inadequatespace

Yes. Hence why I personally believe learning how to be productive outside of power hierarchies is the most important thing for the Western world to learn.

>Absolutely agreed. It feels like tech companies forgot that they are supposed to add value to users.

They literally have forgotten as they’re just following orders from investors (public or private).

Before those orders were “get as many users as possible” as valuation is based on credibility of reaching TAM.

Now the orders are “just use AI as this will be necessary to stay relevant and avoid being displaced” in addition to of course “profitability now”

My sentiments exactly. Incidentally IMO this is arguably more of an anti-authoritative argument, i.e. down on the y-axis, rather than "left" on the x-axis, of the political compass.

Yes, if you are a black male, it’s hard mode.

Interesting. It's almost like models don't like being ordered around rudely with this "must” language.

Perhaps what they've learned from training data is “must” often occurs in cases with bullshit red tape or other regulations. "You must read the terms and conditions before using this stuff," or something like that, which are actually best ignored.

> Maybe it's because we also have suits telling us we have to use neural nets everywhere for everything Or Else, and there's no sense of fun in that.

Yes, and using it a justification to offshore/ layoff

Except managers also have expectations of what can be done

> 16. Admitting what you don’t know creates more safety than pretending you do.

> Senior engineers who say “I don’t know” aren’t showing weakness - they’re creating permission. When a leader admits uncertainty, it signals that the room is safe for others to do the same. The alternative is a culture where everyone pretends to understand and problems stay hidden until they explode.

It's interesting to contrast this with Sean's statement here www.seangoedecke.com/taking-a-position/

> At that point, you need to take a position, whether you feel particularly confident or not.

> If you don’t, you’re forcing people with less technical context than you to figure it out themselves

To square the circle, I think the lesson is hide uncertainty to higher-ups, but don't to peers/ other ICs.

Of course, the challenge is that often, unfortunately, both the manager and the other ICs are in the same meeting.

Probably this is one justification of one reason why I hate meetings that include managers.

Another extremely solid win for Cunningham’s Law.

It’s worth noting that 1. is not mutually exclusive with writing a TODO.

In fact, on my team, all TODOs must have a bug in parentheses immediately afterwards to satisfy the linter. So not only not mutually exclusive, but the opposite.

To be fair, I don't have any great specific ideas, but "Work Without the Worker" for example talks about how a lot of LLMs are fueled by neo-colonialist exploitation.

So I guess broadly speaking there could be strategies involving attempting to influence governmental policy rather than by consumer choice.

Or more radically, trying to change the structure of the government in general such that the above influences actually are more tractable for the common person.

The title of this article implies that it is a major or even the only cause for mass tech layoffs, which I strongly doubt.

For example, rising interest rates I'm sure also independently contributed. I would be interested to if anyone has gotten a sense of exactly how much this has contributed.

I think that’s a bit of a leap; if you think LLMs make the world a worse place, there are many actions that you might take or not take to try to address that.

So, what do all of these responses and the article itself seem to dance around? It's not that it makes developers obsolete, but rather increases inequality. In other words, either creates a class of inferior developers because they don't have whatever new skill, or in the case of offshoring, literally creates a class of lower developers.