> If it's something like "Refactored the apartment list service improving P99 Latency from 2s to 180ms", it definitely boosts the resumé in my mind. A good engineer would be measuring their impact and likely have numbers like that off the top of their head.
> But if it's like "Increased revenue by $18.7M by reducing time-to-first-interaction latency from 2.3s to 117ms, increasing conversion by 47% and LTV by 28%," with the same fidelity on each bullet, I'm very skeptical.
Do you mind explaining why? The former doesn't indicate caring about business impact whatsoever (is this service in the critical path of any online process? Who knows!) while the latter does.
> "Increased revenue by $18.7M by reducing time-to-first-interaction latency from 2.3s to 117ms, increasing conversion by 47% and LTV by 28%,"
The first is that they're playing fast and loose with their numbers. Latency has before/after, conversion and LTV have percentages; revenue is just a single number. Did that double revenue? Or is that half a percent, and is it lost in the statistical noise?
The other is that there's nothing there to convince me that the technical work was was the full cause, instead of, say a new marketing promotion that launched at the same time, or another team redesigning the landing page flow, or another team re-doing all the product photography, or any other concurrent work.
Maybe all those questions have good answers, but I would at least want some nod in there to how they validated it. I find people who focus on "business impact" but don't know how to do the math to have confidence in it dangerous, because it's so easy to cherry-pick numbers that will make execs happy at a glance and prioritize for those things instead of actual long-term system or product or customer-facing improvements.
I'm not binning the resume for it, and maybe it helps get past the people who see it before I do, but I'm gonna dig in on it. And I'm usually disappointed by the answers.
The comments on the article include other people replicating all or parts of the finding. I'm also pretty confident Kelsey Piper wouldn't fail to disable memory while simultaneously talking about how Claude incognito mode is insufficient to prevent the app from handing it your name.
In general these agents support LSPs, which is often as much information as your IDE will give you. They are also not required to output syntactically correct code token by token when running agentically, because the loop is:
1. code
2. syntax check / build / format / lint (details language dependent)
3. test
and they can hop between 1 and 2 however many times they want.
> I don't think it's a psychologically positive self identification to see yourself merely as a gatekeeper and toll extractor rent seeker who only makes a living by withholding agency and skill from others.
That's an incredibly uncharitable reading of the parent comment. At no point in history prior to maybe this year could you argue that working in software was gatekeeping, toll extracting, or rent seeking. Being a highly skilled craftsperson creating software for those who can't or don't want to is a very psychologically positive self identification. Lamenting that the industry is moving away from highly skilled craftspeople is also perfectly valid, even if you believe that it is somehow good for society, which is yet to become clear.
They complained about the skill leveling where now lower skilled people can also do what needed higher skill before. You toiled to learn the craft, now there is a fast track to those results. That's what the rug pull is.
Yes, producing software was value. (It of course still is as of today, we are talking about what may be coming). My plead is to continue searching for ways to contribute value. Don't resign to a feeling that the only way to hold on is if you try to stop others from knowing about or being able to use the skill leveling tech. This makes one bitter and negative. Embrace it, aspire to be happy about it.
Its like getting scooped in science. In research, I always try to reframe it to be happy that science has progressed. Let me try to learn from it and pivot my research to some area where I can contribute something. Sulking about having been scooped does not lead to positive change and devalues ones own self-image.
The problem is that we don't live in a society where the benefits of new technology benefit all.
We're about to pull the rug underneath all knowledge workers. This will disrupt wage earners lives. This will disrupt the economy.
You might feel great about when things become cheaper but remember that when things are cheap it's only because costs are low and when costs are low the revenues are low and when revenues are low salaries are low too. Keep in mind that one party's cost is other party's revenue.
The economy is ultimately one large circle where the money needs to go around. You might think of yourself a winner as long as someone else's salary drops to zero and you still get to keep your income but eventually it will be you whose income will also be disrupted.
Just something to keep in mind.
And also we're going to just not rug pull on the individual knowledge workers but businesses too. Any software company with a software product will quickly find themselves in a situation where their software is worth zero.
Also this comment about gatekeeping is absolutely stupid. It's like saying trained doctors and medical schools are gatekeeping people from doctoring. It would be so much better if anyone could just doctor away, maybe with some tool assistance. So much fantastically better and cheaper? Right! Just lay off those expensive doctors and hire doctor-prompters for a fraction of the price.
> We're about to pull the rug underneath all knowledge workers. This will disrupt wage earners lives. This will disrupt the economy.
to tie back to the actually article, if you believe a rug pull is imminent then you got to get off the rug. Idk, you have to make a decision because we're certainly at a fork in the road. There's no guarantee waiting will result in a better outcome nor one saying it will be a worse outcome. There's going to be winners and losers always and lot of it is really just luck in timing. I guess, in reality, the careers we've built come down to a flip of a coin; stay on the rug, get off the rug.
/i'm thinking of buying a welding truck and getting in to that, then hire a welder and rinse repeat until i have a welding business. There's plenty of pipe fence in my neck of the woods and i see "welder wanted" all over the place so there's opportuntiy too.
Good luck to you and your welding business. Personally I'm getting to a point where I'm just "too old" (and grumpy) to start over, so I guess for me it's going to be a retirement to some LOCO that I can afford.
> We're about to pull the rug underneath all knowledge workers. This will disrupt wage earners lives. This will disrupt the economy.
It will put and end to the middle class entirely, but that’s the intent.
The reality is a lot of people who were formerly middle or upper middle class, and even some lower class populations will face steep, irreversible “status adjustment”.
I’m not talking about “we used to be able to take vacations and now we can’t”. I’m talking about “we used to be highly paid professionals now we’re viciously competing for low paid day labor (gig work) to hopefully be able to afford the cheap cuts this week”.
You can make a living, if: you have a way to modify your behavior in a way such that it compels another human being to reciprocate and modify their behavior in a way that you find beneficial for your life. All of money and economics in the end boils down to this. If you no longer have any kind of behavior that your neighbors and community see as valuable enough to modify their behavior to benefit you and keep you around, then we will be in trouble.
There's no huge reason to bring them to the US. Plenty of US corporations have maintain overseas offices. Even if its impolitic to employ them directly in China, you can employ them in other offices (for example, Amazon has been known to do this with their Singapore offices)
This thread is largely pointless political back-and-forth were predictably the comments with a more positive opinion on current US immigration enforcement will be flagged.
To get back to the original point, personally I doubt sentiment on US immigration enforcement would be so significant a deterrent for Chinese talent, who may not share the political views of the American left for whom this is a big concern.
This is also partially why I do not log in to work accounts on personal devices or personal accounts on work devices.
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