mhss

From all possible concerns, "giving access to anthropic/openai" to your "secret sauce" is the least important one for 99% of the companies out there.

No, is not way better to simply write the code yourself. Most of the code is written faster and better with Claude Code or equivalent. Very niche code is better written by hand. Even then, you're probably better off nudging something like Claude Code in the direction you need it to go. There's nothing interesting about writing it yourself unless you're still learning to code (in which case is a learning exercise for you, not only about the outcome).

I ... literally did both of these things last week ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Not at all. Most people can be super happy with less than the average tech salary (at a point where they don't feel they need more if it comes at the expense of work life balance, time with family, job satisfaction, etc).

A junior or "mid" who doesn't take guidance repeatedly should likely be managed out.

It's perfectly fine remain "mid" (not junior IMHO) but is not ok to ignore guidance and advice from more experienced team members.

It's funny cuz is true. Except it'd probably be one long design doc with 10 rounds of review, 15 CLs (PRs) and months of rollouts later ... fails A/B due to declining user engagement.

Yes. Once is available more widely to common car owners (either from Waymo or others) that would interest me. Current Tesla supervised style semi autonomous driving I would find either boring or stressful (depending on the scenario). I would rather drive myself.

Note Waymo announced a partnership with Toyota, pretty hand wavy, but at least it seems there’s hope the technology may come to regular car owners at some point.

Quite frankly sounds super boring. I prefer driving than supervising. Only true unsupervised autonomous driving would be interesting for me (e.g Waymo).

> What if your means are not sufficient to avoid hunger?

Not all advice is applicable to everyone. It's up to you to decide if you can and want to follow it. The advice was for young programmers and it is solid advice, but again, not applicable to everyone. It is applicable to a majority (probably even large majority). If you are young and earning a sw engineer salary it is very rare to not be able to cover your basic needs and have something left. Most people spends what is left in luxuries, lifestyle creep, etc; which is what the advice is trying to warn people about.

Do you mind sharing what big tech company? I've worked at both small companies and big tech. Managers do not have full control, but they can influence very significantly comp and evaluations. If your manager isn't doing it then it is a performance problem.

My understanding is that the definition of cult requires a common object of devotion. What's that object of devotion for "society"? it's too large and diverse of a group to categorize it as such IMHO. I agree however that sometimes people will categorize anything strongly deviating from the norm as cult-ish.

Engineering managers should not exist? I agree in an ideal world they shouldn’t. Ideally all teams should self-organize in harmony and dance barefoot singing kumbaya forming a perfect holacracy. Alas, we don’t live in an ideal world, and some people like me decided is a problem worth working on even if we don’t enjoy it as much as writing code.

It's the lack of content availability that pushed them over the edge. Sports are a special case, notoriously hard that is super stupid and pushing people to piracy. I tried paying many times to watch a game my kid wanted and either the dumb apps or websites would not work on my TV. Make it easy to pay for the content and most people will take the easy route rather than search online for ad-ridded or dubious websites (unless they can't really afford it and then is not a real loss for the company anyway).

People that cannot afford Netflix will go to great lengths to get the content they want. They're also not mutually exclusive. Piracy growing doesn't mean Netflix isn't. People pay for Netflix AND download pirated movies all the time.

My comment was explicitly replying to an argument about how streaming services would "suffer" because of how piracy is much easier today. There's no signs of that. Just because Netflix mentions that risk in their SEC filings. The article admits as much, it's their responsibility and of course if there were no other alternatives it'd be better for Netflix, but is hardly something that has changed significantly to make a dent in their business. As I said, subscriptions and revenue keeps growing, there's no evidence of them "suffering" because of the alternative (viable to many) that piracy provides.