My sense is that it sounds amazing in theory to executives who have never had to themselves look at internal data. In reality the internal knowledge base is a mix of incomplete, inaccurate, self serving lies, out of date and so on. At worst, the data is explicitly biased to hide reality from executives so the AI will look extra good to executives. Of course, a business that makes all tactical decisions based on lies is not going to do well.
If a startup is laying off engineers then it’s dead in the water. That means it’s not growing and focused on cost cutting at the expense of velocity. Thats what a large company does. The issue isn’t AI but the startup fundamentally being broken and this being a last gasp for air before it dies.
Yeah what a lot of people are missing here is tons of small startups are laying people off, but it's not because they don't need engineers, it's because they are out of runway because their entire vertical (usually some sort of SaaS, often b2b SaaS) is basically now nonexistent. Traditionally businesses favored buying software over building it for cost reasons. Now they can cheaply build exactly what they want instead of paying through the teeth for something that is only slightly like what they want. This doesn't mean the work is gone, but it does largely mean large swathes of the SaaS vertical will be gone. The work itself is shifting to the individual businesses that were once the customers of the SaaS.
SWEs will be fine, all these small VC-funded startups building another CRUD app will not.
I work for a startup that makes a b2b SaaS that is _way_ too complex for anyone to spec out in a markdown file, especially when taking things like ITAR compliance into consideration.
We have seen steady growth and there’s been no signs of slowing down.
Our software facilitates order/quote/factory floor workflow automation with auditable trails in the manufacturing space, with cad file analysis and complex procedural pricing equations for quote generation, alongside a Shopify style storefront and many more goodies. We interface with things like shipping, taxes, erp integrations, and so much more.
I don’t see anyone vibe coding an alternative to our software even if they could. Manufacturers have enough on their plate managing their factory floors.
That said, we facilitate $millions in manufacturing orders per week and our engineering team is 3 people. We couldn’t do what we do without AI, and we would have needed to hire more engineers to handle the scale of our business if it weren’t for the power of Claude Code and Cursor.
A poster-child startup is one that has a long waitlist of willing future customers, and whose engineering team is scaling the tech up, up, up to keep up with the demand.
No, it's "if you already have engineers that know your stack and customers and business then getting rid of them to save a bit of short term cash is stupid unless you're out of runway because of bad business decisions." That is a tangential point to hiring more engineers. You may slow down the rate or hiring however the ROI for getting rid of them in a growing startup is silly imho. A collapsing startup is a different beast.
There's exception and geniuses to every rule. In general however a simple solution will be much more difficult to argue a promotion around even if you make a ton of impact. You may get a top rating and a slightly larger bonus however not a promotion.
Every large company has a ladder for promotions that includes many words that basically come down to "complex." "Drive a year long initiative" or "multiple teams" or "large complex task with multiple components" are all examples I've seen.
Yeah that large company promo thing drives me nuts. Perpetual gaslighting "meh... that was too easy lel". Yeah thanks. Often stuff isn't easy but hard to explain why if the solution turned out to look easy.
What is funny is you can dance through the hoops for 3-5 years for promo. Or grind leet for 100 hrs and get it by jumping.
This lets you not even need Python, r, Julia, etc but directly connect to your backend systems that are presumably in a fast language. If Python is in your call stack then you already don’t care about absolute performance.
Citing Program for International Student Assessment data taken from 15-year-olds across the world and other standardized tests, Horvath noted not only dipping test scores, but also a stark correlation in scores and time spent on computers in school, such that more screen time was related to worse scores.
Let's see what this study actually says, shall we?
> Students who spent up to one hour per day on digital devices for learning activities in school scored 14 points higher in mathematics than students who spent no time, even after accounting for students’ and schools’ socio-economic profile, and this positive relationship is observed in over half (45 countries and economies) of all systems with available data.
> But this is only true if you trust the peer more than the author
Peer review means that EITHER the author or the peer are trustworthy. Not one. Not the other. The failure mode is that BOTH are untrustworthy and not that EITHER is untrustworthy on their own. This is different from no peer review where the author is a single point of failure. There is furthermore the overall system of peer review with some level of checks within it if a peer or author end up being visibly untrustworthy. Not perfect however the same can be said for every single part of human society.
> Every time I see people go "BUT IS IT PEER REVIEWED !??" I can't help but chuckle.
And I sort of chuckle at people like you who don't realize that all of human society if built on the exact same vague fuzzy framework. It's not about absolutes but about levels of trustworthiness and system level checks.
Edit: In this case, for example, the quote is based on a study that the speaker did not publish. The study actually says the exact opposite. So now there's THREE levels of trust that can cross verify. The speaker, the original study authors and the peer reviews. In this case the speaker clearly is not trustworthy as their own source material disagrees with them. Had I simply blindly trusted the speaker this would not have been evident but due to having a study I can verify.
Is A has a p chance of being malicious and B has a q chance of being malicious then the chance of them both being malicious is pq. pq <= p and p*q <= q.
I'm honestly not sure why its so hard for you to understand that TWO people being malicious at the same time is less likely than either being mailicous on their own.
Pick up phone (may be in another room), unlock phone, open app, navigate to information in app (often fairly annoying due to modern low information density app design and multiple apps), return to original location.
I have my phone as well. However the screen is where I'm most likely to need that information anyway. And the screen information density is much better than the phone.
I have the apps on my phone. I use them, and at times they are great - but they are not a perfect solution. (though I agree that $3000 for a system is too much)
- pick up phone (unlock done automatically via face/finger/location)
- swipe finger to the right to show weather OR swipe finger to the left to show callendar
Android widgets show me much more information about weather and calendar view than these monitors (and are free: weawow https://weawow.com/i/app-download + google callendar).
That we think have no cost. The massive failure rate of drug trials and some famous cases of issues discovered only after wide scale deployment indicates we're not that great at knowing ahead of time.
The body is like legacy spaghetti code written by hundreds of teams of outsourced engineers. It mostly works. Just never remove any commented out lines or it may break.
>There may also be consequences to dialling up the immune system beyond its normal state – raising questions of immune disorders.
> Jonathan Ball, professor of molecular virology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, said the work was undeniably "exciting" but cautioned "we have to ensure that keeping the body on 'high alert' doesn't lead to friendly fire, where a hyper-ready immune system accidentally triggers unwelcome side effects".
> The research team in the US does not think the immune system should be permanently dialled up and think such a vaccine should be used to compliment rather than replace current vaccines.
