< I enjoy writing code. Let me get that out of the way first.
< I haven’t written a boilerplate handler by hand in months. I haven’t manually scaffolded a CLI in I don’t know how long. I don’t miss any of it.
Sounds like the author is confused or trying too hard to please the audience. I feel software engineering has higher expectation to move faster now, which makes it more difficult as a discipline.
I personally code data structures and algorithms for 1 - 2 hrs a day, because I enjoy it. I find it also helps keeps me sharp and prevents me from building too much cognitive debt with AI generated code.
I find most AI generated code is over engineered and needs a thorough review before being deployed into production. I feel you still have to do some of it yourself to maintain an edge. Or at least I do at my skill level.
Great article. I def experienced this new form of burnout. I’ve gotten use to working with AI systems to produce code, mainly the velocity of code production. It took me four months to develop an intuition of how to maintain a healthy pace and when to rest. I still feel that the pace is very fast, but my ability to consume code and update my mental model has improved. I try my best not to push past a certain point. I feel once the cognitive load is at capacity, you’re going to reduce quality in your outputs. So I’ve given myself a set threshold that I won’t cross. If things are slower, so be it. It’s not worth the added stress to have completed functioning code, with outsize cognitive debt.
Im fortunate to live in an area dense with traditional taxis and Ubers, no Waymo yet.
I rarely take taxis, the exception is when I have to haul my gear to the studio for a jam session. I always take a taxi, because it’s cheaper and faster than using an app to call an uber.
On 80% of the trips, I end up having a nice chat with the driver and learn something new about humanity or myself.
I really enjoy these interactions, but I feel for the drivers, it’s a very tough job where most taxi drivers have to scramble to find places to urinate or do so in an empty bottle between their legs. There is not much dignity in the job. I feel a negligible segment enjoy it as a reliable career.
I wonder what will happen to the drivers if a large representation of the 1 million+ daily trips are displaced by automation?
I used to feel this way. In the early days of "ride sharing," I preferred Lyft and would sit up front so I could have a conversation with the driver, which they encouraged. It was really fun for a while, and I enjoyed meeting people from different walks of life. Over time, though, transportation became much more functional for me, and now when I take non-autonomous rides, it's more irksome than enjoyable when drivers strike up conversations.
Why the change? I think a big part of your experience is the fact that you "rarely take taxis." Once you're doing it daily or near-daily, the amount of smalltalk becomes more tiresome. Also, with kids and a busy life, I'm usually either looking to get things done or enjoy a rare moment to myself as I'm moving from place-to-place. I agree with OP that Waymo is a huge step up on those dimensions. There's no other human in the same space to feel awkward around.
The fact that they drive more safely and smoothly is a huge improvement, as well. Ironically, I thought this was going to be something I would hate about Waymo. "You mean it drives the speed limit and follows all the traffic laws? It will take forever to get anywhere." It took approximately one ride for my perspective to completely flip. It's so much nicer to not feel the stress of a driver who is driving aggressively or jerking to a stop/start at every intersection. It's not like you can tell them to just ease up a bit, either. When we ride with our kids, we feel massively safer in Waymos.
Yes, it will be disruptive, and I don't particularly love the dominance that big tech has in all of our lives, but I do think Waymo is a marvel, and I hugely appreciate it as an option. As soon as they can take kids alone to all their various activities, it will be yet another massive unlock for parents.
Driving to work is the most common way of commuting everywhere in the US except NYC. So in that sense, no, taking a taxi to work daily is not normal, just as walking, biking, and taking public transit aren’t normal.
When I worked in San Francisco I took Caltrain to the city, but I took Waymo from the train station to the office. San Francisco, like almost all US cities, has poor local transit coverage. In my case there was a bus that took a similar route, but it only ran every 20 minutes even during commute hours and wasn’t coordinated with the train, so if everything was running on time it would have been a 17 minute wait (plus an extra 5 minutes walking). I was busy and well paid enough that spending the extra $10 to save ~20 minutes of travel (and the uncertainty of when the bus would arrive, and how strongly it would smell like piss) was well worth it.
According to [1] the median Bay Area big tech worker earns $272k/year - or $130/hour.
According to [2] Uber drivers make $15 to $25 an hour, before expenses like fuel.
So while it's not normal it's certainly plausible that some people take taxis on a daily basis.
More broadly, as levels of wealth inequality rise in a given society, more people end up working in the personal service sector doing things like cleaning, food delivery, taxi driving etc.
