People are arguing about the role of these HFTs being a net good etc. They’re missing the point, these bright kids are trading something more profound- a sense of purpose, a higher calling or passion- to simply run adversarial arbitrage and pump their egos up with puzzles.
I’m in big tech and use AI extensively, namely to do the same amount of output but in 1-2 hours a day. Been spending a ton of time on my side projects though.
The higher velocity ends up bottlenecking on actual product decisions, deployments, testing etc. Before AI was generally blocked on the design approval, PR cycles, flaking tests etc. AI just helps me endure the pain of legacy code easier.
In my own personal projects I’m flying with AI. I know what I’m doing, I know how I would implement the code. Now I can just save the labor of typing the boilerplate.
Seems like a lot of energy dissecting C-suite news clippings. The reality is that no one cares about alignment and it’s only controversial for the naive or the dramatic among us.
Claude is useful for software engineers. It’ll be useful until something is better-enough and then we’ll all move on to that.
Most folks are using both Claude/Codex together anyways, undermining the idea that Anthropics corporate strategy mattered in the market.
This was always my least favorite part about being a software engineer (and the downfall of many): being a software engineer has become an identity crutch for many. I’ve see so many kids whose whole identity is being good at computers; they go through middle/high school, college getting affirmations about their value and intelligence. Then they get out of Stanford, Berkeley and show up to the feature treadmill that must keep moving but is weighed down by the 10000 short cuts made by the people who came before.
They burn out, or worse become toxic, because their shallow identity led them down the path to being a “Real” engineer and at the end of the day we’re not actually participating in any sort of real value creation beyond attention monetization.
The mystique wears off quickly and they don’t have real hobbies or interests, they basically talk about RSU packages at lunch and the latest tweets etc. I used to joke privately because almost every time we had lunch they spent most of the time discussing the optimal path to walk.
It’s unique in some way- you can’t be a good doctor or lawyer in middle school and the value system is geared towards maximizing paychecks and working in big tech. Once the reality sets in that you’re going to be doing sprint planning + standups for the next 20-30 years it can be a weird shock.
My first job was at a FANG and I lasted about 2 years- I remember riding the escalator in and seeing how miserable everyone looked on my first day. As an eager junior I reached out to the principal engineer in my org for mentoring, asking him what I could do to be better, faster. He told me: “go find a wife and don’t worry about work- you’ve got a long time left”.
At one point I looked at the senior guy running sprint planning and realized I didn’t want to be him. I bought a 1 way ticket and put in my 2 weeks. Went on to backpack around for a year then ended up at a startup where I made a bunch of friends working on real problems.
Is the stakes and the ownership. 5 people in a coffee shop working on a 0-1 problem is a lot more stimulating than 90 people on a team shipping incremental updates to a legacy system.
My hot take: reviewing code is boring, harder than writing code, and less fun (no dopamine loop). People don’t want to do it, they want to build whatever they’re tasked with. Making reviewing code easier (human in the loop etc) is probably a big rock for the new developer paradigm.
HSI was primarily the main investigative body responsible for human traffic and crimes against children prior to this administration. The second largest federal investigative agency behind the FBI (6k agents). Now doing immigration enforcement.
It's unfortunate that they are being repurposed to fix a problem entirely generated purposefully for political gain. Those individuals should never have been allowed to flood the system and take effort away from true egregious victims and crime.
