I think my favorite early story was when OpenAI launched deep research. I was going to an event that I was headlining, and I gave it a CSV of the attendees and asked it to give me a small background on each company they represented.
When people introduced themselves to me, I knew a little about their startup. Felt magical.
I was at an industry event this week. a CEO of a startup took the big board of vendors who are present, put it through an LLM. It summarised the companies he should be looking at discuss partnership opportunities with and why based on his business. Spot on.
I was a horrible student as a child, and in my 20s I strongly held the belief that education was broken. Now that I'm a few decades older I wonder if my problem was not education but life. I did not fit in at most schools, and that had a negative effect on my desire and ability to learn. That's what led me to teach myself computers as a teenager...education and online socialization combined. Win/win.
I think the author is right that education isn't the problem, but they don't really discuss is the social element of schools. Bullying. Ostrification. I'm not really sure how schools are expected to fix that.
There’s something lopsided about education for boys. The system appears to favor girls heavily. There’s projections that college student populations will have shrinking male population. I think this is a systemic issue with school being built to favor a certain philosophy that isn’t well thought out for 50% of the population.
It's not that the system favors a particular gender. The system favors personality traits like self-regulation, organization, and conscientiousness. These traits develop earlier on average in girls than in boys.
i'm not sure if it's an issue of the educational system, but for at least several decades there has been a societal push to correct historical gender imbalances by encouraging girls to do well in school, go to college (especially STEM), get a career.
This has resulted in kids seeing a lot of messaging along the lines of "Girl Power! Girls can do anything!". Which to an adult looks like a shift in the tides of history, but for one of the kids that's all they've ever seen and i think that has an effect.
> This has resulted in kids seeing a lot of messaging along the lines of "Girl Power! Girls can do anything!". Which to an adult looks like a shift in the tides of history, but for one of the kids that's all they've ever seen
This feels too vibes-based. I never saw messaging like this when I was a teacher, nor when I visited the schools my mom taught at, nor when I visited schools to help with kid hackathons. This would be in California, Texas, the PRC, Japan, and Taiwan. Mostly I saw little nonsense alphabet stickers, famous buildings, chemical symbols, or like, comically diverse but in the end harmless bits of bric a brac like an astronaut in a wheelchair.
What specifically have you been seeing that would lead you to think boys in schools are being held back by messaging?
It turns out that when you level the playing field, girls do better than boys. I don't think it's about the "girl power" nonsense, it's about the ability to sit down, focus on something, and produce work that meets a certain standard of achievement.
I would say the more harmful slogan has been "you're okay just the way you are." I'm not saying we go back to harsh discipline and abuse, but there has to be a middle ground where we hold children, especially boys, to a higher standard.
I disagree. There's cases where girls do better and cases where boys do better. This blanket statement is just as bad as saying that all men/boys are smarter than girls.
Exactly, girls and women can do astonishing work in fields that favour more or less their mutual traits and vice versa, no need for "hehe we are better because GPA said so".
> It turns out that when you level the playing field, girls do better than boys.
Why is it that when boys/men where outperforming and out-earning women, people were willing to move heaven and earth to correct this terrible injustice, but now when outcomes have reversed (for years at this point) it's considered acceptable to say "Welp, that's just how it goes. Boys just aren't good enough."
Hmmm...almost like, it's not a level playing field??
This is true and interesting but it's also incomplete. Men still dominate most STEM degrees, and unlike law or business it doesn't seem to be evening out over time. I'm not sure what conclusions we can draw from this.
> We do know boys mature later which may be reason to not level the field completely, but we should still not allow that as an excuse.
I am quite a long ways from right-leaning but this sure does lend credence to their claims of discrimination. If it weren't boys, we'd say that a biological disadvantage is absolutely acceptable as an excuse, and we should try to correct for it.
Structural misandry. I'm telling you the Zoomer/Alpha boys have taken notice and are checking out of the system. Chickens coming home to roost in a few more decades as the West goes longhouse and gets economically pounded by the East. I was an early bird in MGTOW, but now it's common knowledge and operating strategy for most young men.
Boys don't owe society squat, and now they know it!
Boys have been sitting down, focusing, and producing work that meets a certain standard for most of recorded history. That ability is really not a uniquely feminine trait, and suggesting it is is honestly bizarre.
Boys have also been doing more destructive things, but that's a different issue.
Boys and girls do struggle with different issues socially and culturally, which is upstream of struggling with them academically.
What's consistently missed that education is downstream of socialisation. The experience of learning as a first introduction to culture shapes consequences more than individual techniques do.
Part of that is challenging all gender stereotypes. The traditional stereotype was that girls were frankly rather stupid and couldn't handle anything rigorous and challenging.
