There are a bunch of studies out there [0][1] (two I found immediately) showing the risks around problem gambling, but like with most vices people who’ve already picked the pro side tend to react in the same predictable ways (myself included):
1) Dismissal: Feigning or having a profound misunderstanding of how statistics work by poking at the methodology like “N=200? That’s meaningless.”
2) Apathy: “So what if some people get addicted? We can’t babysit everyone.”
3) Rationalization: “Yeah but it helps Native American reservations, so...”
4) Downplaying: "Ok problem gambling is bad, but how prevalent is problem gambling really?"
There's also a version of rationalization where people project arguments from the war on drugs to illegal gambling, as though the enforcement of illegal gambling was somehow had costs greater than just letting anyone bet any amount of money from their phones.
Or things like cigarettes, guns, driver’s licenses, junk food, etc.
Even for those though, opinions are all over the place: Everything from "no rules" to "kids should be allowed to own drink alcohol under the supervision of their parents" to “it’s fine for adults to drink, but not kids” to “alcohol should obviously be banned for everyone."
For most of these we settled into a happy medium that generally everyone feels is acceptable, but we still change our opinions semi-frequently: Cigarettes being a great example in our lifetime.
I get the argument that social media is probably closer to junk food than to firearms, but:
a) Plenty of people argue that junk food should be banned for kids too! Or at least tightly regulated.
b) It’s definitely not consensus opinion that social media is more like junk food than, say, cigarettes. People will vehemently argue either side of that.
That’s exactly what the author did, and it’s why the leveling piece matters so much.
At big tech companies levels very directly control comp, and less directly control the scope of problems you’re trusted with.
You absolutely can tackle large, high-impact problems as a more junior IC, but it usually means pushing a lot harder to hold onto ownership. Otherwise it’s REAL easy for a more senior IC to step in and quietly take it over.
It might be nicer to go work for startups, acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack, then get hired at a high responsibility position.
Though most people into entrepreneurship never go back to big corporations usually.
>acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack
This is not usually how it works. In fact in my experience, the moment a company becomes a scaleup and brings new leadership in to handle growth, those people start getting rid of the hacky jack of all trades profiles.
Larger companies usually value specialized profiles. They don’t benefit from someone half assing 20 roles, they have the budget to get 20 experts to whole ass one role each.
Career paths in large companies usually have some variation of “I’m the go-to expert for a specific area” as a bullet point somewhere.
Smaller companies necessarily have a small team stretched across broad responsibilities, that usually describes startups. If it's scaling up then yeah, that changes. You want to join small teams for broad experience, startup or regular business.
It doesn't even take new leadership. As companies grow, they (have to) put more process in place, people tend to have narrower and more tightly defined responsibilities, and the person at a smaller company--even if not a startup--who was cowboying what they saw as needing doing can become a liability rather than an asset.
There are times where a big company needs to build something new (albeit within a constrained ecosystem and a very narrow swimming lane).
To do so, one good way is to hire the experts of that domain that have built it before. That can mean acquiring a small specialized company, or simply hiring its top talent.
You could also repurpose your existing staff, but a big company is unlikely to have a lot of "builders", as most of its staff is just iterating and maintaining things others have built a decade ago. You probably still want to have some of those people in the team anyway, for integration purposes.
Big tech companies are also notorious for down-leveling if you’re not coming from another big company, so it might not actually be that good of a move.
He was down-leveled to a first level manager at the company you are at? He accepted this? Why? Do you think he / the new company chose wisely? What ended up happening?
I’m not sure why he accepted it, I never pried too much. It was his first big tech job. It’s very possible he still made more money as a first-level manager, so it might’ve still been a net win for him.
He was a great manager, he’s since moved up the ranks but he’s still at the same big tech co. So from both the company’s and his perspective, I suppose everyone’s happy.
Wouldn't be surprised if it was money. My family member runs a software company, salaries came up recently and found out I make as much as their director.
