> You know the pitch - beanbags in the office, free kombucha on tap, and "Agile" processes that are supposed to make everything more flexible, more efficient
No offense, but was this written a decade ago? All of that stuff is long, long gone.
> demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion."
Not my experience at all. From startups to big tech/FAANG, silicon valley and otherwise. Never been asked for an 80 hour week, nor seen anyone work one. I can count on one hand the times that a manager has explicitly asked me to work late in the 16 years I've been doing this professionally.
> If you’re not pulling all-nighters, you’re "not committed."
Not reality.
> If you’re not answering Slack messages at midnight, you’re "not a team player."
Not reality.
> This culture is toxic, and it’s only getting worse.
By what measure?
> this industry is not your friend. It’s a machine, and unless we start organizing, it’s going to keep grinding us down. It’s time to talk about unionizing tech jobs.
And yet, I'm still all for this. I just don't appreciate the silly hyperbole about the state of the world.
At least in my state there is no incentive for appraisers to do this. 99% of appraisals get assigned to random appraisers. There is no such thing as “repeat business”, at least within the realm of your typical home sale where the buyer is financing through a bank.
In California, at least at the time, Realtors called the Appraisers they knew could be a little generous with the numbers to make the clients happy. Speed-dial. Inflated numbers were easy to make plausible, and as time went on, the cycle became self fulfilling.
Appraisers knew this, they got lots of easy business for an afternoon's worth of work, and grew their businesses. Realtors would shrug and say "That's what it appraised at." Banks were happy. Sellers were happy. Lots of money. There was no natural regulation or push-back stopping any of this.
Source: friend made lots of money doing this at the time. They probably made out better than the Realtors.
Yea I believe that. In my state (Georgia) the randomization rules only came about after the '08 crash. I come from a family of appraisers, oddly enough, so I have an unusual amount of insight into the industry for a simple software engineer. Prior to the new rules my family's company had a set of clients (banks) that they would get business from, and they had to reach out and do marketing/sales/shmoozing to get new clients, like any other service business.
After the new rules, banks just bid for an appraisal into a black box and it gets fulfilled ~randomly. The family rolodex became pretty useless. So the playing field was leveled, and it's certainly a fairer process with better overall results for homeowners, but it also kind of neutered the whole appraisal industry since there's not really a good way to compete anymore.
Kind of going on a tangent here, but the appraisal industry is one of those "silver haired" industries that is not able to replace it's older workers who are retiring. It's unclear what the future holds for appraisals, but it seems inevitable that there will be some sort of pivotal change in the industry in the next decade or so.
> Appraisers they knew could be a little generous with the numbers to make the clients happy
This can only work if only very few appraisers in the area are overvaluing. But if that works, why wouldn't all of them get in on the game? And if most of them do, it falls apart because the actual sale prices will be out of line with the appraisals. So, it doesn't really work outside of edge cases here and there.
There are definitely laws and lender requirements that should make appraiser selection somewhat random and their findings somewhat neutral, but based on my house buying experience I don’t believe for a second that they’re effective. We made a bunch of offers and somehow the appraisal was always right at the offer price or ~5-7k above. I’m convinced that the appraisers somehow have knowledge they shouldn’t and covert/indirect mechanisms exist to motivate them to play ball to make deals go through.
Besides small sample size giving me a skewed sample, the other explanation I can think of for this is that appraisal is a fairly exact science and realtors have mastered pricing based on it. Considering the volatility of my market, lack of comparable sales, and the IQ of the realtors I’ve met that seems laughable.
> somehow the appraisal was always right at the offer price or ~5-7k above.
Yes, this is pretty normal. Contrary to popular belief, appraisers don't have any sort of special data or processes that allow them to determine the exact value of a house in any given market (because such a value does not exist). An appraiser is working for the bank and simply serves as a risk mitigation officer. Their job is not to answer "what is this house worth?", it's to answer "is the deal you're lending money on within reasonable bounds?". So when the appraisal value comes in at or around the sale price - it's just a simple "Yes". And when it comes in somewhere else, it's a "No".
There is generally zero incentive for an appraiser to inflate prices (today, this was not always true in the past).
The housing market is vast and complex, without question. And still, the reason that prices go up is overwhelmingly the simple fact that buyers are willing and able to pay those prices.
> Musk, who is called one because... he is against illegal immigration?
Why are folks so incapable of making an argument in good faith on this subject? Like, even if you give elon the most benefit of the most doubt you can muster and you manage to handwave away the multiple sig heils and nazi sympathetic tweets as just some sort of quirky behavior and not at all related to nazism - you have to realize that not everyone does.
> The phrase "shooting oneself in the foot" comes to mind.
It should come to mind for elon, not car buyers. He built a car company based on environmentalism that naturally appealed to people with environmental concerns and then pivoted to publicly insulting and denigrating those exact people.
It's not even really political. Elon isn't the first CEO to hold political values that differ from a majority of the company's customers. It's the fact that he goes out of his way to call his most likely customers retards.
