I have a theory. How close does the following describe you?
* You're an engineer with 3-6 years of experience in a primarily IC role
* Maybe you've done some tech lead stuff, but you've never actively worked in engineering management.
* You feel that management (and HR for some reason?) is constantly in the way of you getting stuff done, and that your life would be easier if you could simply decline every meeting and only communicate through pull requests.
Couple decades in with some leading but still remaining an IC officially.
The right work just doesn't get done without staff engineers and architect types having frequent conversations & meetings as well as constant code reviewing. Or long-term ICs effectively doing this role without the title and expectations/responsibilities (raises hand). You can identify these people because they ask questions relentlessly. Always well-considered ones, but even the ones that might make them look stupid in a meeting.
Coding is a small percentage of the work but also just as important. That's the sweet spot. The "non-stop meetings/socializing" people and the "headphones on & grind PRs" types are both two extremes of behavior that are boat-anchors in any organization and will bring productivity/customer-impact to a screeching halt if it goes unchecked for long enough.
And it's _always_ those stupid-seeming questions that uncover showstopping problems that would have bit you if left ignored.
Edit: Not to greenlight anything Palantir is doing, but in my opinion the FDE/FDSE model is probably everyone's near-future if your company is B2B. You can't be an "ignore meetings" type of person and do that.
Middle-management as we knew it at the turn of the 2010s is probably gone forever. You don't need to coordinate many many teams as you used to. Same as huge frontend team with dedicated support for graphql, etc. AI made most of that redundant.
By extension we're going to need a lot less middle managers as coordination problems decrease.
As for the point I think you're trying to make, the problem with middle management and other chokepoints in general (like PM teams) is that often they become an antipattern. They soak in all the information and then dole it out parsimoniously, so the typical experience as an IC is to be barely able to see the full picture
Management advocates for AI because see ICs as commodities that just need to be coordinated to "do the thing." In this situation, remove the mid-managers, replace the ICs with AI, and use AI to enable them to coordinate the "workers." They forget that organizations exist to organize human output, which requires nuance, empathy, and communication.
ICs advocate for AI because they believe they are "doing the most valuable work." A rational AI would see that and let them do it. In this situation, remove the mid management, replace HR/marketing/sales/etc with AI and use AI to enable them to figure out what to build and they build twice as fast. They forget that the "rational" choice might not be what is best for them, their project, or their career.
Each one rebuts this with the way the system has failed them (managers feel that workers do everything BUT the work that moves the company forward, ICs feel like they can do everything BUT the work that moves the company forward)
I have 35+ years experience as a manager and engineer at large enterprise tech companies (what the kids now call FAANG, though some of the company names were different back then), and was a Founder, CEO and CTO at a $7M VC funded company and several other "differently-funded" startups.
> Whenever you have control over somebody else's organism, suicide isn't something which makes sense definitionally, even if his own body was used to kill him.
> your vendors are likely neurocompromised as well.
Much of the drug trade is ran less than consensually, as is common knowledge.
Often even people envolved aren't even aware these technologies are being utilized, to those who are, their position is often simple: you do what we say or we torture you, even in protective custody, as surgery isn't really practical.
To be clear, your claim is that 'much of the drug trade is r[u]n less than consensually' via some kind of undocumented, unknown-to-most brain implant that can be used to remotely torture people for non-compliance?
That claim falls apart as soon as it touches reality: there are a _lot_ of people who are involved in the drug trade, now and in the past. At some point, one of those people would definitely have had a CT or an MRI on their skull (e.g. my dentist does a whole head CT every 5 years as part of the normal process and insurance pays for it). Surely _one_ of those people would have noticed a brain implant.
>At some point, one of those people would definitely have had a CT or an MRI on their skull
The tech is adversarially designed, you're assuming the medical supply chains are not compromised, and are dramatically underestimating the sophistication involved here generally.
You can't even assume the people interpreting the results are uncompromised, are trained to interpret results in the context of adversarial technology, or are even physiologically able to accurately interpret what they are looking at. This has it's roots in military intelligence, it's not a trivial compromise.
There is a long history of militant and/or criminal (what's the difference) usage of adversarially designed brain-computer interfaces that you will not find documented.
Unless you have proper clearance or are involved with one of the parties propagating them, anyway.
