31–40 of 136 posts
I saw the end coming miles away, but enjoyed reading this essay anyway as it's well written. I guess I saw it coming in good part because I can really relate to the story, from the point of view of a CS associate professor. LLMs are a real pain for students on so many levels. These tools can destroy their confidence by being seemingly better than them at first, which also makes these students want to use these tools…
That's why the B-Ark was built.
I've met a breed of career min-maxers adjacent to Julius that I have a hard time describing. Picture this: you join a new team with a senior engineer, call him Pete. Pete wrote the initial version of a new product, and you joined the team to take over and continue it's development. Pete is bona fide genius who can work miracles and he is always in the critical path of each new initiative, you are told. Once you open…
"My boss came to see me. He told me that the team’s productivity was dangerously declining. That we should use artificial intelligence more effectively. That we risked being overtaken by competitors who, without a doubt, were using the very latest artificial intelligence."
This is the oldest scam in the book. A boss will never talk to you if there is any kind of problem with your productivity, they will fire you and that's it. Any boss talking about needing to work harder etc. is only trying to squeeze out some extra juice from workers who are already working perfectly fine.
But the author and his team seem to be willing victims of scammers and exploiters, so what else is to be expected?
If this is going to enter our lexicon as a short-name for this type of person, I'll point out that since "Julius" is originally latin derived, the pluralization should follow that of most/all latin nouns, and thus be "Julii".
Wtf, are places actually making this nonsense mandatory now?!
I've met a breed of career min-maxers adjacent to Julius that I have a hard time describing. Picture this: you join a new team with a senior engineer, call him Pete. Pete wrote the initial version of a new product, and you joined the team to take over and continue it's development. Pete is bona fide genius who can work miracles and he is always in the critical path of each new initiative, you are told. Once you open…
In large companies I have seen a related pattern. Usually a mid-level engineer that the managers love because they "get stuff done".. meanwhile they are a bulldozer in the code, usually with some "ship-it" buddy green lighting the work. The reason they can "move fast" is because everyone else is trying to limit complexity, etc. and they are punching holes through the abstractions. Then turn into your "Pete" when they…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In large companies I have seen a related pattern. Usually a mid-level engineer that the managers love because they "get stuff done".. meanwhile they are a bulldozer in the code, usually with some "ship-it" buddy green lighting the work. The reason they can "move fast" is because everyone else is trying to limit complexity, etc. and they are punching holes through the abstractions. Then turn into your "Pete" when they…
The reason is why they move fast, since there are tons of Juliuses (as per the article terminology) who cannot code at all.
I've met a breed of career min-maxers adjacent to Julius that I have a hard time describing. Picture this: you join a new team with a senior engineer, call him Pete. Pete wrote the initial version of a new product, and you joined the team to take over and continue it's development. Pete is bona fide genius who can work miracles and he is always in the critical path of each new initiative, you are told. Once you open…
That sounds like a management error, not a Pete problem. If Pete was told to get a demo done as soon as possible, that's what he did. And in many cases that's not a bad thing for management to tell people. Finding product market fit, usually trumps tech debt. The thing is, that management should know, how time intensive and difficult it can be to turn a cobbled together demo into a production system.
Haha, I genuinely laughed, thanks for this gem.
At the risk of getting too meta, I feel like lots of folks will get the gist of Julius and check out from the article… …missing the twist. So as a TLDR, I’ll say that Julius is a peer of the author who is polished but uncomprehending, often spouting convincing-sounding nonsense. And here in 2024 we not only have folks like that to contend with, but also have polished AI output being forced at us from every direction.…
As coders we spend a lot of time And pride on the code. We evaluate our work based on its correctness, elegance, effeciency and so on.
But the way everyone else values it is on how it interacts with the world. We get frustrated when someone with clearly inferior skills perfects the presentation layer.
The solution is not to teach Julius to code. The solution is to understand the importance of what Julius is doing and prioritize adding that to our skillset.
Make no mistake, the 10x programmer doesn't write more code, rather they make their code more useful, more accessible, optimized for usefulness as much as effeciency.
Internalize phrases like "if it's not documented it doesn't exist" and understand that training is more important than creation.