I am 10+ years into my career. I don’t think mgmt / entrepreneurship feels like the only sustainable path. But I believe I may become a manager of a 5-10 Claudes.
What are your Claudes going to be building and who is going to fund it?
Readit NewsPersonally I think all these posts miss 50% of the issue... I agree it's not AI, but I suspect it's only partially an interest rate story.
Tech changed a lot from 2010 to 2020. Prior to 2010 almost everything built required a huge amount of development effort, and in 2010 there was still a huge amount of useful stuff to be built.
Remember – prior to 2010 a lot of major companies didn't even have basic e-commerce stores because the internet was still a desktop thing, and because of this it really only appealed to a subsection of the population who were computer literate.
Post 2010 and post iPhone the internet broadened massively. Suddenly everyone was online and companies now had to have an e-commerce store just to survive. Only problem was that there wasn't a Shopify or even npm to build from... So these companies had to hire armies of engineers.
Similarly there was no Uber, online banking was barely a thing, there was no real online streaming services, etc, etc, etc...
During this time almost everything had to built by hand, and almost everything being built was a good investment because it was so obviously useful.
Around 2015 I realised that e-commerce was close to being a solved problem. Both in how most major companies had built out fairly good e-commerce stores, and also in how it was becoming relatively easy for someone to create an e-commerce store with almost no tech skills with solutions like Shopify.
I'd argue somewhere between 2010 and 2020 the tech industry fundamentally changed. It become less about building useful stuff like search engines, social media sites, booking systems, e-commerce stores, etc – these were the obvious use cases for tech. Instead the tech industry started to transition to building what can only be described as "hype products" in which CEOs would promise similar profits and societal disruption as the stuff built before, except this time the market demand was much less clear.
Around this time I noticed both I and people I knew in tech stopped building useful stuff and were building increasingly more abstract stuff which was difficult to communicate to non-technical folks. If you asked someone what they did in tech around this time they might tell you that their company are disrupting some industry with the blockchain or that they're using machine learning pick birthday cards using data sourced from Twitter.
I used to bring this up to people in tech but so many people in tech at this time had convinced themselves that the money was rolling in because they were just so intelligent and solving really hard problems.
In reality the money was rolling in because of two back to back revolutions – the internet and the smart phone. These demanded almost all industries made a significant investment in technology, and for a decade or so those investments were extremely profitable. Anyone working in tech profited from those no-brainer technical investments.
Post-2015 the huge amount of capital in tech and the cheap money allowed people to spend recklessly on the "next big thing" for many years. 2015 to 2020 was such an amazing time to be in tech because people were basically throwing money at you to build literally anything.
But time's up now. Companies are realising that a lot of the money they invested in tech in recent years isn't profitable and isn't even that useful. So now they're focusing in on delivering value and building up profit margins.
The tech market isn't broken, it's coming back down to reality. Like railway workers post the boom we must face that most of the core infrastructure has now been built. A few of us will stick around making the odd improvement and maintaining what's already there, but that boom isn't coming back. Many of us will need to seek new professions.
Great comment. I’m thinking along similar lines — what is there in tech to build? And the answer is, not much for the current cohort of services.
Big product companies with big products are solved problems in their respective fields. Building an Amazon or a Facebook is quite a lot of work. Maintaining it is much less work.
For a while the industry has done a thing where you do e.g. infrastructure in five different ways across ten different teams across three departments. It created a lot of “work” but it didn’t create much additional value.
Another instance of this was myriad “internal products” with the idea that some of them will be blockbusters because Paul Buchheit built Gmail as a 20% project in days of yore. That didn’t go so well, either.
You get the feeling that all this merry but ultimately futile kerfuffle was done to fuel the hype of growth but the actual job positions were completely uncoupled from revenue growth. For a time this was hard to see while global expansion was happening. Revenue was growing rapidly and so was headcount. It seemed to check out, arithmetically, but it’s not sensible. It doesn’t take twice as many workers to service twice as many employees in this industry.
When the global expansion didn’t have anywhere else to expand to and revenue stopped growing, the workforce-sustaining illusion fell apart. Now those companies are unloading everyone but the skeleton crew it takes to maintain the products. That’s a lot of people.
Insightful Comment from X - https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198?s=2...
I was an L7, I led global AI enablement. I built systems executives depended on, moved wherever the company needed me and fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them.
