Hermitian909 (u/Hermitian909)

Hermitian909 commented on Ask HN: 20% of LinkedIn's recent layoffs were managers · Posted by u/huitzilopochtli

I don't think it's that weird.

In a boom cycle, it's not a great use of resources to try to really tighten up the manger/report ratios because the size of the org because the slack lets you grow faster. The higher the growth, the more managers at a more inefficient manager/report ratio generally.

Certain orgs in LinkedIn were growing really fast. Now they're not and they know the headcount for the next year, time to ratchet down the number of managers to get a more steady, cost-efficient ratio.

Hermitian909 commented on 'Overhyped' generative AI will get a 'cold shower' in 2024, analysts predict cnbc.com/2023/10/10/gener... · Posted by u/kylebenzle

ok_dad · 2 years ago

That’s great! I hope small uses of AI like this work to make us more efficient, but that doesn’t sound exactly like a societal breakthrough, to be able to sell stuff better. I’m looking for AI that can do things other than make capitalism more efficient at parting people from their money.

(Yes, I’m a negative asshole. I should probably be more open minded.)

Hermitian909 · 2 years ago

> I’m looking for AI that can do things other than make capitalism more efficient at parting people from their money.

I think you're really under-estimating the positive, human value that can come out of what I'm describing.

If you leave the world of software companies you'll find that a lot of humanity is wasting huge amounts of time on tasks that could be easily be automated. My most recent experience was the Electronic Vehicle research space - I was able to rather straightforwardly reduce testing cycles for certain key components from 1 year to 1 month through some straightforward software and collaboration with some scientists.

Most of what I accomplished could have been achieved by the scientists if they had used something like Retool[0], but Retool is too sophisticated a tool for them to ramp up on. If AI could make Retool accessible to someone with the technical sophistication of Material Scientist who can write a little Python, it might greatly speed up the rate at which we advance EV technology.

The point I'm making is that making it easier to make products that are accessible means that it's easier to distribute the positive effects of innovation to the rest of society faster. If anything, there's the potential to lower profits long term because today creating a product that is both valuable and accessible is an incredible moat.

[0] https://retool.com/

Hermitian909 commented on 'Overhyped' generative AI will get a 'cold shower' in 2024, analysts predict cnbc.com/2023/10/10/gener... · Posted by u/kylebenzle

ok_dad · 2 years ago

Your last paragraph is the hype.

I haven’t seen any effective uses of the current AI tech that couldn’t have been done for the same cost by humans so far. Images, text, code; I haven’t seen anything but toys built yet. The coding tools might work okay for your average HTTP API, but it’s not going to develop novel algorithms to control building HVAC systems to reduce energy or demand, for example. It’s not going to code much more efficient search algorithms, or faster compression. Maybe someday, but so far everything produced by AI seems to have huge problems, whether it be drawing realistic hands, knowing the factual truth of certain questions, or introducing subtle bugs in complex code.

Hermitian909 · 2 years ago

I'm working on integrating AI into a product right now: IMO you want to look at what's happening now as more a shift in cost to develop and maintain - which itself is going to create qualitative differences.

I can now have 1-2 developers stand up ML backed services at a level of quality that a few years ago would have required an ML + engineering team to build along with an ongoing tuning burden. Now that the AI is "good enough" out of the box time-to-value has dropped, which also allows for more exploration.

One area I'm seeing a lot of traction at my company and amongst other developers: onboarding flows for complex products. LLMs are really great at taking a small amount of input from or about a user, walking down a decision tree, and creating some initial dummy data relevant to them to more quickly demonstrate value. You might not ever know chatGPT is involved but it doing wonders for quite a few companies' conversion rates.

Hermitian909 commented on Advice for Prospective PhD Students gonzales.science/resource... · Posted by u/lairv

ramraj07 · 2 years ago

The question then becomes who do you even trust for advice? I always said never ask a first or second year PhD student lol.

Hermitian909 · 2 years ago

IMO you want to distinguish between advice that is tactical and short term or strategic and long term.

The best tactical advice tends to from people who were recently in a very similar position as you, had had approximately the same goal you have, and either achieved the goal or failed. You want a sample of both successes and failures. The less recent, the less useful the advice.

The best strategic advice tends to be from people who have accomplished things you want to accomplish, regardless of time distance. Their tactical advice is less useful (because it is often dated), but the strategic advice tends to be better. You again need a large sample size to filter out noise.

Hermitian909 commented on Strong static typing, a hill I'm willing to die on svix.com/blog/strong-typi... · Posted by u/tasn

Draiken · 2 years ago

The only thing that really frustrates me in this discussion is that it's all about how people "feel" and without empiric evidence.

