I’ve been slow to invest in building flows around parallelizing agent work under the assumption that eventually inference will get fast enough that I will basically always be the bottleneck.
Excited to see glimpses of that future. Context switching sucks and I’d much rather work focused on one task while wielding my coding power tools.
It sounds like in this case there was some troll-fueled comeuppance.
> “We’re not a scam,” he continued. “We’re a married couple trying to do the right thing by people … We are legit, we are real people, we employ sales staff.”
> Australian Tours and Cruises told CNN Tuesday that “the online hate and damage to our business reputation has been absolutely soul-destroying.”
This might just be BS, but at face-value, this is a mom and pop shop that screwed up playing the SEO game and are getting raked over the internet coals.
Your broader point about blame-washing stands though.
That's the thing about scammers, they operate in plausibly deniable ways, like covering up malice with incompetence. They make taking things at face value increasingly costly for the aggrieved.
I use it in a Python/TS codebase (series D B2B SaaS with some AI agent features). It can usually “make it work” in one shot, but the code often requires cleanup.
I start every new feature w/Claude Code in plan mode. I give it the first step, point it to relevant source files, and tell it to generate a plan. I go catch up on my Slack messages.
I check back in and iterate on the plan until I’m happy, then tell it to implement.
I go to a team meeting.
I come back and review all the code. Anything I don’t 100% understand I ask Gemini to explain. I cross-check with primary sources if it’s important.
I tweak the generated code by hand (faster than talking with the agent), then switch back to plan mode and ask for specific tests. I almost always need to clean up the tests for doing way too much manual setup, despite a lot of Claude.md instructions to the contrary.
In the end, I probably get the work done in 30% less wall-clock time of Claude implementing (counting plan time), but I’m also doing other things while the agent crunches. Maybe 50% speed boost in total productivity? I also learn something new on about a third of features, which is way more than I did before.
Your manager had a boss, too. She had to deal with the oddities and frustrations of corporate life and expectations, too.
Even your CEO has a board to deal with.
I always think it's strange when people draw a mental dividing line between ICs and managers and think people on the other side are living in totally different experiences of the world.
A decent manager, especially a low level manager of ICs, will work hard to shield her charges from the full impact of the company's bureaucracy. And even a mediocre manager can't help but do some of that: they usually still have to approve time off requests and deal with the paperwork for performance evaluations etc.
Yeah, I sometimes miss the more simple IC life. Office politics is a more of a problem in management, but also dealing with humans all the time is just more messy.
I get that we’re all part of the same system, but I consider Office Space a nihilistic rejection of the entirety of that system. It’s not just “my boss is dumb,” it’s “this whole system is anti-human and dumb, and we’d all be happier working outside with our muscles.”
And it’s totally appropriate for that message to resonate with my boss, but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.
Edit: just realized I used a “it’s not just this, it’s that” construction. I swear I’m not an LLM, but maybe their prose is infecting my brain.
> but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.
Having been a manager: I bet your boss didn't want to be there any more than you did. They were forced to do corporate team-building and they recognized the absurdity of it all.
So they tried to come up with something entertaining that they could claim was passably work-related. They were trying to do their best by you within the constraints of what was mandated by their job.
This looks like a nice gesture. You are too occupied viewing your manager as "the other" to recognize when they were trying to bond and do something nice for the team within the constraints of their job.
You're lucky. At corporate team-building retreats I never got to watch any fun movies. One had us listen to lectures by a manager whose primary experience was as a little league coach and who thought leading his team was the same thing. The other involved the manager giving us a psychology test of his own creation and trying to lecture us about what he thought our learning styles and weaknesses were based on all the different self-help books he read.
Totally valid that my boss probably didn’t want to be there either, but for context this was circa 2008 Google where “offsite” meant “go spend company money to do something fun.”
Alternatives were literally things like going to Napa or an amusement park or go-karting. Or if you really wanted to watch a movie, the options were all other movies. Why pick the one that digs at the tenets of your shared reality?
