621–630 of 896 posts
> Salesforce said it won’t hire more software engineers in 2025.
Some headline somewhere reported this, but Salesforce plenty of engineers (in the US at least) in 2025. One of them is a junior engineer on one of my scrum teams.
I still code daily without any coding assistance mostly because I believe this is the way to not forget how things are done, even trivial things. My main point against using AI is that I do not want to depend basically on anything when I'm in front of the screen (obviously not including, documentation, books, SO and alike). I closely see people that are 100% dependent on AI for literally everything, even the most tri…
Recently, after a month of heavily AI assisted programming, I spent a few days programming the good old fashioned way. I spent most of the time confused and frustrated, straining painfully against the problem. I spent most of my 7 hour session this way, and the task was successfully completed. But I was startled by the difficulty. I began to worry that I had given myself some kind of brainrot from disuse. Then I reme…
“Money was never the constraint. Knowledge was.” The irony is how difficult it is to read this obviously AI-generated article due to its unnatural prose and choppy flow full of LLM-isms. The ability to write is also a skill that atrophies. Even when AI is understandably used due to language fluency, I’d prefer to read an AI translation over a generated article. If you don’t care enough to write it, why should I care…
It didn't feel at all AI written to me. It's much better than the AI written junk that HN laps up without noticing.
The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself. The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring, and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach. As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred. W…
> removing people and organizational slack You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. When bean-counters took over the ecosystem they optimised immediate profitability over everything else. Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time. There's no room for experimentation, repair, or anything else. I've commented about lack of slack on several times here…
I think Chesterton and Taleb also had pretty reasonable things to say about understanding a system before you make changes and fragile/anti-fragile systems as well.
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Invest in employees is very broad statement. Before investing to employees I think it should revisit management practices and strategies, which starts in MBA and university. Instead of teaching how to increase shareholder value in the short term, it should also teach how to increase value to the society in the long term as well (and focus on it highly) - not just say: if you win society wins kind of generic fluff. Wi…
> teaching how to increase shareholder value in the short term Problem is this is quite often a requirement for a public company, to maximize company value/profits above all else. Also execs who are more right-wing are typically not interested in helping the larger society in general.
And there are very few large public companies with active enough investors to oust a CEO over this, and even fewer that have both active and activist investors that would be interested in such a thing.
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I'd argue we need both massive antitrust, and higher taxes on the wealthy to prevent them from amassing the power to prevent the antitrust.
Plus a systematic way of keeping the Gini coefficient of wealth small in a sustainable way. I'm a fan of establishing sovereign wealth funds whose dividends are paid out equally per capita for this purpose.
Meanwhile you don't need the government to use tax dollars to buy stocks in specific companies. If you want a UBI then use VAT. Then it comes from every company instead of having government bureaucrats choose which ones, and gets paid out immediately instead of needing a generation of build-up.
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"Profit maximization" on its own would have left most people working 12+ hours a day 6 days a week, like it was very common in the 19th century. Luckily, it's never been the only force shaping our societies.
Working long hours was necessary in those days because productivity was much lower. Productivity has gone up so much people can work a lot less, and vast part of the population doesn't work at all.
Most people do a lot of work themselves that the Richie Rich would pay somebody else to do, like cooking, cleaning, childcare, gardening, etc. If it counts as work when you hire somebody to do it, it should equally count as work if you do it yourself.
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USA had no part in that push?
NATO expansion was pretty controversial in the US https://time.com/archive/6731121/how-clinton-decided-on-nato...