Now the stereotype is that men lack focus, are disorganised, and have poor communication skills.
One stereotype has been challenged, the other seems to have replaced it, and younger men have almost been encouraged to live down to it.
I don't think as a culture we're emotionally mature enough yet to handle these issues in an effective way, and both education and socialisation will remain problematic until we do.
> There’s projections that college student populations will have shrinking male population.
We're well past that. In fact, the gender gap in college graduation is now worse than it was when Title IX was passed. But because the gap favors women no one gives a shit -- many 'progressives' even celebrate it and continue to insist we need all these programs specifically to get women into college.
What philosophy? The gender based outcomes people never seem able to come up with any coherent explanation of what they think the problem is other then to play to stereotypes.
The explanation that I’ve seen floated is behavioral. Boys are active and physical and don’t focus as easily as girls, who are more amenable to sitting quietly and paying attention. The idea is that the current predominant K12 style favors students in the latter behavior group.
I have two kids in K12 and I don’t think it’s that simple. Not that I have a good explanation of my own, mind you.
"Hyperactive and distracted" is not necessarily the exact reason, but there is a large, well documented gap in performance for boys vs girls in elementary school (at least in the US).
What confuses me is that the education system, especially the college track, was designed for men and boys. Lots of colleges didn’t even admit women, and they were largely excluded from learned professions like medicine, law, the ministry, engineering, etc.
I haven’t really seen a good argument for what changed. I guess it’s possible that the school system was originally designed to teach young men skills, like quiet study and deference to authority, that women either learn more naturally or get reinforced in other contexts, and the schools no longer effectively teach those skills but still reward them.
They might be referring to the TED Radio Hour "Beyond the manosphere" by Richard Reeves. I think it was on NPR a while ago, I looked it up because the "school isn't designed for boys but girls" sounded familiar.
I hate to be that guy, but I think it should be pointed out that asian boys don't seem to have much of a problem. If there's a gender bias, why do they succeed?
So the issue with this take imo is that one of the primary goals of schooling is to socialize kids and force them to interact with others they dont get along with. There needs to be some conflict among the students so that they can gain and practice conflict resolution skills that are absolutely vital. I agree that the current system can be improved, it's just not clear how.
My issue with saying socializing is one of the primary goals is that schools leave kids to figure it out on their own. Hard to know how schools are performing at that goal when it is going unmeasured.
Homeschooled kids can socialize outside of homeschool and be perfectly well-adjusted. There's something to be said for avoiding the hierarchical social structure present in schools.
Some of those kids are lacking socially. It's not 100% by any means. The thing is that if you are home schooling your kids, you have to be intentional about socializing them in a way that you simply don't have to if you have them in a formal school setting. Obviously, some parents are going to fail at that but not all will.
Well the thing is if youre home schooling it's really easy to just never have your kid interact with someone they dont get along with. Thats the most important part of the socialization though. If you dont put effort into making your kids life a little uncomfortable Im not sure how theyll gain those skills.
As an adult, you can mostly choose to simply not interact with whomever you don't get along with, and this is exactly the right thing to do in that situation. Especially if the "not getting along" part involves severe abuse, as it often enough does among unsupervised kids. Why shouldn't kids get the same choice?
More importantly someone you get along with even though they are a [Democrat, Catholic, or a long list of other groups that people have strong beliefs in]
Any time you try to randomly assort 30 children of the same calendar age into a room with a single (or even several) teacher, it's going to be bad for nearly everyone except those in the very middle of the curve. A very narrow portion of that middle too. It can't not be. And if the teacher tries to cater to the slow kids and the "gifted" kids even a little, then the middle-of-the-curve children will suffer for that too.
The problem isn't "education"... everyone not destined to be a feral caveman needs one. The problem is "public schools". The idea itself is wrong, and it can't be made to work. But our single-minded pursuit of it to the detriment of all other alternatives just compounds the trouble.
Of the 50 people who end up reading my comment above, every one of you will read it a different way, and it's unlikely very many of you will read it as intended.
> Of the 50 people who end up reading my comment above, every one of you will read it a different way, and it's unlikely very many of you will read it as intended.
Because that's how language works. Stop being a pompous self-righteous ass and take responsibility for your own words.
> Of the 50 people who end up reading my comment above, every one of you will read it a different way, and it's unlikely very many of you will read it as intended.
Isn't this admission a sign that you should be more clear on the intent of the comment? There are many countries with well-functioning public school systems.
It might have worked in the very distant past. I learned that there was once a monitorial system of education where a single teacher might be in charge of many students, but only because the teacher would get a lot of help from skilled students who would teach what they had learned to other students in their charge.
