ludicity

Thank you for the kind words! I did end up taking that five month break in my writing to try and develop a different voice, but it's a struggle. Because our company runs pretty smoothly, the original source of stuff I was angry about has sorta dried up. I still see people do crazy things, but I'm a distant observer.

For the sake of honesty, I should say that these aren't wild amounts of money, it's just a high effective hourly rate. If we achieved 100% utilisation, it would be, but really we're just making enough to get close to our corporate salaries, but on a fraction of the hours. As a business, we need to make more than this in the long-term to be sustainable, as a business is a lot more susceptible to shocks than an employee is. I don't get redundancy if sales dry up!

I've managed to recruit in Perth, which is probably as cursed as it gets. The two things are:

1. I don't bother recruiting on the public market. They're genuinely too incompetent, and you'd have the issue you raised over and over. We sent exactly one candidate to a "normal" company and it was a total waste of time

2. For the remaining companies, I basically consult for free to help them smooth out their process. Places that are already very good but candidate-starved don't need this, but most of them could use a small hand. This is maybe non-trivial to replicate but I have a reasonable psychology background and that has given me some aptitude for feeling out cultural fits. Recruiters have set their rates so absurdly high for no service that I can do this, AND run two hour tech interviews personally with candidates AND undercut competitors and still hit that $1K per hour rate. It's just nuts

My history is all pretty public on the blog, but tl;dr write every day, don't be a coward re: topic, and work hard at writing well. It's easier than ever to meet cool people in tech through writing since almost everyone is spamming nonsense on AI.

It's bedtime in Melbourne, but I write what would be fair to call a well-known tech blog, and very publicly started a consultancy about 1.5 years ago. Pretty much in the same niche you're in. We made enough money to pay two people full -time wages in the first year and I've cracked $1K per hour on some engagements (not many, and each one was <20 hours).

Happy to have a chat if you drop me an email.

This was funny enough that I checked out your blog and it absolutely rules.

Experimental History makes me look at my own writing and go "This is all so mid".

I'm firing you for being unable to adequately commune with the machine spirit.

(But for real, a good test suite seems like a great place to start before letting an LLM run wild... or alternatively just do what you're doing. We definitely respect textbook-readers more than prompters!)

He was the keynote at YOW! so I can't capture all the nuance and hope I'm not doing him a disservice with my interpretation, but the tl;dr is he:

"LLMs drastically decrease the cost of experimenting during the very earliest phases of a project, like when you're trying to figure out if the thing is even worth building or a specific approach might yield improvements, but loses efficacy once you're past those stages. You can keep using LLMs sustainably with a very tight loop of telling it to do the thing the cleaning up the results immediately, via human judgement."

I.e, I don't think he can relate at all to the experience of letting them run wild and getting a good result.

At my first job, all the applications the data people developed were compulsorily evaluated through Fortify (I assume this is HP Fortify) and to this day I have no idea what the security team was actually doing with the product, or what the product does. All I know is that they never changed anything even though we were mostly fresh grads and were certainly shipping total garbage.