And I was still cut.
Here’s the part we’re all supposed to politely ignore: in the U.S. right now, experience isn’t an asset, it’s a liability. And if you’re expensive because you’re good at what you do, the system eventually “optimizes” you out.
We're now in the realm of hold onto your nuts -- sink or swim -- ownership of your own company is the only way out
Written/amended by AI, political talking points, run for Congress included.
Idk how insightful that is. It’s not even entertaining anymore.
micik commented on Professional software developers don't vibe, they control arxiv.org/abs/2512.14012... · Posted by u/dpflan
Easy to use, hard to master. Or: low skill floor, high skill ceiling. My output wouldn't be nearly as good without subagents and skills, and MCPs are somewhat required if you deploy tool using agents at scale.
It's like saying all you need is notepad to develop. It's not wrong, but.. you know.
It’s not hard to master. It’s not a skill to be learned —- it’s a tool that comes with a manual. You read the manual and now you can use the tool. Most people never will read the manual which is what gives the false impression that there’s something “to master” here. It’s like saying vím is harder to use than notepad. Not if you read the entire manual first.
I've moved over mostly to uv too, using `uv pip` when needed but mostly sticking with `uv add`. But as soon as you start using `uv pip` you end up with all the drawbacks of `uv pip`, namely that whatever you pass after can affect earlier dependency resolutions too. Running `uv pip install dep-a` and then `... dep-b` isn't the same as `... dep-b` first and then `... dep-a`, or the same as `uv pip install dep-a dep-b` which coming from an environment that does proper dependency resolution and have workspaces, can be really confusing.
This is more of a pip issue than uv though, and `uv pip` is still preferable in my mind, but seems Python package management will forever be a mess, not even the bandaid uv can fix things like these.
i found uv frustrating. i dont know what problem is it trying to solve. it's not a tool for managing virtualenvs, but it does them as well. i guess it's a tool for dependency management. the "uv tool" stuff. kinda weird. i gave it an honest try but i was working around it with shell functions all the time.
in the end i went back to good old virtualenvwrapper.sh and setting PYTHONPATH. full control over what goes into the venv and how. i guess people like writing new tools. i can understand that.
You don’t have to look very hard to see an enormous number of people expressing discontent at the latter.
To speak to your examples, the right to repair, farmers vs John Deere, the exodus from X to Bluesky, the rise of alternative messaging platforms, the outright murder of CEOs on the street and the beatification of the primary suspect on social media…just to scratch the surface
These are all headlines straight from HN and the fact that you even know about them is the difference.
The fundamental difference is while we both lack any real power to change this, under an actual dictatorship people get jailed or worse for that expression.
Let’s touch base on this again when Dictatorship from big capital means Disney puts me in prison for dissent against the mouse and then offers me clemency if I go to the front lines in their next special military operation.
oh boy. you served GP a portion so generous they'll have plenty left over to take home and chew on for a while.
that last sentence rung like a bell & will reverberate until Larry Ellison's police drones follow you home because you blocked the drive-in of a Larry-owned fastfood franchise by way of a peaceful sit-in, protesting the mistreatment of human workers by robot overseers at Larry's Lasagna, nation-wide.
orwell it not come to that?
The edit history of the announcement is quite a ride:
> [2025-11-27T02:10:07Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [1]
> [2025-11-27T14:04:47Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining rookies eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [2]
> [2025-11-28T09:21:12Z] it’s abundantly clear that the engineering excellence that created GitHub’s success is no longer driving it [3]
---
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20251127021007/https://ziglang.o...
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20251127140447/https://ziglang.o...
3: https://web.archive.org/web/20251128092112/https://ziglang.o...
that's a long time between edits. as a single contributor to my own posts, i usually achieve a like iteration within minutes. did they have to have a board meeting in between the changes? lovely conservative process. "rookies", love it
Deleted Comment
Good question, you may have to be the ultimate power user to need this feature? What are those people doing?
anything. we're doing anything.
In an economy, time is an important asset. When people are scrolling, they are neither creating nor consuming (spending money), which makes them inert from the GDP standpoint. It’s an economic blackhole.
This is why the government needs to care. If it goes unchecked, it will bring the economy to its knees. No country in the world can afford to have a significant portion of its population burn their time and energy like that.