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I have so many reasons this shit irritates me: - I work in big tech, and my day is 10 teams meetings separated by runs to get more coffee - I have friends who kick ass and are unemployed, who would kill for this opportunity - It gives an impression that Googlers are lazy, which ain’t true. - It confirms everyone’s biases about gen Z, which are total bullshit. I have interns and new grads hustling, getting patents, and not walking around shooting selfies or posing - it’s gonna lead to more worker surveillance, because this shit makes managers think “damn, are my ppl actually working?” If they’re not the kind of managers already in the details (hint to managers… you should know if anyone is slacking this hard) Please a.) realize this isn’t how ppl actually are in big tech and b.) if you’re thinking of putting something like this on your TikTok or whatever, please exit the industry right effing now /rant

Teams under ZIRP: - One eng manager - One prod manager - One agile coach - One scrum master - One program manager - One product marketer - Two UX people - Three engineers Teams now: - One eng manager - One UX - Six engineers Guess who moves faster.

RTO has 2 primary backers: - CRE who are taking massive losses on office buildings - Execs who are big mad that the midlevel engineer that has better hair whose spouse is a professional decorator has a nicer office and ergo seems more important in zoom meetings What good is a corner office if you can't walk by a bunch of small cubes on the way to it where all your worker bees are busy filing your TPS reports?

I just used Concur to book a trip today. AI can't disrupt that sector soon enough.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people go "bhut the systeeeeem" as a response to problems of behavior, as though individual people are just NPCs. The problem isn't big bad apple not having a port. The problem is people being anti-social assholes.

Software engineering leadership now means you need to know engineering. It means you might be in an executive meeting one moment, and on the phone with a customer the next in the deep weeds on an issue. For awhile, during the last boom, many became engineering leaders without being engineers, and worse, proudly stating "you don't need an engineering background to be an engineering leader". Those days are over. Modern engineering leadership now is about sweating the details, knowing your product inside and out, knowing where it breaks, knowing which customers had a bad experience and why, as well as how you are going to fix it. It requires knowing your team, every member, and orchestrating their work for the good of the product. It means when you listen to standup, you know not just what is on each work item, but why it is there and why it matters. The conversation about "founder mode" versus "manager mode" is really about active versus passive leadership. Nobody wants passive leaders who act as little more than a transformation function between JIRA and the CEO. Nobody wants someone making decisions who doesn't deeply understand the impact of those decisions, and that requires knowing the internal details and the external market. Knowing the details is a signal of commitment. Knowing the details is a proxy for gives a shit. Knowing the details used to be a nice to have. Now it is a core requirement of the job. The good news is nobody hires the middle manager anymore who mostly just summarizes jira and sends status reports. If you are an engineer, more often than not, you will likely report to someone who also understands and has done actual engineering. The other good news is, if you get promoted, you won't get as rusty, because nobody goes into management anymore without having to still know the details about how products are built.

Something I've wanted to share publicly for months I can finally talk about. Our agent model for data center observability, code named Llo11yPop (think Large Language model for Observability aka o11y).

AI will end the careers of stubborn senior engineers who refuse to use it out of pride or hubris well before it affects one iota of the careers of more open minded junior engineers who learn both how to code AND how to use LLMs to generate code.

What happens when something like deep research gets deployed to read, in an agentic manner, the entire footprint of what employees do, and the CEO just asks "corporate deep research" a question like "who really is getting the work done?"

My most effective debugging technique in 30 years of professional software development: Turning off the computer and talking a walk (or to gen Z ppl out there, touching grass)

My first founder I worked with. Phil Katz, the PK in PKZip (invented the ZIP file) - in '96 made us write some code with 4 levels of pointer indirection to "confuse people on purpose" who might disassemble the code (no idea whether his belief was founded in reality, but we did

Test in production they said…

Hustle bro mad because people enjoy life. My recommendation - life is short, take some goddamn vacation. You will probably do better work!

