> 16. Admitting what you don’t know creates more safety than pretending you do.
> Senior engineers who say “I don’t know” aren’t showing weakness - they’re creating permission. When a leader admits uncertainty, it signals that the room is safe for others to do the same. The alternative is a culture where everyone pretends to understand and problems stay hidden until they explode.
It's interesting to contrast this with Sean's statement here www.seangoedecke.com/taking-a-position/
> At that point, you need to take a position, whether you feel particularly confident or not.
> If you don’t, you’re forcing people with less technical context than you to figure it out themselves
To square the circle, I think the lesson is hide uncertainty to higher-ups, but don't to peers/ other ICs.
Of course, the challenge is that often, unfortunately, both the manager and the other ICs are in the same meeting.
Probably this is one justification of one reason why I hate meetings that include managers.
It’s worth noting that 1. is not mutually exclusive with writing a TODO.
In fact, on my team, all TODOs must have a bug in parentheses immediately afterwards to satisfy the linter. So not only not mutually exclusive, but the opposite.
The title of this article implies that it is a major or even the only cause for mass tech layoffs, which I strongly doubt.
For example, rising interest rates I'm sure also independently contributed. I would be interested to if anyone has gotten a sense of exactly how much this has contributed.
agreed, the interest rates and the overestimation on the stickiness of the pandemic’s increase in internet usage post-pandemic are the primary other contributing factors that, imo, represent the lion’s share; even allowing that the tax changes are tertiary is a stretch much less as the primary/secondary reason
It's hurts small businesses the most, and practically destroys startups. Titles are simplified by necessity and I think the phrase "...that's fueling..." doesn't strongly imply exclusivity.
I think that’s a bit of a leap; if you think LLMs make the world a worse place, there are many actions that you might take or not take to try to address that.
To be fair, I don't have any great specific ideas, but "Work Without the Worker" for example talks about how a lot of LLMs are fueled by neo-colonialist exploitation.
So I guess broadly speaking there could be strategies involving attempting to influence governmental policy rather than by consumer choice.
Or more radically, trying to change the structure of the government in general such that the above influences actually are more tractable for the common person.
So, what do all of these responses and the article itself seem to dance around? It's not that it makes developers obsolete, but rather increases inequality. In other words, either creates a class of inferior developers because they don't have whatever new skill, or in the case of offshoring, literally creates a class of lower developers.
Right. What the article is unsurprisingly glossing over (per usual) is that just because AI is perceived (by higher-ups that don’t actually do the work) to speed up coding work doesn't mean it actually does.
and that probably to some extent all involved (depending on how delusional they are) know that it's simply an excuse to do layoffs (replaced by offshoring) by artificially so-called raising the bar to what is unrealistic for most people
I recently tried this, but the import to draw.io did not go well. It imported as a single static image rather an editable diagram. Maybe I did something wrong?
Usually in such cases either copy and paste the error message from draw.io, or screenshot it and upload to chatGPT. It will debug it for you.
There’s also a specific sequence of steps to import mermaid scripts, I don’t remember the menu location by heart, ChatGPT can also give you the steps needed to do this.
Because the organization of your struct is exactly how the memory have to be organized and that might be important for you. The compiler doesn't know your intended usage so it can't rework the structure at its will.
For example, you might take the block of memory and data and send it to another system that will decode it. Or you can take the block of memory and store it in a file or in a hardware device where it means something in this specific order.
> Senior engineers who say “I don’t know” aren’t showing weakness - they’re creating permission. When a leader admits uncertainty, it signals that the room is safe for others to do the same. The alternative is a culture where everyone pretends to understand and problems stay hidden until they explode.
It's interesting to contrast this with Sean's statement here www.seangoedecke.com/taking-a-position/
> At that point, you need to take a position, whether you feel particularly confident or not.
> If you don’t, you’re forcing people with less technical context than you to figure it out themselves
To square the circle, I think the lesson is hide uncertainty to higher-ups, but don't to peers/ other ICs.
Of course, the challenge is that often, unfortunately, both the manager and the other ICs are in the same meeting.
Probably this is one justification of one reason why I hate meetings that include managers.
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