As a former Lyft driver in SF I felt kinda weird when saw the bit about urination. Like, that's just not a problem. As a driver you just plan ahead as in any other job out there where you're not allowed to disengage at a whim. Pilots and surgeons don't pee in bottles, why would drivers? It's kinda funny when people try to empathize but come up with these creative scenarios of what's challenging. The parts that are bad are same as any other thing done for a living: money and dealing with other people. The job was shit when people were shit and/or when the money was shit.
I enjoyed it as a job, not a career. But that was in 2015.
Pilots and surgeons surely have easily accessible bathrooms as a part of their workplace, no? They’re also compensated significantly more and (IMHO) given a lot more dignity
In my city public bathrooms are extremely rare and it’s not trivial to find one. I’m sure taxi drivers are a bit more in tune with where they are out of necessity but even then it’s no guarantee they can find convenient parking/be in the right place/etc.
No. Not for some surgeons at least. Once you start cutting you may have to stay until the job is done so get good at holding it. In the The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe podcast episode Dr. Rahul Seth talks about doing 12 hour surgeries. No breaks, no bathroom, constantly on his feet working.
Commercial pilots flying airliners generally have it a bit easier. As for military pilots flying tactical aircraft, well this song might give you an idea of what they face.
Yep. This is a really weird thread. The no bathroom piss in bottle thing is not a thing I encountered in my IRL XP. Never felt this imaginary problem, never affected my dignity.
Funny enough, I did later work on surgical training tech and went into O.R.'s. And yeah, everyone in the room stays until the work is done, no easy pee pee breaks. Back to back procedures. But then also nobody ever complained about that there either. It's a fun job.
Idk. I'd reiterate a point I was getting at: what makes any job less dignified is dealing with shit people and/or shit pay. Fwiw Bathrooms you can plan for same as you plan for getting hungry by packing a lunch.
> I really enjoy these interactions, but I feel for the drivers, it’s a very tough job where most taxi drivers have to scramble to find places to urinate or do so in an empty bottle between their legs.
Public toilets, their condition and their non-existence are an often-overlooked issue! It's not just highly problematic for taxi drivers, but also for parcel and postal delivery people... and it's not just relevant for workers either, it's also (IMHO) a violation of anti-discrimination laws.
Imagine you're old and don't have much bladder control or volume, or you're a woman who recently has given birth, or you got one of the variety of bowel related diseases, or you've got a child who is still dependent on diapers. Your range of free unimpeded movement is basically limited to where you have easy and fast access to a toilet or at the very least a place to take care of yourself/a child.
>I wonder what will happen to the drivers if a large representation of the 1 million+ daily trips are displaced by automation?
If it happens gradually enough, they will just find other jobs. After the transition, society will be producing more with the same labor force, and thus the aggregate utility will increase.
In the past when automation displaced many jobs, we did things like raise the age kids could stay in school. There used to be huge numbers of e.g. 14 year olds who previously would be expected to go to work that would now have the opportunity to stay in school. Kind of like a mini UBI as in the transition period they would usually get given food, healthcare etc at least minimally. What’s the equivalent now?
try talking to young attractive women on their experiences and you'll maybe appreciate this somewhat forced interaction less. my partner has been literally kidnapped multiple times (refused to take her to her destination and refused to let her out for over an hour), had drivers refuse to unlock doors until she gave them her number at least once every two months, and constantly has drivers take detours and longer routes to force conversation for longer.
the sooner we can stop subjecting people to having to interact with strangers in a semi-private setting just for basic needs like getting around, the better off vulnerable people will be
I think there will still be delivery services where you need someone to go into the restaurant and then up to the customers door. That’s going to stick around unless we get to a point where the restaurant is responsible to load up the Waymo and the customer is responsible for getting it out which probably won’t happen anytime soon. The whole delivery market was also mostly created overnight from something that didn’t exist before.
In Miami, there are several competing companies like Coco Robotics which employ human "pilots" to monitor a small fleet of robot delivery boxes where the restaurant deposits the food in the box and the box unlocks with integration into the app.
Just figured you'd want to know anytime soon was at least a year ago.
I’m aware of those but those only go 2-3 miles so they don’t work for the majority of suburban and rural Americans. Also they don’t have the convenience of delivery to your door unless they can start using elevators.
these things are all over the city i live in, too. absolute menace and an abuse of the commons. i've had them literally run into me more than once and i've started physically moving them out of my way when they stop in the middle of the sidewalk.
