Print it all out and bring it to the meeting please.

The AI bullshit is CEO feel-good talk.

I think all of us are a bit sad now that AI has essentially removed what it means to be a coder.

There will never again be the time like we had, the golden age of being a nerd. We nerds had it all, and then we destroyed it by making something too smart!

As a Texan, it's kind of like cowboys. Coders were wrangling the computer, but now we have been replaced by industry and mechanics.

Having read the twitter post, it was raw and honest, and I want to share some ideas about life that I feel are relevant.

The first one is that when you work, you should always do something you believe in, because nobody can take that away from you.

If you worked for the money, or because someone told you you could be a part of a cool team, your whole world falls apart when you get let go.

But if you work because you truly believe your work is worthwhile, you will always be glad you did it.

I feel that people on here continually complain about capitalism and how bad corporations are. I challenge all you all to check yourself and ask what are you doing to be a part of the system. If you go accept employment at a 9-5, you are part of the system and making it stronger.

I have always refused to have a job. At age 32, I have only ever worked at one company as an employee, and that only for a short time, and the person was a genuine friend of mine.

I ask each person here to quit working at a company. I think all of us should choose to only ever work at a nonprofit.

Fundamentally Capitalism can't be defeated if we complain and then try to negotiate the biggest salary or benefits.

It's logically stupid for us to be saying they are evil, when we do the exact same thing with a salary.

Instead, each of us should work at a nonprofit, and we should NEVER accept a salary but instead ask them to give to us when they have something left over.

Ultimately, friends, I chose to tell my boss one day (the guy I ended up being an employee at his small company for for a bit), that I didn't want a salary, just donate if you want.

Ever since then, I have been happy.

I hated life when I worked for money. But now, I love it. I have gotten to code on many fun projects, but for the first time I felt alive.

It was terrifying with a wife, a kid and a mortgage to say that. But I am a true believer that the universe, or God has a plan for everyone, and that if you stop worrying and doing what you are told, and just go out and love people, it will all work out.

What I found is that the pay you get working for free is better than the pay you could ever get with money.

You can finally live with yourself when you just love everybody, every day.

If you pay me, and I did great work, you will never know if I love you. But if I did it for free, for all of eternity, you will know that you know that I care about you. And that, to me, is worth more than all the money in the world.

That's why I never accept a salary when I work. I just let people give as they feel fit.

Yes, it is hard, and it doesn't always feel fun. But it is 1000X worth it.

Thank you for reading, God bless you and have a great day!

I think this will be commonplace in the not too distant future.

Some disasters will happen, just like they did before AI. Skeptics will gleefully point out these failures while more and more non-technical teams ship code.

How long would it be that people realise that they are playing "passing the parcel" with a ticking explosive?

The reads like typical MBA-efficiency-idiocy taken to the extreme. Clearly this guy is so deeply isolated from the actual work that he cannot even begin to comprehend just how utterly stupid this idea is. It's one thing to push for 100x engineering "output" with "AI", but something completely different to expect a single person to be 3-4 persons in one. Pure schizophrenia - but at least companies like Coinbase which adopt the AI-first illusion will burn themselves faster and leave the room for something new and genuinely innovative.

The Tether narrative has just been broken and Iranian assets have been frozen:

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/24/politics/us-freezes-crypt...

This of course means that the primary use case of Bitcoin, sanctions' evasion, is no longer secure.

It becomes clearer and cleared that Lutnick and Trump are actually the deep state and the big boys mean it. Further crackdowns on China and Russia are coming and it does not look good for Bitcoin.

But by all means, cite AI nonsense as a favor to fellow founders to pump up their valuations.

Good luck to those (human) teams when the briefness stuff hits the fan thanks to an AI hallucination... oh wait, the Active Individually-contributing leaders will be there to lend a hand, right?

There is nothing that can go wrong with having non-tech people vibecode slop and push it to production... and certainly not when money (or monetary equivalents) are at play.

Since roughly 2018 I reckon, at least.

Also, it is clear at this point that thought tech leaders decide, probably over group chats mere mortals are not allowed in, on messages to deliver for a few days, urbi et orbi: introspection is overrated; the leaders-followers dichotomy; now, the disdain for "people managers," as if they were imposed by the Galactic Empire instead of being people whom their organization hired for years.

