I mean yes, if you waste time on worked that does not bring value, people tend to get cranky. If you then take longer than you said, it's not a mood enhancer.
That's not a people problem though. That's failure to recognize that a company pays its employees money to make more money, not to have a pretty code base.
Yes, that means communicating the value, but that's not a people problem. That's a skills issue.
"anyone above senior engineer level needs to know how to collaborate cross-functionally"
If you can't collaborate xfn and deal with other people in general, you are not a senior engineer, despite the title inflation.
The difference is that PE firms own firms as investment vehicles, while Valve is owned by people who see making games as their calling.
No, I don't think Gabe's averse to the nice checks, but he is in a business he deeply cares about on an emotional level. He doesn't just want to milk it to the last drop, he wants to leave his mark on gaming.
This is the problem of governance by “the good king”, and no, there isn’t a clear succession plan, so things will probably get worse in a post-gaben world
As opposed to reaching, say, somebody in an offshored call center with an utterly undecipherable accent reading a script at you? Without any room for deviation?
Yeah. Well. There are company that require TPS reports, too.
It's mostly a sign leadership has lost reasoning capability if it's mandatory.
But no, reporting isn't necessarily the problem. There are plenty of places that use reporting to drive a conversation on what's broken, and why it's broken for their workflow, and then use that to drive improvement.
It's only a problem if the leadership stance is "Haha! We found underpants gnome step 2! Make underpants number go up, and we are geniuses". Sadly not as rare as one would hope, but still stupid.
There are plenty of good tasks left, but they're often one-off/internal tooling.
Last one at work: "Hey, here are the symptoms for a bug, they appeared in <release XYZ> - go figure out the CL range and which 10 CLs I should inspect first to see if they're the cause"
(Well suited to AI, because worst case I've looked at 10 CLs in vain, and best case it saved me from manually scanning through several 1000 CLs - the EV is net positive)
It works for code generation as well, but not in a "just do my job" way, more in a "find which haystack the needle is in, and what the rough shape of the new needle is". Blind vibecoding is a non-starter. But... it's a non-starter for greenfields too, it's just that the FO of FAFO is a bit more delayed.
My internal mnemonic for targeting AI correctly is 'It's easier to change a problem into something AI is good at, than it is to change AI into something that fits every problem.'
But unfortunately the nuances in the former require understanding strengths and weaknesses of current AI systems, which is a conversation the industry doesn't want to have while it's still riding the froth of a hype cycle.
Aka 'any current weaknesses in AI systems are just temporary growing pains before an AGI future'
I had a VP of a revenue cycle team tell me that his expectation was that they could fling their spreadsheets and Word docs on how to do calculations at an AI powered vendor, and AI would be able to (and I direct quote) "just figure it all out."
That's when I realized how far down the rabbit hole marketing to non-technical folks on this was.
Yes, but it's not in any way relevant to the topic of the article except both mentioning awk.
The author specifically wanted a functional variant of awk, and they wrote the article because it meant updating their priors on LLMs. Both are interesting topics.
This is many useful things, but it's far from a reproducible C++ build. That'd require you ensure bit-for-bit identic builds when you reproduce, and logging the repository state is just a tiny first step to get there.
Just in case people miss the core message: This is something you do if you have a credible risk assessment that you think a big conflict is a possibility within the next decade or so.
And, as much as I'd like to focus on deteriorating Canada/US relations, it's likely a dual purpose. The Ukraine/Russia/NATO situation would be the second factor. OK, a triad, China/US is also on the radar. Whatever the weighting, it's pushed Canada to work on a mobilization framework, because the combined risk is high enough.
Which means "oh shit" feelings are entirely appropriate, panic isn't.
Any rational assessment of Canada's military capabilities, its funding capabilities, and population will lead to a determination that they're not in any sort of position to have any sort of meaningful defense or offense without the US running point.
For that to change would require generational shifts in culture and revenue generation and so on. If the US chooses not to defend them, they're exposing themselves to unacceptable risk. If the US chooses to defend, Canada isn't contributing within the same order of magnitude. If the US chose to attack, then more has gone wrong in the world than you could possibly cope with, having a few thousand more tanks, ships, and helicopters isn't going to save the day. It'd take decades to build up population, R&D infrastructure, resources, and so on, and there'd likely be a lot of pressure to not do those things and use the US military industrial complex instead.
Not saying this is good for Canada, btw, just that the reality is they've kinda coasted on US coattails for decades now, and for better or worse, they're stuck. Which should in turn beg the question - if there's no practical or pragmatic point in spending a bunch of money on military preparedness and expansion, then why's that money being spent, and who's getting paid? Why are bureaucrats being militarized, instead of a discrete, well regulated military being created to meet whatever the need was?
The bureaucrats are being militarized out of desperation.
The political faction all bureaucrats in the nation belong to can't find enough soldiers. This is because they treat those soldiers with contempt- no young man wants to die for Ottawa. Plus, the volunteer soldiers that come back from Ukraine are not going to be on Ottawa's side if domestic instability ramped up, but will be familiar with the tools of modern warfare.
Ottawa is currently (and perhaps rightfully) paranoid of a domestic uprising just as much as it is of the US invading. The US is strategically wrecking the economy of Canadian citizens only a few hours away and if those citizens violently insist on suing for peace Ottawa might lose its power forever.
So, you do the next best thing- you take the faction with the political power in Canada (in this case, Ottawa bureaucrats) and tell them that if they want to keep their privileges, they must join the reserve.
The fact that if any nation decided to actually attack they'd instantly flee (bureaucrats are not known for their courage under fire; that's why they're bureaucrats!) is a problem for future them. What matters is that, to fuel the jingoism fire long enough to keep the bureaucrat faction in power, they need to be seen to be doing something, and this is that something.
So it looks like they think they can keep the peasants in line by going full police state with drones and ultra surveillance? Good lord.
I respect regular Canadians quite a lot, but damn, Canadian government officials seem like a social experiment in how far you can push people before they blow up in your face.
If they arm and empower a significant local population, they do have a credible defense, because the vast majority of leaders in the world knows fighting a decently armed insurgency is extremely costly. They watched the US itself, a military that dwarfs the entire rest of the world's militaries, do it multiple times, along with Russia and a few other countries. The "cheapest" way to win against an insurgency is to literally blow the entire country up until nothing is standing à la North Korea, but that also destroys 95% of the value of taking a country which defeats the entire point of taking it.
Most people haven't noticed until recently but many countries around the world have been dramatically increasing their defense spending for several years now, pre-dating and somewhat independent of the Ukraine situation. Most of it is targeted for operational capability by the end of this decade. Interpret that how you will.
As an eye-popping number that illustrates this, just the backlog of new foreign weapon sales awaiting approvals in the US is almost $1T on its own. Countries are spending tremendous amounts of money on advanced weapons right now.
I think it's just they sense that US is no longer willing to be the world police (with its good and bad), so they better either prepare themselves for defence or prepare themselves for offence to grab some lands they have been drooling over for a while.
That's not a people problem though. That's failure to recognize that a company pays its employees money to make more money, not to have a pretty code base.
Yes, that means communicating the value, but that's not a people problem. That's a skills issue.
"anyone above senior engineer level needs to know how to collaborate cross-functionally"
If you can't collaborate xfn and deal with other people in general, you are not a senior engineer, despite the title inflation.
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