Ohhh man wait I have so much to say about the “just say no” engineer.

The "just say no" phenotype of engineers believe these things generally (from my experience)

- thinks cloud is a psyop by the big tech people to fool companies into being locked in

- thinks everything companies do is to fool the stock market and prop up stocks

- thinks tech ecosystem was at its peak during their time and ever since then it has become overly complicated mess

- thinks that AI is hyped and will just becoming a passing thing in a few months

- simultaneously believes both that no new features are required in their product because it complicates things but also thinks layoffs shouldn’t be done (what would employees do?)

- believes in conspiracy theories like “bullshit jobs” but doesn’t realise the irony

- believes in things like “enshittification” and is generally pessimistic about the state of tech

There are lots of good things about these engineers as well to be fair

- generally smarter in a narrow sense and can spot out unneeded complexity

- they are the people to go to for hard technical issues

- they do, to be fair, care about their code base which I see less in others

- though dogmatic at times with dev principles, they bring a father like pseudo wise vibe to the team that makes it feel like a family

Making up a guy to get mad at.

this is a terribly written article that oversimplifies what happened during zirp to the point of absurdity. We have always had just say no engineers-ask anyone with a platform role. They’re still saying no a lot.

This is perhaps a very American-centric article? I realise that ZIRP was near-global, but "When banks hiked interest rates, almost every tech company immediately laid off 5-20% of their engineers." does not track with my or my friends' experiences.

And, fundamentally, in countries with employee rights, as an employee I do not give two shits about interest rates the company I work at borrows on. My philosophy on software design does not change. You can argue that the company might pick and choose who it makes redundant, and they might value people who produce "more product", but companies have always valued that visibility. It's your responsibility, if you care, to sell your actions in a commercial context. I don't think ZIRP changes that, and I have not personally noticed a change there.

The hypothesis that companies today need to really focus so they can make money ignores the fact that, in fact, most or the major AI companies are not making money relative to their costs.

I disagree with the analysis, although I liked the opening paragraph. Why separate the economics of interest rates from the economics of AI productivity?

I feel like the article is pretty contradictory.

Apparently ZIRP was the era of abundance and of codebases growing rapidly and:

> with so many engineers running wild, how would they keep their systems from becoming completely unmanageable? Enter the just-say-no engineer.

So before "AI", the just-say-no engineer was a vital part of the system who was preventing it from getting overrun by (human-generated) slop. Good.

If ZIRP had not ended (but with AI):

> this would be a glorious moment for the just-say-no engineers. LLMs would have thrown fuel on the “engineers running wild” problem that the just-say-no engineers were empowered to solve. Tech companies, unable to publicly or privately cast doubt on AI-assisted coding, would have relied heavily on these engineers to prevent the tsunami of AI code from swamping the entire company.

Again, the just-say-no engineered would have been a vital part of the system shielding it from the influx of slop. And apparently this scenario isn't what's happening, because ZIRP had ended. Okay, what next?

> LLMs are adding insult to injury for the just-say-no engineer. They’re forced to watch while other engineers merge AI-generated PRs that would previously have been blocked, and are told to use the tools themselves

So even though ZIRP had ended and we've avoided the slopocalypse, the teams (now reduced by layoffs but augmented with AI) are still adding slop, even the traditional gatekeepers (just-say-nos) are now being actively forced to add slop and suddenly, none of that is a problem?

I'm simply not following.

The article's logic doesn't hold up. The OP argues that "no-engineers" were valuable during ZIRP because companies were over-hiring and adding too much code but that's exactly the situation we're in now with AI. If anything, the analogy strengthens the case for them.

The OP even acknowledges this:

> Ironically, if ZIRP had not ended, this would be a glorious moment for the just-say-no engineers.

But then never explains what ZIRP actually has to do with it. Why does the end of ZIRP change anything?

I agree with this take for experienced and capable engineering teams. Three times over the last three years, I have told my senior engineers to skip code review, and nothing catastrophic happened, and recovery from bugs was rapid. Three times I have been told by engineering management to reimplement code review. Now that management is either gone or about to be gone.

I low key disagree with the majority of this.

First, i dont think the low interest rates did that much for “tech companies” who were already cash cows which is usually the bench most people speak about. Small companies already operated in a no free money era as they never had the capital access to begin with.

Covid had a big hiring spike in tech and then it sloft off once rates went up. More of an excuse than real market conditions although startup, for sure impacted. Lets not even start with the political “org building” that still drives the “no” mindset today.

