Most engineers will scoff at the idea of patching up a legacy project if they see the slightest deviation from “best practices”. They will slam their fists on the table and claim that management keeps “piling on tech debt”. They will argue for a total rewrite and dismiss any concern of said rewrite taking years because “this is what it means to have high standards and best engineering practices”. They wear this as a badge of honor and frame the conversation as a question of morality and purity, in which they of course have the upper hand since they are not motivated by petty business concerns such as profit.
Engineers that refuse to acknowledge constraints, whatever the nature of those constraints may be, are not engineers. At best they are ideologues, at worst they are just incompetent. The most pathetic thing you can do is just continuously deny the laws of physics and reality, because it doesn’t suit you at some ideological level.
Truly elegant solutions are those that account for all constraints in the simplest, most concise way. It is those that do more with less.
despite the title..i read this post as an exhaustion with SV culture. everything starting with the personality types that are elevated (ie some flavor of antisocial personality disorder) and ending with the activities that earn you social capital (ie identifying the next anti-consensus big industry).
i've seen this happen with people that have had much much smaller financial success in the industry..or even ones that haven't had any at all. you are either naturally inclined to identify with the culture or you trick yourselves into it so that you may belong.
<insert paragraph about social desire to be connected and how we construct an image of ourselves through others>
the culture of SV today is an amalgamation of Taylorist ideas, Randian objectivism, Utilitarianism etc etc. there is a lot of social capital to be earned by embodying the values of these currents. DOGE is a quintessential representation of this. it is not surprising at all that author had such a visceral reaction to it.
its important to emphasize that there have been very successful companies that have gone against the current (ie Apple), with an emphasis on craftsmanship, obsession with the process, taste-driven vs data-driven decisions and appreciation for things that are outside of profit maximization.
My take is the opposite of yours. The guy loves SV culture. Most of the article is a humble-brag about it.
His problem is that $60m is not enough to be an important player in that world. He was just a cog in the DOGE machine which wasn't enough after being number 1 at Loom.
He has now decided to study physics to try and be like the tech bro messiah Elon.
As a former Amazonian (2017-2020) I was a big believer in the leadership principles partly due to how often they were referenced during my time there and partly due to the business world's obsession with Amazon's secret sauce. The company does a very good job at indoctrinating everyone by using them extensively throughout the hiring/performance management lifecycle. In fact, during the interview loop each interviewer is tasked with evaluating whether the candidate exhibits a specific leadership principle.
As many have pointed out, with time you notice the principles being used in all sorts of ways against you depending on the context. The management class is conditioned to tell you that "principles are deliberately in contention with one another"...which gives everyone the necessary cover to spin a particular guiding principle in whichever way suits them in that moment. Or you could buy the kool-aid and pretend that whoever architected these principles was so linguistically adept that they truly figured out the perfect way of articulating a set of contentious principles that taken together distill the exact cultural nuance that Amazon is all about. Wittgenstein is rolling in his grave.
In their current state, the leadership principles are simply a way of defining the lingo for work conversations and providing some sort of framework for decision making (emphasis on framework)...which still has a bounding effect on how things are done at Amazon, albeit in a very very limited way. I do think most people would have trouble coming up with their own decision-making framework if they had to, never-mind articulating or communicating it to their peers. However, it would be preposterous to claim that the Amazon principles have any significant cultural value, at least in the narrow definition that most people commonly ascribe to "business culture" (ie language is also culture, but in this context its more about unique behavior specific to a company).
What drives the culture more than anything at Amazon is the insane growth that the company has seen in the past couple of decades. People there have felt it very deeply and have the battle scars to prove it. Everyone that has been at the company long enough will point to the often counter-intuitive things that one should do to succeed at sustaining this type of growth. Bear in mind this is a different type of business than the other high growth behemoths of the industry and Amazon has its own peculiar aspects..
As far as the article goes, I think that the most important aspect that the author gets right is that. the decline is probably due to the influx of people in middle management that don't have any idea about what it really took to build Amazon into what it is today.
This video is a fake representation of Chisinau. The author deliberately chose the one derelict area (despite being on a central street, it’s the equivalent of being in the Harlem but yet still on Madison ave) that’s been a point of contention between the local authorities and central government for 20+ years. The hotel is being deliberately left unattended by local authorities as a fuck you to the parliament. Nothing more than a bargaining chip.
This is a terrible misrepresentation of Moldova and the progress it has undergone in the past 20 years. Please look at Moldova’s GDP growth since 2000 compared to the rest of Europe and some BRICS countries https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/national-gdp-constant-usd...
It is as close as you can get to India/Chinas growth without leaving Europe. Chisinau is bustling with activity and full of foreigners chasing entrepreneurial opportunities. The leading Eastern European private equity funds are making hundreds of millions of investments in the country and there appears to be a gold rush in all service oriented areas: IT Consulting, Banking, BPO outsourcing etc.
It is lazy, easy and dishonest to draw a portrait of a derelict country. Diving into the essence of what is actually happening behind the scenes takes a lot more effort. The description of a horse carriage in the center of the capital city is outright false. Chisinau is on par with Kiev, Warsaw, Bucharest, Sofia etc, but bustling with opportunity at every corner.
Like many post Soviet countries, Moldova is incredibly corrupt. Fortunately, it now has a former US federal prosecutor leading anti-corruption efforts. The current president and more than half of the current prime ministers cabinet is made up of Ivy League educated technocrats under 40 yrs of age. It is a very exciting place.
I commend you for plugging AI into a commonly used tool in this space vs creating your own platform for building websites with AI. It's refreshing to see someone working back from a great user experience and meeting the users where they are today. This requires focus in the face of constant integration challenges and lots of design restrictions/limitations. Best of luck going forward!
This is great! I wish my PR review tools allowed me to plug in something like this. Hopefully one day we will go back to the world of customizable/plugin-based software. Most of my web tools are very prescriptive about the user experience and dont let me tailor my tools.
I think the fundamental conflict here is that OpenAI was started as a counter-balance to google AI and all other future resource-rich cos that decide to pursue AI BUT at the same time they needed a socially responsible / ethical vector to piggyback off of to be able to raise money and recruit talent as a non profit.
So, they cant release science that the googles of the world can use to their advantage BUT they kind of have to because that's their whole mission.
The whole thing was sort of dead on arrival and Ilya's email dating to 2016 (!!!!) only amplifies that.
the email evidence confirms that infrastructure is one of the strongest moats in this space. From Elon:
"Not only that, but any algorithmic advances published in a paper somewhere can be almost immediately re-implemented and incorporated. Conversely, algorithmic advances alone are inert without the scale to also make them scary."
This is reinforced by the fact that infrastructure / training details are much more sparse in papers than algorithmic adjustments.
It's all about 1. researchers (capable of navigating the maze and carefully chosing what to adopt from the research space) 2. clean data 3. infrastructure
This can be summarized as a bet on the cost per query going down significantly. Last I checked, it costs OpenAI almost 20x more to run a query vs Google. At that price-point, without serious monetization and even assuming GPU prices go down significantly within the next 5 yrs, it's really more a bet on being to financially withstand the competition.
Engineers that refuse to acknowledge constraints, whatever the nature of those constraints may be, are not engineers. At best they are ideologues, at worst they are just incompetent. The most pathetic thing you can do is just continuously deny the laws of physics and reality, because it doesn’t suit you at some ideological level.
Truly elegant solutions are those that account for all constraints in the simplest, most concise way. It is those that do more with less.