...the same junior developers that management and the investor class have stopped hiring.

Most seniors I know like mentoring newer engineers and would happily have more juniors on the team, but we don't get to make hiring decisions. I don't like that we have a glut of unemployed/underemployed new college grads and I feel bad for them, but I do not remotely care that management may have to pay me more than they'd like in 5 years because they decided they didn't need a junior pipeline anymore. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

This post is the piece those two were circling around: what happens to the bottom of the chart, and whose job it is to fix it. Spoiler — it’s yours, senior engineer. It’s mine. And most of us are about to get it wrong in a very specific, very tempting way.

BS. Most good seniors I know would love to hire more juniors, feel badly for the mass of recent college grads who are unemployed, and enjoy mentoring new engineers without needing a wall of AI slop to tell them to do so. When you give us control over the hiring budget and let us hire juniors again, you can blame us for the future senior engineer shortage. Until then, blame the people actually at fault (management, executives, the investor class), not us.

I'm far from a slop advocate, so this is more of a devil's advocate point: plenty of code writing is not enjoyable.

If I'm working on my own project, to my own standards, writing exactly what I want to write I'm usually going to get enjoyment out of it. That's pretty commonly not the case when writing code for an employer. Maybe the tech stack sucks, the product is inane or worse, you think the feature is a dumb idea but have to do it anyway, you're bending over backwards to work around tech debt that you're not allowed by management to fix, or you have to appease incompetent/out of touch architects or tech leads who presume to tell you how to do your job. I personally don't enjoy writing that code very much. At a certain point it's almost like nails on a chalkboard if you genuinely enjoy programming for its own sake: you know what good would look like, you know how far away what you're working on is from good, and you feel sad at all the organizational inertia you'd need to overcome to get to good or, choosing not to do that, at compromising your standards. That bugs me, at least, and at a certain point makes it hard to even start certain work projects.

LLMs can make this at least bearable. Rather than spending hours looking into the change yourself, writing all of the code, fighting the shitty test framework and swearing at the past engineers who made it so bad, you let the robot figure it out and review its work. The result may still suck, but it was going to suck if you wrote it by hand too, for reasons largely out of your control. You can't be fully hands off, and you still have to deal with the things you don't like to get a good result, but you put yourself a step away from what bothers you and by doing so make it a little more pleasant. And, when you find work that's actually fun, interesting, or rewarding, you just cherry pick that for yourself. I've grown to appreciate them for this reason. I have a lot less dread for the nails on a chalkboard work than I used to, anyway.

While I don't disagree with this post in spirit, it feels tone deaf. Many very popular and well used FOSS projects rely on one or two core contributors who are volunteering their time to build something useful, fitting that work in alongside their paying work and the rest of their life. If a maintainer of a project I use has 3 hours in between their kid's baseball game and dinner one Sunday to spend working on it, I'd much rather them spend that time making the project better than on giving pro forma replies to PRs and issues that aren't valuable to the project to adhere to some sense of decorum (and, as a former maintainer, even a polite "no" to a bad idea or a disguised request for free technical consulting is time consuming).

As a tangent,

Not acknowledging contributions and the work that goes into them, whether through a quick response or a kind word, undermines our entire community. Every time that happens, it’s a “fuck you” towards a contributor. That seems fashionable if we look at the wider society—things are falling apart around us as we burn the planet and let nations get away with exploitation and murder—, but that doesn’t make it acceptable.

is kind of a wild connection to draw given the reality of many (most, I'd argue) FOSS projects. A busy single maintainer prioritizing their limited time by ignoring low effort contributions is in no way like burning the planet.

(maybe the author is implicitly thinking of very large, well resourced projects with sustaining funding and a lot of maintainers, where I think a higher standard might be fair. That's not really clear from the post, though, and I don't think it's accurate to regard those as "the community", in the same way that we don't regard Google, Amazon, etc as the entire software industry)

I have a hard time telling AI authored LinkedIn thought leadership apart from formulaic LinkedIn thought leadership sometimes, but this feels AI written, which makes it fairly amusing considering the point it's making.

(Does vibe coding feel incredible? Also, "Nobody’s asking what happens in Month 18 when the original dev has left and nobody understands the codebase" implies that the vibe coder original dev understood the codebase at any point, which isn't an argument I'd feel comfortable making for any of the ones I've worked with)

App Tracking Transparency on iOS devices is an interesting test case for this argument. When an app wants to track you, you're asked in plain language whether you want to be tracked. You can say no. You don't have to be a savvy user to say no, and the consent is explicit rather than being buried in a EULA that you don't read. If you say no, the app will likely still work fine. Specific numbers vary, but somewhere between a majority and a vast majority of iOS users opt out when given that choice. How much that costs advertisers is harder to reason about (a lot of the data comes from advertisers themselves, who are hardly unbiased), but the data are at least consistent in arguing that ATT opt outs produce a quantifiable drop in ad engagement (clicks, etc) and ad spend.

I'm personally a big fan of ATT. You shouldn't have to be a savvy user to opt out of surveillance capitalism. I also don't personally care that much about how effective online advertising networks are. But I think LG and similar companies are probably not off base to worry about making it possible to cleanly opt out of everything. From their perspective, that wouldn't be a great outcome.

driven by our mission to create meaningful connections between brands and their audiences

Oh fuck off with this.

Having used these at my day job I can understand the policy against them. Ours is fairly well tuned by the people who operate it, adapted to our codebase, and its comments are usually on point, but its false positive rate for my own PRs is still in the low double digit percent range (feedback that's factually wrong, not relevant to the PR, not scoped appropriately, etc). Before all that tuning, back when we first started using it, I probably went days or weeks without seeing a well-founded suggestion from the tool. Incorrect comments still create work for the PR author (investigating, double checking, etc), they create noise for human reviewers, and ambiguity about whether a change is ready to be merged. I read that policy as being against random people pointing their own review tools at PRs for this project, which I assume would be more on the high false positive/high noise end of the spectrum (i.e., not being tuned for this specific project). I can totally see why already busy maintainers would want to spare themselves from a bunch of poorly calibrated noise.

One nice thing about them compared to human reviewers is that you can just tell them to (professionally) fuck off if they're wrong without hurting their feelings or having an HR conversation.

I was half joking. 😅 Of all the tradesfolk I've hired to do work on my house, my arborist is the only one who's job I could see myself actually liking. He gets paid to be a nerd about something (trees, tree health, tree care), the work itself seems a lot more pleasant than dealing with plumbing or electrical repairs, and at least my guy is a one man band who just shows up and does his thing, which is certainly appealing after a career of various EMs, PMs, TPMs, and other people who need to be appeased when doing work. Also the fun tools.

Nothing wrong with being an arborist.

There's a residential stroad near me that does this without advertising it. It's a neat trick if you know about it, but a solid majority of the folks I see on that street just haul ass from red light to red light (and I catch up to them right when it turns green again).

I'm not too optimistic about traffic calming coming up in this road's future. Maybe it'll get speed cameras.

There's a parallel universe where the US continued supporting its own domestic EV industry with more tax credits, more charging infrastructure, more grid investments and stricter corporate fuel economy standards. Maybe in that universe the automakers would attempt to compete with Chinese EVs instead of whining. Instead we elected orange man. Oh well.