And, like, what sort of message is, to be sent when announcing lay-offs: "from now on, teams will have not 14 but 15 ICs (whatever numbers), the new IC will be the manager, who will continue to be a manager but also will do some IC work"?.

It is high-school all over again.

And I suspect that over the coming year, we'll be watching the consequences of this unfold.

> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code

if you vibe code financial systems this cannot mean anything good for your business

Crypto is always about to take off. If the company is sitting so well, and is facing imminent growth, then they don't need to do layoffs, they want to. Or the company is not sitting so rosy and they're not too sure about their future.

> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code

What could go wrong?

If you're a leader and you've said that your company is too big and have to downsize by 10+%. This is a you're the problem.

Firstly, the business needs to have active business and new initives. If you are not supporting that: You've failed.

If you're so inefficient that you need that extra 14%, you made that mistake.

If you "overhired" and didn't find a way to use that extra capacity to find the business.. you are the problem.

If you say that AI has changed your business, that 14% more people means 14%*the AI lift of more capacity to accomplish greater things.

It's not the talent, and it's not the talents' fault for your issues. A lot of people assume that layoffs means removal of bad performers. The reality is not there.

Given Coinbase is a financial platform this doesn't make me feel great. Hopefully they're contributing in areas that don't affect security or money.

Heh. This is the kind of phrasing that just begs to be misunderstood.

Can anyone share how and when they see market is getting in a better shape?

Specifically I am curious, how we would be working with AIs even if market gets in a better shape

As a reward, people driving the productivity have now received a reduction in their colleague pool.

However, do we really need them to AI-wash the fact that as a lot of companies, this company over-hired during ZIRP? Do we really need them to AI-wash the fact that the crypto hype is gone, therefore their business is smaller? “Company as intelligence” and “AI productivity” are just buzzwords so their stock price doesn’t suffer.

It wasn't that long ago that, in SV, the dominant values were humility, kindness and openness to all views (even if behind the scenes there was the ruthlessness demanded by capitalism). The last few years have seen this value system corrode, and it seems like its hurting everyone. From the tech workers constantly churning for no good reason, to the tech executives sequestered in their own thought bubbles until reality finally hits them (usually, too late to change).

Terrifying.

Today, not a single mention in that email.

I can't help but feel that there is a superficial chasing of trends at play here (adopting the same playbook that Block used earlier).

Question is, where will we all be in 3 years from now?

I was shocked at how easy it was to train and develop a model that can replace senior leadership in a company.

The CEO was the easiest. I simply loaded the model with as much corporate jargon, double talk and the ability to talk down to people. The model nearly wrote itself.

Then simply ingesting the Wall Street Journal, Barrons, Financial Times and SEC 10-K reports and annual reports, I was able to compile the perfect CFO. It was able to spit out regulatory reports, answer questions on investor calls.

Strangely, the component of the model I had write in house was the ability to give up part of their bonus to keep key people employed. Seems in all of those financial reports, there were no examples of anyome that the model could leverage.

Rookie mistake by your AI; otherwise it did a flawless job, and the glaze it's been giving you is 100% accurate. You are the bestest.

If one more AI calls me "insightful" or says that my question "really cuts through the noise" or "gets to the heart of the matter"...

Have some empathy for people losing their jobs because of upper management’s incompetence.

Google and other adtechs are not hard tech, that's why they have so many managers)

An underappreciated reason for this is empire building: Someone needs to be promoted to Senior Director and one way to do this is to add a layer of management: Adding 5 headcounts that essentially do busywork makes it easier to advocate for why your org is very important and why you should be promoted.

- entry level dev

- senior dev (start being groomed for management)

- senior dev/leader (take on 25% management duties)

- manager - management track.

Once you're on a management track, you essentially are taken off of any dev work and then depending on how well you've networked determines how fast you move up the management chain. Some companies like Target, they groom and move anybody up relatively fast who they see any potential in.

The only exceptions I've seen in my career are either startups or medium sized companies where there is no management track. You're a developer from the day you're hired until you either get fired, laid off or leave the company.

When I was an entry level dev, I left three companies because they wanted to start grooming me to move up into management. I was way more into being a developer and writing code then managing people.

