571–580 of 842 posts
Brian once came to Hacker News to comment on a thread I posted (about being made an offer then ghosted by Stripe for a leadership position), so if he has the time for that I'd love to see him here talking about the non-technical teams thing. Could be an interesting discussion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a software engineer who also hires other software engineers, I’m curious about the disconnect in our experiences. I do systems programming. Before AI feature development roughly went like, design, implement, test, review with some back edges and a lot of time spent in test and review. AI has made the implementation part much faster, at the cost of even more time spent testing and reviewing, though still an improve…
I never touched kubernetes and in 1 week I have a few nodes running and i understand a lot of it. Not perfect but not bad.
> We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent Is this code for "we're firing all the old people"? As I understand it, I can say I'll only hire proficient English speakers (a "bona fide occupational requirement"), but I can't say I'll only hire native speakers, as that would discriminate against various protected groups. This seems like the same thing—proficiency may be a bona fide requirement, but expecting they l…
I would disagree. I am among the oldest on our team and also the most in tune with AI. I see AI-native as those who have embraced it, and are learning to leverage it appropriately.
Age-ism is reinforced by senior people resisting the notion that they need to change and adapt. I'm not like that (I'm 51). But I'm having a lot of tedious debates with people lately about how they don't want to use AI tools, how their job is somehow special so they can't use it, etc. Many of those people are actually quite a bit younger than me. There definitely is a pattern here of people that are a bit set in their ways not adapting and being a bit stubborn. Age-ism is unfair to people that are actually putting in the work to learn and adapt. But life is unfair.
Nobody actually has more than 6-12 months of experience with agentic coding tools at this point because the tools were pretty much unusable before then. I was using ChatGPT and a few other tools before that for occasionally copy pasting bits of code or figuring out bugs. But that's not really the same thing.
Half a year is not a huge gap to bridge if for whatever reason you are a bit behind on this. So, get on with it. It should not take you that long to catch up. Especially if you are a bit older, the best way to counter age-ism is showing that you have all the skills already.
> Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. No, you didn't. You watched engineers use AI to ship in days something that looks like what used to take a team weeks. After enough rounds of feature evolution, you'll realise that what they actually shipped isn't at all the same. Anthropic's C compiler, which also seemed like a good start that would have taken people…
People that manage AI agents are not engineers as they do no engineering but are instead just supervisors.
> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. [...] Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams. Oof. So not only are they giving their remaining managers more reports, but those managers will be expected to do lots of other, non-management work. Sure, nothing can go wrong…
Or maybe we should go back to what it was before Google and big $$$ tech decided that if you were a "manager" you shouldn't contribute technically. Being a manager now means a bunch of busy work talking to other managers and weekly 1:1s. There is a ton that has been written about the managerial class. Producing nothing, but for sure making themselves look self-important. Before that the manager was essentially the be…
A good manager is worth their worth in gold even if they produce zero technical output. I've had managers that were absolutely instrumental in my career as a programmer, and they did close to zero IC work.
>>Before that the manager was essentially the best engineer in the tea
Yes, and it was absolutely awful. Keep the best engineer in the team as the best engineer on the team. Call them experts, distinguished, senior++, whatever, don't make them managers.
>>Let's go back to what it used to be
God, please don't.
>>We don't need weekly 1:1s to check on feelings.
Speak for yourself please. I find weekly 1:1 extremely important for the entire team, especially in fully remote roles.
Can't access x.com, getting "Invalid request rewrite". Has anyone else seen it?
> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. [...] Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams. Oof. So not only are they giving their remaining managers more reports, but those managers will be expected to do lots of other, non-management work. Sure, nothing can go wrong…
> We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent Is this code for "we're firing all the old people"? As I understand it, I can say I'll only hire proficient English speakers (a "bona fide occupational requirement"), but I can't say I'll only hire native speakers, as that would discriminate against various protected groups. This seems like the same thing—proficiency may be a bona fide requirement, but expecting they l…
> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. [...] Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams. Oof. So not only are they giving their remaining managers more reports, but those managers will be expected to do lots of other, non-management work. Sure, nothing can go wrong…
Also, why use the analogy of player-coaches? How many successful player-coaches are there in the big leagues? There's a reason it's very uncommon ...
In most sports you've retired by the age of 40 and most coaches are older than that. I would say that's the reason it's common in sports, but that's the exception not the rule