Comment by nomel

Maybe I'm just lucky but I have a few gen Z coworkers and they are probably more often than not the voice of reason in our org (start up with 8 engineers). I think if an employee can't handle simple constructive criticism or clarifications maybe they should not be employed.

I did used to work for a consulting firm about a decade ago, and I was leading a staff augmentation project with another company and I was once chastised for saying "hey guys" in a chat because there were women in the group. I was encouraged to use "y'all" but not wanting to sound like I was from the south, I just used "peeps" which was somehow okay.

I'm all for inclusive language but I thought that was a bridge too far.

> From my experience, it's definitely drifted away from a bunch of nerds solving problems to something more towards emotional/personal/politics. I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy. "Back in my day" people would just state facts, point out flaws, and argue a bit, and have fun doing it, for better or worse.

In the last few years, I ended up at a bigtech co through an acquisition, and had been someone who was a go-between for solving issues across teams by having a good understanding of everyone else's codebases, tests, build processes, deployment, infrastructure etc. This papered over the culture of siloed development, refusals to think beyond single services etc. I would submit tests and patches, along with tickets describing the bug, impact statement, fix, test coverage, risk, and make myself on-call or directly supervise deployment, etc.

Attempting to continue that in an org x25 larger was met with people firing off angry emails to executives saying their authority was being undermined and made to look bad, when long standing issues were made trivial and fixed by "someone they had never met before", and wherever they came from can they please go back to. I have no idea what a lot of these people were spending so long doing, their commit history was often full of changes that would make you go think "???". I guess it's lucrative to run out the clock year after year on a 180k package, attending meetings where you argue that things are difficult and lets meet again in 3 months? After becoming highly visible for bringing things to attention, I was offered a package to leave, I assume so they could go back to a culture of top down authority and silence.

Getting big is the same as getting old. Getting big means that they lucked into getting a cash cow and a bureaucracy springs up to manage that cash cow, kind of a necessary evil, and also attracts opportunists who think they can make the cash cow bigger (and enrich themselves in the process). So the business starts bloating up with employees.

The last 12 years were largely the same, the last 3 were completely new.

Companies used to have elaborate processes for quality, reliability and all that and it flew out the window on day 2 of LLMs. So of course you'll find people who no longer are productive because the context is now being created for machines, not for humans.

Actually, I think there are areas of interest that come up in large companies. Microsoft started the equivalent of an FDE organization about 12 years ago. It was interesting to have the freedom to build and grow an organization from about 20 to 800 people. Working with customers and product teams to help get direct customer feedback to help evolve products was interesting. Now, 12 years later, FDEs are sort of the current buzzy role.

I think you are on to something maybe. I also think there is a key part where Microsoft and others would hire people so nobody would. I know cases where people were hired and stayed on irrelevant or useless projects for years. Because of non compete agreements this means a good professional would stay few years out of the hands of the competition.

I think now LLMs might play a part of those dismissals but also I think those companies are embracing for thin cows season.

The record profits and etc are the last few for a while I am guessing. My guess they might have up to a year of positive numbers as consequence of deals and layoffs up to this moment.

I think at some point it will be clearer what are the real productivity gains of LLMs. My opinion is that there is a gain but we are already on the phase where there is a deceleration on the improvements and the costs have not yet caught up. The reason for this is the frequent change in the reporting of results. Now they hide the models, they hide the harnesses, they hide the results. They would not be doing that if they were 100% confident it was working perfectly. Also they have been putting too much effort on blocking other initiatives by hiring important researchers with no clear proposition on what they will be doing. One might argue that when you hire Karpathy you never know what he will might be doing anyway, but I digress. We also see some of the huge investment funds starting to switch strategies.

Unless there is no breakthrough, we might see LLMs results in a couple of years. The company I work for and others from friends I know have all started restrictions on costs. Some even started hiring people back.

My prediction is that the low AI cost per token era will end very soon when investors realise that the market is broken and they want their money back for leverage themselves or other businesses.

I even think this is why Elon Musk is merging all his companies. He might making himself artificially richer, but I think he is focusing his efforts to smart weapons and robots.

I think there will no way back to the inflation of people as in 2020/2021 but probably we are going back to early 2010s number.

I suspect there is still a good amount of shedding the defensive-hiring going on from the pre-AI, low interest, high growth inflation front-loading era. Now all that is crumbling, interest is rising, growth is contracting due to several factors, and AI is clearly crushing manpower demands. What do you do under these new circumstances with an excess of staff you largely hired as capacity and defensively?

It may be a bit controversial, but I believe the male tectonic shifts going in right now under our feet are also driving much of the shift regarding “immigration” because billionaires don’t need immigrants as much anymore and they’re also causing systemic problems in things like the housing market. In fact from what I’m hearing, there is concern that immigration is now becoming a potential cost due to the major changes in society rather than a profit center by scaling up marginal returns from every immigrant you can import by hook or crook, i.e., the more people you import, the more you can undermine salaries and increase revenues and thus, profits.

Part of what scares me about hold these companies are is how they've like the Titan Cronus been allowed to keep eating their children. There's so so much missing new blood that should be here, so many interesting medium sized companies that should be adapting, figuring out this new age, but so much of our talent and brainpool is locked up deep inside one of a handful of these massive techno-feudal empires.

I've worked with a number of people who were like this at MSFT. They've all been laid off.

> I think it's a fundamental rule that the competence and effectiveness of an org must fall, over time

IBM, GE... how many former American giants failed to evolve.

I go back to this article on the failure of US steel: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-inno...

It feels like tech overcorrected from allowing assholes to be assholes. To now having words and tone policed constantly.

> I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy.

Perhaps what you perceived as someone being emotional was actually someone who spent a long time barely functioning due to things that have been happening in their life, and that small event just so happened to be a straw that broke the camel's back.

People around you are going through stuff. Everyone is. Someone's stuff is easy to carry, someone else's stuff isn't. "Back in the day" people also carried their burden with them. This is nothing new. Perhaps you never noticed because so far everyone you dealt with was great at masking, and desperately want to avoid having to see coworkers like you worsen their burden by doing what feels like kicking them while they are down.

My ass, latest gen is actually more open to criticism. Old gen people used to be bullies and dogmatic. I call your story bullshit.

> and have fun doing it, for better or worse

Like how "the boys" in engineering would made jokes about having sex with the female office manager in the middle of meetings. It was only a great time for certain people.

> saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy

Was it about displaying the user's birthday?