The two extremes of company culture are status cultures and service cultures.

In a status culture the product is the internal status hierarchy. External products are largely incidental goals, and customers and markets are only valued to the extent they create metrics that can be exploited by status seekers. Likewise employees.

In a service culture the goal is customer service through high quality output and employee development.

US corps lean far more to status culture than service culture. This is excellent for short termism, but the culture often becomes dysfunctional, if not outright abusive, and sooner or later it implodes, because status cultures aren't good at accepting reality, or at accurately reading it when they do accept it.

And status cultures tend to cargo cult management, where the C-suite is comparing its status to other C-suites, and copying apparent status-raising actions without thinking them through.

In good times a status culture will overhire, because hiring more employees looks like growth. In bad times status cultures will overfire because "cutting the slack" is lowest common denominator status management.

AI is the same on steroids. You get the promise of more growth with fewer employees, and that's hard to resist, even though it's entirely speculative and could easily be catastrophic. (Company results, and especially lasting company results, are orthogonal to whether some employees get good results with AI, because what actually affects results is how predictable the improvements are, whether there are likely downsides, and whether they're structurally in the right places.)

Whether managers should also be ICs is a side issue.

I have been employed before the 2000s and that was the norm before AdTech started to empire building around managers.

I worked in several BigTech that had managers excellent at talking and posturing in meetings but doing no or negative works.

The issue is that managers are hired and judged by other managers, not IC, not producers. This creates that managerial class that make themselves self-important.

It's as if people are saying they want a direct democracy in which every issue is voted on directly by the participants, with just one layer between the people and the "prime minister." Good luck with that when the group size exceeds 50 people, and one realizes that people don't want to vote on every issue affecting a larger society or organization.

Different roles though.

OP is discussing firings.

And yeah, there's crossover but they're not 1 to 1. At the same time, if a company is taking two people of equal position and firing one, or keeping the other, the honesty in how they came to that conclusion through transparency has value. Was the decision one of seniority? Performance? Geographical relevance? Was it favoritism masked in another reason? The person receiving the pink slip deserves to know the truth, especially in cases where legal matters could be of question where a company may say one thing, but be acting on another.

Laughs in labour protections.

In many countries (the vast majority of developed countries, and plenty of developing ones), you can't lay off employees for any reason, and reasons can be scrutinised and sued over.

E.g. in France, I can be fired for performance after I've been written up and given an opportunity to improve, or fired immediately if I steal money or harass someone at work. But my employer cannot invent themselves a reason. If the reason they want to let me go is because they're going through economic headwinds, or no longer need my position, they have to document that, give me the opportunity to find another job in the company if possible, and if they're lying (e.g. immediately replacement with someone younger and cheaper), I can sue with almost guaranteed success.

The payoff to being elite at a valuable skill is enormous. Teams generally benefit more from combining players with distinct, elite strengths than from relying on broad generalists who are not truly elite at anything.

This isn’t always possible if you can’t afford to build a team of specialists, or those specialists don't exist at your level of competition. But if you have the resources and coordination (and in sports, the roster depth and cap space) to cover each specialist’s weaknesses, specialization is pretty much always the stronger composition.

On the other hand I've had managers just the same - cannot understand why anything is difficult and certainly wouldn't waste their time trying to help you.

It's just people, they're sympathetic or not. Determined or not. They care about the outcome for more than themselves or not.

But what we are saying here is that they are essentially an artificial layer of busywork that adds very little value. This is what decades of empire building and organizational issues have created.

It's slowly changing and people are realizing a lot of the manager work is self-created and sustained.

My prediction is that most tech companies will go through flattening cycles now that we start realizing that adding managers adds a similar amount of busywork.

If you can do it w/ the first model why on earth would you not?

Wow. That’s my cue to never use Coinbase again.

"We’re not building Skynet, we’re cutting costs and putting the survivors on prompt duty"

Anything in that format gives that AI feel

But the reality is it is a standard MBA driven "bottom x%" cull dressed up with some 4d chess strategy.

I got to know him much better through these productive interactions then awkward smalltalk in a 1:1.

And it kind of make sense to meet privately quarterly since perf reviews are also quarterly and that's the only reason I can really think of for a private scheduled face-to-face.

