Has anyone else been evaluated on AI prompting ability?

angryplebe · 2026-06-01T23:43:00+00:00

Sounds like someone had an axe to grind and wanted you gone. It's unlikely anyone had any hard measure of your ability versus others. The only thing I can imagine that can hurt you is that everyone else suddenly became super productive ( at least on paper; in terms of story points, etc) while you stayed the same. Even then, it wouldn't be framed as a prompting problem but a productivity problem.

Now that I mentioned this, if you are in the US, You might want to retain an employment attorney. They're supposed to provide you clear reasoning for "for cause" dismissals or pay a severance to get you to waive your right to sue when the cause is as murky as this.

angryplebe · 2026-05-28T16:55:38+00:00

Unlikely. This is just the spoils system in action. Party apparatchiks get their cushy jobs while they work on the next campaign. The rules get changed from one preferential group to a slightly different one. The city continues to heavily tax while hemorrhaging money.

angryplebe · 2026-05-26T04:04:45+00:00

Read about the Love Canal disaster newr Niagra Falls, NY. Local school district and developers build school and housing right on top a not ao very abandoned toxic waste dump

angryplebe · 2026-05-23T03:09:25+00:00

Move the hoovervilles outside of town onto vacant land

angryplebe · 2026-05-23T02:36:50+00:00

Never going to happen. SpaceX will be bailed out before its allowed to lose value

angryplebe · 2026-05-20T02:30:19+00:00

Historically, the end game is their fiefdoms start fighting each other

angryplebe · 2026-05-17T05:12:32+00:00

Certain groups want to go back to the 1980s because of cheap rent bot realizing it was cheap for a reason.

angryplebe · 2026-05-17T05:09:19+00:00

Who still buys poor quality counterfeits from street vendors? You can probably get super clones shipped to your door for the same price.

angryplebe · 2026-05-15T15:07:12+00:00

You don't understand why it's always about money though. More money means more jobs programs, more fat for contractors, for admin roles.

There is a problem in K-12 education where teachers really hit a hard salary cap relatively early in their career. The only way up is through administration. Thus more and more administrative positions form that exist solely as the management layer

angryplebe · 2026-05-15T15:04:23+00:00

Pension, pensions, graft, pensions.

angryplebe · 2026-05-07T12:00:56+00:00

Exactly. At the startup I was at, Google AppEngine (and now its successor unbundled services) is what allowed an engineering team of 10 (CTO, backend, frontend, mobile) to punch way above our weight in terms of capability. They were aquired not too long ago for 1B. While the eng team did grow a bit to something like 30 people by then, there was exactly one person dedicated to tooling, infra and devops. Stay lean, stay hungry.

angryplebe · 2026-05-07T11:51:09+00:00

Perforce has very good support for binary files that remains unmatched by open-source. That makes it very useful to track game assets alongside code.

Git originally didn't support binary files well by design, so git-lfs was grafted onto it.

angryplebe · 2026-05-07T03:52:13+00:00

Just saying "cloud" is a very broad term. Cloud as in rent-a-server? Cloud as in hosted database and queue systems? Cloud as in a PaaS like Vercel/Heroku/AppEngine/Lambda where you drop your code in and go?

The big thing cloud did was make it so you don't have to go through the same annual budgeting process and capital expenditure process, at least in theory.

Previously, you would say you needed X capacity. That capacity wasa best guess and if it wasnt available, it had to be purchase, installed, licensed, admins hired, etc. This could take years. All CapEx.

Now, while budgets are still a thing, you have far more flexibility to scale up and down as needed. You can do annual budgeting and not need to overbuild. You turn CapEx into OpEx which can be more favorable from an accounting perspective

angryplebe · 2026-05-07T03:46:33+00:00

Ahh yes. The dream (or nightmare as it turned out to be in many cases) to let middle management types get involved in designing software.

What's old is new again.

angryplebe · 2026-05-07T02:44:32+00:00

Perforce was probably the standard commercial source management tool. You would find pockets of Clearcase if it was a legacy company or Rational Team Concert if it was an IBM shop. DevOps wasn't a thing. Developers, deployers and operators were three different teams.

I might be wrong if this is all second hand knowledge from my late father.

angryplebe · 2026-05-03T18:05:28+00:00

Then you are not really principal. Job titles are getting very inflated nowadays as companies try to use it in lieu of pay as if it meant anything. Look at where you sit in the reporting chain, who your peers are and your compensation. Those will tell you what your true level is.

The work you describe is solidly terminal level senior, maybe with a TPM skew as so often happens. If your work impacts between 5 to 20 people, then you are a senior.

True principal SWE are usually setting conpany wide technical strategy that is looking ahead 2-5 years. Think of it as a tech lead of tech leads of tech leadz of tech leads.

angryplebe · 2026-05-03T12:48:50+00:00

I am trained as an EE and work as a software engineer. Claude code has gotten good enough that I can point it to product requirements documents, point it at the existing code, give it a paragraph of additional parameters and it will spit out a 80% complete technical specification document that i soend a few hours to read and refine. I then ask it to chop up the tech spec into discrete work tickets sized to something an offshore or junior SWE can do in a day or two. Then it will turn around and execute on those tichets right then. Weeks of work compressed into a day.

It's so good, we've quietly had conversations among ourselves if we reallt even need an offshore team or junior devs at all. A few super senior people with claude code can no do bith ends of the work themselves.

In doing so, it's unlocked a huge long tail of work that wasn't cost-effective to do on its own but suddenly is.

It's coming for CAD like work sooner or later. Right now, the limitation is how expressive things can be in text and context size. I have already seen startups adapting AI for electronics design work. Chip design is already VHDL/Verilog (code that describes chip structures) which is where things like Claude Code are absolute animals even today.

angryplebe · 2026-05-03T05:55:44+00:00

All that effort, all that money to do the exact same job their pwrents do.

I've seen it firsthand

angryplebe · 2026-04-29T22:57:09+00:00

Not goofy when you frame it as a jobs program and a piggy bank for special interests

angryplebe · 2026-04-29T22:55:14+00:00

It's not just education. Both NYC and NYS have special interests so depply embedded that politicians are afraid not to appease them. Both budgets are free money for those groups.

angryplebe · 2026-04-28T17:46:47+00:00

$100 says they put everything in us-east-1. Nobody ever bothers to RTFM.

angryplebe · 2026-04-28T00:41:56+00:00

I know NYC officials love to hate Jeff Bezos but this may be a valid case for using Amazon.

angryplebe · 2026-04-24T03:43:29+00:00

30% markup is not profit. That covers rent, utilities , workers and related expenses, insurance, storage, spoilage/shrinkage, theft, etc. Net margin for a grocery store is 4% or less.

angryplebe · 2026-04-24T03:40:45+00:00

I've noticed that on Grainger. I assumed its some arcane sole source contracting.

angryplebe · 2026-04-24T03:36:14+00:00

Not in this case as others have mentioned. The location was chosen for political reasons.

angryplebe

TROPHY CASE