111–120 of 207 posts
I think a lot of people don't see the historical trend of where investment moves around. The 90s dot-com era was driven by massive investment in e-commerce (remember that term?) businesses. It created a bubble, which then burst. When bubbles burst, investors change tack, and when investors pull back, companies turtle and do layoffs. After Y2K, investment moved on to real estate. In 2008, that bubble burst. It moved o…
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Why are we letting tech companies in the USA do this?
It generates economic activity and taxes in the US and suppresses wages. Most of the H1 candidates are in shitty roles that are well defined low/moderate skill jobs for giant companies. Hire people whom you can’t actively exploit and those are the kind of jobs where unions can organize. The alternative is offshoring the work, not hiring Americans. The smart thing would be to just let people immigrate. Instead we have…
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You're correct that it doesn't answer the why. But it answers the what, how, and allows one-off features. So the guy that wrote might (or might not) still have the edge with the why. But that's not the moat it used to be.
In big companies, the why is 80% of the work. I could swear actual dev work is less than 20% of a “developer’s” job at a standard large (non-SV/FAANG/tech-first) company. The rest is holding a lot of really weird organization-specific context in your head to make the right decision.
Now, my support asks claude about the codebase to answer those sorts of questions. He's better than my memory.
Maybe we've had different experiences.
Feels early to blame AI for most of this. A lot of it still looks like a reset from 2021-era hiring assumptions rather than actual labor replacement
These companies need liquid cash to invest in AI infrastructure, and so they're doing mass layoffs to give them the capital to invest. Simple as that.
2022-2024 was COVID reset. 2025-2027? is reallocation of spending from R&D to infrastructure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're correct that it doesn't answer the why. But it answers the what, how, and allows one-off features. So the guy that wrote might (or might not) still have the edge with the why. But that's not the moat it used to be.
In big companies, the why is 80% of the work. I could swear actual dev work is less than 20% of a “developer’s” job at a standard large (non-SV/FAANG/tech-first) company. The rest is holding a lot of really weird organization-specific context in your head to make the right decision.
In banks its rather 10%, at least in mine is.
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In big companies, the why is 80% of the work. I could swear actual dev work is less than 20% of a “developer’s” job at a standard large (non-SV/FAANG/tech-first) company. The rest is holding a lot of really weird organization-specific context in your head to make the right decision.
With my own tiny company, I used to answer questions about my code to support. Supporting the support. I remember doing that when working at big companies too. Now, my support asks claude about the codebase to answer those sorts of questions. He's better than my memory. Maybe we've had different experiences.
But I am skeptical that people who have not seen a complex corporate environment understand how different it is.
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Why are we letting tech companies in the USA do this?
Because if we didn't we wouldn't have a tech industry? The main problem with immigrant talent in computer field is that legislators don't understand the difference between IT and Tech product development jobs. IT jobs don't need immigrant talent, so companies like Accenture, Infosys etc. should not be given H-1B visas. But tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple, OpenAI etc. absolutely need immigrant talent, or they…
Feels early to blame AI for most of this. A lot of it still looks like a reset from 2021-era hiring assumptions rather than actual labor replacement
Over hiring is one thing.. but that wouldnt be a problem if there was an endless stream of projects to take that are value creating. So the issue is not necessarily the over-hiring.. more that the large tech firms are running out of projects to take that are value-creating. Which is not surprising - the labour market in its currently state is absolutely not perfect in allocating labour. It should be noted that fixing…
So I want to talk about the Claude Mythos mega-model that had a real marketing push in the last week. Marcus Hutchins (of IWannaCry fame) posted about the economics of this [1]. The upshot here is this was a longstanding BSD bug but mostly because nobody is paying BSD bug bounties and a null-pointer dereference may induce a crash but rarely (if ever) leads to privilege escalation as buffer overflows generally do so i…
Problem with these models is that they are not reliable. You never know when the provider decides to nerf the model and after good week of making progress you find the model is now running in circles and you are burning tokens like you are operating a steam locomotive and standing still.
Anytime anyone feels insecure that AI will genuinely do their job, I point them to creators like this [1]. Also, I find it so wild there are people, even here on HN, who don't admit that LLMs hallucinate, lie and forget.
I would have a hard time trusting any critical code produced by an LLM. This was a frequent complaint with OpenClaw (being Vibe coded) and the general advice was to not run it on any computer you're logged onto as you'll get hit by prompt injection attacks and the like.
Anyway, the models don't need to be reliable. They just need to be an excuse to fire people to suppress labor costs. That's the true use case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are we letting tech companies in the USA do this?
Because if we didn't we wouldn't have a tech industry? The main problem with immigrant talent in computer field is that legislators don't understand the difference between IT and Tech product development jobs. IT jobs don't need immigrant talent, so companies like Accenture, Infosys etc. should not be given H-1B visas. But tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple, OpenAI etc. absolutely need immigrant talent, or they…