Isn't this just solved by better student teacher ratios, which you could totally have in public schools if they were funded better and societally we valued teachers more?
What are private schools doing that you couldn't implement in public schools with adequate political will and money?
Your question is easily resolved by looking up how much American schools are funded, compared to historical funding, other countries' funding, and their relative successes.
Outcomes aren't any better with lower ratios. The best-funded public schools have funding higher than anywhere else, in the world, and have poor outcomes... it's not a funding problem. And it's difficult to "value teachers" when we learn of these outcomes, it runs counter to human nature.
Private schools are (excepting the truly 0.01% which are the most elite schools meant for the children of billionaires and statesmen) are nothing more than public schools dressed up in $20,000/yr tuition so that the upper middle class can feel special. They draw personnel from the same pool of teachers, they use the same textbooks and pedagogy. They are essentially public schools with a new label. But that you think I might be talking about private schools shows how you can't even really think about alternatives. You don't have the mental language to do so.
I think I should also gently suggest here that the issue could also be expectations. The idea that you put 30 random children in a class and that therefore there must be some who are "gifted", and there must be some who are "slow".
I don't know man? I'm just saying that sometimes sure, all the kids in your neighborhood could be above average. But most of the time, all the kids in a class are just average. And now the poor teacher has to explain to irate parents that their kid's not any more special than the other kids in the class. (Only we don't. We acquiesce to their insanity and label average at best kids as "gifted" and then have everyone be shocked when those kids don't gain admission to Ivies. Ma'am, that kid was lucky to get into his/her state flagship. And even at that state flagship, s/he probably ain't gonna be majoring in ChemE or anything if you want my honest opinion.)
Sure, you can have slow kids in a class. But, really? 30 random kids? Is it statistically likely that any are "slow"? Or is it more likely you're dealing with no good parents who don't work with their children at home? Then those same parents come to berate the teachers for not doing enough to teach a fourth grader addition and subtraction. With absolutely no reflection on why a fourth grader, with no learning disability, doesn't understand addition and subtraction.)
I don't envy teachers because these are the attitudes they have to deal with.
Public Service Announcement: No people, your children aren't "gifted". And it's very unlikely that your kids are "slow". Your kids are very likely, (horror of horrors), just average. Every one of them.
If we can just get past those things we can start looking at some of the real issues.
Don't have kids huh...gifted is just a classification for those with test scores in the top 1-5%. So if you have 100 kids, there is a pretty high likelihood you have 1-5 gifted kids (yes its not that simple, whatever).
And the research on the topic says that tracking (the idea you are criticizing here), improves educational outcomes. What to know the real problem with education? Its people like you who don't have kids and know nothing about the education system driving their own ideology and biases into the system. You have no stake in this, yet you want your opinion heard despite the fact that you put no effort into learning about the topic of education other than going through the system yourself which hardly counts.
PS You don't even know the term for the thing you are criticizing.
PPS By definition, every kid can't be average. So you don't understand statistics either.
>people like you who don't have kids and know nothing about the education system
You know when I did my student teaching stint to certify? 1993.
PS: You know why they say tracking works? Because we throw out data from after high school graduation. Ever wonder how those, uh, "gifted", kids who got "A"s in high school Calc typically do in Calculus streams at the University level? I can assure you there are many many professors out there dealing with the results of our tracking system, (that being where the proliferation of "gifted" programs came from), who would not say that it is "working".
Over a weekend about a decade ago, I toyed with making a Final Fantasy Tactics-like game in the browser using CSS for the renderer. I could not get it to work in the time I gave it. I realized too late I needed to make some abstractions and stop trying to manipulate CSS directly.
Which is a long way of saying I appreciate how challenging this probably was to figure out. I love stuff like this.
I worked at a fully remote company that did the best job hiring juniors in my 20 year career. The talent and enthusiasm in that pool was great and really injected something into teams.
What changed was ZIRP ending. The layoffs from that were real, and the managers who can't hire a ton angle for more senior people instead. The junior culture changed overnight.
> The layoffs from that were real, and the managers who can't hire a ton angle for more senior people instead.
A lot of my past employers built their process around requesting additional headcount first, then determining the budget for the role second. It was in every manager’s best interest to maximize the budget for the role so they could hire the best candidate they could find. In practice this meant arguing that you needed someone senior or staff at minimum. Then the job posting got written. There was always a theory that we’d take great juniors but they would get filtered out before getting far enough. When they were told they had to lay off 2 people, they would cut the least experienced and hold on to the most experienced.
