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ford commented on How good engineers write bad code at big companies   seangoedecke.com/bad-code... · Posted by u/gfysfm
Herring · a month ago
> Big companies know that treating engineers as fungible and moving them around destroys their ability to develop long-term expertise in a single codebase. That’s a deliberate tradeoff. They’re giving up some amount of expertise and software quality in order to gain the ability to rapidly deploy skilled engineers onto whatever the problem-of-the-month is.

And also to "keep the balance of power tilted away from engineers and towards tech company leadership." The author touched on that and forgot about it. You don't want key projects depending on a group of engineers that might get hit by a bus or unionize or demonstrate against Israel or something. Network effects and moats and the occasional lobbying/collusion mean the quality of your product is less important.

ford · a month ago
Has it been many people's experience that big companies intentionally remove experienced engineers from your team to something unrelated, in the name of fungibility? I've surely seen efforts within a team to make sure that there's not a single person who's necessary for the team to reach full productivity, and I think most would agree this model does not make for resilient teams. But many of the best engineers I know have had much more energy invested in getting them to stay than to leave
ford commented on How good engineers write bad code at big companies   seangoedecke.com/bad-code... · Posted by u/gfysfm
ford · a month ago
At the end of the day writing good code is rarely the "end" someone is shooting for. It's more research, more features, more experimentation, etc. Maybe hobby projects and library maintainers are the exceptions.

In my experience, big companies have the biggest incentive to write good code. They have the highest conviction in their bets, and they know with high confidence they will be around in 10 years. One large tech company I worked at had a rule of thumb that all code would need to be maintained for ~7 years - at which point, as the author points out, the entire team may have been replaced. This is precisely when the time it takes to write good code is a worthy investment

ford commented on Effective harnesses for long-running agents   anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/diwank
johndhi · a month ago
Why do we need long running agents? Most of my experienced value with LLMs has been like 1 to 10 turn chats. Should they just ban longer chats to solve these issues?
ford · a month ago
"Why are we trying to make Yahoo Search faster? I already am fine with my 2-3s wait time"
ford commented on Effective harnesses for long-running agents   anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/diwank
ford · a month ago
I think we take git for granted as software engineers Software engineering has decades of experience with proposing changes, merging them, staging them, deploying them, and rolling them back, and collaborating with other code-writers (engineers and agents).

I'm very interested in what this will look like for outputs from other job functions. And if we'll end up with a similar framework that makes non-deterministic, often-wrong LLMs easier to work with.

ford commented on Sanders: Government should break up OpenAI   thehill.com/policy/techno... · Posted by u/CharlesW
ford · 2 months ago
IMO the only concentration OpenAI has is brand. Anthropic & Gemini both have roughly equivalent models. This could change quickly since success compounds, but for now I am actually somewhat surprised at how competitive LLM labs are with each other.
ford commented on Sanders: Government should break up OpenAI   thehill.com/policy/techno... · Posted by u/CharlesW
ford · 2 months ago
The argument sounds like he believes AI (+ robotics) will take jobs, and breaking up OpenAI could slow it down

Historically the most productive countries are the most prosperous - I think there is a big landscape of local maxima/minima in how healthy & happy a country/economy is, but shunning new technology has never been the path to Quality of Life. The only future where the US maintains its relative success involves American leadership in AI and robotics, with humans supporting them

ford commented on The <output> Tag   denodell.com/blog/html-be... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
ford · 2 months ago
Interestingly I've often seen this in Claude outputs, especially on long prompts. I've assumed this is because of Claude's XML-based instruction format, but this does make me wonder how related the two are. And if Claude may have a harder time using <output> given it's related to both accessibility and its instructions
ford commented on 996   lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/9/4... · Posted by u/genericlemon24
ford · 4 months ago
I've never understood the risk trade-off for early stage employees (Employees ~4 through ~10-20).

At this stage equity packages are often <0.5% over 4 years. Founders on the other hand may have more like 30% equity at this stage.

But the odds of success are still quite low - <3% is generous.

In venture funded companies I think it's wrong to say that at <10 employees, founders are 60x more responsible for company outcomes (or taking on 60x more risk), even accounting for what they did to start the company.

That being said - I get working hard if you're appropriately rewarded for it. Just less so if it's primarily on behalf of someone else.

ford commented on AI makes bad managers   staysaasy.com/management/... · Posted by u/zdw
ford · 7 months ago
This sounds like specific instance of what I think most people believe about AI: It's good for tedious or well-scoped tasks, but shouldn't handle things that are core to your job.

I think students see this (use AI as a friend/tutor, but don't use it to do your entire HW), and software engineers see this (use AI to refactor or handle small tasks, but don't use it to design your whole system, or for abstractions that need to be carefully designed)

(Many comments here are about if performance management is core to a manager's job - which for the record I think it is)

u/ford

KarmaCake day349December 20, 2021
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jakew at duck.com

ML + Eng

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