I agree. My point is this is probably unrealistic:
> It might be nicer to go work for startups, acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack, then get hired at a high responsibility position
You mostly don’t get hired into high responsibility positions at big tech from startups, unless you’re acquired by them directly.
There are some notable exceptions obviously, but those generally require you to be some sort of leading domain expert.
It depends on how many people he was in charge of. If he’s CTO of 500 people company where only 40 are engineers, you’re not getting past senior manager at faang.
Most of my titles have been pretty made-up (with acquiescence of manager). Never had the formal levels seen at large tech companies. Last job description was written for me and didn't even make a lot of sense if you squinted to hard. Made a couple of iterations for business cards over time.
Couldn't have told you what the HR titles were in general.
It doesn’t work like that. An “architect” at a small startup will get you maybe to a mid level position at BigTech if you pass the coding interview. The scale is completely different.
And those “entrepreneurs” usually make less than a senior enterprise dev working in a 2nd tier city or a new grad at BigTech.
I thought this article was engaging. I think it taps into something many of us can feel at times, that collective sense that truly breakthrough ideas are significantly more difficult to come by. It piqued that sense of curiosity, even if I have some questions about the methodology.
The comments section here is also quite a study. Many of the responses are so quick to dismiss the article with basically a "Well of course, this is all obvious, it's clearly due to [insert dubious reasons]." Thankfully not all of them: Some of the top comments show some genuine curiosity and deeper reflection, rather than just a pithy shoulder-shrugging dismissal. But it's definitely a pattern.
It's a little funny to read this and then immediately see comments in other posts lamenting how LLMs are always "confidently incorrect." I suppose LLMs really are just mimicking what they've been trained on.
I don't think this is a really convincing argument: There are plenty of leaders who haven't "done the job" in decades, and we don't question that. It's incredibly common in professional sports, for example.
Mike McCarthy hasn't played a down of American football in 40 years, and never played at a very high level. But we don't question his ability to get others to perform complex motions.
This is not really a good analogy. Tech is different.
I am not saying you should sit down and write code. But in IT you know the difference between a tech lead who knows technology, who knows what works, for what reason. And the one that just demands results but knows nothing about the details of the technology. Has never gotten his hands on it.
> This is not really a good analogy. Tech is different.
Why? Seriously: Give me a convincing reason why tech is different from every other field, where this happens regularly.
> I am not saying you should sit down and write code.
But that's the whole premise of this conversation. It's entirely possible to understand something deeply without doing the thing yourself.
It's entirely possible for a CTO to deeply understand technology without writing any code themselves, opening up a terminal, tinkering with anything, or even what individual contributors are doing day-to-day. I would actually say that's the hallmark of a good CTO.
Because one is an intellectual activity, the other is not. You cannot expect the 60+ year old coach to run and train with the team members. But you can as a CTO try out technology, open the terminal, run a docker container to see the technology. Otherwise you are too far away from the things you try to orchestrate. Here the analogy of a master chef comes to mind. She doesn't have to work with her sous-chefs, but it helps to be able to still master the knife, make sushi or make a Crème brûlée, or even an omelette. All while mostly focusing on the big picture.
Most of those engineers, outside of ones who have extremely specialized knowledge or skills, are essentially managing others still just without a direct reporting chain.
The commit log for most of these high-level engineers is extremely sparse. They're spending most of their time writing documents or influencing orgs, not writing code.
Yes. I was responding to the sentence "With no directs, even “principal” would be a stretch in any company of note." which talked about direct reports.
I don't know about that. I was a "CTO" for a small (10-person) and a slightly larger (around 100-person) VC-backed startup. Hiring was always top of mind at both places. Not even "people management", just hiring alone. I'm not saying this universal, but when a company is expected to scale rapidly (as is often the case with venture-backed firms), managing people can easily consume your entire workday even at a relatively small size company.
Of course, I'm not saying that's everyone's experience. There are obviously lots of reasons that dynamic might be different: For example if you're not a VC-backed company, or a CTO who's a world-renowned technical expert in a particular field (nobody's bringing Ilya on board for his ability to hire).
