wanderr (u/wanderr) - Readit News

wanderr commented on Nobody gets promoted for simplicity terriblesoftware.org/2026... · Posted by u/aamederen

wanderr · 11 days ago

This is the norm at large tech companies and, IMO, a huge problem and major detriment to productivity within organizations as the cost of that added complexity is paid by everyone.

BUT, at least very occasionally I have seen people get promoted for simplicity, I've even successfully made the case myself. With a problem that was itself so complex that it was causing fires on a regular basis, and staff & principal engineers didn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole. When a senior eng spent a couple of weeks thinking about the problem and eventually figured out a way to reframe it and simplify the solution, melting away months of work, making the promo case was actually quite easy.

The problem is, the opportunities to burn down complexity like that don't present themselves nearly as often as the opportunities to overcomplicate a thing, which are pretty much unbounded.

wanderr commented on Rivian R2: Electric Mid-Size SUV rivian.com/r2... · Posted by u/socialcommenter

dalyons · a month ago

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...

“ The researchers attributed most of the gap to overestimates of the “utility factor” – the ratio of miles travelled in electric mode to the total miles travelled – finding that 27% of driving was done in electric mode even though official estimates assumed 84%. ”

Perhaps the rav4 prime @ 41ml max ev range is a better system than all the other low range PHEVs like it, and has better real world usage data than them. I doubt it though, but I don’t have the data on just the rav.

wanderr · a month ago

0 mention of rav4 in this article which seems to be about European cars.

wanderr commented on Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down idiallo.com/blog/teaching... · Posted by u/firefoxd

wanderr · a month ago

I had a neighbor who mounted his TV directly on the shared wall to my bedroom in violation of the lease terms. The wall was hollow and seemed to not only conduct the sound into my bedroom but act as a natural amplifier. I offered him a nice speaker system I wasn't using but he said he didn't know how to connect it to the TV. I offered to do it for him but he refused. I offered to pay a professional and he still refused. I was forced to move my bed into the living room so I could sleep through the night as he started his day by watching the news at full blast at 3am.

Naturally, in response I propped those speakers to the same wall and played whale calls at a low volume any time I wasn't home.

wanderr commented on Amazon cuts 16k jobs reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/DGAP

wanderr · a month ago

My hot take is that AI is shaping up to be a tax on big tech.

Yet another round of layoffs being blamed on AI. As with last time, this is not due to productivity gains from AI, rather it's due to wanting to reallocate budget towards investing in AI. (and maybe an excuse for something they already wanted to do)

I think some productivity gains from AI are real, and I've experienced some firsthand, but reductions in force being ENABLED by AI are not, and I don't think we will see much of that for a good while still.

AI is attracting a lot of investment dollars because it's seen as disruptive; the capabilities it potentially unlocks for people are enormous. The problem is that general intelligence is still far away (fundamentally cannot be reached with the current approaches to AI, in my opinion), and the level of investment required is so high that the only way folks are getting that money back is if it does enable a level of layoffs that would be crippling to the economy.

Additionally, there is not a huge difference between the top models, and thanks to the massive investments the models are incrementally improving. It seems obvious from the outside that AI models are going to be a commodity, and good free models put downward pressure on prices, which they are already losing money on. So I think it's going to be a race to the bottom, and is very unlikely to be a winner-takes-all situation.

I think this means that the reward for big tech companies pouring insane amounts of money into AI will be maintaining their current position, or maybe stealing a bit of business from each other. That's why I think AI is more of a tax on big tech than a real investment opportunity.

wanderr commented on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025) · Posted by u/david927

wanderr · 4 months ago

https://www.writenow.care/

Completely bootstrapped online counseling platform focused on affordability ($25/week!), accessibility and doing the right thing by clients and therapists. Currently only available in NY, FL, TX and Singapore with plans to expand as budget allows.

wanderr commented on How Opus and o3 saved me from permanent blindness mmaaz.ca/writings/blindne... · Posted by u/pr337h4m

wanderr · 6 months ago

The UCSF "you need a referral but we can't find it, and we can't be bothered to figure out why" experience matches my own. Infuriating.

wanderr commented on Gemini 2.5 Flash developers.googleblog.com... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

wanderr · a year ago

Gemini has the annoying habit of delegating tasks to me. Most recently I was trying to find out how to do something in FastRawViewer that I couldn't find a straightforward answer on. After hallucinating a bunch of settings and menus that don't exist, it told me to read the manual and check the user forums. So much for saving me time.

wanderr commented on Harvard study finds seed oils healthier than butter producer.com/news/harvard... · Posted by u/bilsbie

wanderr · a year ago

I wish articles like this would engage in a bit of critical analysis of the studies they are reporting on. It's no wonder people are confused as hell about the latest science about what foods are healthy when there are seemingly new contradicting studies coming out all the time and the news about them just parrots the contents of the study with no critical analysis why this new understanding might be better, or worse, than what we had before.

