> That entire role is software engineering. Many in the industry suck at most of the parts and only like the programming part.
I'm always amused when I read anecdotes from a role siloed / heavily staffed tech orgs with all these various roles.
I've never had a spec handed to me in my career. My job has always been been end to end. Talk to users -> write spec into a ticket -> do the ticket -> test the feature -> document the feature -> deploy the feature -> support the feature in production from on-call rotation.
Often I have a few juniors or consultants working for me that I oversee doing parts of the implementation, but thats about it.
The talking to users part is where a lot of people fall down. It is not simply stenography. Remember most users are not domain/technical experts in the same things as you, and it's all just a negotiation.
It's teasing out what people actually want (cars vs faster horses), thinking on your feet fast enough to express tradeoffs (lots of cargo space vs fuel efficiency vs seating capacity vs acceleration) and finding the right cost/benefit balance on requirements (you said the car needs to go 1000 miles per tank but your commute is 30 miles.. what if..).
> I've never had a spec handed to me in my career.
We call those places "feature factories".
I have been required to talk with many in my life, I have never seen one add value to anything. (There are obvious reasons for that.) But yet, the dominant schools in management and law insist they are the correct way to create software, so they are the most common kind of employment position worldwide.
Classic VC pump playbook - run it uneconomically until everyone is addicted, then 5x prices once you have enough critical mass. See 2010s "Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy"..
It seems pretty transparent that they are heavily resource constrained, (training run for Claude 5.x, higher usage / growth than anticipated). I don’t disagree that their long play is monopolistic pricing, but what we’re observing seems better explained by the fact they have a very tight compute budget they are trying to optimize over to put as much as they can into next gen experiments / training to make sure they stay competitive over the next 6-months / year.
> “Especially after the first couple years, he’s got it so dialed in that some of these recordings, on, like, crappy little cassette tapes from the early 90s, sound incredible,” deMause said.
I think in some ways we’ve come full circle such that it doesn’t matter.. because people are listening to various compressed streaming music sources, with loudness-wars mixing, output to airpods, phone speakers, laptop speakers, and all sorts of suboptimal listening devices.
I think you're conflating lossy encoding degrading fidelity with the main problem that plagues most audience recordings: the crowd is in the foreground and the band is in the background. One is nearly imperceptible to most people that haven't spent decades in studios like Neil Young, and the other is immediately obvious to everyone.
I used a paid SaaS sync service 10 years ago (not Dropbox) that had the following failure mode even though it had been around for a few years..
You could have it mirror an entire subdirectory, including external drives.
If you booted up long enough and that external drive was not mounted, the service registered that as a subdirectory delete (bad). When you then mounted it again, the sync agent saw it as out of sync with the newer server-side delete and proceeded to clear the local external drives.
They also implemented versioning so poorly that a deleted directory was not versioned, only the files within it. So you could recover raw files without the directory structure back in a giant bundle of 1000s of files. Horrible.
This is the kind of thing I think about when i see the mindset of “we’ll just replace all the SaaS with vibe code” pitches.
Not everything is a CRUD app website.
I was running my own hacky sync thing to the cloud a decade ago. I would never in my boldest dreams compared it to dropbox.
Even if you know the use cases, the edge cases could be 99% of the work.
POCs are 100x easier than working production multi-user applications. Don’t confuse getting to a POC in 2 hours with getting a final product in 4 hours.
The biggest blocker there is probably whatever remaining creditors to the company when it goes under then have claims on remaining assets like the software.
One solution would be putting something in the tax code such that donating the code to an open source foundation gives a bigger benefit than simply writing it off as a total loss and destroying it.
And how about friends & family without official roles, congressional appointment process approvals, etc who just.. happen to be around a lot and involved in a lot of stuff?
I think we are sort of in the worst of both worlds right now re: medicines/supplements/gray market.
FDA approval is expensive slow process. Doctors train for a long time and then work 40+ years entire careers, some without a ton of continuing education.
But then we have an entire gray market because enough legal and practical loopholes to drive a freight train through, such that people are self medicating with dubious substances of dubious origin of dubious purity sourced via dubious means.
Even if peptides work, you have no idea what side effects they have, or if the ones you are taking are even real, not contaminated/tainted in some manner, etc. Given a lot of the hype comes from social media for otherwise healthy people to take them for lifestyle / augmentation reasons.. to me the risks still outweigh the rewards.
Real solutions like regulatory reforms to find ways to bring down testing costs seem more important than reforms to make it easier to slap anything on the shelf at GNC as a completely untested “supplement”.
Where did you get this idea? I did a simple, five second Google search and learned that on average, US doctors are required to complete about 50 hours of continuing education for each one- to two-year recert cycle. (On HN, I also hear similar complaints about public school teachers. It isn't true. Public school teachers are required to do similar continuing education.)
Taking continuing education credits to check a box for retaining professional licensure and educating yourself about emerging and novel concepts in your field are two vastly different things. If anything, CE helps professionals update their knowledge base regarding existing processes and procedures.
Not US, but the seminars to fill in the hours in my country were closer to legal bribes and/or holidays in often exotic places. They usually were provided/funded by the medicine lobby.
Same in US only sometimes more banal. Signup sheet in front of the stacks of pizza at some research talk at the medical school. Back row entirely asleep. Talk had nothing to do with medical practice but the researcher holds an md phd. Might be talking about their work in yeast.
Compare how seriously many SWEs take mandatory HR/compliance trainings vs hanging out on HN, taking online courses, arguing about code, trying new frameworks, coding in spare time, etc.
The problem is it is so ingrained in US culture that switching to tip-free has generally failed where tried, even in pro-labor lefty hoods in blue cities.
Numerous restaurants in NYC tried and flipped back over the last 10 years. Restauranteurs reported illogical / innumerate behavior where sales went down when they switched to untipped higher prices.
Well sure, it has to be mandated through law or underpaying workers will inevitably outcompete those that pay workers. I don't think that's an argument that anyone likes tipping culture (except wait staff in bougie cities).
I remember when Uber first came to Austin, one of the big draws was that a tip wasn't expected. The app didn't even allow it IIRC and Uber sort of advertised this as a feature. 15 years later, back to it, tips seem expected again?
Oddly enough, the fact that I was initially sold a product where a tip wasn't expected has made me continue to not tip Uber drivers. Not sure what that says about me.
I'm always amused when I read anecdotes from a role siloed / heavily staffed tech orgs with all these various roles.
I've never had a spec handed to me in my career. My job has always been been end to end. Talk to users -> write spec into a ticket -> do the ticket -> test the feature -> document the feature -> deploy the feature -> support the feature in production from on-call rotation.
Often I have a few juniors or consultants working for me that I oversee doing parts of the implementation, but thats about it.
The talking to users part is where a lot of people fall down. It is not simply stenography. Remember most users are not domain/technical experts in the same things as you, and it's all just a negotiation.
It's teasing out what people actually want (cars vs faster horses), thinking on your feet fast enough to express tradeoffs (lots of cargo space vs fuel efficiency vs seating capacity vs acceleration) and finding the right cost/benefit balance on requirements (you said the car needs to go 1000 miles per tank but your commute is 30 miles.. what if..).
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