Am I missing this, or are you assuming that I am incapable of finding opportunities myself, within or without the organization that the manager is beholden to? I honestly can't understand this framing, of the manager's job as a sort of opportunity finder for those 'under' them, and somehow being more impactful at this than the individuals themselves.
I'll give you this, some people need to be managed and for some reason presented with opportunities by a 2nd party. But some people just don't, they need to be collaborated with.
> Am I missing this, or are you assuming that I am incapable of finding opportunities myself
Somewhat, yes. It has nothing to do with you. Some opportunities you can create yourself, go for it. Other opportunities only arise in the context of leadership meetings you are not a part of (by definition, if you're not the manager). Having a manager in those meeting push for your opportunities is priceless.
Having had many managers who don't do this for me and a few that do, definitely want the second kind.
If one of my direct reports came to me and said they were interested in working on, say... AI observability (replace with whatever interests you), and that was something I had any influence over (even if only indirectly), I'd be finding whatever way I could to connect my report with that kind of work.
It's all well and good to say that you're in control of your own career advancement, but that's not in conflict with working with your manager on supporting your career development. Even if they don't have anything to teach you, they will necessarily have some influence of your scope/area of work, so it only makes sense to work them on aligning your work with your interests.
I believe everything you wrote about here is actually cooperation between two people, and to the point of what I said, you not actively getting in the way of your direct report's career progression.
> The manager's job is to find you impactful work that a) gets you promoted and b) challenges you in the ways you want or need to grow.
To me, the comment I responded to reads like a manager actively involved in the promotion of a direct report, and in finding a scope of work that the report might find challenging so that they grow. Your comment reads like a colleague helping out another colleague to the best of their ability. Which is exactly what I expect from a manager.
> You're missing a very important aspect of how managers impact your career: Opportunities.
Indeed! In basketball terms, a manager should be the MVP in Assists. They don't score directly but they set up plays for you so you can succeed. It's then up to the employee to act on it and score.
> I'm not convinced that "actual logic and thought" aren't just about inferring what comes next statistically based on experience.
Often they are the exact opposite. Entire fields of math and science talk about this. Causation vs correlation, confirmation bias, base rate fallacy, bayesian reasoning, sharp shooter fallacy, etc.
All of those were developed because “inferring from experience” leads you to the wrong conclusion.
Bayesian reasoning is just another algorithm for predicting from experience (aka your prior).
I took the GP to be making a general point about the power of “next x prediction” rather than the algorithm a human would run when you say they are “inferring from experience”. (I may be assuming my own beliefs of course.)
Eg even LeCun’s rejection of LLMs to build world models is still running a predictor, just in latent space (so predicting next world-state, instead of next-token).
And of course, under the Predictive Processing model there is a comprehensive explanation of human cognition as hierarchical predictors. So it’s a plausible general model.
> under the Predictive Processing model there is a comprehensive explanation of human cognition as hierarchical predictors
It’s plausible!
But keep in mind humans have been explaining ourselves in terms of the current most advanced technology for centuries. We used to be kinda like clockwork, then a bit like a steam engine, then a lot like computers, and now we’re just like AI.
That’s why you blow a gasket or fuse, release some steam, reboot your life, do brain dump, feel like a cog in the machine, get your wires crossed, etc
> Society is a compact between the dead, the living and the yet to be born. Having a piece of someone’s deepest thoughts is a treasure for future generations
If you want to be remembered, live a life worth remembering.
> everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immediately filling it with more things
You fill a jar with sand and there is no space for big rocks.
But if you fill the jar with big rocks, there is plenty of space for sand. Remove one of the rocks and the sand instantly fills that void.
I think that's kind of the point though: AI is the sand, but it's the rocks that hold all of the value; the further you get away from using AI the more real value you obtain. Like, a few of the rocks have gold deposits in them, and the sand is just infinitely copious but never holds anything valuable. And you've got a bunch of people running around saying, "Behold my mountains of sand!"
You fill the bottle with water, you put a fish in it, you remove half of the water, the bottle is still half full, but if you remove the fish, it will have less water than before.
