Sometimes, a little nudge is all it takes. I didn’t get diagnosed until somebody close to me asked if I’d ever been evaluated. Highly recommend finding some way to bring it up.
Cambridge. The job market is absolute trash right now and you managed to get your foot in the door at Amazon anyway. If you can do it now, you can certainly do it with your masters later if needed.
If I’m going to be responsible for the code that Claude writes on my behalf, I’m also going to take full responsibility for the moment that it is added to the project history, so I’m going to at least review every line before I allow that to happen.
The automatic coauthor line is also just a pet peeve. It’s a tool, not a person. I don’t say that a commit was coauthored by vim - why should Claude get special treatment?
I want it to commit on my behalf, and I don't pay full attention before commits. But I do review every line at the PR level, just as I would if some other human were to submit a PR, and if I find something off, then I ask it to fix it before I will approve the PR.
re: automatic coauthoring -- you can turn that off, but I prefer to turn that on. Commit ownership is something that I want to make clear was not just a human, but a human + AI. Agentic coding does get special treatment from me, because the volition to make changes doesn't come from me. I want that to be clear in the history. The only time I do my own commits (without the coauthor line) is when I make some change myself, without a coding agent.
> ~50% of Americans voted for the party that is diametrically opposed to them
Less than half of the US population voted in the last election. ~50% of Americans _who voted_ voted for the party that is diametrically opposed to unions, but that group is only ~23% of _Americans_.
More voter turnout wouldn't have changed anything. From
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/26/2024-election-turno... , "The survey suggests that 'if all Americans eligible to vote in 2024 had cast ballots, the overall margin in the popular vote likely would not have been much different'"
This also matches what Democratic-leaning pollsters like David Shor have said in their own analyses.
It's important to understand that what we have, we have because of a comparatively small group of people. That's important and interesting because it means you can influence the outcome of an election in two ways:
1. Get people to change sides. This is difficult: people who already vote in a particular way are unlikely to change because of external pressures (and in fact, are more likely to dig their heels in if challenged on their views); or
2. Get more people to vote. This can be challenging in its own way, but can also just boil down to logistics problems.
Whether or not 100% voter turnout would have the same results is neither here nor there. If you accept that premise + the premise that the vast majority of American voters vote down the party line for one of the major two, then you have potentially 2x the number of voters for your desired outcome. All you have to do is go find them and get them to vote.
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).
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