The point is that society elevates symbols to a level of importance above and beyond the things those symbols are supposed to refer to.
Thus people valuing the symbols of professionalism over actual engineering prowess; LinkedIn profiles over the person themselves; and LLM output over a human's actual thoughts.
Despite this person self-evaluating as having regressed in their engineering skills, all the outward status markers that are supposed to represent outstanding achievement are still there, and project a persona that is not congruent with the author's own self-image.
Worse yet, you must play this game of smoke and mirrors because you are "only seen when [you] do the fake crap like update [your] LinkedIn to celebrate 1 year at $FAANG."
This also reduces the signal/noise ratio when posers begin aping those same status markers in order to represent expertise where none exists. If you want to experience this directly, I suggest you attend some networking meetups and talk to the newer blood in the cybersecurity industry. Not exactly DEFCON 10 any more.
And a common blind spot around good software engineers is that software is the hammer for all nails.
Someone recently asked me if Mark Zuckerberg was a good engineer. I think the answer is a very, very qualified "yes." He knew enough to bash together a prototype in PHP of a social network site. But he was a very good problem-solver; he managed to find a tool space people found use in, and iterated on it until it got so good it dominated lives and became the primary communication solution for millions of people. He also knew enough about people to hire the right folks to do the hard (and tedious; the tedium should never be ignored) work to turn his prototype into product, scale it, and maintain it. And that's every bit as much problem-solving as implementing a breadth-first search to populate a "People you might also know" list.
He didn't need to have Knuth's Art of Computer Programming memorized to do what he did.
Software engineering (and the software it creates) are tools. They give us pleasure to use also. But the tools and the pleasure can become disconnected from what gives other people utility and pleasure without some heads-up checks from time to time.
To put it more succinctly: businesses want to hire people that will help them make money. The ability for a programmer to make money for a business is not as tightly bound to perfect code and passion projects as this person, and many programmers, think.
I don’t like this definition of “good engineer” because it seems degenerate with “good businessman” or “good product designer.”
He was a bad engineer: early implementations of Facebook were buggy, insecure, and not featureful. I agree that engineering is not valued in-and-of itself generally (it is just a tool), but instead of turning it into something inherently valued by changing the definition of it, we should just admit that it isn’t valued in-and-of itself. I mean, in all fields (other than some art, maybe) the end result is valued more by outsiders than the process to get there…
He successfully pushed a product out that worked well enough to get traction and get popular.
Part of good engineering is knowing what problems to solve. Facebook early version was buggy and insecure and lacked features. And none of that mattered to the target audience enough to not use it; its value outweighed the pain points. A junior engineer can solve today's problems; a senior engineer can build against tomorrow's, and a staff engineer knows what problems should be solved and what shouldn't because time is a finite resource. The further you go up the ladder, the fewer problems can be solved by throwing the right algorithm at it with your programming tool of choice.
A dreamer and a hobbyist can put together a well-crafted site with five users. An engineer keeps working at solving the problems between there and five million, including solving them by building the systems to solve them and finding the people to work in those systems.
At the places I've worked, sales guys get some say in prioritization of features, but rarely in prioritization of their implementation.
I would say the distinction is good sales guys can turn market sentiment into a feature request, good engineers can turn one or more feature requests into behaviors in the system.
But the actual truth is that a sales team with some idea of how software is written coupled to lead engineers with some idea of market sentiment and taste is more powerful than either discipline heavily siloed.
He is not asking for that. He is explaining why he feels bad for not being able to continue delivering his top notch work that was done for free before and hoping to be able to do that again in the future. I appreciate that although I have never used his open source code.
I think the point is that his (perceived) engineering skills were far better when he worked on those passion projects, yet recruiters didn't care. But after grinding leetcode and joining a FANG the recruiters are knocking down his door despite him feeling like a much worse engineer.
Which is funny because I remember when people online swore up and down you needed open source projects online to get your foot in the door. It’s never been true, but if you’re lucky it might help. Part of me wondered if it was the industry itself spreading that around so they can continue to profit off the use of free software.
Best case scenario they were thinking of that one person (0.01% er) who worked on a project that absolutely wowed them. But then even the homebrew creator couldn’t get his foot in the door
The post is somewhat strange but I think the point of it is clear. Projects aren’t what land jobs. This is contrary to age-old advice of “build a portfolio to show off” which has been repeated for as long as I remember. At least since 2010 or so.