You fill the bottle with half of the water, you put the fish in, you can fill in the other half. If you start with the first half, you will end up with more water.
You write a metaphore in a comment, you remove half of it, you add another one in the middle, you add the half of the first one, and… nobody understands anything.
Is it the ultimate result of LLM use? People internalising the idea that writing is about stringing words together like a Markov chain without realising they're not saying anything of substance?
In a more advanced civilisation, you would be put in the pillory for the townsfolk to throw rotten cabbage at you until the Lord fixed whatever made you say that.
The point of the metaphor is not to say "spending time is mechanically similar to putting things in a container". It is to look at spending time from a new angle, and see if it helps you understand it better. A wise person sees a metaphor as a launching point for thought, not as an expression of a metaphysical connection.
Yes, there are bad metaphors, and people who take metaphors too seriously. That you can conjure a bad metaphor with somewhat similar to semantics to some other metaphor does not mean that said metaphor is bad.
I'm so glad that style of inerview was dying out right when I graduated. And I love puzzles. But I don't need wannabe IQ tests for a job that expects me to work in legacy code and coordinae with other engineers.
Hahah, I just have to reply and say I loved the original comment and was happy for the laugh. Obviously this is the answer to the riddle of
> Given a 3-liter container and a 5-liter container, both initially empty, and access to tap water, how can you measure exactly 4 liters of water without using any additional containers
I've offered and received some convoluted metaphors recently, love leaning hard into this one.
They're talking about Archimedes' principle, displacement of water. The fish makes the water bottle overflow, so be careful when you add the fish so that it doesn't. It's a counter analogy to the rocks one above.
They’re pointing out that if the jar was _filled_ with sand, then of course you can’t fit any rocks in because it’s full. It’s cute but misunderstands the original metaphor I think.
> including totally trashing the old implementation and creating an entirely new one from scratch that matches all the requirements
Let me guess, you've never worked in a real production environment?
When your software supports 8, 9, 10 or more zeroes of revenue, "trash the old and create new" are just about the scariest words you can say. There's people relying on this code that you've never even heard of.
> Let me guess, you've never worked in a real production environment?
The comment to which you're responding includes a note at the end that the commenter is being sarcastic. Perhaps that wasn't in the comment when you responded to it.
It wasn’t thanks for highlighting. Can be hard to tell online because there’s a lot of people genuinely suggesting everyone should build their own software on the fly
If the amount of code corporations produce goes even 2x there's gonna be a lot of jobs for us to fix every company's JIRA implementation because the c-suite is full of morons.
I work on a product that meets your criteria. We can't fix a class of defects because once we ship, customers will depend upon that behavior and changing is very expensive and takes years to deprecate and age out. So we are stuck with what we ship and need to be very careful about what we release.
But if you start from the beginning with a code base that is always only generated from a spec, presumably as the tools improve you'd be able to grow to a big industrial-grade app that is 100% based on a spec.
The question is how many giant apps out there have yet to be even started vs. how many brownfield apps out there that will outlive all of us.
If the spec covers 100% of the code paths, then yes, you're right. But now spec and code are entirely redundant. Changing the spec or changing the code takes the same effort.
If the spec doesn't specify all the details, then there are gaps for the code to fill. For example, code for a UI is highly specific, down to the last pixel. A spec might say "a dialog with two buttons, labelled OK and cancel". That dialog would look different every time the spec is reimplemented.
Unless of course, there was also a spec for the dialog, that we could refer to in the other spec? That's really just code and reuse.
> When your software supports 8, 9, 10 or more zeroes of revenue, "trash the old and create new" are just about the scariest words you can say. There's people relying on this code that you've never even heard of.
Well, now it'll take them 5 minutes to rewrite their code to work around your change.
> Well, now it'll take them 5 minutes to rewrite their code to work around your change
You misunderstand. It will take them 2 years to retrain 5000 people on the new process across hundreds of locations. In some fields, whole new college-level certifications courses will have to be created.
In my specific experience it’s just a few dozen (maybe 100) people doing the manual process on top of our software and it takes weeks for everyone to get used to any significant change.