Office Space has become a part of the corporate culture's shared language. You are out of the loop if you haven't seen it, and it wouldn't surprise me that a lot of people are introduced to it in a work-related environment (as I was).
Because your manager might have been dealing with something privately, and didn't feel like doing something fun, but had to because the Gods Of Corporate decreed it so.
And so, an act of rebellion against a shared reality that forces you to have fun on schedule when it's time for the quarterly offsite.
Don't worry, your use of its not X, it's Y did not trigger the LLM pattern match for me. I think the main reason is that your two clauses are of very disparate lengths. LLMs use its X not Y as a rhetorical device that relies on brevity and punchiness, while your longer quote has the authentic ring of clumsy, human phrasing.
>And it’s totally appropriate for that message to resonate with my boss, but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.
That just means they valued their actual sentiments more than keeping appearances. Doesn't sound weird: it sounds humane.
>Alternatives were literally things like going to Napa or an amusement park or go-karting. Or if you really wanted to watch a movie, the options were all other movies. Why pick the one that digs at the tenets of your shared reality?
To point at the elephant in the room, as opposed to just go on with the program and have another forced fun session.
I mean, your questions amount to "why couldn't she just be a good cog and pretend like the rest of us?"
It's like being surprised a coworker is a human on the inside.
> Edit: just realized I used a “it’s not just this, it’s that” construction. I swear I’m not an LLM, but maybe their prose is infecting my brain.
LLMs didn't come up with their quirks in a vacuum. Humans always influenced each other in their language use.
It used to be over sound waves mostly but they don't travel far, then came the printing press, later radio and TV. LLMs are just another language blender.
It seems to me that line managers straddle the line somewhat and above that is where it is a really different world. I have started a company and now back to being an IC so been on both sides of it. It's not totally different, but it is a lot.
I've been back and forth between manager and IC, too.
It is different. I won't deny that.
However, politics and corporate absurdist formalities aren't exclusive to management. A lot of the corporate politics and face-palm worthy office games I've dealt with came from ICs, either as my peers, reports, or as some other manager's reports.
We just tend to give a pass to ICs when they do it because they're not viewed as having as much power in the office.
Can confirm, as an EM this is very true. The best you can hope for is that we're transparent with you about the BS and don't BS you. That's what I try to do.
> my former manager organized an offsite where we all watched Office Space together.
Working in management is infinitely more soul crushing than being Peter Gibbons.
I literally brought up The Peter Principle when I quit a job like that.
Office Space is a parable about a software developer who doesn’t want to be promoted beyond his core competency. Peter Gibbons is fighting the Peter Principle.
> Office Space is a parable about a software developer who doesn’t want to be promoted beyond his core competency.
I always thought Lumberg gets a somewhat un-derserved bad rap in that flick. He is characterized as the villain and of course is—from Peter’s perspective which is where the story is told. But within that universe and at a 10,000 foot POV was he? He seems to be the only one within the corporation that is actually functional, capable, motivated and excelling in his role. No doubt he is a dick, but that’s just part of his role and he’s good at it. He’s a cog, knows he’s a cog, but realizes the machine still needs to run. He recognizes that Peter has hit that competence/incompetence point. He also realizes the Bob’s are incompetent, but powerful. He really is the only one that seems to realize everything that is going on.
His communication deficit was too big to actually be a good manager, no?
(Well, maybe not. Maybe being soul-crushingly efficient is optimal if you know most people will fluctuate out soon anyway, so your lack of ability to actually build a rapport with them is not a material impediment to deliver results sustainably.)
Shit rolls downhill...and most people just try to keep an eye on where the next turd comes from without bothering to watch where it goes after it's past them.
I watched Office Space with a bunch of coworkers at a previous job. It's a funny movie that most people in startups view as a parody of big company office life. Our company didn't function like the movie.
You sound as though you worked for one of my managers, though he just gave everyone a copy of the DVD for Christmas one year. The thing is, he definitely got it, knew he was part of the system, and did his best to take care of the people working for him.