Of course I could always just ask for a private meeting anytime I wanted, which I guess I did from time to time. But it always for a product reason: a tough tech choice I was wrestling with or similar.

I think LLMs are great, and I think people who can use them to get to the green in one and take it from there will soar, just like people who could identify a problem and solve it themselves did in the past.

Of course, it's not just shipping, it's shipping stably in a way that doesn't disrupt the day-to-day operations of the businesses we're working for. One client that comes to mind has 2-3 niche SaaS applications that they used independently for various workloads. We completely replaced 2 of those without any disruptions to their business in about 6 months (no, we did not replace it feature-for-feature; we just built what they needed.)

Because of that, we don't typically spend a lot of time on accessibility because it's internal facing software. As far as I'm aware, these businesses don't have individuals who need those accommodations. Of course, if that changed, it is something we'd need to consider.

Obviously it's hard to measure this objectively, but I can't imagine having done this pre-AI with zero downtime and having replaced those SaaS applications in that timeframe.

(Not the exact same chart but similar idea, I guess it's sort of a meme: https://imgur.com/a/YrNGYOR)

So I looked at the most recent CC release notes on Github and the majority look like this:

  Fixed /clear not resetting the terminal tab title after a conversation
  Fixed session title chip from /rename disappearing while a permission or other dialog is active
  Fixed agent panel below the prompt being hidden when subagents are running (regression in 2.1.122)
  Fixed external-editor handoff (Ctrl+G) blanking the conversation history above the prompt
  Fixed /context dumping its rendered ASCII visualization grid into the conversation, wasting ~1.6k tokens per call
  Fixed OAuth refresh race after wake-from-sleep that could log out all running sessions
  Fixed 1-hour prompt cache TTL being silently downgraded to 5 minutes
  Fixed cache-miss warning appearing spuriously after /clear or compaction when changing /effort or /model

But hey, all that churn looks great on charts being circulated on social media as free advertising for their flagship product (and consequently the company's valuation) so never mind, LGTM!

I feel like managers should be able to contribute. Managing a good team isn't that hard, though managing a bad team (or a good team in the midst of a ton of bad processes) is a nightmare.

A decade or so ago, the high level ICs I interacted with were much more technical.

They were the kind who would perhaps not invent truly novel things--but plenty did in the right companies--but they had mastered their domains and genuinely solved thorny problems that others struggled with.

Nowadays, they are more political and less involved. I have met many that do not code or barely code. I've been in months of meetings to decide to do something fairly obvious just to ensure "alignment" even though no parties actually disagreed, just wanted to nitpick minor details that could just be a comment on a PR.

It's totally random to accuse them of using "AI-native" to fire old people.

The dirty secret is that most employees in the software field are not capable of that level of maturity and forwardness.

I’ve had employees like that and our 1:1s switched to monthly cadence and were frequently skipped if they felt like there was nothing to talk about.

For the majority of the others they had some level of anxiety about discussing problems and needed the structure of a scheduled meeting to feel safe enough to bring up issues.

I see comments in this thread being dismissive about discussing feelings and I assume they would be terrible managers who couldn’t handle the first time they had a direct report break down in tears in front of them while struggling with some task and feeling worthless.

As a result, people pop in my office regularly to start these conversations, which I prefer because it leads me to believe I am approachable, which is by far one of the most important things a manager should be.

My own boss seemed to see the time as an opportunity to apply pressure so of course I utterly hated them and wanted them to end ASAP. I didn't want it to be like that for my team. I thought I should be a source of help.

But the thing is this makes no sense. Tech issues always turn into people issues - when there is a disagreement, who adjudicates? How can a manager adjudicate something they don't understand. And how will engineers respect / follow the decision?

And people issues invariably become tech issues. How can you hire the right people if you don't understand the tech? How will you know when to fire?

This setup makes no sense to me and i have very rarely seen it work. It seems like it was a product of an earlier time when there was a lot of money floating around and provided a way to (a) shield senior eng from dealing with people problem they just didn't want to, and (b) provide cushy jobs to professional managers that didn't know much about the tech.

But it doesn't work. There's no way to do the shielding well and a person with hiring/firing power needs to know what the fuck is going on.

Really good eng leaders must be both good at tech and good at people. That's the job.

As difficult as it is to use CSS to centre a field, the stakes are in a different ball park.