Instead the writer discovered what we all inevitably do. Companies don’t really care about what you’re capable of. They care strictly if you’ll bend over backwards, give up everything, and grind leetcode to make it through their arbitrary and demeaning hiring process. At least you can somewhat justify it at FAANG given you need an “efficient” way to weed out 80% of the 30,000 applicants you get a year. But this rot goes all the way down to the mom and pop e-commerce startup anymore.
It’s no surprise. I suppose if the writer was a major contributor to a larger project their experience might be different (as you could probably fool ATS and HR using them as experience on a resume). But indeed, no one cares about your toy implementation of a linter.
It’ll only get worse in the age of AI slop, AI slop brained company leadership, and leetcode supremacy.
"This is contrary to age-old advice of “build a portfolio to show off” which has been repeated for as long as I remember. At least since 2010 or so."
The thing is this not only used to work, it was The Way. You could short circuit the entire technical interview process by sending a link to your commit histories on various open source projects or hell even your GitHub account if you had decent amounts of public activity on there. Even better, a company's unwillingness to accept these in lieu of infantile "coding tests" was a great way to weed out bullshit organizations you wouldn't want to work for in any case. Now that none of that is the case I haven't the faintest idea how one would go about getting a job writing code these days short of leveraging your network to score a nepo hire?
I have spoken to a few people in the "recruiting industry". In particular, one CEO of one. Both were rather frank discussions. Both told me that it is a complete waste of time to submit resumes and do follow up calls. Rather shocking. Indeed, they both suggested that networking and/or being nepo-hired is basically the only way you'll get in somewhere. That isn't a "big company with big goals" somewhere. This is a trend in almost every sector of software. If you're like a lot of people and need remote work due to not living in one of the 3-4 major tech hubs it's even harder.
I do remember a time when projects mattered. I believe my open source work 12 years ago was what got me the job even after I failed their coding test miserably.
It probably won't get better for a long time. I've been casually looking around for a new gig and even with over a decade of experience in software across the backend stack (bare metal and up) I don't fit a lot of the requirements. They want junior engineer grind, mid level pay, and staff+ level knowledge. As expected, it's a employer market now, and we're probably gonna be waiting for the glut of new CS grads, bootcampers, etc to give up and move on to other things.
> probably gonna be waiting for the glut of new CS grads, bootcampers, etc to give up and move on to other things.
If we’re lucky, an Open AI collapse will have Lehman Brothers like ripple effects throughout the rest of the industry. Not only will that flush out the chaff, it’ll also burn out genuine talent, so competition in the aftermath will be easier.
Although, FAANG is kind of an old acronym. Those companies (other than maybe Apple because they’ve always been weird) are more like Microsoft was, when the phrase was coined. In the sense that they are matured companies that aren’t striking out and building new things in new markets.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve lost the “look at interesting portfolios” muscle and gained the “look at metrics” one.
Most people didn’t work at FAANG back then, right? You worked at FAANG because you were better than people who took the conventional approach, and the really competent growing companies could figure that out.
What I find interesting is that despite, as you said, FAANG doesn't really have the "genius appeal" it used to have they still demand it. You would sort of expect a company that is in the glacial stages of movement to have more capital and more leeway. If anything, the competition for these positions has gotten even worse despite the work not being anything close to revolutionary or novel at all.
I think they aren’t quite totally glacial yet. They are just well along the path. It is a continuous thing. I mean they hired a bunch of competent people over the last decade+. Probably those competent people just don’t the incentive structure to look at portfolios.
The competition should get harder; resumes-optimizers are much harder to compete with than thing-builders, in the game of getting hired, right?
for many people, it is not. you have enough free time, energy, and money to fix your weight issue - many people are missing at least one of these factors, oftentimes more.
there are more complicating factors here too - try telling someone taking lithium that gaining weight is a choice. or birth control, or SSRIs... the list goes on.
yeah, it's pretty easy for you - a middle aged wealthy guy - with enough free time to go to the gym 5-6 days a week - to maintain your weight. most people aren't in that situation.
I've spent years at a healthy BMI when the pandemic was ongoing while getting no exercise. Didn't gain a pound. Weight is all diet. You don't need free time, energy, or money to fix it
i have always maintained a slightly underweight body, well into my 30s, despite limited exercise and unrestricted eating.
i personally know many people who struggle immensely, despite eating far less than me.
for me, it takes exactly 0 effort to remain thin. zero. i literally don't even think about it. other people count every single calorie they eat, exercise religiously, take weight loss medication, and still have trouble managing their weight.
but hunger is a primal thing - some people are far hungrier far more often than other people, for many reasons - and yes, it takes energy to resist hunger.
money and free time aren't required, no, but it definitely helps your odds.