But it's very, very easy for people management to be a day-to-day thing and I don't think it's a waste of time compared to direct contributions.
As a former "CTO" at a small company and an early stage employee at several others, hiring was a ton of work for everyone. It was honestly the hardest thing I had to do. However, it was by no means a constant, day-to-day thing.
More power to you - I easily spent weeks at a times sifting through resumes and interviewing, and even once someone was hired making sure they were onboarding well and feeling well-supported and etc.
By the time everything was humming along we were either raising a new round (and thus hiring more), or someone was leaving and we had to refill that role.
Most of the examples you gave seem focused on life outside of work aside from the last one, so I’m curious which of them you’d say don’t also apply to lower-income jobs. There are lots of ways for middle-class people to “fail” too outside of work.
Personally, I worked in food service for a decade (mostly as a line cook of some sort) and most of these rules still applied, maybe to a slightly lesser degree.
Even with dishwashing, if you have some way of dishwashing that halves utility costs, someone would listen to you.
The answer might also be “who cares, get back to work” but that’s also true of a lot of middle-class employment. Your manager won’t give a shit if you think the expense reporting system sucks. Amazon’s famous for “disagree and commit” which is just a corporate way of saying the same thing.
That's fair, but I don't totally agree that there is a "work sphere" that is different from the "life sphere" in this regard. That distinction between politics and economics is a synthetic big-L Liberal one that only goes back to approximately Napoleon. The fact that some people have worse jobs, worse working conditions, and worse pay is fundamentally related to the fact that they rent, struggle with money, and have a poor education. Our society has bucketed them into this life, which is a package deal, just like the middle class package is.
Anyway, in this context I was mostly addressing the idea that these "lessons" from high school don't hold in the "real world". To me, the "real world" includes your landlord, the cop on your street, etc., just as much as it does your job.
Sure, but these are all true of middle-class employees as well:
1) Many middle-class families rent and their landlords aren’t necessarily any more understanding.
2) Not to be too political, but many middle-class employees don’t enjoy a friendly relationship with police either and similarly can easily “fail”.
If your argument is that being wealthy affords you a lot of leeway to fail in life, I mostly agree (though again, there are plenty of minority groups who would disagree that wealth always affords that privilege), but “middle class” encompasses a very wide swath of people which this doesn’t apply to. Many middle-class employees in the US are a paycheck or two away from being pretty destitute.
Maybe you meant “professional” or “upper class” instead?
We can quibble about where to draw the markers, but my point is that these "lessons" that people in these comments are decrying as mostly not true about the "real world", are in fact true for some people, likely even some of the people that you went to school with. You and I heard our asshole math teacher say "It's not gonna be this easy in the real world, cats and kittens!" and probably now regard that as the opposite of true. Many others wish life was as easy as high school. Thanks for the engagement but I don't see any point in "arguing" this point -- that we appear to both agree on -- any further.
I'm not of the "LLMs will replace all software developers within a year" mindset, but this critique feels a bit overstated.
The challenge of navigating rapidly changing or poorly documented code isn’t new: It’s been a constant at every company I’ve worked with. At larger organizations the sheer volume of code, often written by adjacent teams, will outpace your ability to fully understand it. Smaller companies tend to iterate so quickly (and experience so much turnover) that code written two weeks ago might already be unrecognizable, if the original author is even still around after those two weeks!
The old adage still applies: the ability to read code is more crucial than the ability to write it. LLMs just amplify that dynamic. The only real difference is that you should assume the author is gone the moment the code lands. The author is ephemeral, or they went on PTO/quit immediately afterward: Whatever makes you more comfortable.
1) Dismissal: Feigning or having a profound misunderstanding of how statistics work by poking at the methodology like “N=200? That’s meaningless.”
2) Apathy: “So what if some people get addicted? We can’t babysit everyone.”
3) Rationalization: “Yeah but it helps Native American reservations, so...”
4) Downplaying: "Ok problem gambling is bad, but how prevalent is problem gambling really?"
0: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1989-05439-001
1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32402593/