Comment by ChrisMarshallNY

As a new grad, I think a lot of the companies that have respectable goals to me only hire at the senior level. So what am I supposed to do, go do something I deeply disagree with for a few years so I can eventually work on something respectable?

> But how do you find a respectable one, in a gold rush?

Look for those who are trying to serve established respectable professions, ideally have already done so for many years or decades. Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism (in the ideal sense).

Then look at their own mission. Then look at their own work. Do they show their work? Are they open? Do they willingly allow their customers to audit their work product? Does how they talk about their work match the work product itself? Does the thing do what it says on the tin? Are they hypocrites with respect to those they serve or those they manage?

These are my strategies and I’ve found they lead to working almost exclusively with people who have high Integrity.

Maybe a respectable company is one where the answer to "what would make this business more profitable but worse for the world?" is not treated as a product roadmap

I'm sure it wasn't common, but even in such a company you could "extract as much money from the clients as possible" by delivering as much value as possible. Doing things carefully, solving problems, going a little above and beyond what was expected to the point that your clients were glad to pay your billings.

Also, it's just two sides of a point of view to see something like "upselling" as pressuring clients into buying things they don't need, or making them aware of things they didn't know you could provide.

Weekly church attendance is at all-time lows. Nobody I know today goes to church. It was common when I was a child. And I'm not talking about going to save your soul from damnation, but for regular reinforcement of the Golden Rule, and other wisdom on how to live, and belonging to a group of people who care enough about those things to show up for it on a regular basis.

Teaching of right and wrong in school has fallen off. Anything touching on traditional morals risks being conflated with religion, which is kryptonite in the public schools. So now it's much more about how you feel, and excusing bad behavior because of hurt feelings, "disrespect," or some culturally or socially disadvantaged group you might claim to belong to. The soft bigotry of low expectations. We've stopped demanding that people follow the rules. If a kid got in trouble in school, he could probably expect to be in trouble at home too. Now, it's more likely that the parents will call the school and complain.

I also think a big part of it is that it’s becoming more and more easy to cheat your way through life in many respects. Many people always chase the thing that makes the most money, and they’ll take every shortcut they can to get it. And the tools for cheating your way through life are evolving. Every aspect of the tool chain.

I’m not sure whether it used to just be that everyone had to pretend to have integrity, whether they did or not, since the appearance of integrity was something we indexed on pretty heavily as a society.

I definitely agree with you though: it seems like the need/desire to pretend isn’t even there now much of the time, and I suspect that overall this means there is less integrity: some people who were pretending in the past may have “faked it til they made it,” and even if not, it at least faking it would have led to fewer obviously integrity-less actions being committed in the public sphere.

From my perspective, they aren’t making it.

It have a sense of relief that I’m content with so much less. Yesterday I made some sourdough bread and it was so gratifying. They cost around 70 cents CAD when you break down the costs for flour, salt, and energy to cook them. When you pull them out of the oven they do this incredible thing where they crackle and pop as they cool, and the rock-hard crust gradually softens. The smell is incredible. The first slices are always this impossible combination of crispy, glass-like crusts with a chewy, pillowy, delicious interior. It’s so good.

I’m in the worst financial condition I’ve been in my life. I earn less than half as much as I used to. Yet I enjoy things like this, I love my job, I can afford to take care of my family, there are countless things I want to do that I can still afford to do. Explore the outdoors, swim, dive, read, fish, spend time with friends.

That stuff is making it. I don’t need to exploit anyone to enjoy those things. In fact, I can make people’s lives better! I can give my neighbours nice bread. I can share fish I catch. I can take someone to an amazing spot I found.

The world doesn’t ask anything of us beyond that. It’s a choice to pursue more, and it’s a choice to pursue more at the expense of others. I really believe that choice comes with a consequence, too. My impression is that people who choose poorly tend to live hollow and discontented lives. I don’t think there are many exceptions, and when there are, these people tend to share a lot of traits with psychopaths. I don’t envy them either.

Let me ramble about this: in your position you have to pay a moral price to make more money. It's just logical. But it creates a systemic incentives problem, especially when the cost of living is going up, making the price you have to pay relatively lower, or in other words making you can't afford to not pay it.

I hate this kind of people. But some of them simply can't afford not acting this way, more than you do. Instead, people of power, who can and do set the agenda, don't care about it, because again, incentives problem - they won't change the system to one in which they make less money.

Part of this in my opinion is the fact that the western world ideology, the trash can we are all eating from, is simply money.

I wonder what Slavoy Zizek would say about this.

> It makes me wish I was one of them.