> i have always maintained a slightly underweight body, well into my 30s, despite limited exercise and unrestricted eating
I'm the same, but not because my bodies special. I can very easily gain weight and actually have really bad self control around food.. especially snacks
I pretty recently moved to the US and it infuriates me that so many stores only have 200g+ family-size packs of chips/crisps/whatever you call them.. I want them, but not a huge pack, so I just don't buy them. I know if I keep them at home I'll eat the whole bag in a day
I eat mostly nutritionally dense, unprocessed food because even though I hate cooking I found ways to bulk cook tasty meals and keep them in the fridge/freezer for when I'm lazy and would otherwise order shit
I have breakfast at 1-2pm.. which makes it really hard to overeat in such a short time window before bed. Not for any specific reason I just have coffee before then and it blunts my hunger
I don't think about it either.. but so many of my habits I've built up, if I look at it, make it really hard for me to get fat. I'm guessing you have similar things
"choices" are as much lifestyle design (whether you meant to do it or not) as they are pure willpower. They're all things in your control that can make it so you don't rely on just resisting hunger
There are always excuses. Everything is too hard until you actually do it.
Your argument is akin to being told that on average Women are shorter than men and then you say, well I know a tall woman.
There are exceptions but the vast majority of us can accomplish this, we just don't prioritize it. You get what you prioritize.
Choice isn't binary, it's a continuous distribution. There are thousands of factors influencing the power you have over your weight. That's why I'm thin and I don't try at all, and other people are overweight and cry from trying so hard.
Can you just make the choice to solve P versus NP? Or climb K2? There's a lot of factors that affect a persons ability to make any choice. Willpower, knowledge and experiences, time, intelligence, etc.
There's thousands of factors that influence you making that choice, some factors in your blood, some from your childhood, and some from how your day went.
I'm very lucky that the stars aligned, so I don't have to try at all. Really, zero effort.
Others have to try very, very hard every day of their life. They need to think about what they're eating constantly. Do you know when I think about what I'm eating? Never. I just eat whatever I want, whenever I want.
it's a lot easier to prioritize it when you have time, money, and energy. that's my whole point. you are in a position that enables you to manage your weight effectively. many people are not.
honestly this joke is pretty played out at this point - you need to put more distance between your app & the initial idea, otherwise it feels a little too much like a soulless rehash / pale clone of the original.
isn't anyone else horrified by this? the implication is that given an arbitrary picture, chatgpt can give you a very likely approximate location - expert level doxxing is in the hands of anyone with access to a chatgpt subscription.
because women are commonly stalked by men, if it must be said. if any idiot can plug any picture into chatgpt and ask "where was this picture taken?" while being able to successively narrow the scope, the potential for stalking - especially of the parasocial kind - goes up.
Keep in mind that this is o3 + web search against a human without web search. A sufficiently motivated person with access to your entire social media history, Google Earth and Streetview, etc. would outperform this significantly and could pinpoint almost any inhabited location with coverage.
If you watch Linus Tech Tips, you may have noticed that when he films at his house everything is blurred out to keep people from locating it - here's a recent example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD_RYb7m4Pw
All that to say, unfortunately doxxing is already really hard to protect against. I don't think o3's capability makes the threat any harder to protect against, although it might lower the bar to entry somewhat.
the way i see it, before these tools, only someone with a lot of resources (or skills) could track down a location from a picture. now, anyone can do it.
the best case outcome is people become more aware of the privacy implications of posting photos online
It needs a lot of context. If its a private picture, it won't have enough information. I gave it a picture I took of my yard and it's guess spanned several US states.
I think this is incredibly cool. As with many things, the good cases will outnumber the bad.
This was always possible, it just wasn't widely distributed.
Having a first class ability to effectively geocode an image feels like it connects the world better. You'll be able to snapshot a movie and find where a scene was filmed, revisit places from old photographs, find where interesting locations in print media are, places that designers and creatives used in their (typically exif-stripped) work, etc.
Imagine when we get this for architecture and nature. Or even more broadly, databases of food from restaurants. Products. Clothing and fashion. You name it.
Imagine precision visual search for everything - that'd be amazing.
we are millions of streams that never stop flowing -- but we love to pretend that there's consistency to it. we like to imagine ourselves as a continuous person.
but we're not. we change, moment to moment, forever, endlessly -- it doesn't stop, ever. not when we go to sleep. not when we go through a traumatic event. not when we die.
a stark reminder of our fragility. i hope the author can find peace.
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