We still have people using pages that we deprecated a year ago. Nobody can figure out who they are or what they’re missing on the new pages we built
> You misunderstand. It will take them 2 years to retrain 5000 people on the new process across hundreds of locations. In some fields, whole new college-level certifications courses will have to be created.
> I will die on this hill: tech firms that mandated 5 days in the office was about soft layoffs, rather than a principled stance on individual performance under WFH
“True work only happens in person with human collaboration! Everyone must come back”
2 years pass
“Oh wow we can replace everyone with a chatbot this is amazing”
narrator: It was the interest rates all along. Many of these tech businesses are fundamentally bad, the ROI is smoke and mirrors, energy shocks and bad macro-economics are coming, and investors are starting to ask hard questions.
Tech has never been perfect, but there was a time when it felt more hopeful and optimistic and about building cool stuff. There's always been give and take with the money side of things that's necessary to keep fueling the building, but it feels like it all kind of went off the rails somewhere.
I'd be fine with earning less (we're pretty frugal) to work in that kind of environment with good people.
I don't think it was interest rates. Tech just saw that workers were able to extract higher and higher pay and more and more benefits and the industry saw an opportunity to reverse this trend. And it has succeeded. The semi-coordinated action since 2023 has caused pay to stagnate, enabled businesses to remove benefits, and frightened workers away from changing employers.
> You also need to build a team that you can trust to write the code you agreed you'd write
I tell every hire new and old “Hey do your thing, we trust you. Btw we have your phone number. Thanks”
Works like a charm. People even go out of their way to write tests for things that are hard to verify manually. And they verify manually what’s hard to write tests for.
The other side of this is building safety nets. Takes ~10min to revert a bad deploy.
If you do that, it expands your test matrix quadratically.
So, it makes sense if you have infinite testing budgets.
Personally, I prefer exhaustively testing the upgrade path, and investing in reducing the time it takes to push out a hot fix. Chicken bits are also good.
I haven’t heard of any real world situations where supporting downgrades of persistent formats led to best of class product stability.
That's the polite version of "we know where you live". Telling someone you have their phone number is a way of saying "we'll call you and expect immediacy if you break something."
Wanna be treated like an adult? Cool. You'll also be held accountable like an adult.
Never received a phone call at 5am on a Sunday because a bug is causing a valued customer to lose $10k/minute, and by the way, the SVP is also on the line? Lucky bastard
> New features and better UX is more useful for the users of many systems than fixing tail frequency bugs
If nobody notices a bug, does it matter?
There's whole classes of technically bugs that simply never happen under the real world operating constraints of a software system. The infamous example is that memory leak story from the Microsoft blog[1] – you don't need to fix memory leaks on a rocket that goes boom (or runs out of fuel) after 5 minutes of flight time. Just add the extra memory chip and move on.
Engineering is all about building to real world constraints. Don't build a suspension bridge where a sturdy plank will do.
It's not a bug if someone designed it to work that way though - a no-op allocator is an allocator too, and can also be used on short-running processes (even outside of things that go boom).
> 2 tickets, 2 sodas, 1 popcorn.
> $86 dollars.
> Don't know if I'll ever go to a conventional movie theater again.
We almost never go to regular theaters anymore. IMAX feels worth it for something like F1 or Top Gun where it’s all about the visual spectacle, otherwise meh.
We go to Alamo Drafthouse a lot tho. A little pricey but the experience of watching a movie in comfy seats over a fairly decent restaurant dinner is fantastic for certain kinds of movies. Peaky Blinders was the most recent. Tommy Shelby paired with a good cocktail or two, fantastic.
Also I don’t know how Alamo achieves this, but people there are really good about noise and other bullshit. I think it’s because they do in fact kick people out for being annoying.
They no longer prohibit phones during the film. In fact, now they require one to place an order. This has just started and is rolling out to every market. It completely undermined their entire value proposition. Alamo Drafthouse is a walking corpse.
You're missing a very important aspect of how managers impact your career: Opportunities.
The manager's job is to find you impactful work that a) gets you promoted and b) challenges you in the ways you want or need to grow.
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