That's a pretty dismissive attitude for ~100 million professional drivers worldwide, making a living doing actual useful work on a forum where the vast majority of users do not do any useful work.
There is also a demographic cliff most of the world is currently going off, declining birth rates and labor shortages. Would you rather have a human nurse in your very old age retirement, or a human driver. Because we don’t have enough young people now for both.
So let's poach these people from the third world and...what about the third world? People can't just be made in factories like robots and self driving cars can. It seems inevitable that either we will have really sucky retirements (please die early grandpa, we can't take care of you!) OR (hopefully) automation will come to the rescue despite luddite protests.
Plenty of people from the third world are interested in moving, trying something new. We should all be free to try new things, but of course you he world isn't set up that way. Seems like we could match up dual needs. The western developed world is in the midst of a racist and fascist period, so not the best time to try this. We have competing changes, shortage of workers in many job areas in the West like the trades in the US, also shortage of jobs for young people in the west.
I'm all for immigration, but the world isn't producing enough people to make that a very viable long term solution. Eventually we have to reduce our demand for labor, especially when our civilization is lopsided for awhile with older people and not enough young people (a problem that will fix itself eventually as the old people die off, I guess).
I'm OK with robots driving cars like I'm ok with not needing an elevator operator anymore to use an elevator.
Artificially protecting jobs by holding back technology is terrible form. At best it’s short term before the economics become an order of magnitude cheap and at worst it’s hamstringing your economy so you’re left behind.
Be that as it may, I would argue there's a straight line from "it's okay to destroy this fairly-low-skill-career for the good of the economy" to the overall situation the US finds itself in today
I figure that’s the way of the world. We’ve gone from a majority low skill economy to a much more complex one over the decades. It will probably continue.
Huh? how can one possibly generalize whatever experience they have not only to one country but to “other countries”, i.e. to the world. I’ve taken taxi in many countries, in all continents, and my experience have been that the drivers are generally helpful. There are scams and bad experience, but that’s minority. That applies to any country, the US included
I’m surprised they don’t have opt-in LLM-based “chatty mode” where you can talk to the AI personality of your choice while riding. Obviously shouldn’t be the same AI that’s deciding whether to run over the child or crash into the oncoming train.
why would anyone need this when then can pull out their phone and use their LLM of choice, if they wanted. I expect some large percentage of social users will just facetime chat with their friends during the ride
I really enjoyed reading this story. I personally believe in subscribing to self concordant goals and working altruistically to cultivate the good Society.
I also agree with the statement above. But what the author leaves out is that good work that speaks for itself can also create insecurity for those that are in an intense competition for recognition.
People’s reality is entirely subjective, where even well intentioned people may reject ideas that don’t contribute to their interpretation of reality.
In my personal experience, when I came up with and executed ideas that made substantial impact and outperformed others, I wasn’t given proper recognition, mostly due to others insecurity and politics to support a subjective reality that everyone can agree to. Particularly leadership who were non-technical sycophants that cared more to please their master than to do the right thing for the company or even themselves.
Humans are complicated social creatures where ethics and altruism often lose to filling personal voids.
I do believe in the concept of the wolf, someone who has reached self transcendence that doesn’t need to subscribe to a subjective shared reality and can achieve personal satisfaction through mastery by exercising their will to do something they believe is intrinsically meaningful.
I disagree. Ideas don’t speak, and work doesn’t speak. People do. Being a 10x engineer isn’t just about having great ideas, it’s about having great impact.
Sometimes I hear ICs say with some pride that “I’m not interested in playing office politics”. I promise you they will lose out to the engineers who are able to self advocate, and coalition-build.
You look at gaining recognition for good ideas as a zero sum game that requires self promotion.
If you develop a good original idea that solves a problem and it gets implemented, you have created positive impact without self promotion. If you're not concerned with public perception, then the discussion stops right here.
Someone can take credit for your idea to gain perception that it was their original idea. But in the end, someone who self promotes that can't come up with original ideas will eventually lose their believability factor and will be unable to promote themselves much further.
The crux is in the “and it gets implemented” part. Teams have a limited bandwidth, so what gets implemented absolutely is a zero sum game, that’s why backlog prioritization exists. In order for your idea to get implemented, you have to advocate for it, and convince others to do the same.
Writing great code and delivering useful side-projects can make you a 2-5x engineer. If you want to be a 10x engineer, you have to scale your impact beyond what you can do alone
Edit: maybe your great idea is actually something that you can implement on your own, such as a test suite or a tool. You still need to change other peoples behavior. You need to convince people to try it.