At other companies managers were given budgets and left to manage their headcount to fit. This created an inverse situation where they would try to get 3-4 juniors instead of 2-3 seniors or 2 staff level people. When layoffs came you would see teams choose to drop the one highly paid person instead of cutting 2 juniors.
So while your company lost their juniors, I know a lot of people angry that their companies let go of experienced people to keep the cheaper juniors around. Little policy changes can have an outsize effect
ZIRP alone isn’t even the full financial story - there was a time bomb tax change from a 2017 bill that impacted R&D (most software work) and that took effect in 2023.
But it’s fairly visible that big companies (eg Meta) that are spending a lot on AI are actually changing spending on headcount and hiring to maintain margins. It’s not the efficiency of the workers, it’s the maintenance of margins with big new spending.
My first and only layoff was effective 1h before that law went into effect. 1,000s of us were shunted off b/c an entire research arm was canned due to the changing cost of research s/w teams.
I'm poorer but happier now b/c of it. That job was nuts.
I took a decent sized pay cut about 6 years ago to join a small company and build out our own product knowing that I may not get a raise for awhile but got to work on something cool with people I liked and I haven't regreted it for a moment. Looking forward to waking up to do work is a wild feeling.
I’m kind of doing this right now for the first time as a founding engineer in a very small but tight knit team. On paper, I’m objectively in a less secure position, but holy shit is it nice to enjoy work consistently.
I haven't dreaded going to work in years. I also realized burnout is less about how much time you're putting in and much more about how that time is spent. And when I had micromanaging bosses every hour felt like 4.
The layoffs are happening all over, not just in USA. Atlassian has cut jobs. Spotify. Wisetech. Xero. It's happening all over. This is not a USA tax policy problem.
What could possibly trigger people to down vote this absolutely neutral, and 100% factual, normal post? Cant the moderators not explain, than down voting is not for things you don't agree with?
While factually correct, the US tax change was a huge driver of global layoffs. And the original comment didn’t just mention US tax policy as a source of layoffs, and the alternative source provided would apply globally.
The tax change impacted US company spend on their overseas businesses, so of course they’d be impacted, and it would indirectly impact overseas supplies of domestic business. Beyond that, it sets a tone and many in business are quick to follow the behaviors of others.
That's just silly. The fact that you disagree with an opinion does not mean that other people should not get the chance to be exposed to it. That's how echo-chambers form.
At the same time, the amount of disagreement an opinion gathers is an extremely important channel of information for determining whether you agree with someone's position. Silencing the disagreement with it gives an outsized benefit to harmful and malicious statements.
That's fine when a disagreement (or downvote) is just a signal on the post, but when it's used as a way to silence an opinion (e.g downvotes will hide it) that's even more harmful and malicious. Especially when the guideline is to downvote posts that are low-quality or don't conform to the rules, not posts you just merely disagree with or are against your belief system. Popularity should not be confused with truth.
> The One Big Beautiful Bill Act introduces Section 174A, which restores immediate deduction of domestic research and experimental expenditures starting in tax years beginning after December 31, 2024, reversing the controversial five-year amortization requirement that took effect in 2022.
This is true as stated. However, it is important context that the time bomb was originally introduced in Trump's signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in his first term. So, yes, Trump's OBBBA fixed it, but Trump's TCJA caused it in the first place, too.
This is a fair criticism and I am not defending the practice. My understanding is that time-bombs like this are very regularly introduced into all sorts of bills, party-agnostic. It's how they can say things like "We saved $X over Y years!" where a lot of the time-bombs go off half-way through the 'Y-years" bit unless renewed.
Please correct if I'm wrong about this. I only know what I read, which is hard to trust anymore.
> the managers who can't hire a ton angle for more senior people instead
This is a huge factor. I’ve seen teams admit that they are too “senior heavy” and then still hire senior engineers over junior when the rare position opens up.
I’ve also seen teams cut college hiring and internships because head count is tight and they don’t expect positions to open up.
I'm in BigTech and these days we have to fight to even get backfill hiring. If we can get one head count per year we're aiming for someone that can handle a wider range of tasks.
Which is a damn shame because most juniors I've worked with are amazing and the most recent junior hire 1.5-2 years ago is so much better than I was their age it's almost embarrassing.
And my team is in an area termed "strategically important" before anything other than AI became an annoyance.
We ended our intern program and so did a ton of other companies.
IMO one of the worst decisions we've ever made because 80% of the time the interns we take on and then hire are absolute superstars.
And even before we ended it we had a couple of years where we stopped competing for talent from Waterloo. I guess Trump made that harder but yeah bad decisions all around.