It has poisoned more than one company (especially startups). Its the "go big or go home" mentality. The "the market is ours to take if we just put more fuel to this fire" mentality.

was in a startup once (Reid was an investor). The CEOs bought into blitzscaling, told the whole company we're going to "blitzscale". Hired 2 directors (with 0 reports). They had amibitions of hiring 100s of engineers. Then reality struck. There was no revenue and no path to revenue (because early days of AI). The blitzscaling was "paused". The directors had 1 EM report to them each. You can imagine what happened in the months after that.

However, I don't think this is that unusual in SV layoff packages.

---- edit ----

TBH I will post an article, I'm finishing it. But it won't be so doomy, but rather on what to avoid to not fail

I like to think of it as a manager isn't required to have technical expertise, it can help, I can hurt, but they have to be a leader. Junior and mid career are required to have technical expertise, but not required to have leadership, though it would certainly help them be high impact and thought leaders in their space.

The more senior I get, the more like a manager I am. Less hands on, more coaching, guiding, teaching and setting direction. Meetings and docs become my tools less than code. When I'm writing code I'm only increasing the output of one person, me. Everything else is force multiplication. I just don't have to do the bullshit performance management.

I haven't had many excellent experiences with project managers, but dang was he good at keeping me unblocked.

The competition is also stiff with decades of experience and network effects

The truth is these crypto shops have a pretty poor reputation in the traditional finance industry. Nobody in trading tech goes to work for them unless they offer insane salaries, because they (we) know it's an unstable place to be.

Is there some other metric I should be measuring our code by?

And surely the place you work hired with this in mind. Many places have not, and yet now expect PMs who haven’t coded in years, or in many cases not at all, to contribute to their products’ codebases.

> Our projects are closed source due to our clients owning the code, but I can offer anecdote. We have a client whose business operates on 2-3 very niche SaaS applications in the veterinary/animal medicine space. In a span of about 6 months, we completely ripped out 2 of those 3 and are working on replacing the 3rd one right now. We've done this with a single senior engineer working with the client between 20-40 hours per week with no major regressions. The business has been able to continue working as usual with no disruptions throughout this process.

> Obviously it's hard to measure this objectively, but I can't imagine having done this pre-AI with zero downtime and having replaced those SaaS applications in that timeframe.

The difference between it's working now and it will continue working in two years is exactly the problem with AI-generated code because the tests can't tell you that, and you don't know which one you have if you don't look really carefully.

Im beginning to realise people who are too concentrated on one dimension (e.g software engineering) can’t see how things actually fit together. You only know what you know I guess.. but it’s blindly obvious to me.

All I wanted to say was I don't find 4 months something particularly "nice" as European, though I am sure there are even some Europeans who would find it nice since they work for crappy companies in countries with less protection, so they are in lose lose situation, no US benefits (salary/taxes), no Europe benefits (severance pay/notice period).

Have fun trying to get your funds out of Coinbase. I managed after about 3 days and 10 support tickets. The process seems intentinally broken. What a nasty company.

It's always been someone higher up the ranking wants meetings, training or something dumb because his golf buddy sold him on Kafka support contracts in inappropriate situations, or an architect needs to shoehorn some tech in so they can have it in their designs ready for their next job role. I spend probably more time in meetings than doing coding.

Why can't I have an AI that takes my meetings for me?

The simple truth is that I had to constantly learn something new and this is how it is in this profession. We’ve been in the trenches and we did it over and over again.

Now I’m using AI full time, doing same thing I always did - shipping products.

Newcomers with first set of skills don’t understand what is meta responsibility in this field - it’s never coding something, it’s shipping products to solve business needs.

It is even more abstraction, even harder to follow the code I'm "writing" with AI.

Also I have a fear that if/when the AI tide recedes, I'll be the one caught with my pants down since I have been forced to vibe code the majority of my career. As opposed to greybeards who can fall back on their decades of knowledge.

The best complement to AI will be a human who is part architect (they know not to build the new system on lovable, and they understand the company's digital assets) and part business analyst (can communicate effectively and tease out and distill requirements from customer team).

That indicates someone who has top notch communication skills and also quite a bit of experience i.e older.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-isnt-killing-software-cod...