It’s hard to imagine it not. And also kudos and crazy respect for all the thousands of engineers that poured their work into making combustion engines as efficient and reliable as they are. A true marvel of humanity, and something to be respected even as we leave it behind.
Relative to EVs it’s not. But relative to ICE engines from 50 years ago it’s great. EVs are obviously going to take over ICE, my only point is that we shouldn’t discount all the work and ingenuity that went into ICE engines simply because a disruptive technology came about.
Ah yea the old “web scale” phase. I think everyone’s more or less accepted that very, very few startup-level (or even SMB-level) workloads need more scalability then Postgres/mysql gives.
My favorite example is that Twitter used mysql for all tweets, writing ~5k/s 24/7/365, until about 2016ish. Well into being a public company with billions in revenue and 300mm+ MAUs.
3/4 companies in the Bay Area senior software engineer interviews require a System Design interview where they will tell you "what if you had 10m users" and expect a distributed write-heavy sharding answer
You’re not wrong in the literal sense. But the “inside baseball” of that question is just that it’s a prompt to talk about how you would horizontally scale a system should the need arise. It’s not a prompt to start questioning whether 10mm or 200mm is the specific limit.
Lots of people were mad that my employer developed a new distributed NoSQL database engine, but it was literally just an API to encapsulate what an application doing "sharded MySQL" would do in its own data tier. A lot of this is a question of framing and storytelling.
I’ve been a paying cursor user for 4-5 months now and feeling the same. A lot more mistakes leaking into my PRs. I feel a lot faster but there’s been a noticeable decrease in the quality of my work.
Obviously I could just better review my own code, but that’s proving easier said than done to the point where I’m considering going back to vanilla Code.
There's this concept in aviation of "ahead of or behind the plane". When you're ahead of the plane, you understand completely what it's doing and why, and you're literally thinking in front of it, like "in 30 minutes we have to switch to this channel, confirm new heading with ATC" and so forth. When you're behind the plane, it has done something expected and you are literally thinking behind it, like "why did it make that noise back there, and what does that mean for us?"
I think about coding assistants like this as well. When I'm "ahead of the code," I know what I intend to write, why I'm writing it that way, etc. I have an intimate knowledge of both the problem space and the solution space I'm working in. But when I use a coding assistant, I feel like I'm "behind the code" - the same feeling I get when I'm reviewing a PR. I may understand the problem space pretty well, but I have to basically pick up the pieced of the solution presented to me, turn them over a bunch, try to identify why the solution is shaped this way, if it actually solves the problem, if it has any issues large or small, etc.
It's an entirely different way of thinking, and one where I'm a lot less confident of the actual output. It's definitely less engaging, and so I feel like I'm way less "in tune" with the solution, and so less certain that the problem is solved, completely, and without issues. And because it's less engaging, it takes more effort to work like this, and I get tired quicker, and get tempted to just give up and accept the suggestions without proper review.
I feel like these tools were built without any sort of analysis if they _were_ actually an improvement on the software development process as a whole. It was just assumed they must be, since they seemed to make the coding part much quicker.
That's a great analogy. For me it is a very similar feeling that I get ripped out of "problem solving mode" into "code review mode" which is often a lot more taxing for me.
It also doesn't help reviewing such code that sometimes surprisingly complex problems are solved correctly, while there's surprisingly easy parts that can be subtly (or very) wrong.
A hard pill to swallow is that a lot of software developers have spent most of their careers "behind the code" instead of out ahead of it. They're stuck for years in an endless "Junior Engineer" cycle of: try, compile, run, fix, try, compile, run, fix--over and over with no real understanding, no deliberate and intentional coding, no intimacy, no vision of what's going on in the silicon. AI coding is just going to keep us locked into this inferior cycle.
All it seems to help with is letting us produce A Lot Of Code very quickly. But producing code is 10% of building a wonderful software product....
Same result - I tried it for a while out of curiosity but the improvements were a false economy: time saved in one PR is time lost to unplanned work afterwards. And it is hard to spot the mistakes because they can be quite subtle, especially if you've got it generating boilerplate or mocks in your tests.
Makes you look more efficient but it doesn't make you more effective. At best you're just taking extra time to verify the LLM didn't make shit up, often by... well, looking at the docs or the source.. which is what you'd do writing hand-crafted code lol.
I'm switching back to emacs and looking at other ways I can integrate AI capabilities without losing my mental acuity.
> And it is hard to spot the mistakes because they can be quite subtle
aw yeah; recently I spent half a day pulling my hair debugging some cursor-generated frontend code just to find out the issue was buried in some... obscure experimental CSS properties which broke a default button behavior across all major browsers (not even making this up).
Velocity goes up because you produce _so much code so quickly_, most of which seems to be working; managers are happy, developers are happy, people picking up the slack - not so much.
I obviously use LLMs to some extent during daily work, but going full-on blind mode on autopilot gotta crash the ship at some point.
Just your run-of-the-mill hallucinations, e.g. mocking something in pytest but only realising afterwards that the mock was hallucinated, the test was based on the mock, and so the real behaviour was never covered.
