First, the author is right. This is the way the world works, and if you want to get ahead, play the game. But I have strong contempt for management throwing up their hands and saying “it’s your promotion, own it”.
Usually the subtext is that they’ve created a promotion process which is onerous, they are under paying you market rate, and/or management doesn’t want to make hard decisions or uphold their side of the bargain. The last thing I want to do as an IC after I’ve crawled through glass for several years to accomplish something Herculean is draft documents that defend my accomplishments from bureaucrats.
When I hear comments like that, I raise my eyebrows because it’s almost tempting me to apply elsewhere. I don’t know why, when presented with mountains of evidence, managers can’t just make a reasoned judgment call and grant promotions when appropriate, unassisted.
If you don't like your broadband provider; you change it. If you don't like a car brand; you don't buy it. You don't buy them and claim their deficiencies are unfair.
This could work if there is an accessible alternative that's better which there may not be.
Demanding change can also work, and regardless of whether better alternatives exist.
"Just move to a country where women can vote" was not an effective strategy, demanding the vote worked for a huge number of women without them even moving to the next town.
Yes, if there's only one employer in the entire country then you're stuck. If the context is a communist country I'm happy to modify the advice. Except even then it's still "leave the employer and go somewhere else".
Not just more than one employer, but some healthy number of available options.
You thought A is great but you think you can find better so you go to B. They turned out worse, you then tried C and those weren't great either. But now A won't hire you back because they already filled the position, and there are no other available companies doing the thing you want to do. Now you're stuck with inferior employment options compared to the choice of not changing jobs in the first place, unless you're willing to do something else entirely or start your own business.
Depends on the field obviously, but there are reasons why people might want to stick with a not-so-bad job instead of looking for a perfect one.
Of course - and employers have the same issue with employees. We don't have perfect information, but having conversations with alternate employers' employees helps. Just try and find stuff out. It's not going to be perfect, but it's also hard to imagine a better system that can work in practice.
Former manager at big tech here and this is my experience, not sure it really translates to other companies.
Usually higher ups constrain line managers of ICs with limited budget (most of the time you don't know what it even is). Moreover, the process is inherently flawed: I may help folks find opportunities for impact and it may even be great impact in my eyes, but eventually higher ups want to just promote the really really good people, which will inevitably result in comparing everyone with everyone. Most of the time I was not in these conversations.
It's unfair because most people work against some goal that's agreed upon, and later that year the criteria changes.
This is to say, no one is really in full control in some companies. In 12 years, I have yet to find a process and surrounding environment that promotes fairness. When there's limited money and a true meritocracy is enforced, there's loss of control. Yet, managers should own the message of why you don't get promoted, even though you should in their eyes and there's no clear reason for the outcome (EDIT: other than "someone, somewhere was better than you" in some way which is very disempowering).
First, happy customer of OSM and it’s impressive what they’ve built! That said, I’ve noticed their company website field is sparsely populated.
Any recommendations for acquiring the place website URL through an API or ethically scraping it at scale? I’m specifically wondering about options that wouldn’t involve Google Places.
For low-funnel sponsored advertising, the effects are largely instantaneous, and you can measure your net profit lift simply by turning it on and off every hour (or day).
I’m using AI in my daily life. ChatGPT has largely replaced Google. My programming output and ability is greatly enhanced. I’m working on projects that were impossible a few years ago. How can people say this is another hype bubble?
Some people say that it has greatly enhanced their abilities, other people say that it's mostly useless. I am myself in the latter camp. I never build the habit of using it because it failed miserably on relatively simple things. However, even if it was smarter, I can hardly see how it could be faster to design the prompt, correct it multiple times vs. just typing code in flow state.
What about things like copilot that are simply predictive autocomplete? It doesn’t pull you out of flow state but dramatically increases typing speed, especially for boilerplate.
It absolutely kills flow state for me personally because I’m being shown code completions that may or may not have anything to do with what I am actually about to write.
When I allow myself to review the relevance and correctness of the attempted completion, I have to set aside the actual code that I was envisioning. This may or may not be easily recoverable after the (generally wrong) suggested completion is dismissed.
I am not neurotypical, and we are all different anyway, so it is obviously different for others. But I disabled the active code assistance option at work almost immediately due to it being actively harmful to maintaining flow state.
Investors aren't hyped about AI being a nice quality-of-life tool for the general populace. They are investing on the notion that it will eventually replace a lot of employees and make the requirement of expensive skilled labor obsolete.
My lesson from the dot com boom is that's it's very hard to pick the winners. For every Amazon, there were a thousand pets.com. Investing in DEC, Sun, Yahoo, and friends would not have paid off.
That's a broader lesson too. I have an okay -- far from perfect but decent -- track record knowing which national economies will grow, but investing in index funds for those economies rarely yields good returns. I have a tiny portion of my portfolio in various developing markets, and the GDP can rise tenfold with no investment gains.
Many very real revolutions have bubbles. Bubbles are the period when people over-invest.
Because some other people are operating under the assumption that this wave of AI models will automate all labor on the planet, instead of making the average desk jockey 10-25 percent more efficient.
An impact on what? Most desk jockey labor hasn't been optimizing for efficiency for decades. I'd say the amount of "work" will simply go up by 25%, and the position of the human-based processing nodes will shift a little bit. But it's a Schelling point attractor that mutually-antagonistic companies will be pushed into adopting. You certainly won't want to hire 25% more human employees at your own company to handle your counterparties' increased paperwork generation from their use of AI.