Second, ai has now been in the mix for at least a year now where it is objectively useful. I have not seen a single project complete faster than it would have pre ai. Stability is a wash trending to worse than pre AI.

The rigor is what is see draining slowly. You can be fast, say yes, and use ai all while maintaining some kind of quality bar.

> Worse still, the AI tooling mostly works. It’s not (yet) causing any kind of catastrophe. The code isn’t quite as clean, and it’s a bit less well-understood, but it’s good enough

And there it is.

The article vastly underestimates how often no was said before ZIRP. Getting to yes was very, very, very hard. Zirp moved the default to build it snd they will come.

what's this glorious "do whatever you want" era???

2022 coincided with a lot of things, such as the time period where R&D tax credits for US tech salaries were allowed to expire (reinstated in 2025)

it also coincided with rate hikes

it coincided with ChatGPT launch, which was incapable of replacing engineers at the time

it coincided with a tech bear market

it coincided with a crypto implosion and web3 bear market as well, which a variety of engineers were involved with or had asset exposure to

the R&D tax credit lapse I think was the biggest one, while the smallest headline. and therefore I think making a whole blog post about the rate hikes exclusively is grasping at straws

ZIRP was 2008 to 2022? The 2010s were calm and collected, zirp-mania gripped us through the pandemic. You cannot compare 2011 and 2021. Totally different environments.

This is trivially incorrect outside of SV.

There are plenty of slow moving projects that focus on the stability of the codebase if you work for a business that isn't a "tech company" and work on services instead of products.

I stopped saying No. If management wants to push stupid decisions, so be it. They are getting payed for strategic decisions. If their strategy is bullshit, so be it. If they tank the company, so be it. I am not getting payed for that kind of work. And the more bullshit I hear from upper levels, the less I identify with my company.

This is a nice narrative, but without real world test cases, reads like yet another fanfiction on the internet.

Good article.

People don’t realize the breadth of the impact of the low rates and quantitative easing policies.

This stuff clearly helped navigate the 2008 crisis. But the cost is huge: bubbles everywhere, inequalities through the roof, spiralling government debt.

And while the interest rates have gone up, bank reserves are still nowhere near their pre-2008 levels.

Unfortunately, the way the monetary system works is quite difficult to understand, and is unlikely to ever enter the political debate.

Just-say-no is a Quality Control mechanism.

You need someone to say: this shit is not going to prod, unless its value is obvious to everyone

> Tech companies are now more focused than at any time in the past two decades

Citation needed. In fact, I find the utter opposite - the pivots are happening hard and fast, planning is taking a major back seat, and it’s a ship with speed and look good and be visible at all costs mentality.

The truth is the guardrails are being ignored in the frenzy. Style is winning over substance. I think if you revisit this hot take in a year it’ll have aged so poorly it will seem like a parody.

Maybe this article cites a real phenomenon. I don't know. What I find odd though, is that it doesn't even include the question of whether there is merit to the Yes or No of the engineer. Maybe the cynical take is that within many corporations it does in fact not matter, but in the real world if you want to fly to the moon, you will need engineers who say No to ideas that are stupid within the framework of engineering, given the projects budget, time and personal constraints and the goal it tries to reach. You don't need a Yes/No-engineer you need someone who can decide how a reliable well-engineered contraption within those limitations would look like. Sometimes that can be a sophisticated rocket, sometimes it can be a makeshift raft or a band aid slapped on a crumbling structure. A good engineer would be one who understands those constraints, while preventing you from killing people in the process.

Many goals companies want to reach are taking place in the real world. But some are not — and I wonder whether the latter may not sometimes be the actual issue. Money boys playing virtual money games while stopping to care about the real physical world just need someone to go along, so their latest Potemkin village can be painted in the color of the season quickly before Paris fashion week.

> desperately chasing new capabilities and features that can make money

Ah yes. And.. where are those?

I don't agree with this argument.

In the 1990s (and earlier) and 2000s startups were "rebels", almost countercultural (to Corporate America at least). Think about the famous 1984 Macintosh ad that evoked George Orwell. There's a famous story about Steve Jobs remembering a magazine called the Whole Earth Catalog from the 1970s with a picture captioned "Stay hungry, stay foolish". If you listen to Steve Jobs talk about Corporate America, he talks about John Scully or Xerox where conformity ruled. NOthing really challenged the status quo. Nobody really cared about products. Everything was run by accountants, finance people and sales people.