I mean, I generally avoid using mocks in tests for that exact reason, but if you expect your AI completions to always be wrong you wouldn't use them in the first place.
Beyond that, the tab completion is sometimes too eager and gets in the way of actually editing, and is particularly painful when writing up a README where it will keep suggesting completely irrelevant things. It's not for me.
> the tab completion is sometimes too eager and gets in the way of actually editing
Yea, this is super annoying. The tab button was already overloaded between built-in intellisense stuff and actually wanting to insert tabs/spaces, now there are 3 things competing for it.
I'll often just want to insert a tab, and end up with some random hallucination getting inserted somewhere else in the file.
Seriously, give us our tab key back! I changed accept suggestion to shift TAB.
But still there is too much noise now. I don't look at the screen while I'm typing so that I'm not bombarded by this eager AI trying to distract me with guesses. It's like a little kid interrupting all the time.
Imagine how many errors occurred before we had digital spreadsheet technology.
That said, I’ve always thought there was a product that sits somewhere in between Excel and full blown custom software that provides some of the controls we need while still being and build able by someone with low/average technical skills
FileMaker seems to cover this (admittedly my interactions with it was in high school, which was last millennium), it's a database app but there's a lot of "make your own UI" parts in it, so you can create custom UIs (and wizards) for your use cases.
I suppose MS Access offers this too, although FM feels more user-friendly, MS Access felt like Internet Explorer 4, where an error dialog would pop-up for every little JavaScript error (disclaimer: this opinion is from 25 years ago).
No you're right on the money in my opinion. I have very fond memories of spinning up apps in MS Access that were quick and dirty but extremely powerful, and able to be maintained/modified by folks that were not professionally trained software engineers. I think there's a missing area in the market for something exactly like that again.
The hive mind really hated (hates?) MS Access and I don't know why.
I built a mini ERP for my father's company when I was 16. Started out as an excel spreadsheet, but then added inventory, accounting, and printing contracts and reports.
He kept using it until retirement and was very happy with it. I could learn & apply SQL. Win-win.
I've done that over the last several years, building an order-tracking/accounting system for myself in Excel. (Inventory and fulfillment is handled by commercial software.) I'm mulling over whether to move to a "real" database.
I'm on a Mac so can't move to Access. I've thought about FileMaker, but am considering Panorama X because unlike FileMaker it reportedly allows undoing almost anything, while FileMaker is like the typical database in a record commit not being undoable.
(Yes, I know that not allowing such is good practice, which is why I am not a database admin.)
I've heard good things about Panorama X, and it has a spreadsheet-like UI. However, I've used Excel enough to know that I haven't tapped more than a small fraction of its ability, especially things like Power Query. As much as I loathe VBA, what if the cost of moving to a "real" database isn't the up-front cost or conversion time, but the longer-term inflexibility of Panorama (and, pretty much, anything else in my price range) compared to the beast that is Excel?
I've not used it, but I thought Airtable occupied this spot. It seems to have a few open-source clones if you want to run it locally. I don't know if they are any good.
Replacing this excel sheet with a 'proper' system would cost between $5million and $20million probably, depending on what sort of consultancy delivered it
And would be inflexible, and maybe still wrong, and not necessarily more transparent... So it may mean several extra million dollars per year in ongoing maintenance if things turn out typically...
Excel has many issues, but the cost of replacing it is surprisingly high.
>And would be inflexible, and maybe still wrong, and not necessarily more transparent...
I'm going through this right now. Not anywhere in this scale, but just in terms of deciding whether to move an order-tracking/accounting system I've built in Excel to a "real" database.
The database I am considering (Panorama X for Mac) is quite inexpensive, I've heard very good things about it, and has a spreadsheet-like UI. However, I've used Excel enough to know that I haven't tapped more than a small fraction of its ability, especially things like Power Query. As much as I loathe VBA, what if the cost of moving to a "real" database isn't the up-front cost, but the longer-term inflexibility of Panorama (and, pretty much, anything else in my price range) compared to the beast that is Excel?
>[1] Except the one you want the answer to at a given moment, amirite fellas?
Everytime I relearn how to do a vlookup, none of the examples online do what I want. It's like they are trying to do something completely opposite of what I want. It's super weird, because what I want to do is always a pretty common thing to need done.
No offense, but was this written a decade ago? All of that stuff is long, long gone.
> demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion."
Not my experience at all. From startups to big tech/FAANG, silicon valley and otherwise. Never been asked for an 80 hour week, nor seen anyone work one. I can count on one hand the times that a manager has explicitly asked me to work late in the 16 years I've been doing this professionally.
> If you’re not pulling all-nighters, you’re "not committed."
Not reality.
> If you’re not answering Slack messages at midnight, you’re "not a team player."
Not reality.
> This culture is toxic, and it’s only getting worse.
By what measure?
> this industry is not your friend. It’s a machine, and unless we start organizing, it’s going to keep grinding us down. It’s time to talk about unionizing tech jobs.
And yet, I'm still all for this. I just don't appreciate the silly hyperbole about the state of the world.
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