solatic

Let's put it this way - I don't think you could run a Fortune 500 company with 2-3 engineers. I do think there's still a role for "Non-Functional Software Engineers" who are hired to take a long-term perspective on systems maintenance for the golden geese that keep the company's revenues rolling in, handle vendor migrations, stuff like that, which is very different from the responsive, short-term perspective that Product needs. Companies will probably still benefit from people dedicated to their analytics / BI / data pipelines, as an internal product. Roles like Security, Legal, GRC will survive, not because AI can't replace them technically, but because someone still needs to be held accountable. Headcount will still rise with the number of products offered, and eventually you still need the systems and guardrails needed to keep that number of people aligned. All of that is complexity.

You're missing the point about how the industry is going to go through a great narrowing. In the past, you'd have one PM and 8-12 engineers. Now you only need 2-3 people with both product and engineering ("architecture", to quote the author) skillsets. You are absolutely correct that most engineers are not interested in the Product side - those are the engineers who are going to get cut in this great narrowing. Quoting the author:

> I grew up with the distinction of "tech guy" needs a "product guy". I am not dismissing it, I am just saying that the world is entering into a phase where both roles are eventually melting into a single function.

The whole reason why Engineering exists in organizations is to take Product's ideas and turn them into reality. When Product can realize its own ideas (through AI) then Engineering is no longer necessary as a political sub-organization. Making it happen requires engineers to learn Product skills and adopt a "Product" job title. We will likely call people with both skillsets Product Engineers. People who can't adapt to learning both skillsets are at risk of losing their jobs.

Ops is bifurcating in two:

* AI-resistant organizations led by graybeards who refuse to send telemetry off-prem (to either observability vendors or to inference providers) and will be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the future, over their cold, dead bodies. There's a lot of large, conservative organizations in this category like banks and governments, where budgets are rubber-stamped and Don't Break It If It Ain't Broken attitudes are tacitly approved of.

* AI-accepting organizations where Ops will go through the same great narrowing that Dev is going through now - build the dark factory and let it run. You do still need people who know what good architecture looks like and to shepherd changes to improve the overall system to make it more observable, scalable, and maintainable. You do still need Non-Functional Software Engineers who don't answer to Product, for the sheer political reason that you need people who have a long-term perspective, compared to Product that has a short-term perspective. The business will make decisions like "Vendor X is too expensive so we're migrating to Vendor Y" and you will need somebody to drive the agents to make that happen in a way that respects availability and compliance requirements. You probably don't need, in the long-term, a whole team of people to handle it, let alone a whole group or a whole division.

At the end of the day... focus on being a strong engineer. Somebody will always be needed to take care of the trees.

There are genuine, obvious benefits to having a larger screen. People are limited by the size of what can fit in their pants pockets, and the need to carry at least one device that they can hold up to their ear (i.e. with one hand) for phone calls. The market of people who are willing to carry one device is much larger than the market of people willing to carry multiple devices (i.e. a separate tablet).

The question isn't whether or not there's value to unlock in the foldables category, it's whether manufacturers can get the product right, and overcome durability concerns among a consumer base that is righteously conservative about durability concerns on high-cost devices that they depend on every day.

My current anecdotal example: if you're building cross-platform native apps, you need to run agents on macOS and Windows, because xcodebuild only runs on macOS and the Windows SDK is only available on Windows.

The mistake is believing that you can make no mistakes. Either you make a mistake by taking too long to polish everything to a blinding sheen, or you ship at a reasonable frequency and sometimes make mistakes in what you ship.

GCP got really, really good in the last few years. The cross-account story is now better on GCP than on AWS. BigQuery, Spanner, Pub/Sub, GKE are all best-in-class. AWS has its advantages too: CloudFront, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, and IPv6 support are all best-in-class. It really just depends on what your product's actual architectural needs are, and whether you have access to nosebleed budget to pay for it all (these services are all staggeringly expensive).

Part of the problem I have with graphs like this is that they don't differentiate between paper wealth, being able to get a loan against the paper wealth, and hard assets (real estate, vehicles, cash).

Let's take a personal anecdote for an example: I joined a startup when it was early-stage, stayed for a few years, and exercised my stock options when I left. The startup is now "successful", but still private; my shares have also surely been heavily diluted. I have no idea when I'll be able to sell those shares or how much they're really worth. I have no way of turning those shares into quality-of-life improvements for any foreseeable future. Do they make me "wealthy"?

I don't think most Americans have a problem with rich people buying nice houses and nice cars, and using their wealth to pay for private staff. I think the real problem is how much of the wealth is allowed to stay off public markets. Cargill is worth more than $50 billion and its stock is not available on public markets. The growth in wealth of most AI companies - Anthropic, OpenAI - happened off of public markets, and so none of it trickled into the American middle class by their retirement accounts. Venture capital is keeping companies private for longer because, quite simply, none of the investors need the cash to pay for their cost of living, so they're quite happy to let paper gains continue to live on paper.

If your company has revenues of $X million a year or more, you should be forced to make public financial reports (effectively forcing you to list stock on a public market). Period. I think economists will naturally disagree on how much X should be, and that's fine, but I have little doubt that there should be a line like that, somewhere. Concerns about public markets forcing short-term thinking are a different problem, one addressed by mission-lock implements (Eric Ries's recent book Incorruptible is great here). Public markets ensure that gains in wealth are shared more broadly across the economy and increase tax collection by incentivizing more frequent buying and selling of the underlying stock, since those are taxable events.

The "Pro" in MacBook Pro has slowly degraded to "it comes with a fan so that the chip can keep chugging when it gets a hard workload, unlike the MacBook Air where the chip will throttle since there's no fan".

This 100%.

A Mac Mini is what I buy when I need a CI runner to run build, signature, and UI testing for macOS / iOS apps. I also have (one of) mine hooked up to a projector for home theater.

An iMac is what I buy my aging parents so that they can have an Internet terminal in the breakfast nook.

Totally different markets.

This is an overgeneralization.

If your company is larger than Dunbar's number (150 employees), you have low-level employees making median wage and a fraction of a fraction of a percent equity, it's not impossible to have a high-engagement culture, but it would be close to exploitative and at least unhealthy for them.

But a founder accepting a fatalistic viewpoint on this would be signing their own death warrant. There's no room for fatalism in startups. Rather, good founders need to both bring boundless optimism and work to ensure that there is a means for expansion and reward for employees that continues as the company gets larger.

I sympathize with the author, but instead of intensity, I would describe it as externally-observable emotional engagement (though that is a mouthful by comparison). Success follows founders who care deeply about their mission, customers, product, and people, and who succeed in getting other people to care deeply as well.

It is such a stark contrast from corporate culture, where you survive and get promoted by learning to disengage from the mission, customers, and product, and focus on being quietly, not intensely, useful for your boss.

> 128 GB RAM

> $7k

heavy sigh