221–230 of 270 posts
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I reject commits like this, make them re-write it and explain why such and such coding will never be allowed in our code base. Forces the change in coding practice.
> I reject commits like this Which is a great idea until your superior asks why you're holding back the vibe coders and crippling their 100x productivity by rejecting their PRs instead of just going with the flow.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I reject commits like this, make them re-write it and explain why such and such coding will never be allowed in our code base. Forces the change in coding practice.
> I reject commits like this Which is a great idea until your superior asks why you're holding back the vibe coders and crippling their 100x productivity by rejecting their PRs instead of just going with the flow.
This is due to the flawed cornerstone of our culture that a person's job is their worth and value and purpose in the world. This was necessary when the combined efforts of our labor were still not enough to provide basic needs for the people. The dream of automation was always to fix that. We did that, and more. We have long had the technology to provide for people. But we invent tons of meaningless unnecessary jobs…
Those are cold comfort if compensation isn't enough or the job ruins your health or drives you into burnout, but I think their absence becomes important if you talk about popular UBI or "end of work" scenarios.
That's why I think even if we had some friendly tech company that did All The Jobs for free using automation and allowed everyone to live a comfortable life without even the need for an income, and even if we changed the culture such that this was totally fine, it would still be a dystopia, or at least risk very quickly drifting into one: Because while everyone could live a happy, fully consumption-oriented life, they'd have zero influence how to live that life: If the company does everything for you that is to be done, it also has all the knowledge and power to set the rules.
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I fail to see the problem! "Time to lean, time to clean" is fine for someone billing/paid by the hour. As someone on a salary, when the work is finished... I am too. What's overtime? I believe some paperwork had the word 'exempt' on it. My unvested shares are an incentive to save the place from immolation over the next N years. Where's this 'must be at work doing something else' in the contract, again? "Where's the l…
The problem is as soon as everyone returned to office they did care. Even while remote many employers acted like they were being cheated because employees would work less or distribute their work throughout the day. We have a tendency to scream crisis while stock prices and market caps rapidly rise. Every little downturn is evidence for the cry, but that doesn't change the trend. They keep saying that the share holde…
CEOs and middle-management are loud and clear: get back to the office/work yourselves to the bone. I've never had to attend so many pointless Teams calls just to prove presence... until this started making the rounds. I've been WFH for nearly ten years. I didn't stop caring until they started. Funny, isn't it?
Anyway, we're rambling a bit. Why such a soft apologist? They care. And? These still mean the same thing as fifty years ago: 'salary', 'exempt', and 'at will'. If you mean the peers: well, comparison remains the thief of joy. Management probably also wouldn't want us discussing comp, eh?
I hope my point is clear, it's not our place to worry. This is a business transaction, the terms were well-defined. A coworker being upset that you Did Good and Was Rewarded is insanity. Go after the employer, not your peer.
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The two other things that come immediately to mind are clothes; if a shirt cost $4,000 per, our closets would look way different, and cars. No matter your personal opinion on cars vs public transportation, if even if the cheapest vehicle cost $500,000, society would look way different. The real thing it exposes though, is which side of the capital vs labor you work on. If the widget factory suddenly is able to make 1…
The customer who was paying 3000 for a website may now be going to somewhere like Wix.
This is due to the flawed cornerstone of our culture that a person's job is their worth and value and purpose in the world. This was necessary when the combined efforts of our labor were still not enough to provide basic needs for the people. The dream of automation was always to fix that. We did that, and more. We have long had the technology to provide for people. But we invent tons of meaningless unnecessary jobs…
That's part of it, but I think not the whole picture. Many jobs do have some genuine benefits they give the employee (in addition to salary) : practical experience and skill training, but most importantly a certain degree of influence and power: You can't go on strike if you don't have a job. Those are cold comfort if compensation isn't enough or the job ruins your health or drives you into burnout, but I think their…
People don't have to need these things though. For a lot of people it's all just the means to the end of being able to live comfortably.
Because while everyone could live a happy, fully consumption-oriented life, they'd have zero influence how to live that life:
I don't think most people care much about that. But either way, they have the option to. I don't think humanity will slip into a vegetative dystopia because the default spirit of life is grow, expand, go, go, go, don't stop to think about the bigger picture. There is always curiosity and ambition in the gene pool. But society is jammed up with this model that is low-efficiency for everyone except the people that are financially in a position where they don't have to care (and I include myself at the lower end of that tier).
I was never excited for automation. Automation doesn't mean we do less. It means that we do as much work, and now also the work has a higher complexity ceiling; you need to understand the systems that are being automated, and need to maintain the automation. More things are possible, but everything is more complex, and of course, you still need to work 40 hours a week. Products don't get better either, but that's mor…
My first engineering job was non-SW, and had a lot of manual work. I automated a lot of it. Yes, it led to more work. What would take half a day could now be done in an hour. So we now had to produce 4x more. I spent 4 years there automating left and right. Everyone silently hated me. One of the problems with my automation was that it allowed for more and more Q/A. And the more you check for quality issues, the more…
The reward for good work is more work. If they company wanted to pay you more, they would've already done so. If the company wanted automation, they would put that as a job description and pay accordingly (or more likely outsource it and get a shitty result for 10x the price - despite never willing to pay you anywhere close to that even if you were to give them the fully working solution).
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>Being adaptable now is more important than ever. I do actually plan on getting old, and as much as I would love to retire before I'm no longer adaptable, I'm not so sure my finances or my brain will comply. >At home I save time because my dishwasher automates washing my dishes. I don't think this fits my analogy, because you personally can go watch TV or read a book or exercise given the time that is saved by the di…
> At work, you must be at work doing something else, and the "something else" is seldom a real improvement. If I could automate my job and then go on a hike I'd be a lot more excited about it. When you find an employer that is happy to pay people to not work, let me know because I also want to work there.
Labor, just like any market relies on information asymmetry. Your company is in business because it manages to sell something at a higher price than the cost it incurs producing it. Your company will absolutely not give away its "secret sauce" to their customers so they can go off and do it themselves and stop paying.
You should act the same; if you have "secret sauce" that allows you to deliver the expected output quicker, enjoy the free time or put it to use elsewhere.
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> I reject commits like this Which is a great idea until your superior asks why you're holding back the vibe coders and crippling their 100x productivity by rejecting their PRs instead of just going with the flow.
I'm in a unique situation where I started the company so there's nobody above me.