This attitude persisted into the 2010s. Google was quite famous up until that time for shipping when ready, basically. Decisions were engineering-driven rather than being driven by launch dates, product goals, marketing, finance, sales or quarterly earnings. They famously studied what made teams successful with Project Aristotle [1] and concluded that the number one factor was psychological safety.

In the 2020s we have a vastly different picture of neurodivergence than existed in the 2000s and even the 2010s. A lot of the people who found success at Google. Famous examples include the likes of Urs Holzle who famously wrote a user manual [2] for interacting with him. Many of these people did not or would not survive let alone flourish in Corporate America. Why? Because it's a social/political game almost entirely divorced from output. Google's technical infrastructure remains top-notch to this day. They're still coasting on that inertia and what Urs built, both technically and culturally.

But Google slowly dismantled all that. Careers got formalized into job ladders. Getting promoted got harder (eg compare getting promoted to Staff Engineer in 2010 vs 2025). They added stack ranking, which is just a popularity contest and reeks of the Corporate America social/political capital (and I'll die on that hill).

But worst of all (IMHO) was the change in the 2020s that moved from job security (and thus psychological safety) to Corporate America's "up or out" approach. I'm talking of course of about permanent mass layoffs. I cannot begin to describe to you how toxic of an environment that is by comparison. Nitpickers might point out that engineers always had an "up or out" to Senior SWE but it's not the same.

There were other initiatives too like the new CFO Ruth Porat changing the promotion percentages (because nobody had any visibility into that), reducing discretionary equity, etc.

Did Google need to do any of this? At differen ttimes during all this the annual profit per employee was hovering around $1 million. So the answer is "no".

But the fate of any company is that it gets sufficiently large where the only way to keep growing profits is to raise prices or cut costs and for a tech company, labor costs are a major part of the cost structure.

This isn't a Google-specific issue. Google is just a bellwether for the entire industry. The mass layoffs all started about the same time when interest rates were still zero I might add. It's not the first time the industry has engaged in collusion eg [3].

Google to me feels like the new Boeing. Boeing coasted for many years on the 747 and 737 also became a major defense contractor. That inertia took them a long way but there are cracks. The 737MAX was a debacle. The 787 was an outsourcing shitshow.

And hey look where Intel is compared to even 10 years ago. It would be unimaginable given their decades of lithography and engineering dominance. But it's like the move to 10nm just completely broke them and they never recovered.

So I reject that this was a ZIRP issue of being engineering-driven (which is really what we're talking about here). After all, that wasn't a thing before 2008 either.

[1]: https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/

[2]: https://codenote.net/en/posts/6191/

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

No Exit, written in 2014, recounts that infamous time a team (trio?) of founders were funded before they had a business idea.

I think saying no is more important now with AI, as features can be built so quickly now. But there are a lot more costs after the feature has been built. Mostly with AI the code isn’t understood that well, wich incurs a cognitive debt. Then there are extra maintentance and documentation costs. And the costs of carrying around features that add no value.

I can imagine that if you’re a startup and want to try new features quickly, it makes sense to say yes more. But the senior mentioned in the article will also be able to understand that.

It's about denial of labour leading to denial of broader competition, rather than a true intent to build a competing product. If you were actually to follow through with building the product you would need a lot more than just engineers to roll out a successful product, effectively an entire company is needed, which would spread the company focus out and the lead to investor questions about your focus and commitment. Then if it's an unproven idea there's significant risk in going to market etc etc.

Cheaper to just lock up the talent and burn the wages. Bit of a ding to your books, big ding to your competitor's capability.

In saying that, it's a terrible practice. Massive waste of time, opportunity, talent and money.

>And if competitors were in the same boat, why bother hiring these people at all?

Suppose an established org (N) got disrupted by a startup (N+1) because the startup was able to do things faster and cheaper. Once the startup becomes the established org themselves and slows down a bit, they are exposed to the same risk, unless they hire all the smart people (who would otherwise be hired by N+2 startup) and buy out all the N+2 companies who actually managed to do something despite having less money. Eventually it becomes too expensive and there is a good excuse to fire all those people. I don't think it's 100% of what is happening, but it could be.

Code is an asset.

Code that enables a company to generate revenue is an asset.

Code is an asset.

Code that can be sold for more than it cost to generate is an asset.