Imagine feeling starved no matter how much you have, knowing the vast majority hate you and would gang up on you, so you form close alliances with others who (like you) would mercilessly betray you if they felt it would benefit them.

Society doesn’t reward every sociopath or even most of them. It rewards people who are smart, disciplined, charming, and (in other ways) lucky.

But society is not the true reward granter, the self is. The real winners are those content with what they have.

There's a difference between "networking," and "having a relationship."

I worked for a Japanese company, for a long time, and the Japanese were really big on personal relationships.

They weren't necessarily "warm and fuzzy" ones, but they were based on mutual respect and shared interests. I worked with many folks for decades, and we got to know each other well. We didn't always like each other, but we respected and supported each other.

Personal Integrity isn't something that can be faked. If you are in the kind of relationship I just described, fake integrity will be exposed fairly soon.

I do, but I also use LLMs in a manner that seems drastically different, from most folks here.

I use the standard $20/ChatGPT Pro sub, and run Thinking 5.5 as a chat interface.

I use it like a "trusted personal advisor," as opposed to a "black box employee."

I'm intimately involved in almost every step of the development process. Most of what I ask from the LLM, is function-length snippets.

It's made a huge difference in the velocity and scope of my work.

I have learned that I need to be very careful, though. The LLM sometimes really borks things, and I have to rip out the garbage, and rewrite the code, myself. I can't even imagine the quality of "vibe-coded" software.

I like building stuff. I don't care about the code. I convinced myself over 20 years that I liked coding to get myself through the drudgery of corporate work but the reality is the building was the important thing to me. I'm able to build things quickly with AI.

I guess some people only enjoy the destination and don't care how they got there. These people seem to enjoy AI more than the people who want to enjoy the journey along the way.

I'm curious of the places you've found joy while writing software traditionally. For me, it has been in reasoning about the system, debugging issues, and discovering what works. The iterative process of eventually coming to a more complete understanding, as you stand on and build off of your prior understanding.

All of those elements are present for me while using AI to augment my output. I have started using voice to interact with my coding harness though and I think that has maybe influenced my opinion. I also don't let things go fully autonomously and look at the diffs along the way.

LLMs have gotten so good at coding I often find it exhilarating. I'm mostly doing experiments in accelerating machine learning in hardware. I can do way more experiments now. As an example: Just this afternoon working with claude to experiment with using a GA to learn a non-uniform 1D CA rules to calculate the popcount function where the GA is running in an FPGA to speed it up. It's non-uniform in that each cell gets it's own 8-bit rule.

Depends on how you use them. I'm a detail-obsessed perfectionist. I believe these qualities are what have enabled me to produce better software than most people. I use LLMs the way I can without violating these principles.

I asked the LLM to explain, rephrase, or rewrite things until I was happy. Some examples :

I asked for examples of how the algorithm worked. I asked for examples of how to call the code. I asked for a happy-path unit test and a simple error-handling unit test. I asked it to rewrite something as a pure function. I pointed out an obvious race condition and told it to guard against that issue. I asked it to rewrite a function in the style of this other function. I told it to separate one function into two separate functions that handle the first step and the second step separately.

Etc etc.

If you don't understand it, ask for more or better comments, or better variable names, or cut down the scope into a smaller section, or more examples.

Edit: also I almost entirely leave the LLM in read only mode... I tell it to make the smallest change possible, and tell it I will only copy paste it in its proposed change when I understand the change and where it needs to be made. That way it's my hands on the keyboard, interacting with the code by making recommended changes... 80% of the code is touched by me (via copy-paste) most-of-the-way before I will 'git commit'.

Sure, there was one recursive folder descent function that found the most recent file modification time that I didn't fully understand, but it's self-contained in a function, I don't care to learn every corner of file modification times, and it appears to work, so I left it as is for my static site generator.

> Before 2000

The salary expectations exploded when the VC/PE-bobos went into the space and started "build-and-sell-high".

Sure there were Billionairs made before tech & internet, but public was not aware of most such transactions.

Yeah, maybe a test could be: How much do you enjoy the time actually working on something vs the time going home and enjoying the things your wage enables you to have.

Or as the sibling comment said, do you enjoy the vocation or the vacation more?

(Everything in moderation of course: Even the most interesting and meaningful project will turn into drudgery to some degree, simply due to the amounts of time involved. Also we're in the attention economy, so there are lots of things specifically designed to feel more rewarding in the short term than to work on a long-term project. Maybe the difference is how much meaning and reward there still stays besides the day-to-day drudgery)

I assumed that it was a joke. I guess I could be wrong, though.