chatgpt just refused to tell me the first verse from a poem when I asked it by telling it the second verse and to remind me the first one, it complained about not being able to violate copyright laws! poetry by a dead poet is not something it could narrate, something a quick search on the internet returned immediately. I sound like an old man shouting at I don't even know what but come on!! Things are going bad and there is nobody in the drivers seat, speaking of which Tesla FSD has started driving like an actual drunk, moving the steering wheel right then left, then right then left on perfectly straight roads, making me dizzy as the driver, why? because neural network? what is happening with LLMs and AI feels like a very bad platuae of human existence.
This team does not report to me, I will ensure their demise and make sure their work is never adapted by anyone within my sphere of control. It is easy to justify such behavior behind snazzy terms but I have seen this so many times that it isn't funny. Sometimes leadership may make a decision you may not agree with or even understand but focusing on why it happened, what you can do to align yourself and how you can help product, customer and business succeed are more important than your walled garden of carefully controlled conway conventions. It is right there in your own terminology of tribes, how very tribal.
What exactly should the author have done differently? It's part of the leadership roles to understand the power structures within your organization. Reading between the lines, a new team was thrusted onto an arguably functioning sub-org to address concerns that they had not themselves raised. Then the expectation was for that sub-org to take a hit on their KPIs to onboard to the new teams platform.
It's not "tribal" to refuse to do something that is misaligned with all your explicit incentives. Otherwise we'd have to pay lip service to every internal tooling team just because they exist. It's the leadership team's job to keep pushing if they strongly believe the sub-org leader is acting in bad faith.
The best managers I've seen would turn this situation into a headcount request.
The problem is leadership has priorities 1-5. Your team works on 1-3, but the PM keeps getting hassled about 4 and 5, so they look for levers to get them to happen.
In this situation, the PM scrounged up headcount from elsewhere, but if you present the option of adding headcount to the existing team, then you create a more harmonious option of getting these lower priorities accomplished.
Of course, this guy was taken fully by surprise by the suggestion. It's much harder to present a better option after the fact, and I agree that letting leadership feel the consequences of its decisions is a reasonable thing to do in this case.
> What exactly should the author have done differently?
Work with the other engineering manager.
This person was angry about the team's appearance, but the other engineering manager who assembled the team is barely a side note in the document.
The way you deal with these situations is by working with the other managers involved and propose better solutions.
This is a weird blog post because it's supposedly from someone in a high up engineering manager position, but it's written with a political awareness that I'd expect from someone who had never managed before or who was a first-time manager without good mentorship.
They had better solution and used it. You cant "work with" people who are not working with you in the first place.
This was not a cooperative situation. Trying to cooperate in this situation will make you walked all over and also will make you the one to be blamed when it fails.
What about expecting them to suck up their pride, work with the other lead for a comprehensive plan that includes possible WONTFIX-es?
Strategy and leadership don’t come to exist on their own. It’s middle management that has the best operational and tactical view bear none. Use that to influence decision making instead of complaining. (Yes, this is a theme in my professional life. Our middle managers don’t know their own worth. Pretty please give me Plans about what you Want to Deliver. Those are so much better than general strategies.)
sports and competitive gaming can really highlight team attitude with this sort of thing.
if you are playing as a team, and someone on the team makes a committed decision then it no longer matters if it was the best decision or not given the info at hand - the team is committed. Everyone making an effort to make the best of ANY plan usually has way better results than a confused/sloppy execution of the best plan.
and with longer term plans, once everyone is moving together and following each others lead, you can quickly pivot into the right plan if something is very obviously wrong.
I have wanted to hold back from answering comments that ask for proof of real work/productivity gains because everyone works differently, has different skill levels and frankly not everyone is working on world changing stuff. I really liked a comment someone made a few of these posts ago, these models are amazing! amazing! if you don't actually need them, but if you actually do need them, you are going to find yourself in a world of hurt. I cannot agree more, I (believe) I am a good software engineer, I have developed some interesting pieces of software over the decades and usually when I got passionate about a project, I could do really interesting things within weeks, sometimes months. I will say this, I am working on some really cool stuff, stuff I cannot tell you about, or else. And my velocity is for what used to take months is days and hours for what used to take weeks. I still review everything, I understand all the gotchas of distributed systems, performance, latency/throughput, C, java, SQL, data and infra costs, I get all of it so I am able to catch these mofos when they are about to stab me in the back but man! my productivity is through the roof. And I am loving it. Just so I can avoid saying I cannot tell you I am working on, I will start something that I can share soon (as soon as decades of pent up work is done, its probably less than a few months away!). Take it with a grain of salt, and know this, these things are not your friends, they WILL stab you in the back when you least expect them, cut a corner, take a short cut, so you have to be the PHB (dilbert reference!) with actual experience to catch them slacking. Good luck.
I am good at software. It turns out that isn’t sufficient, or alternatively stated, you have to be good at a number of other things than just churning code, even good code. So to me, the combination of being good at software, understanding complexity and ability articulate it concisely and precisely, when combined with the latest and greatest LLMs, is magic. I know people want to examples of success, I wish I could share what we are working on, but it is unbelievable how much more productive our team is, and I promise, we are solving novel problems, some that have not been tackled yet, at least not in any meaningful way. And I am having time of my life doing what I love, coding. This is not to downplay folks who are having a hard time with LLMs or agents, I think, it’s a skill that you can learn, if you are already good at software and the adjacencies.
> This is not to downplay folks who are having a hard time with LLMs or agents, I think, it’s a skill that you can learn, if you are already good at software and the adjacencies.
Someone on the page already quoted Dijkstra, recommend reading that, he was correct.
Prompt engineering isn't engineering at all, it's throwing words at a wall to see which ones stick then declaring success if the outcome looks at all recognizable. That isn't actually success.
I like it, a test so bad, it just might work! I think the trick is not the equal sign, trick is to keep it so simple and small that most qualified people will not try to short circuit it.
This is not really Veblen situation. A lot of these are primarily money laundering outfits, the artificially high prices, are simply a means of converting cash into bank deposits. Similar schemes exist in art, sculptures, and jewelry. There are some mom and pop type stores that are legit and some of the money goes to actual artists who make these but the ones in Palo Alto (or similarly unattainable rent neighborhood rug shops), are not that.
That’s internet lore. Nobody is buying a $50,000 rug with cash. If any of the people were, the rug guy wouldn’t have a place to bank. Reality is you can move a few rugs a month and make ok money.
There’s a market for these types of businesses. In my area there’s a dude with a company that sells and maintains $50-150k+ Christmas light and decoration displays. He has ~100 customers. The men’s clothing place I go to is a group of guys hanging out having a good time - it doesn’t look busy, but their 4-5 customers a day are dropping $3-10k/visit.
Stores like that are “laundering” money like the rest of the commercial real estate world… by playing games with various (legal) tax schemes. They are no more illegal than a Hampton Inn or AirBnb guy.
Real money laundering places are restaurant/bar, laundromats, arcades, and low income residential.
Tax schemes are there to save taxes using legalism loopholes, these places are happy to pay the taxes on "cash" purchases to bank the proceeds. Nobody is buying 50K rugs is correct, most of the transactions are self reported for the purpose of paying taxes and depositing funds. IRS and fincen are not in it together, in fact IRS encourages people to pay taxes on ill gotten gains.
Wrong question. There is no reason to link the sort of dirty money with the type of laundering business. The process of laundering, and need thereof, are universal to criminal industries.