I have said the same for a while. And I also think there is an increasing trend of clueless CEOs trying to replace expensive developers with AI token spend. We are still waiting on the long tail of consequences from those decisions, but I suspect it is going to look like a lot of perfectly financially viable companies turning into dumpster fires. Followed by opportunities as their clients churn.
At the end of the day, there are a bunch of different things going on. Higher interest rates, general overhiring during COVID for whatever reasons, and (yes) AI. And probably more macro trends. Maybe at some point we'll see some data-driven analyses but, from what I've seen, it's really hard to tease all the threads apart.
Remote work would seem to have a potential impact on mentoring and future development but that seems like a longer term trend. But, maybe, as the article suggests, some companies that are heavily remote are thinking that entry employees are going to be harder to develop--but that's a problem for the future so better not hire them today.
While I tend to agree, if that email were about arranging a D&D session, I don't think I would care. Especially if the alternative is we never find a time to play D&D.
Humans are valuable, but I think we've been putting human output on a pedestal lately. There's a lot of human slop (as the author put it) on the internet. Slop businesses. Slop social media accounts. While there's very little in the world of AI I find that is better than what a human proficient in the skill with sufficient time can do, proficiency and time are in short supply by most people.
Cue that "I, Robot" meme about if a machine can make a symphony. Maybe AI is making it even easier, but intentless form is already everywhere without AI, if you look. Ever seen an Uwe Boll film?
MCP is still great if you're running AI in an environment that precludes a shell while needing dynamic tool discovery, but that's a narrow set. People are learning how useful it is to give AI access to a shell. If you're giving them a shell, may as well give them a CLI.
However, I don't think that's what is really hurting MCP, because it could evolve. What really killed it was the standards process and enterprise groups getting ahold of it. It went into spec writing and got adjudicated into uselessness all while enterprise authentication groups were figuring out the best angle to make money on it. I listened to a pitch from Okta on MCP and they wanted to charge out the nose for it for no good reason.
Frontend web development has always been particularly vulnerable to changes in technology. The role has mostly been responsible for translating the vision of the designer into code. You could say FEs dive into things like TTFP metrics, but arguably these are all things designers care about too, and if you give AI a metric it can measure on its own it is very good at optimizing it.
If FEs want to keep working in this area, I highly encourage them to become excellent designers. Many think they are, but can't quite fly solo without a designer and soar to the same heights.
Agree and disagree. When did designers become the gatekeepers in what a page should look like and how it should behave? I never liked the pattern of leadership and design throwing a Figma over the fence and the saying “now make it”. Have seen plenty of it in agency work. If anything, AI has leveled the playing field - the onus can fall on both of them to do the doing or fess up that they need the other.
> When did designers become the gatekeepers in what a page should look like and how it should behave?
Since...forever? You may not like the waterfall model, but unless you're at a small startup this is how most software gets made. Even the more collaborative shops where FEs give input on designs, it's just that...input on designs owned by a designer. That AI leveled the playing field is my point. It's now much easier for designers to subsume the responsibilities of an FE than the reverse. You know this is true because if it weren't, designers would never have been a thing to begin with.
I tend to agree. I believe most of these arguments, whether consciously or not, are rooted in sour grapes.
If AI were already the norm, and someone came along and said, "hey! I've got a great idea! Instead of AI building all this stuff, what if we did it by hand?" and talk about all these amazing benefits to hand crafting code, people would largely say no thanks.
As far as the abstraction argument goes, well, we've been creating higher order abstractions for a long time and called it good. I don't see why we should suddenly be against abstraction.
That's an argument from assumption. The issue isn't whether AI is "building all this stuff" but how well it's doing it, how well the people using it are doing it, how expensive it really is, and whether there are observable objective benefits at the end - not just a subjective sense that some work is taking less time.
The reality is probably bimodal. The people who are benefiting are benefiting a lot, but they're likely in a minority. The majority will be tokenmaxxing at great expense and spinning their wheels in real terms.
But there's no hard research to prove that.
Considering the huge sums involved, the absence is interesting.
Calling that an argument from assumption is fair. I am basing this on where I think the puck is going, but I don't think I'm wrong. The issues you mention are not unsolvable problems, and AI is very good at independently iterating and improving on an observable objective metric.
Reality is certainly bimodal today, but that's because as an industry we're lagging behind capability. We're in the early days of the innovator's dilemma S-curve.
This has been me as well. While I don't think my time is quite up, I have heard the call of the sea. Grey ships are waiting.
There have been times in the last decade where I wished I had chosen a profession that lets me stay offline more. Ironically, AI has given me more enthusiasm for tech than I've had in years, which seems opposite to most people's experience.
When people introduced themselves to me, I knew a little about their startup. Felt magical.
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