I don't have stats to back it up, but many people claim that Office Space made a lot of people resign their cubicle jobs and this was a sharp effect on its release.
Office Space was released in 1999, at the peak of the dot-com bubble. So, of course office jobs (particularly software jobs) would decrease when that bubble popped.
I specifically avoided making the claim because you really cannot prove either way
I remember when it was released, I graduated that year, and I remember the reactions at the time
it would still be anecdotal and it's hard to know how many people did in fact resign as a result of the impact from this film, and if it's something that would make any difference in the grand scheme of things
This reminds me of a UI pattern I saw in an old iOS comic reader (Comic Zeal) for organizing your comics. You had a horizontal rule that worked as a cursor. You could swipe things to the side (“pick”) to add them to the cursor. You then moved the cursor to the desired location and tapped it to dump the contents (“place”).
My biggest problem with the OP implementation is the “place” button can be far from the “pick” button. Why not just leave it on the moving element - change the label from “pick” to “place” and call it a day.
- It has gotten easier to file patents, so more are filed.
- Companies increasingly use patents like weapons/deterrents, so there’s more incentive to file an idea you weren’t planning to use to build your war chest.
I suspect regulatory capture is a big part of the explanation though.
I just want a panel. I’m already doing what the article suggests (running a Hisense offline with a media box), but my TV still crashes a few times a month and needs to be power-cycled/takes about a minute to reboot.
There’s just no reason for this. You have one job: Take my signal and display it. Anything else is just another place for things to go wrong.
>Everyone likes a service when it’s subsidized by VC dollars.
Netflix went public in 2002. It was +8 years later that the streaming-only service was launched in 2010. The digital streaming wasn't "subsidized by VC".
Netflix had more content from everybody back then because the other studios licensed their content for cheap prices to Netflix. But those studios then realized that Netflix was growing rapidly on the backs of their content. Once those multi-year contracts expired, studios like Disney didn't renew with Netflix and instead, started their own platform (e.g. Disney+).
You're not wrong, but that doesn't mean they weren't still in "growth" phase.
Their pricing, and their doubling down on account sharing policies over the last few years have shown that they are no longer in a growth phase.
I cancelled my Netflix account a few months ago because I had gotten the "You're not accessing this from your typical location" blocker. Even though I was trying to watch from my permanent residence and I was the account owner / payee.
The reason that happened was that my wife and I own two properties. We are happily married, not separated, but we just like our space... especially with two adult daughters who still live at home with one of their significant others also living in the house.
We are a single family "unit" but have two locations. Furthermore, my wife has sleeping issues and was using Netflix at night in order to fall asleep. To have to get me to check my email for an access code, was a total deal breaker since I would be fast asleep. So that cut her off from her typical usage of Netflix.
And the reason Netflix thought that I was accessing the service from a different location was that I hardly ever watched it. Every time I'd pull it up, I would spend more time scrolling for something to watch than actually watching anything.. and typically I'd just give up and go watch a 30m YouTube video instead.
So I was paying more, receiving less ... mostly had the account purely for my wife and daughters who watched it the most ... and then the final deal breaker was logistical barriers preventing me from being able to use what I'm paying for.
Agree, but I think they moved away from growth to this not because they lost investor money / vc demands but because they started losing a lot of licensing deals and content, and had to shift from redistribution to making more and more originals with capital investment cost and etc.
Slightly different reasons for enshitiffication - if Spotify lost half of their catalogue suddenly they might move in the same way I guess.
These content library contracts are only for a couple of years, and each time one lapses, some terms get negotiated. Nobody in the streaming industry is successful because they have a long term lock on someone else’s content. It’s all about eyeballs and margins.
Sure, that was very early though. You could argue that was crucial for establishing their brand, but the industry has caught up and doesn't do that very much now.
Excited to see glimpses of that future. Context switching sucks and I’d much rather work focused on one task while wielding my coding power tools.
reply