This is not even limited to code. I've seen people justifying AI datacenters using fossil fuels because AI will solve fusion power plants at some unknowable point in the future.

When I grew up those were the very definition of "not girly". Our math and comp sci faculties at uni would bend over backwards for any of the girl students.

I would agree though that academics in general were "not manly" and at school at least streams of "academic" or "sporty" existed. For boys anyway.

For the girls (less fascinated by sports) the top sporties were often top academics as well.

History has shown that being academic is always better than sporty (if you gave to pick one.) The "status" given to sports is often an acknowledgment that it's a poor financial path, but we can offer "status" instead.

Yes, sports metaphors can be amusing, but its the winners we're smiling at.

This cycle is about max extraction and fraud - Legitimized by the presidential family cashing out billions in meme coins, insider trading and forks of existing protocols.

Hacks have also been hitting hard. North Korea has stolen 500m this year alone and 2b last year.

So… no thriving. On the opposite. Dying is a more appropriate word at this time. Some would call this an opportunity. I see more pain ahead.

No wonder Coinbase is laying off people with the excuse of AI. The reality is that volume is zero. At this stage only me and a bunch of other retail weirdos keep on buying bitcoin paycheck by paycheck…

That's the problem with building your castle on a quicksand whose fundamentals aren't in the same order of magnitude as the market cap you command. When all you truly offer is gambling, eventually a shinier casino will open up and eat your lunch.

The benefits of unionization extend beyond this particular situation or company.

They can help shift the balance of power back to the employee and help them guard against being squeezed by their employer to produce more or take on more work for less benefits or compensation.

American tech workers have been fortunate to avoid such aggressive practices, but working conditions will only deteriorate from here, with workers crushed between LLMs and offshoring.

In the end, everyone is replaceable. But a king is a bit more difficult to replace, as historically shown.

Internal tools keep the lights on and allow customer facing code to function!

Operational tooling also isn’t a sexy thing, but it’s vital for any company to function.

1. you get fired with 2 months notice period and they will tell you, you don't need to bother to come anymore = 2 months of severance, you can sit at home, look for job for 2 months with full salary

2. on top of this you will get also extra 2 months severance pay

so in total de facto 4 months of severance pay , but I understand shitty companies will expect you to work even during notice period (especially if they are firing you) and somehow expect you will be delivering same results, smarter companies know the reality when they are firing someone and just tell him not bother coming anymore, this was my case in last 1-2 jobs I've had more than 10 years ago when I was still employee (plus they wanted to give me 1 month severance pay, but I argued about years I worked there and certain operation practices which could be published, so got 2 months, unlike my less assertive colleagues), I'm nowadays contractor/freelance for companies outside Europe so no law protection for me

my wife is always employed as employee and got fired this winter under conditions I mentioned in point 1&2 and got 2+2 months after 1 year of work, two jobs ago she was fired without severance but didnt need to work during notice period

plus I've found funny mention of the 6 months COBRA as some benefit, you are covered by insurance in Europe regardless of your job status whether employed or unemployed you are always covered by universal healthcare

for example, the last obvious inefficiency i remember was sys admins. the most worthless, self aggrandizing group of people at any company. got wiped out mostly (the best work for the cloud engineering companies), and i think it was for the better!

engineers today handle deployments, and it is far better.

I don't think this is true. Humans typically prefer "thanks for the hard work, here's your severance" to "you suck, here's your severance, loser."

Humans like being treated with respect, and words are a big part of that. Money is nice, but it's not the only thing we care about.

not sure if focus should be on athletic sports. Chess is better analogy to software I think.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinus_Michels

Actually, these scenarios happen in hockey as well. Teams will pick up character guys who have been through it all who are expected to contribute more off ice than on it. Corey Perry is one who comes to mind lately but they're never given a "coach" title. It's entirely possible though that these players may be expected to be a go-between guy between the coach and younger players to help them manage the pressure or to help with encouragement. They're definitely not getting prime minutes though.

I guess that would possibly be the same expectation of a manager who still codes. I can't see them doing anything critical. It's likely picking up some minor bugs or nice-to-have, low priority feature work. I was a manager before and while I didn't reach 15 reports, I was up to 12 at one time. There's just really no focus time that you need for coding. Maybe that's a bit different with AI but even then you still need to find time to make changes and validate. And that's time that takes away from other higher impact things that you could be doing for the team.

