It’s not enough to have unique ideas. You need capital, compute, people, distribution, customers… There’s huge appeal to joining a place that has all those things and lets you pursue your unique ideas without worrying about all that.
Mo money, mo problems. Just let the dude work, he’s not starving and he’s probably enjoying his life not completely wrapped up in the stress that running a company in this market must be.
It seems if you already have negative feelings about AI or the speaker, you’re going to interpret their comments as something that reinforces your negative feelings.
To me, the speech (as a whole) reads like: "don't assume AI is going to be as bad as the last technological revolution; embrace it". Computing is great and I love it; LLMs are great and I love them too. But computing is now used by corporations to harass and abuse us on a scale never seen before and AI is starting to be used for that too. So that is why I don't believe it's our responsibility to prevent the AI revolution from being as bad. All evidence points to it being worse exactly because of corporations like Google. I get that this guy is only the former CEO but the speech seems kinda tone-deaf to the reality here, and I bet that's why he got booed.
Was commenting on the quote in particular. It’s just a version of “the future is in your hands” which you can find in one form or another in many graduation speeches. Just seems odd to me to read a cliche line as something cynical.
Ali G’s version of it in his 2004 Harvard commencement speech:
> “You lot will become powerful people who can change de future — and you need to, coz de world at de moment iz totally f—ed up.”
This is the predominant (public) talking point. And it’s true.
But along with that: when you have effective people becoming even more effective with AI, it becomes glaringly obvious who the INeffective people are. At which point it becomes hard to justify keeping those people around.
(That often includes people who are otherwise effective but aren’t utilizing agents and are therefore losing their edge.)
Before AI, it was impossible to measure productivity. Some tried with misguided metrics like lines of code added but that just incentivized writing obtuse code.
Stuff just gets done, I guess? Projects move faster, people onboard faster with less intervention, etc. The speedup seems noticeable enough that it doesn’t need precise measuring.
If the speed up is noticeable enough then coming up with a metric should be easy?
I haven’t noticed a speed up in my own org though the feeling of engineers rushing to implementation has become more pronounced. Team members no longer understand what others are doing and siloing has become intense even within my team.
Quality matters as well as speed though: reworking comes at a cost, so you really need to be tracking more than one metric. A lot of problems are caused by optimising for one metric above all else.
Impossible to measure in absolute terms but I think it's clear productivity increases relatively when LLMs are used. At least that's my strong experience.
It's important to say a large layoff isn't performance related, because it helps those who got laid off find new work. Even if it was all performance related, you want someone else to hire your former employees.
And, in a large layoff, it's likely to be at least partially true. Large layoffs work better when they're done quickly, when there's signs of layoffs but no information, many people will head for the exits themselves... which helps your headcount numbers, but ideally you want to keep people who are good at figuring stuff out and taking appropriate action and instead they've left. So... lay off people who are 'known performance issues', but also lay off some whole teams that have a mix of performance, and then do some random assignment and catch a mix of performance, because getting direct managers involved to pick who goes means having too many people know about the lay offs.
> This is NOT a cost cutting exercise.
Yeah, this one isn't credible. If it was about something other than costs, like pivoting to a new market, you would offer first choice of jobs for the new market. Even if it's look at our productivity, 20% of our employees have nothing to do, it takes a lot of spin to say not paying them to twiddle their thumbs is something other than cost cutting.
Didn't a few large tech companies fail even that low bar of decency? I seem to recall news of layoffs in the not too distant past where the employer openly let it be known those chosen were chosen for performance reasons, e.g. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/14/meta-targeting-lowest-perfor...
That to me is a pretty clear reason to question the accuracy of those two claims. Insiders are saying that even people who were performing well in very profitable groups are being cut, which is hard to square with the stated motivations.
Training can be socialized by asking people to take govt loans on further education and then letting the people default on them. Why should company spend their profits on it? /s
> On the one hand, I get that it's a Sunday, and the CEO can't just write a mass email without approval from legal or other comms teams
This is not how things work. In a crisis like this there is a war room with all stakeholders present. Doesn’t matter if it’s Sunday or 3am or Christmas.
And for this company specifically, Guillermo is not one to defer to comms or legal.
Shaming like this doesn’t change people’s minds, it just makes them hide their feelings and introduces new or even greater feelings of guilt. The opposite of what you (hopefully) intended.
Ironically, you are telling the above commenter to not comment as they did, so that op can comment as he did. If one person is allowed to share their thoughts then so is the other.
One shared his own experience, the other is a direct attack on his kids and the parent. Quite a big difference. The "I pity your kids" is straight up vile.
How is it vile to pity children whose parents regret that they were born? Children whose father loathes spending time with them. Sorry, but maybe some people should feel shame sometimes
Because it's performative pity. The person doesn't really care about that person's kids. They just wanted to attack the poster, and decided to do that through his kids.
Exactly as happened with computer revolution... Expectations raised in line with productivity. In HN parlance, being a 10x engineer just becomes "being an engineer," and "100x engineer" is the new 10x engineer. And from what I can see in myself and others right now, being a 100x of anything, while exhilarating, is also mentally and physically taxing.
If people are realistically a baseline of 10x more productive where are all the features, games, applications, SAAS’s that are suddenly possible that weren’t before?
They're out there. I've noticed a surge of Show HNs right here. A lot of it is vibe coded.
I would like to see GitHub's project creation and activity charts from today compared to 5 years ago. Similar trends must be happening behind closed doors as well. Techy managers are happy to be building again. Fresh grads are excited about how productive they can be. Scammers are deploying in record time. Business is boomin'.
It's likely that all this code will do more harm than good to the rest of us, but it's definitely out there.
AI might be 100x faster than me at writing code - but writing code is a tiny portion of the work I do. I need to understand the problem before I can write code. I need to understand my whole system. I need to test that my code really works - this is more than 50% of the work I do, and automated tests are not enough - too often the automated test doesn't model the real world in some unexpected way. I review code that others write. I answer technical questions for others. There is a lot of release work, mandatory training, and other overhead as well.
Writing code is what I expect a junior or mid level engineer to spend 20% of their time doing. By the time you reach senior engineer it should be less (though when you write code you are faster and so might write more code despite spending less time on it).
I can tell you, with absolute certainty, that before AI ~0 junior/mid level devs spent just 20% of their time programming. At least not at tech companies
My experience is very different. A junior should be spending >90% of their time coding, a mid level about 75% and a senior about the same. It only really splits after that point. But the senior spending 25% more time on the wrong thing is worse than than them spending 25% less time on the right thing.
It’s only when you get to “lead” (as in people manager) or staff (as in tech unblocked) you should spend the rest of your time improving the productivity of someone who spends more of their time coding than you do.
And that brings us back to square one - if everyone is a 100x engineer, then everyone's again a 1x engineer. Lewis Carroll nailed it with the Red Queen's Race.
This mythical class of developer doesn't exist. Are you trying to tell me that there are a class of developers out there that are doing three months worth of work every single day at the office?
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