171–180 of 185 posts
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Will wrote one of my all-time favorite essays about software engineering: https://lethain.com/migrations/ He's worth paying attention to IMO.
I just read this for the first time and was totally underwhelmed. What is the takeaway? "Derisk, Enable, Finish"? This is not insightful or even interesting.
I get why someone would want to tell people this, but I think it fails to be advice, as it describes the current state of affairs without much actual guidance for how to do better in it Which, to be fair, no one really seems to be able to answer that meaningfully
The real answer is, leaders chase trends, so to keep them satisfied you need to also chase trends. Some advises can be: * learn prompt engineering to impress your boss and next employer * adapt AI IDE at work, of course don’t go for cline or freemium ones, go for max expensive tier of Cursor/Windsurf/v0 etc * Take some expensive(more the better) courses and workshops on Agentic topics, build some small projects. Just…
Jikes
I started my own business last year that has happened to go quite well. As I’ve watched the software industry over the last year, all I can think is… “damn, what lucky timing.”
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I keep looking for what you claim to be doing. I feel like reality continues to smack me in the face with “no one cares about quality”. I have tried big enterprises. I have tried 8 startups in 18 years. I watch the leaders / founders make the same mistakes over and over. Anyway - your profile resonates with me. Would love to grab a virtual coffee if you are up for it.
Could you share the mistakes they are making repeatedly?
Quality seems completely lost as a goal in any shop. See Demming and Peopleware.
In very general terms: "founder mode" is more often than not toxic because it is taken out of context and used to scapegoat being an asshole. Much like the Steve Jobs worshipping of yesteryear.
Lack of financial oversight by board/investors including founders putting up company money for personal investments including moving money into personal accounts to try and inflate their credit ratings.
Non-VC startup: lack of preparing for a future where income is reduced for a period of time and keeping some amount of business savings around
VC startup: lack of appropriate fund handling given the assumption that the money machine will always be there
Hurting all option holders by removing the ability to exercise early or ruining their exit with poor financial stewardship including down rounds or bridge rounds
Always time to fix it later vs taking the time to plan and execute correctly in the first place. This is a relative scale of time to market and risk to opportunity cost but with the exception of large events like tradeshows or such a few more weeks to get it right is better than hobbling along with literally millions of dollars of technical debt if success is found.
And re:tradeshows - demoware is the name of the game and sales needs to be onboard with eng that demoware is demoware and what to sell ahead of the product
Lack of clear execution plan as product market fit is found and everyone has been acting in "throw shit on the wall to see what sticks" mode
General lack of discipline to keep things orderly as work is done which is a failure to understand systems and second / third order effects. Speed is a lagging indicator not a leading one. Everyone wants more, faster but then fails to slow down to put process in place to facilitate moving faster.
Not growing teams appropriately. Lots of lack of empathy, poor hiring practices, abysmal firing practices. Lots of tolerance of "smart assholes" in small teams when leadership only cares about P/L and so the toxicity grows.
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I agree with the sentiment, but LLMs have already had a lot more adoption than VR and Crypto.
You're right of course, but nobody ever gave me a free VR headset or a few thousand dollars of Monero. OpenAI and Google will both give you, for free, access to an LLM whenever you want. I can do a Google search and help with LLM adoption right now, it will be at the top of the page.
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Well, "frontend development" means a million different things, but LLMs are very good at flexbox and grid (and I'm not). With backend I find they're good at the really high level (give me the options for architecture and their pros and cons) and doing something small and precise (gimme a function `List (Maybe a) -> List a`). The stuff in-between I have to handle myself.
> Well, "frontend development" means a million different things, but LLMs are very good at flexbox and grid (and I'm not). This is my #1 complaint about how people talk about LLM productivity If you aren't good at something you are not qualified to say that LLMs are good at it
> If you aren't good at something you are not qualified to say that LLMs are good at it
Hard disagree: Even if you aren't good at writing a function like `List (Maybe a) -> List a`, you can easily say whether the LLM suggestion was good or not.
If you aren't good at playing the game of go and a program beats you giving you nine handicap stones, probably the program is good at it. Many similar examples.
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Web element feel similar to PHP or wordpress development in 2010. There are millions of small businesses that demand wordpress websites, but the barrier to entry to support and build systems got very low very quickly. Professional developers were competing with high school students and offshore devs for work. As a backend Developer, I can now build websites easily with Claude and react. I think web development, espec…
Genuine question: why do you think LLMs will be able to handle frontend development in a way they won’t be able to handle backend development? I assume you’re talking about real companies, not toy projects or websites for restaurants or whatever.
BE requires a lot more context around microservices, database, reverse-proxy, api-design, etc.
A signal that makes me correct is the number of BE vs FE at a big company.
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Genuine question: why do you think LLMs will be able to handle frontend development in a way they won’t be able to handle backend development? I assume you’re talking about real companies, not toy projects or websites for restaurants or whatever.
Frontend (IMHO) tends to be simpler than BE systems, because FE is literally a single device, and often a single git repo. BE requires a lot more context around microservices, database, reverse-proxy, api-design, etc. A signal that makes me correct is the number of BE vs FE at a big company.