Well, yeah, management sees a weak labor market and imagines the ability to fire all those troublesome engineers. Remember, especially in recent years, tech management is made up predominantly of grads from a select set of "elite" universities, whose caliber is determined mostly by how rich the parents are. It's no surprise we're in a moment of extreme labor disdain. The idea engineers with years of education are as fungible as manual labor has been tried again and again with the same results. LLMs won't change that.
> It's no surprise we're in a moment of extreme labor disdain.
So sad to think that a generation or two ago, everyone wanted to emulate the HP Way. Now all of that is gone and unless you are a superstar, you're just a commodity to be managed, and extinguished when the time comes.
Sorry, going to have to disagree with you there friend. It is not the case that everyone wanted to emulate the HP Way. The HP Way represented the best of Silicon Valley thinking, and if you read the book, you will see that even those guys were an outlier.
I remember that there is a passage in the book where the HP guys go and meet with other leaders of American corporations, and most of them felt that they did not have any kind of obligation back to society. I am a huge fan of the HP Way, but they were unusual, and not the norm.
That and the large technology companies don’t really have many ideas for new software or features that will make them more money. Can only increase profits by reducing costs.
15 YOE, here: Well, I just interviewed between October - Decemeber of last year, and since then, the company I joined has gone full vibe-coding and is changing to AI interviews. So...
It's funny because Apple said on stage Lightning was their connector for the next decade in 2012 then shipped it for exactly a decade, despite being the first to ship a USB-C device. When they switched to Lightning in 2012, the peanut gallery complaint was Apple making everyone buy new cables and accessories. Either too fast or too slow for their critics with the same timing.
Jeff Bezos started Amazon with family money. Sure, there were richer folks, but few have parents capable of giving them hundreds of thousands of dollars for a business venture.
I see a lot of folks lamenting how Yegge has ignited a fire under leadership for egoless, factory worker style engineers. I don't think many would care much otherwise, but his post here is lamenting AI is not enough of a factory worker yet. On a site mostly populated by folks who put most of their lives into becoming skilled professionals, hearing "we think your work should be the kind of work we send to the cheapest, least-developed places on earth" like factory work is disheartening. Of course, it mostly seems like Yegge is here to make money off meme coins and selling Dolt plus his vibe-authored book, so why would anyone take this seriously?
I mean, he can't explain what he's building except pickaxes to make more pickaxes, so it's a bit suspicious. It's just incredible how much impact he has had with this little hustle, given his products are basically turtles all the way down.
Every Yegge post about AI reads like a Music Man style con job, but he’s got Silicon Valley startup founders salivating and pushing his book to their employees.
I know plenty of engineers with expensive trucks used to carry their families around during the week and haul their hunting bounty home on weekends. In that scenario, the Cybertruck is a total failure. Where's the exposed bed for a deer? How about hauling the boat to the lake?
BINGO: the folks buying these things are doing so to virtue signal their politics. If you need a truck for work or hunting, you're still buying a truck, not some Silicon Valley concept car like the Cybertruck.
And? How does that give the ffmpeg authors a power over Amazon? (Hint: it doesn’t and the guy we’re discussing is spewing nonsense for maximum retweets)
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