> A 25 percent efficiency boost to desk jockey labor is a profound impact.
In terms of 25 productivity, yeah, I think that is a good thing and could be true. However, the problem is that it is sold under the pretense that you can fire a large chunk of workers and rely in large part on AI, which makes it a whole lot more attractive to investors.
> That is precisely what you can do if your workers are 25% more efficient.
If AI is just a tool that improves performance by 25% it changes what investors believe. It is a lot more expensive than 25% increase in productivity as investors were sold a different reality.
> Or alternatively, drastically lower the skill requirement for the job and replace your skilled workers with cheap unskilled workers
With the error rate of GenAI I'm curious to see how this plays out in the long run. It seems that only more skilled workers can pick up on the wrong answers.
I find it insanely useful for moderately basic tasks I don't do often e.g. "write me a regex that will match XYZ", or basic latex formatting. Much more efficient than googling for docs!
Having heard a variation of this comment many times, I keep waiting for an “aha” moment, where I see the light and abandon my obsession with minimalism and clean code.
But at least in science roles it hasn’t happened yet. Rather, I keep seeing instances of bogus scientific conclusions which waste money for years before they are corrected.
Being systematic, reproducible, and thorough is difficult, but it’s the only way to do science.
Literally the only thing I tend to worry about up front is deployment automation. I've worked in so many environments that don't have it, or have some byzantine manual deployment strategy that just gets irksome and difficult. I'm a big fan of containers, even for single-system deployments. If only because it always bites you when you are under the greatest time pressure otherwise.
Beyond that, my focus is on a solution to the problem/need at hand, and less about optimizations. You can avoid silly stuff, and keep things very simple from the start. Make stuff that's easy to replace, and you often won't ever need to do so.
Most software isn't about science, and isn't engineering... it's about solving real world problems, or creating digital/virtual solutions to what would otherwise be manual and labor-costly processes. You can shape a classic rdbms into many uses, it's less than ideal, but easy enough to understand. Very few jobs are concentrated on maximizing performance, or minimizing memory or compute overhead. Most development is line of business dev that gets deployed to massively overpowered machines or VMs.
But that's just the point, for most problems most people have, you don't have to be scientific. If your invariants vary and it breaks 5% of the time that's fine and nothing bad happens.
There's so much waste in the world, that it is unbelievable.
However counterintuitively, I have stopped caring about waste, and have been more focused on the value. Waste you can always optimize later if you want to, value creation is the difficult part.
The problem is that there are really only a few large platforms: windows, Android, macOS and iOS. These are also owned by three mega corps. The issue here is that free market mechanisms break down in the small competitor count limit.
Ummm…might want to tell that to Apple. Check the guidelines.
If us devs were smart, we’d organize and have our apps go on a maintenance break until Apple and Google remember what a computing and platform is without 3rd party devs.
You’re already seeing that with car and headset though.
I sort of hate buying cheap junk toasters, but I also don’t need something with a bunch of unnecessary frills like an LCD screen. And it needs to toast well!
I’ve been banging my head against the internet looking for something and have come up mostly empty handed. I don’t really want a toaster oven either. The dualit classic is close to what I want, but it sounds like it doesn’t toast that evenly which seems crazy to me given its price point.
Does anyone else feel like there’s a significant gap in the market when it comes to well-engineered minimalistic toasters?
My two cents is that while browser tracking matters, people should also be conscious of not giving away their email and cell number when signing up for accounts or making purchases. Every time you do this, the company sells the data to Google and Meta and it gets joined together on those primary keys, creating a comprehensive profile of your interests. Use Apple’s “Hide my email” and I also like the company “my pseudo” which creates throw away e-mails and cell numbers. It’s silly to be all up tight about browser tracking, but then register everywhere with your real personal information.
I hear this a lot, but I have never understood the details. How is the data sold to Google? What program are these websites participating in, where Google is paying them for customer email addresses, phone numbers, and purchase history?
Yes, Google and Meta (the parent company of Facebook) do allow businesses to upload customer email addresses and phone numbers for advertising purposes, under specific conditions. This process is part of what's known as "Custom Audiences."
1. *Google Customer Match:* Google allows businesses to upload a list of email addresses through their Google Ads service. This feature, known as Customer Match, lets advertisers target or retarget their advertisements to these customers across Google products like Search, Shopping, YouTube, and Gmail. Businesses must comply with Google's policies and data protection laws.
2. *Meta Custom Audiences:* Similarly, Meta (Facebook) offers a feature called Custom Audiences, where businesses can upload lists of emails or phone numbers. These are then used to match users on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms in Meta's network for targeted advertising. The data is hashed to protect user privacy, and the businesses must have the right to use this data.
Both companies emphasize privacy and the necessity for businesses to have obtained the data lawfully and with the user's consent. Users also have tools at their disposal to control their ad preferences and understand why they are seeing certain ads. It's a balance between effective targeted advertising and user privacy, governed by both internal policies and external regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
Google and Meta are building social graphs across this uploaded information.
Usually the subtext is that they’ve created a promotion process which is onerous, they are under paying you market rate, and/or management doesn’t want to make hard decisions or uphold their side of the bargain. The last thing I want to do as an IC after I’ve crawled through glass for several years to accomplish something Herculean is draft documents that defend my accomplishments from bureaucrats.
When I hear comments like that, I raise my eyebrows because it’s almost tempting me to apply elsewhere. I don’t know why, when presented with mountains of evidence, managers can’t just make a reasoned judgment call and grant promotions when appropriate, unassisted.