> Senior engineer looks under the hood, sees 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess with emoji comments everywhere, runs out the door and never looks back.
Senior engineering _consultant_ looks at those 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess and sees $$$: months or years of contracts and likely very dysfunctional management that is willing to pay multiple times the cost of full time employees to keep the burn on a non-payroll line and/or keep the “AI first” story rolling on.
> Senior engineering _consultant_ looks at those 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess and sees $$$: months or years of contracts and likely very dysfunctional management that is willing to pay multiple times the cost of full time employees to keep the burn on a non-payroll line and/or keep the “AI first” story rolling on.
That's not been my experience. Even pre-AI, when I was asked to find a bug in some hacked-together codebase, sticker shock was often the result.
"What do you mean, billing for a week? The guy who created this is an actual software engineer and you're billing just as much as he did!"
I've got a list of small ex-clients who won't get work from me anymore, unless they are happy with "Here's my weekly rate, 1 week minimum".
Hourly rates don't work on a client who considers $200/m to be overpaying for s/ware development services.
I suspect there’s a middle ground that involves either keeping tests more proprietary or a copyright license that bars using the work for AI reimplementation, or both.
I think it’s entirely reasonable to release a test suite under a license that bars using it for AI reimplementation purposes. If someone wants to reimplement your work with a more permissive license, they can certainly do so, but maybe they should put the legwork in to write their own test suite.
Management often has a perverse short-term incentive to make labor feel insecure. It’s a quick way to make people feel insecure and work harder ... for a while.
Also, “AI makes us more productive so we can cut our labor costs” sounds so much better to investors than some variation of “layoffs because we fucked up / business is down / etc”
I prefer pushing the constraints to motivate a different solution instead of asking them to do an unmotivated exercise.
“Google Sheets is a great solution for two people, but let’s say the department expands and now it’s ten people. How does this change your answer?”
It’s easy to break Google Sheets as a workflow by increasing the number of users, adding complex business logic, etc.
It’s interesting to see what candidates come up with and how they think. Sometimes the solutions are genuinely interesting. Mostly they’re not, which is okay. If you don’t give yourself the opportunity to learn as an interviewer, you’re missing out.
Knowing Google, there’s a good chance it will turn out like AMP [0]: concerning, but only spotty adoption, and ultimately kind of abandoned/irrelevant.
While I'm glad AMP never got truly widespread adoption, it did get adopted in places that mattered -- notably, major news sites.
The amount of times I've had to translate an AMP link that I found online before sending it onwards to friends in the hopes of reducing the tracking impact has been huge over the years. Now there are extensions that'll do it, but that hasn't always been the case, and these aren't foolproof either.
I do hope this MCP push fizzles, but I worry that Google could just double down and just expose users to less of the web (indirectly) by still only showing results from MCP-enabled pages. It'd be like burning the Library of Alexandria, but at this point I wouldn't put the tech giants above that.
AMP lives on, mostly as AMP for Email and used by things like Google Workspace for performing actions within an email body (allow listed javascript basically).
Don't forget the all-important last step: abruptly killing the product - no matter how popular or praiseworthy it is (or heck: even profitable!) if unnamed Leadership figures say so; vide: killedbygoogle.com
> You don't talk about all the assembly high level languages make, or at least it's no longer how people view things.
Speak for yourself. I routinely look at assembly when worrying about performance, and occasionally drop into assembly for certain things. Compilers are a tool, not a magic wand, and tools have limits.
Much like LLMs. My experience with Claude Code is that it gets significantly worse the further you push it from the mean of its training set. Giving it guidance or writing critical “key frame” sections by hand keep it on track.
People who think this is the end of looking at or writing code clearly work on very different problems than I do.
My guess: they keep you around on contract for 1-6 months because laying you off immediately would be very disruptive.
One company I worked for did this. It felt weird to everyone. But they did give a slightly better severance to those that stuck out their contracts so it worked out slightly better for them.
> It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it?
It didn’t and I’m not sure anyone who knew anything about at-scale manufacturing ever saw it that way. Injection molding is far cheaper per unit and more accurate.
But 3D printing has made a major impact on prototyping. Parts that would have taken serious machine shop work or outsourcing can be printed in a few hours. It really changed the game for mechanical engineers.
In terms of vibe coding, time to demo/prototype is greatly reduced. That definitely takes time and cost away from R&D. But I don’t know that it’s had much impact on transfer to manufacturing, which can easily be the hard final 20%.
I don’t think you can take “percentage of GDP” as an indication that the US is doing less. It could be doing the same amount while the GDP grew tremendously in other areas, for example software.
This is roughly 2.9% a year over 20 years, so slightly ahead of inflation over the period.
To me this points to a story where manufacturing grew slightly but the other parts of the economy grew a lot more. Not exactly a bear case on manufacturing, but not a tremendously exciting one either.
When politicians talk about the decline in manufacturing what they mean is jobs. I work in American manufacturing and there are tons of amazing projects happening but the decline in jobs is real. Especially low skilled jobs, This trend will only continue and I doubt any politician, regardless of thier background, can change that. And I’m not sure it’s a bad thing as it means manufacturing productivity is increasing
The main reason it’s so political is the drop in number of jobs has been huge, and too fast for many to adjust. Automation has come fast.
“ Manufacturing employment declined from 17.3 million in January 2000 to a low of 11.5 million in December 2009, a drop of 33% over the decade. Compared to the peak of 19.5 million in 1979, manufacturing employment had declined approximately 41% by 2009.”
There's a long-term economic problem looming around the loss of jobs: which is that most people's ability to command a share of our economic output (i.e. earn money) is tied to their value as a labourer. If that labour is no longer needed by those who control capital and thus allocation of labour resources (which is increasingly the case across many segments of our economy), then we end up with an economy where people increasingly struggle to earn a decent living.
Of course there are areas where that labour would be useful: healthcase, teaching, childcare, elderly care all come to mind (and there are many other examples). But our economy is not set up to enable this. The problem isn't supply side (difficulty retraining people to do the jobs), it's demand side: the people who need these services often don't have the money to pay for them. So the jobs are badly paid.
And it's a downward spiral: as wealth becomes more concentrated, demand for labour drops because those controlling the wealth already have their needs met and often don't care about the needs of others.
If history is anyhing to go by, then this will eventually lead to war and/or revolution.
I've been thinking about this and I definitely agree.
On the last sentence, one significant difference between then and now will be the possibility of automated soldiers, which is terrifying to think about.
Senior engineering _consultant_ looks at those 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess and sees $$$: months or years of contracts and likely very dysfunctional management that is willing to pay multiple times the cost of full time employees to keep the burn on a non-payroll line and/or keep the “AI first” story rolling on.
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