That said, I hope this is right. As someone who is allergic to dairy it would be nice to know that the substitutes I'm consuming aren't significantly worse for me, and it would be great to see more dairy free options for foods although the trend seems to be going in the opposite direction (for example, the amount of "dark" chocolate with milk in it is astounding, and brands that were reliably true dark chocolates have started adding milk too)

wanderr commented on Should managers still code? theengineeringmanager.sub... · Posted by u/blah2244

n_u · a year ago

Strong yes for 3 reasons

1. Reducing dev friction.

When I had managers who coded they were ruthless about removing friction in the dev and deployment pipeline because they had to deal with it too. If build times went up, deployment infrastructure broke or someone’s PR broke dev they would roll it back immediately. If someone consistently blocks PRs the manager noticed the trend and would address it.

2. You get a much better sense of IC’s contributions by writing code.

There are ICs who play politics very well and sell themselves but that set is not the same as the ICs who deliver. If you are writing code you start to notice which ICs have written key features, built critical APIs or worked on hard problems because of comments and Git blame.

3. Understanding your codebase.

I hope most managers have solid CS and engineering fundamentals but that is a necessary but not sufficient condition to grasping the full picture. There’s a reason it takes time to ramp up to full productivity on a new codebase. If you work in the codebase and have had to use that one annoying but critical library or dealt with that tech debt from 2 years ago then you know what is hard and what isn’t. I’ve found when a codebase has a quirk that makes developing certain features hard all of the non-technical people keep forgetting why we can’t do that thing and all the technical people have it burned into their brains.

wanderr · a year ago

I think every team needs a TL. If the EM isn't filling that role, then another team member should be, and most of what you're talking about falls on the TL (with some sanity checking from the EM by talking to other team members about these things as well)

wanderr commented on Should managers still code? theengineeringmanager.sub... · Posted by u/blah2244

wanderr · a year ago

Ex-Dropbox manager here. I also built BetterHelp (sorry) and I was the VP of Engineering Grooveshark.

Dropbox was the first job I've had where managers are not expected to code although they still go through a small ramp up where they can fix a tiny bug or make a hello world commit and deploy it to production to show that they understand how some of the systems work. Due to some crazy circumstances with the team I took over, I never even got to go through the ramp up. I was thrown straight into the deep end leading a team dealing with an urgent crisis that could end the business.

It was scary as hell, going from what in hindsight had been a "TLM with extra responsibilities" in my previous jobs to a full fledged EM role with all of the same accountability for quality and timely production, but none of the direct control. But I quickly realized that I was surrounded by people who were at least as capable as I was and usually more brilliant.

I think my greatest technical strength was always in eliminating technical complexity, making systems more robust and maintainable. It turns out you can still spot the blinking red lights of unnecessary complexity just by talking about the systems from a high level and asking the right questions, and when you help other talented engineers see those problems, they will naturally want to fix them. No need to jump in and do it yourself.

Once I knew I had a team I could trust and understood the strengths of the different players, I had to shift my focus to learning how to be a real manager. Managing people is a wildly different skillset than writing good code or building a good product, and I realized that I had never really been a manager despite leading teams of people. My apologies to everyone who ever worked for me before this point. Without realizing it, I had always treated the human factor as an annoyance and I probably hindered the growth of past teams a lot by stepping in and doing the high stakes, high urgency stuff myself.

When folks grew under me, especially at Grooveshark when I was young and immature, it was a happy accident and not something I was very intentional about. At Dropbox I really learned the importance of investing in people, giving them opportunities to grow and creating space to allow them to make mistakes. I didn't touch a line of Dropbox code or ever commit a thing, but my teams were high impact and many of the engineers who worked with me told me I was the best manager they've had.

Now I'm a co-founder at my own startup and, of course, I'm writing code again. Yeah, I'm a little rusty with some of the language specifics but I've been talking to brilliant engineers about their work for the last 7 years, when it comes to robust system design I'm probably a better engineer than I was the last time I wrote production code that was used by tens of millions of users. I will of course be in the hybrid role of building and managing folks for a while, but I hope I can keep my manager chops honed and support my team properly as I build and grow it and, eventually, stop writing production code again.