garciasn

I think you may be conflating two different arguments.

I'm not disputing productivity improvements can lead to smaller teams, particularly in a shareholder-driven org; that's a separate conversation, IMO. The fact I work at an employee-owned organization, currently, I suppose I'm simultaneously a worker and an influential shareholder.

I was trying to say, running counter to what is frequently mentioned on HN about FAANG Eng Leaders, that I don't equate engineering success with growing headcount. I've always preferred building small, highly effective teams that can accomplish more without needing to grow, just for the sake of growing headcount. My want to do more with the same number of people isn't an argument that headcount won't shrink. It's an argument that growing headcount was never my measure of success in the first place.

No that you asked, but, my measures of success are: are my engineers happy (being that many of them have worked with me at least one company before, and one at 4, I feel they are); are we playing with the latest technologies; and are we learning new things every day?

Because I don't live in a world where my team needs to grow for me to feel more successful? My teams have been small and tight-knit at every place I've been an Eng leader. I left a job with 13 engineers and they're at >90 now, apparently doing less; but, that's just what I hear second-hand.

I want to do MORE with the same amount of folks.

Two years ago: nice toy.

18 months ago: it can do some things but it’s generally not useful.

12 months ago: wow; this can write ok code that a human has to do a lot of review to make sure it’s ok.

6 months ago: holy fuck I’m shipping great stuff with only the occasional redo.

3 months ago: Jesus Christ this is actually pretty fucking great. I have to work entirely differently; becoming a manager of my single agent launching sub agents.

1 month ago: my god I am shipping more, faster, and more useful than ever.

Today: we have fleets of highly effectively domain expert agents working entirely autonomously and shifting between fleets depending on domain, available usage remaining, and we’re shipping 10x with 100% better reviews than before—expanding by the day and self-improving its own harness.

—-

Next week: the agents will prioritize code golf.

The week after that: everything is written in ASM.

We’ll come full circle in 3y

e: fyi; this is my personal progression with LLMs.

And this is when you get on each and every single school board meeting agenda and sit in on every single public meeting available.

You ask them repeatedly why there’s a delay in public record release. You ask them all privately at every meeting for an update.

Be patient. Be polite. Be kind. But be fucking absolutely persistent; especially at the public meetings.

They want to be a fucking obstructionist? No problem; be persistent and public. School board members are not generally career politicians; they’re largely single issue members who leave once their kids are done with the district or they move on to another office or area.

School board members don’t like political pressure from the public. School district administrators are largely shielded from the public. Make them feel the pressure.

I absolutely despise the world we live in where the default answer to everything is effectively “no.”

I wish we could get to a point where we default to “yes” and find solutions rather than making it easier to say “no.”

They're not 'hospitable,' they're 'advantageous' due to being lower tax rates. If anything, lower tax rates make places less 'hospitable' in the long run.

There is a downvoting campaign going on too. This points to potential manipulation.

Reading reviews about almost any movie is like this. But, I expect the comments on HN to be more genuine than I’m witnessing in this thread.

It almost as if the comment section is filled with HN-trained LLM-backed bots intentionally being absurdly vague; just like the trailer last month was.

I am seriously concerned this is all some sort of ingenious marketing ploy to get people to watch the movie instead of just saying, “I genuinely don’t give a shit about Holmes any more now than I did a decade ago.”

Based on what I read, it was effectively that; just like all social networks.