They should just mandate 1 spouse should stay at home (working remotely or not working) or you must hire a full-time nanny. I'm only half joking. If your kid has enough unsupervised time to be watching porn on a regular basis, wtf is going on?
The solution is obviously to force CCTV inside homes, with data analyzed and hosted in a government cloud. If you are against this proposal, you support child abuse.
And no, this money couldn't be used to improve the life of families.
It's very conceivable that we reach a point where software is treated as a black box, i.e. no human ever reads it, only LLMs read and modify it. Isn't this essentially what vibe-coding means?
This is simply a symptom that the company doesn't have good Quality Control processes in place.
AI-produced code is good but it's not so good that it can replace hand-crafted (or heavily supervised) code written by the type of engineer who works at Cloudflare.
What's really happening is that a few employees realized they can game the system by turning on a firehose of AI slop and pushing 10x the LOC than any other engineer (with or without AI), because there's no one to tell them to stop, and in fact with a management that actively encourages this.
> What's really happening is that a few employees realized they can game the system by turning on a firehose of AI slop and pushing 10x the LOC than any other engineer (with or without AI)
Did they figure out how to game the system? Or was the system set up exactly with incitaments to produce exactly this outcome?
They figured out how. Mind you the system was setup with incentives to produce this outcome - but before AI it wasn't really realistic to produce all those lines of code even though you could and so nobody was gaming it so badly it broke. (it was always broke, but the breakage was acceptable before)
The "correct" way to shop at Costco is to wind through every aisle. They want you to discover what they have - what's new, what's gone, what's on sale, try some samples etc. There are some general anchors like the fridge, the alcohol, the produce section but it's otherwise pretty ephemeral.
It's not the kind of place where you go in with a shopping list, make point-to-point pickups and then checkout.
Costco is America's most important "third space". For many people including myself, it's a consistent weekly outing with friends, roommates, girlfriends, wife, the kids. I've even taken tourists there.
Notice how almost no one goes to Costco alone, and contrast it with the supermarket, where most people now go alone.
One of the bitter lessons I learned in my SWE career is that looking the part is almost everything. The meme boomer advice of "dress for the job you want, not the one you have" is remarkably true if you broaden the definition of "dress". Race, gender, lookism, age, everything matters in your career.
Career progression gets easier just by being the right age, or being the right race (whatever that is at your company), or being the right gender (again, depends on your company). Grooming and personal fitness are easy wins. I've never seen an obese or unkempt executive or middle manager.
Even the way you move makes a difference. If you stay past 4:30pm, you're destined to be an IC forever. Leadership-track people leave the office early even if it means taking work home, because it shows that you have your shit together. Leadership-track people eat lunch alone, not at the gossipy "worker's table". And of course, the way you dress matters (men look more leadership-material by dressing simple and consistent, for women it's the opposite). It's all about keeping up appearances.
Interestingly enough, a coworker recently told me that I likely don't have much room for advancement at my employer, given my race. He said look at the race of the people on the ladder above you (it's mostly one race), and then look at yourself.
Also, being tall. Easiest way to identify management is height.
Even more frustrating is that in many ancient empires, racism essentially didn't exist. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was a big driver of it, as a way to "justify" the evil.
> men look more leadership-material by dressing simple and consistent, for women it's the opposite
This made me think back to the people I've seen rise through the ranks: the women started off dressing very conservative and as they got to senior exec positions, started wearing very bright and powerful outfits. The men on the other hand started with bright t-shirts/polos etc, but then ended up in more conservative suits.
I remember learning this lesson. I’d bought some new clothes and worn them to the office. I got more appreciation from my manager than from the entire heroic 6 month death march to ship the last product release.
If you stay late it looks like a) you're struggling, b) you're a try-hard, c) you don't have a life after work.
One of the most actionable low-hanging career advices I could give is be among the first ones to pack up and leave for the day. You can always continue working at home if you're not done.
When I worked for a crypto startup early in my career, we were once chastised because no one was in the office at 6:30pm. Some engineers (including me) did mostly work from home but most people, engineers and non engineers alike, mostly worked from the office.
And a couple years ago I did a short consulting stint for an AI startup (I know how to pick the bubbles huh?) where I shipped something at around 6pm my time, got a call at 9pm their time to talk about it, and then he asked me "what are you working on tonight?" I quit the next day.
Anyway, this advice confuses me because many companies see staying late as a badge of commitment. Maybe it doesn't apply to startups.
Eating canned stuff seems to be going out of fashion as people realize about the Alzheimer's risk. There are basically no "new" canned food brands. People prefer frozen fruit to canned fruit, especially since frozen has gotten a lot of positive PR lately, e.g. "it's fresher than fresh produce at the supermarket!
And yet, by most development and wellbeing metrics, America is doing better than ever before.
My theory is this:
People are just more aware of wealth disparity now. People in the 90s and 00s knew that multi-millionaires and billionaires existed, but they were faraway mystical gargoyles in Connecticut or Monaco.
What's more transparent now is that you might be making $50k and your neighbor might be making $500k. Or the kid you grew up with moved to Dubai after making a small fortune on crypto or drop-shipping, or became a YouTube/TikTok celebrity.
People didn't even know surgeons hit 7 figures, not low 6 figures, until recently. People knew Wall St suits made good money but they assumed it was $200k, not $2m or even $20m.
I remember when levels.fyi first came out and lots of people on social media were like "these numbers are completely made-up". A lot of SWEs themselves didn't even believe FAANG IC SWEs made $200-500k.
Not to mention, social media video lets you experience their lives through their literal point-of-view now.
In a way, the democratization of wealth and fame, and the transparency of information around it, has made people more anxious. We basically live in an era of epidemic FOMO.
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