The research out there found no meaningful difference between both styles (unless there's newer research I haven't seen?) and people keep taunting around how their preferred side is undoubtedly the right one.

That's just like, your opinion man.

Personally I like typed languages but the type systems in languages like TypeScript are simply insufficient. You still end up with runtime bugs because you can't actually use those types at runtime. You can't encode a lot of the runtime logic into the type system so you're still manually checking impossibilities everywhere. I find myself even having to create local variables just to make typescript detect an obvious condition.

If a type system could basically remove the need for me to think about runtime bugs, then that's an absolute killer feature that I doubt anyone would argue against. But most languages don't provide that, so you're stuck in this halfway point where you have all this overhead, some benefits, but you still can't 100% trust your types.

As for why there are no meaningful differences in bugs, speed, etc my guess is that it all evens out. Without the type system safety net you are much more likely to test your code and as a result less bugs go in. On the other side people rely too much on the type system that's not good enough and then still end up with the same amount of runtime bugs. On one side you write code faster, but you have to test more, so it also evens out with writing more boilerplate, but with less tests.

I really wanted some hard research on this, but I know it's a hard one.

Hermitian909 · 2 years ago

> I really wanted some hard research on this, but I know it's a hard one.

I think we'll have to settle for judgment calls.

I tried going through some of the research we have on developer productivity a few years back and it's almost all garbage or is only truly applicable to juniors (e.g. when you're new you really benefit from quick feedback time on static errors).

The entire space suffers from the fact that good experimental design is impossible to implement with anyone who's not a college student (good luck getting professionals to follow your rules for months) and the curse of dimensionality from the need to disentangle individual variations, type of software development, management style, and a thousand other things to try and draw out a signal.

Sadly, many things and life can't be effectively measured.

Hermitian909 commented on Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It soatok.blog/2023/10/02/re... · Posted by u/Kye

bit_logic · 2 years ago

These are also hard to measure:

* Employee happiness

* Less sick employees since they don't spread their germs in an office

* Much lower attrition and retention of institutional knowledge

* Lower rent costs or possibly zero rent costs for office (actually this one is very easy to measure)

* Able to hire from outside local metro area

None of these was enough to move companies even an inch towards WFH pre-COVID. And yet now vague issues due to lack of water cooler conversations is enough to shift everything back to in-office?

Hermitian909 · 2 years ago

Pre-pandemic, why would you risk testing out an unknown style of work and management that almost no one had experience with?

Now there's a significant portion of the labor market that expects WFH, companies need to produce a policy on WFH/RTO instead of treating it as a non-decision.

Data gives no clear insight into which is better, which makes this a judgment call, and everyone with >5 yoe has enough experience in both modes that they feel qualified to make that judgment. Many think requiring some in-office time is superior. You can try and dismiss those opinions as "vague issues due to lack of water cooler conversations" but that's not going to actually convince anyone with the power to effect these decisions - even if you're right! You need answers to concerns like "virtual communication is too low bandwidth to build alignment on strategic shifts that are necessary for the company to grow to profitability" (quote to me from a director at a company with >1,000 employees).

My argument is basically: if you could have addressed those concerns, it would've happened during the pandemic. Manifestly, those concerns were not addressed in a satisfactory way. Therefore the only real resolution now is to wait 5-10 years to see if RTO/WFH is a meaningful differentiator for companies.

Hermitian909 commented on Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It soatok.blog/2023/10/02/re... · Posted by u/Kye

bit_logic · 2 years ago

Where's the data? Before COVID, there were plenty of anecdotes from remote companies about how it helped their hiring and productivity, but that wasn't enough to convince the vast majority of companies to try WFH. They stubbornly said the status quo of in-office was enough and no further discussion was allowed.

Now where's the data to change the status quo from WFH to the office? Amazon admits they have none. If the other companies forcing in-office had data they would be shouting it as much as they could, but when asked for data, it's just silence. Companies have had record profits and quarters with WFH, so clearly the financial data shows no issues with WFH.

Again where's the data? All we hear are anecdotes, that wasn't good enough to change the status quo before COVID, why should it be enough now to change the status quo away from WFH?

Hermitian909 · 2 years ago

Talking to lots of middle and upper management, the primary complaints I hear are hard to measure - poorer communication, less alignment, less innovation, etc. None of this reduces the number of tasks being done, but reduces the utility of those tasks. Measuring directly is hard, but ultimately you'd expect it result in lower growth - which many companies are seeing (but it's hard to disentangle this from the macro situation).

I think the hard reality is that companies need to make a thesis on the level of flexibility in remote/in-office work and commit, then 5 years from now we'll get an idea of what works well.