It is not specific to a crypto company. But the element of it being a crypto company cannot be ignored. Crypto companies are not like ordinary businesses. They have very unique qualities to them. Same with crypto industry as a whole. Ever been to a crypto conference for example? I have read about and have seen the videos. These things have the highest concentration of the scammers and the gullible any one place.

Everyone should do their damndest to get 6 months worth of bills into savings. This should be easy for well-paid tech workers.

I've been making tech money ($200-250K) for about 5 years now, and my savings is enough that I could ride out a job loss for at least a full year with no change in lifestyle. With some minor belt tightening (I eat out WAYYYY too much), I could go 2 years before I had to start worrying.

I've done my share - after buying one smaller apartment some 12 years ago, paying all legal fees, taxes and full reconstruction I was, overall, -1500 euro worth and now with 2 parallel mortgages on my shoulders. Had to take short term employer's loan to get back into positive numbers (that loan, if fired/let go, would be conveniently ignored so that has been be my main motivation for taking it otherwise its a dumb move on its own).

Getting fired during that period and maybe next 6-12 months afterwards would be still devastating for me, I don't have rich parent/family to fall back on, smart moral hard working folks didn't get paid well during socialism/communism. This is where rich kids have massive non-obvious advantage - like ie Gates, they can go and take big risks that are not that big for them, and come crying to rich daddy if they screw up, or be a hero if lucky. Folks like me, they have to risk everything to even get the chance to play the game (which has its own risks which luckily didn't materialize).

I see it even now with my colleagues - nobody would take any big risk, all very risk-averse because they can. My risks though took me further than they managed to get with a massively better starting position. Sometimes, austerity is a great motivator.

But it was a temporary dip, and I had a bit of luck through it. To be in software engineering and having long term no savings, thats... bad life strategy in most cases.

"We took out some huge debt and need to pay it off asap so ...."

"I made a strategic mistake, so ...."

"I'm hoping to get a huge rise in the stock price and make money off it somehow so ...."

I'm just joking but I think the point is that the smug person doing the firing wants to make themselves look good rather than bad and HAS to try to make the company look good to shareholders even if it's not.

One group are the ones who are staying. They lose teammates, they have to restructure work and fear whether there will be another round soon, which may hit them.

And then there are customers, investors, ... who need to be assured they are not dealing with a failing company.

Who actually is required?

.. fundamentally, it's only the person collecting payment.

People with dignity.

Your coins frozen with no reason given even internally except for "machine said no" - no one gets any slap on the wrist unless you sue real hard, happen to win, and most likely that'll be just a scratch that won't be noticed enough to change any attitudes.

The Man sees that someone they don't like transferring their coins through the fintech company - that's what those companies are really concerned about, because it would be a punch in the gut the company will feel.

Thus, the incentives. Current social design doesn't punish for false positives (until they hit really high levels), only false negatives.

What licenses of theirs were terminated? Seems to me that the regulatory oversight is a joke.

Just a vague nonsense about compliance, that magickly aligns with padding their float. In reality they are using compliance and regulatory language as a shield to prop up their numbers. They are using KYC/AML to hold your funds hostage, as it's the most plausible explanation that also allows them to legally seize it under a legal sounding explanation. The fact that they do have to perform KYC/AML and there are penalties for not doing so just happen to make it a valid enough sounding excuse for when it's used overly aggressively because it lines up with other goals.

If they move the hair trigger to freeze funds 2x as often as they need to against the innocent false-positives to pass compliance checks, due to a hair trigger, then it falls under plausible deniability and even better when the regulator comes they can say some insane bullshit about how good their KYC/AML is. If they freeze it less often but instead just steal some for a little while and then return it, then it's more obvious a crime has been committed. It's obvious what they're up to.

