this as a 10+ years product manager and R&D person with 20+ more years of engineering on top.
I also had to deal with "managers are just complicating things" or "users are stupid and don't understand anything"; do you think I complained? No, I had engineers barter trust of their ingenuity with trust of my wisdom, and brought them to customer calls and presented them to users almost like royalty, which made them incredibly respectful as soon as they saw what kind of crap users had to deal with.
The industry is broken now, this is just a response to that. Leadership and product don't have any respect for the code, why would engineers have any respect for the ticketing process.
Thats an unreasonable asymmetric effort demand, "Your code does not matter but my precious tickets must have elbow grease put into them."
The industry is broken. It's broken in the same sense the railroad industry is broken. It has reached the point of abundance, where we're doing things that don't need doing. That won't get done in an efficient market. But since we're not in an efficient market, there are globs of capital thrown at people building stuff that.. doesn't stand a chance of actually making any return on capital.
But while it lasts, us, the glorified machine-minders (just like railroad engineers, well, minded the engines), get paid large lumps of money, through large hordes of managers, arguing on minutia of conversion optimization, and fundamentally, being paid enough to not to try and do something else, perhaps competitive.
And that is broken. Especially for the "smarter of us" - the graduation ceremony of my physics department rings true - we've trained you to discover the secrets of universe and reach the stars, and most of us will use it.. to gain an edge at Lehman Brothers.
(And I think the root of this problem, is the abundance of low-risk capital, from people who expect a small return and a pension that lasts for decades in retirement)
My behavior is a reaction to the environment I am in. And currently the environment is push slop code as fast as possible. So being able to claw back just a little bit of my time from the people pushing this stupidity is a small pro in a sea of cons.
Teach me your ways. I’ve long wished for an actual, human secretary to handle that for me. The context-switching and digging around in a painful, slow interface (I don’t just mean Jira, 100% of the ones project managers find acceptable seem to have this quality) is such a productivity killer, and it’s so easy to miss important things in all the noise.
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