I'm speaking specifically to the example given by the author.
He was approached by an engineer that saw a critical flaw in the software that goes beyond simple "backlog prioritization".
The engineer "quietly" escalated his concerns by showing a thoughtful approach to fixing a global problem that goes beyond his assignment, that if left unsolved can cause problems for everyone.
Given the managers experience, he understood the engineers intrinsic motivation to do good (not biased in self promotion) and believed that the idea would speak for itself and gain the confidence of other engineers, which it did.
This approach is antithetical to what you described. The engineer did not advocate for himself or his idea, he identified a bigger problem that was far more important than his assignment. He brought the idea to leadership out of concern, to deal with conflicting priorities above him. He was not caught up in politics or transactional thinking.
The message the author is trying to convey, people with significant talent that have higher order values, are not concerned with labels such as "wanting to be a 10x engineer". They just focus on what they believe are the most important problems that they can solve that benefits everyone, not just themselves.
These people are truly rare and your argument that playing politics is necessary to promote ideas, proves how rare it is to come across these people.
Engagement is prioritized over quality on most mediums. I find user generated content on social media absolutely abhorrent.
Thank goodness for hacker news. I can read something, share my views and in some cases, my views may be based on some weak intuition and I learn from polite correctness.
I was wondering what preclinical models meant. It would be more accurate to call it animal models. I read roughly 3% - 5% of compounds move from preclinical cancer therapies to fda approval. That’s a tough success rate.
I’ve personally found meditation, exercise and healthy food intake are more effective for self regulation and coping with tough emotions over medication and supplements.
Each human being is unique, as is the recipe for sustained positive metal health.
I think it’s helpful to consider and experiment with different ideas and strategies.
I strongly disagree there is one single solution that can provide significant lift for a large population.
It’s great to be useful as living for your purpose is the best way to achieve life satisfaction. But it’s important to establish boundaries and avoid developing codependency and not to define yourself through the perception of your acts towards others. Having a skill that helps others gives you a sense of mastery. The fact that you have this skill and apply it in good faith should be enough to establish a good sense of self without feedback from others.
I love being an engineer and solving problems that I’m good at, which are problems too complex for most people to approach. But not everyone feels that way, some or most people don’t care or don’t understand the motivation, as they may have different motivations of their own. Learning to accept that and be confident without validation from others is very tough but possible, as you apply yourself consistently with focus and clarity, you gain a stronger sense of purpose. You are never fulfilled, but continue to pursue anyway, that is the trick I learned for myself. The trait is called equanimity and is more of a sustainable attitude vs a feeling, that is transactional. It’s easier as you get older and comes with maturity.
Yes, equanimity is a great quality to possess. It means that you never get too high or too low. When things are really going your way, you know that things can change for the worse. Yet you can be content. When things are not going your way, you know that things can change for the better. And you can be content.
This doesn't mean that you don't try to achieve anything. It means that you can still be content whether you succeed or fail.
No problem! Happy it was helpful. I learned about equanimity last year in a book I read about the science of self actualization, how to reach your unique potential.
I believe the concept of public decency is entirely cultural and has less to do with courage.
Where I live, if someone is being loud in public, you usually keep to yourself. So long as they are not being overtly offensive or profane.
In other countries, like the Netherlands for example, people will have no problem telling you to be quiet or verbalize any violation of cultural norms. I believe it's like that in Germany and Scanda as well, from what I hear.
> But I can honestly say that in the past 25 years I have never, ever seen them saying anything remotely like this to another Swede.
Let me guess, you live in Stockholm? :)
As a Swede, I have definitely seen Swedes (usually older people) telling-off other Swedes and I even do it, recent examples: driving/parking like an asshole, being obnoxious, walking in the bike lane, not looking where they are going. I don't care if they're a Swede or a martian, it makes no difference to me.
< I haven’t written a boilerplate handler by hand in months. I haven’t manually scaffolded a CLI in I don’t know how long. I don’t miss any of it.
Sounds like the author is confused or trying too hard to please the audience. I feel software engineering has higher expectation to move faster now, which makes it more difficult as a discipline.
I personally code data structures and algorithms for 1 - 2 hrs a day, because I enjoy it. I find it also helps keeps me sharp and prevents me from building too much cognitive debt with AI generated code.
I find most AI generated code is over engineered and needs a thorough review before being deployed into production. I feel you still have to do some of it yourself to maintain an edge. Or at least I do at my skill level.
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