Of course the KYC/AML/ regulatory officers are probably just pawns in this. The executives in the crypto and fintech space tell these people they need to set the sensitivity up to the 9s which does increase KYC/AML 'true positives' but the unspoken part is that money is now locked up into the company's accounts which creates a moral hazard in their fiduciary duty. They know damn well what that actually does is inflate their float, at the cost of a bunch of false positives. In theory that's satisfying AML because a function of doing so is you trigger more true positives, but in reality it's merely stealing money to increase floats not actually optimizing to meet the cutoffs to keep your license. But no one is actually going to come out and say this. It will probably take a class action suite, which I have little doubt will eventually happen when someone comes out and admits one day that these regulatory compliance triggers were intentionally set on the sensitive side for non-regulatory reasons.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03823

Just a minute ago 5.5 looked at some human-written code of mine from last year and while it was making the changes I asked for it determined the existing code was too brittle (it was) and rewrote it better. It didn't mention this in its summary at the end, I only know because I often watch the thinking output as it goes past before it hides it all behind a pop-open.

Feels like a problem that will solve itself. There are more cars today than people ever had horses.

There's a difference between your boss not caring about you (does any boss really care?) and your boss actively disliking you enough to call you a loser when they expect to gain nothing from it.

In the former case, disrespect is a side effect of laziness, while in the latter it is the whole point.

If you ask AI to generate hundred different paragraphs and choose the one which best conveys what you actually feel and want to communicate.

Is it is still a perfect nothing?

I noticed it was especially bad for on-call and incident response; these managers get pulled in to all the incidents because of their status and supposed involvement, but are not particularly useful in those rooms, adding even more cooks to the already crowded kitchen.

It can certainly overlap with what makes a great engineer, but not most of the time.

I'll stop you right there. AI is not good at systems programming, it's good at CRUD web development, which is where most people are seeing the gains.

Now there may be an additional corner case or 20 where its still valid but they are not your typical software engineering work.

I also have your experience, even 100x code delivery improvement would barely move the needle of project delivery in our place. Better, more automated integration and end-to-end functional tests which reflect real world usage/data flows would actually make much bigger difference, no reason to think llms couldn't deliver this in near future.

For things like web frontents/backends, though, it works beautifully. I ship things in days that would take me weeks to write by hand, and I'm very fast at writing things by hand. The AI also ships many fewer bugs than our average senior programmer, though maybe not fewer bugs than our staff programmers.

Maybe they're using AI for testing and reviewing more than you are, not just for coding?

Maybe they're using AI for testing and reviewing more than you are?

It's glue, custom business workflows, and basic web CRUD stuff. We build almost everything on Rails unless there's a critical reason not to (e.g., maintaining an existing system versus building from scratch.)

With very few exceptions our team composition is one senior engineer paired to a business. So we get to avoid a large amount of SDLC busywork which is inter-team communication. This leaves more time for client<->engineer communication which has a host of additional benefits. We also build with a "North Star" methodology which keeps everyone, including the client, laser focused on the work at hand.

To answer your final question about how we're benefiting so much from AI, I think it's primarily that we're leaning into it for both implementation, testing, and review. I know it's a sin to let AI review AI, but... it works. I'm actively skeptical of it myself, but our error rate and rework rates don't lie.

And we've got clients in various stages of development and/or long-term support. It's not like we're just hammering a bunch of stuff out and then bouncing. Most of these are multi-year tightly-integrated projects with our clients and we don't see a lack of trust or frustration that you'd expect to see if you were shipping slop. Our Honeybadger errors typically stay at zero, our performance metrics are acceptable across the board, and most importantly our clients love the work we're doing.

I can't think of any other way to measure the quality of what we're doing. And by those metrics, AI has made us better, not worse.

I should write a blog post to outline more of this in detail.

I constantly reiterate to people, whether they're reporting to me or not, that they need to speak up when there's a blocker. I feel its a very telling skill of engineers whether or not they can communicate issues in an effective manner urgently and figure out the best course of action to unblock.

I've heard tales of 300k/yr engineers that just sit there and wait for a manager to ask if they're blocked, or just sit there until they're told what to do.

That's why historically having managers being strong IC contributors remove that need because they already KNOW the progress and issues on the field.

Modern BigTech created that artificial layer of managers that need to know about all the blockers and progress, just to report it to another layer of managers. That layer is so big that they need 8 hours of meetings to sync with each other. This is purely an organizational issue.

I'm saying a lot of the managerial work is busywork that got pushed as a need by BigTech need to empire building.

I agree with keeping sync'd with your devs but these sorts of behaviours should be caught and corrected in code review