> Being a self-made billionaire means they created a billion dollars of value. They didn't take it from you or anyone else.
Nobody is a “self made” billionaire. That value you’re talking about didn’t just spring into existence. It had to come from somewhere. There is always a source.
Who flew the rocket? Who built the rocket? Who built the parts for the rocket? Who mixed the fuel?
Building big ambitious things is a good thing. But consolidating an amount of money that nobody could ever reasonably spend into the hands of one person (especially when that money is just the excess value produced by the workers) is unethical and unneeded.
> That value you’re talking about didn’t just spring into existence. It had to come from somewhere.
Are you arguing that wealth is not created, but is transferred? Where was SpaceX's value transferred from? Where was the current wealth in the United States 250 years ago?
What you're referring to are called "expenses". The value created is what somebody is willing to pay for a piece of that action (i.e. an ownership share). Expenses reduce the value.
For example, if you bake a cake the value you created is what you can sell the cake for minus the cost of the ingredients and the use of an oven. For SpaceX, the money spent to buy materials and pay employees takes away value.
> that nobody could ever reasonably spend into the hands of one person (especially when that money is just the excess value produced by the workers) is unethical and unneeded.
Musk doesn't spend much of his money. He invests it in creating more businesses.
> is unethical and unneeded.
You're arguing that Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, etc., are unethical and unneeded. None of those companies would exist without Musk investing his fortune into them.
BTW, why don't you and your friends get together and start a rocket company and make yourselves billionaires?
This is usually the part of the conversation where someone mentions slave labour in an emerald mine and immigration fraud and then comes the part where you usually say something along the lines like "hasn't been proven in court!"
If you've grown a ton of tomatoes, you're probably doing it for the express purpose of profiting from it. To dial back the scope to something more comparable, if I have 4-5 tomato plants, I'm going to have all the tomatoes I want and then some. In that case, yes, I'm absolutely going to give away some tomatoes so that other people can enjoy them (as opposed to them ending up in the compost bin).
> I just tap on that to open the relevant app, if I care to see more.
The key difference between what you're doing and what Homebridge enables is to make the relevant app the "Home" app. If all of my IoT devices are controllable (and can be automated to some degree) through a single pane of glass that I can share with my wife, that's a big improvement over "Ok, to get access to our cameras, you need to go install these three apps and log in to all of them and accept my sharing invite, etc, etc".
Yeah, you can talk to Siri to control the devices sometimes, but that is at the very very bottom of my list of benefits. I want the app UI specifically, and Homebridge enables that. (one concrete example: Ring doorbells don't play nicely with Homekit on their own, but you can install a Homebridge extension and then your doorbell camera shows up as a Homekit-compatible camera in the Home app).
Gotcha, sounds like it makes sense for some uses cases, but perhaps not mine at this point. Seems like the killer app is automations, and I just care about notifications. I'm glad it exists, and presumably at some point I'll give it a try (especially if it resuscitates my Wemos, which it sounds like it can).
Peak east coast US! You can travel three states of distance and back in a day or less on the east coast.
Three states over and back would be a day or two minimum, but potentially nearly a week on the west coast. (Depends on start and stop locations obviously, but if you start from eg Portland, three states over could be the Dakotas).
I, too, find myself wondering why this seems to be such an intractable problem. Maybe it's just misaligned incentives? That is, the phone companies really only care as much as they need to in order to prevent you leaving for another phone company.
From a technical perspective, it doesn't seem to be _that_ difficult: it seems like KYC but for anyone who wants automated access to telephone networks. I know there are some existing efforts there that are more technically comprehensive than that (SHAKEN/STIR), but I don't know where they're at in terms of adoption/rollout.
In other ecosystems, I could see how this could be a problem, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem with a Go upgrade.
What’re the actual, practical results of a package pushing you towards a higher go version that you wouldn’t otherwise have adopted right away? Why is this actually important to avoid beyond “don’t tell me what to do”?
* You're an engineer with 3-6 years of experience in a primarily IC role
* Maybe you've done some tech lead stuff, but you've never actively worked in engineering management.
* You feel that management (and HR for some reason?) is constantly in the way of you getting stuff done, and that your life would be easier if you could simply decline every meeting and only communicate through pull requests.
Humor me, please. I'll explain after.
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