Hermitian909 commented on Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free thenation.com/article/soc... · Posted by u/paulpauper

jandrewrogers · 2 years ago

The US spends more on education than the military, it is difficult to defend the idea that spending on education has not been prioritized. Per the OECD, US spending per student is among the highest in the world by a large margin, which raises the question of value for the money already being spent -- any deficiencies compared to other countries aren't for lack of money.

The US also spends a lot of money on the military. Whether prudent or not, at least that spending produces an objectively superior product. We spend even more on education with ambiguous results.

Hermitian909 · 2 years ago

> US spending per student is among the highest in the world by a large margin

It is high, but not exceptionally high[0]. It is then worth remembering that the US overcounts spending on primary and secondary education relative to peer countries because we lack most of the social welfare programs that exist in peer countries and effectively funnel welfare services through the education budget.

As an example, if you have a severely emotionally disturbed child the school district might spend ~$100,000 a year to house the student elsewhere[1]. In Norway, this problem would be budgeted under social services, rather than education.

Numbers are further inflated by increased cost of living relative to most peer countries[2]. This is effectively a dead-weight cost for which we receive no additional benefit. Since Labor is the biggest cost for schools it greatly impacts cost of education.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/238733/expenditure-on-ed...

[1] https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4110#:~:text=Special%....

[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-expe...

Hermitian909 commented on Privacy washing: Google claims to support privacy while lobbying against it proton.me/blog/google-lob... · Posted by u/dotcoma

pierat · 2 years ago

Those whom do not know their history are doomed to repeat it.

I am an anticapitalist, and I am acutely aware of what I am against. Advertisements, and how they solidified in the 1800s to current is one such thing I'm directly against.

I've also seen Rome Collesuem's chiseled graffiti to what amounts to "eat at restaurant". Rudimentary, when compared to hiring psychologists to extract as much wealth by exploiting the human psyche, but they were adverts nonetheless. And even those shat upon infrastructure and the humans who were there.

I do think there's a gradient of unethicalness in advertising. If I'm looking for a thing, and shown lists of things that match what I'm looking for, it's at least consensual behavior.

But these days, advertisements are anything but. They're invasive, insidious, and many a time try to fool the human that they're legitimate (and not paid) content.

But I'm guessing the emotional words you chose to use tells me you're probably in adtech.

Hermitian909 · 2 years ago

> If I'm looking for a thing, and shown lists of things that match what I'm looking for, it's at least consensual behavior.

An argument I find compelling here is as follows: sometimes I will look for something, and the world will tell me what I want does not exist. I will either build it myself or do without. If the state of the world changes, and a solution emerges, I would like that fact pushed to me (concrete example: new, more efficient battery chemistries for hot climates).

Waiting for everyone to pull slows down growth of whoever is innovating this new thing - which in turns hinders their innovation - which in turn slows down innovation in the economy.

There's a tradeoff here with all the bad things you lay out about advertising, but I'm not convinced I should prefer the more rapid rate of innovation.

Hermitian909 commented on Why’s that company so big? I could do that in a weekend (2016) danluu.com/sounds-easy/... · Posted by u/__natty__

rich_sasha · 2 years ago

I often wonder this too, but... I think making "another Google" is not the best example.

I think it's hard to argue (although some people clearly did) that making a search engine is easy. You need to index all of Internet, cache it maybe too, rank stuff, filter out spam, work over different languages, do something about images, parse a lot of (broken) HTML, maybe run some js to figure out what a dynamic page should show, then serve it up super quickly... google is faster than pinging a local (!) NFS server at my work.

But then I remember a comparison on HN about how booking.com is O(50) people and Airbnb is O(2000) total. Or I remember the total headcounts at Twitter, an app that lets you post very short messages.

Or LinkedIn, a vast company with a very subpar UX, basically an inferior clone of a dozen of other social networking sites, only kept afloat by its network/monopoly effect. I mean, searching for people by name barely works! You're better off using Google to look for people on LI that its own search box!

No doubt it's just my cognitive limitation, like I can't visualize the vastness of the Cosmos, but this is a close second.

Hermitian909 · 2 years ago

> then I remember a comparison on HN about how booking.com is O(50) people and Airbnb is O(2000) total

One thing to ask yourself - is the company chasing growth? A company like AirBnB or Twitter could absolutely run on a much smaller team if they agreed to mostly abandon growth. They could focus on reducing tech debt, make architectural decisions that reduced flexibility in the name of reliability and lower maintenance, and then eventually lay off a huge portion of their staff.

Instead they have a growth thesis - that growth requires investment, having to favor velocity over unit economics, etc. The higher the growth target, the more inefficiencies you take on.