... that runs Mario and Zelda games, so it will sell regardless

Retiring in <3 years, which is really making me think of what clever ways to use my LinkedIn profile for maximum shenanigans

I have so many reasons this shit irritates me: - I work in big tech, and my day is 10 teams meetings separated by runs to get more coffee - I have friends who kick ass and are unemployed, who would kill for this opportunity - It gives an impression that Googlers are lazy, which ain’t true. - It confirms everyone’s biases about gen Z, which are total bullshit. I have interns and new grads hustling, getting patents, and not walking around shooting selfies or posing - it’s gonna lead to more worker surveillance, because this shit makes managers think “damn, are my ppl actually working?” If they’re not the kind of managers already in the details (hint to managers… you should know if anyone is slacking this hard) Please a.) realize this isn’t how ppl actually are in big tech and b.) if you’re thinking of putting something like this on your TikTok or whatever, please exit the industry right effing now /rant

Teams under ZIRP: - One eng manager - One prod manager - One agile coach - One scrum master - One program manager - One product marketer - Two UX people - Three engineers Teams now: - One eng manager - One UX - Six engineers Guess who moves faster.

I just used Concur to book a trip today. AI can't disrupt that sector soon enough.

RTO has 2 primary backers: - CRE who are taking massive losses on office buildings - Execs who are big mad that the midlevel engineer that has better hair whose spouse is a professional decorator has a nicer office and ergo seems more important in zoom meetings What good is a corner office if you can't walk by a bunch of small cubes on the way to it where all your worker bees are busy filing your TPS reports?

Everyone in here saying "but can you build salesforce from prompt, show me" (for the record, I think we're not far...) Why hasn't it been done? Because no specific person needs all that. End users need one specific capability at any given time, not all of them, and if you can build your own ephemeral SaaS for a specific problem today, then throw it away tomorrow, you don't need all the ceremony. I know this because it's been happening for 40 years. Nearly every executive and decision maker I know has a bunch of spreadsheets that run from extracts from a bunch of big SaaS apps. Because for all the ceremony, most big SaaS functionally becomes a big cloud database with an expensive-to-change limited UI. So ppl build spreadsheets as workarounds to solve their specific problem. And sometimes share them around a department. One COO I know put it this way "you will pry away my spreadsheets I run things with from mu cold dead hands". Roll forward to today, and replace spreadsheet with an AI system that can just read your data and answer questions. Or even just generate your spreadsheet with the required VLOOKUP functions from prompt. All of this is pretty trivial to create now. Reliable data and AI is all you need.

Software engineering leadership now means you need to know engineering. It means you might be in an executive meeting one moment, and on the phone with a customer the next in the deep weeds on an issue. For awhile, during the last boom, many became engineering leaders without being engineers, and worse, proudly stating "you don't need an engineering background to be an engineering leader". Those days are over. Modern engineering leadership now is about sweating the details, knowing your product inside and out, knowing where it breaks, knowing which customers had a bad experience and why, as well as how you are going to fix it. It requires knowing your team, every member, and orchestrating their work for the good of the product. It means when you listen to standup, you know not just what is on each work item, but why it is there and why it matters. The conversation about "founder mode" versus "manager mode" is really about active versus passive leadership. Nobody wants passive leaders who act as little more than a transformation function between JIRA and the CEO. Nobody wants someone making decisions who doesn't deeply understand the impact of those decisions, and that requires knowing the internal details and the external market. Knowing the details is a signal of commitment. Knowing the details is a proxy for gives a shit. Knowing the details used to be a nice to have. Now it is a core requirement of the job. The good news is nobody hires the middle manager anymore who mostly just summarizes jira and sends status reports. If you are an engineer, more often than not, you will likely report to someone who also understands and has done actual engineering. The other good news is, if you get promoted, you won't get as rusty, because nobody goes into management anymore without having to still know the details about how products are built.

Test in production they said…

What happens when something like deep research gets deployed to read, in an agentic manner, the entire footprint of what employees do, and the CEO just asks "corporate deep research" a question like "who really is getting the work done?"

Fully autonomous AI written code is going to be written once, used once, and disposed. Once this is achieved, the whole notion of tech debt as we know it utterly goes away.

Wild trying to schedule things with a medical specialist (nothing serious, just normal old man 50+ health screening stuff). An entire industry that still runs on phonecalls and faxes, as though nothing has changed since 1993.

Retiring in <3 years, which is really making me think of what clever ways to use my LinkedIn profile for maximum shenanigans

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people go "bhut the systeeeeem" as a response to problems of behavior, as though individual people are just NPCs. The problem isn't big bad apple not having a port. The problem is people being anti-social assholes.

Something like oai deep research, but for all your corporate data, docs, calendar, and messaging, coupled with operator that just… does stuff you ask.

I was today years old when I realized I might be a "personality hire".

Breaking News: Jony Ive hired as head of UX for Workday.

Devin, but for Devops