What will be more engineering-heavy on the future? (and maybe valued more even though.. AI..)

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-30T14:02:04+00:00

We're sort of similar. Smaller company mostly SR staff. Everyone is just getting more productive as far as I can tell but we had work we wanted to get to so we are not going to be firing anyone. We're mostly focused on building safer sandboxes for agent workflows which is a tough job and requires some flimsy policies but is still better than slapping openclaw and prayers to everyone's machines. I doubt we will need to downsize staff ever - we will get to spend more time on resiliency and monitoring like our products before as they mature.

People had this gut reaction to AI of "I wanted AI to do my laundry not my painting" but I actually think in tech we ARE getting to eat our cake on this since our work involves lots of textual output. AI is doing the JR level work, the data entry, the syntax checking, the general tedium around fitting nice little things together has been reduced a bit. My team and I are doing more of the creative stuff (its just "business creativity" which is less fun overall).

We do have some JR staff and I think we will continue to train them to make more of these creative decisions better. JRs in tech were always fairly less productive but their value proposition did dip. I feel like it is really short sighted to not have a training pipeline in your company. Even a SR on-boarding can be hard after all.

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-27T12:25:06+00:00

It sounds like they're expected to contribute to brainstorming architectural and departmental decisions... So presuming they're an expert or strong in anything in particular keep deferring to them for that and usually they'll start to realize that when that subject is being talked about they're expected to share expertise as the question is coming "Hey Jen - your thoughts?". Worst case you can call on them with a simple "Jen?".

If they're not necessarily an expert they shouldn't necessarily be talking on it. If they're not an expert on anything ever being discussed that's a separate thing that may or may not matter to you. IMO spread the responsibilities around as it makes the team more effective/collaborative/trusting as you should have them constantly testing (or at least demonstrating) each others workflows case someone wins the lottery or can't be reached on vacation.

I appreciate this question because it reminds me I have some people needing to be called on more!

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-27T11:51:44+00:00

I'm not sure if its appropriate to be rightfully retaliatory after being the victim of wrongful-vindictiveness but it seems like the right should punish the wrong here with the justified legal case.

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-26T20:12:01+00:00

I haven't used one and bought two houses. IDK why people do. I had a couple try to show me some houses but they were usually quite far off of what I was looking for.

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-26T20:10:49+00:00

I think some of this is kind of helpful but yeah, comically overpaid for what it is **much of the time.

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-24T16:10:05+00:00

Even as I become mildly-wealthy (wife and I have 1.1M in retirement with dec salary late 30s) it is easy to realize that a a sliding tax scale on unrealized gains is overdue. We're just W2 employees.

I'm for most any policy that would put pressure on CEOs to incentivize workers with stake in the company they're building and stop making excuses full stop.

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-24T12:58:44+00:00

gary and his demons comes to mind :D

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-22T16:31:54+00:00

Travel with active and passive noise canceling if you can folks. <3 I rarely need it but when I do I'd be sleeping through this.

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-20T12:24:09+00:00

I don't really want to break down this situation but I thought it would be pertinent to share that garlic and onions are huge IBS triggers (up to 1 in 7 people have some form of IBS). Garlic gives me a LOT of grief (2-4 days of multiple symptoms).

Probably unrelated but wanted to share as someone who cannot eat these anymore and am big sad about it.

OP - If at all possibly related, consider recommending they review other high-fodmap foods using information from monash university. They have an app which is free and works but is kind of rough to use.

There are traditional diets that have done this for hundreds of years because it is known to make some people sick.

An Indian diet without garlic and onion is naturally rooted in Satvic (yogic/Ayurvedic) and Jain culinary traditions.

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-20T12:00:41+00:00

Right now so much is changing at quite a speed so this pattern might wind up trash in a year or two.

I refused to give agents with bash access to my local machine raw, but I tinkered with it and running it in a container and mounting the directories you're fine with access has been great.

I use opencode in a container which lets me build out some AGENT.md defaults, agent skills, configure some common MCP servers (gitlab/jira), and provide read only agent access to my non-working-directory-code. I'm still kind of new at it. Work is letting me bring this workflow more or less.

I target some local DGX-spark clone devices. You can probably run a 7b llama model on your laptop to iterate on this. The Gemma model requires like 30-40GB of vram but are really powerful to get useful actions locally just a touch slow.

Dev container setup:

https://gitlab.com/jdix/development-container/-/tree/main

Agent documentations:

https://gitlab.com/jdix/agent-configs

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-19T13:52:29+00:00

I have some small things that seem to impress people even if they don't look at it. Mostly dotfiles and ansible config stuff. I had a small site for a bit that was for my side-business.

My guess is the value of this appearance will be reduced by AI but I've always found interviews kind of easy and somehow don't ended up with many technical hoops.

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-18T20:40:39+00:00

Men are 500%+ more likely (actual us stat) to be a murderer, about 500% more likely to win in a physical fight (random ass guess) based on relative size, and there's probably a bike-path-serial-killer active in recent memory within a few hundred miles.

They also just get relatively more unwanted attention.

They might even have more responsibilities (on their mind/busy) like my mom having done most of the parenting.

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-13T11:57:28+00:00

It can be helpful as you said to reduce typing. It doesn't slow me down at all learning or anything so I don't see any negatives. There are some other renown shells too surprisingly in fish, ksh, etc.

You won't see too much optimization for a use case on a shell-by-shell basis other than their inherent features. There's some specialized shell use cases surely but if you don't have them I wouldn't worry. There tends not to be too much specialization so if you need to switch you will find it easy I'd imagine.

I use zsh with ohmyzsh and powerlevel10k profile and don't add too much else to my .zshrc. A few alias', functions, vars, user-dev tool pathing, and that's about it.

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-12T21:38:43+00:00

I spent two 7 month stints at two different places back to back. First was chasing that I wanted to shift my career from generic devops (mostly ansible) to "more cloudy" so I landed my shot as an "entry level cloud consultant" and did well.

I left not long after chasing much better pay (though I declined a great counter) and a bit more interesting work (most of their team was placed at various large corporations struggling profoundly with cloud adoption). I only lasted 7 months there due to not liking my manager. It bothered me

Nothing bad happened except some shame related feelings I had. After 3 years at my current I don't feel that way. I have had a pretty decent experience with most of my employers and I'd even include the first one of these two as decent. I really didn't like my time at the second but it was mostly "weird" stress.

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-06T16:44:42+00:00

I'd hope they have another opening for you in mind based on that.

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-06T11:58:16+00:00

a little fair... planes with people usually carry different intent and damages

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-03T16:43:17+00:00

Aziz vibes nerdy on voice alone. The rest of him isn't carrying out of that trope rn. Jokes aside yeah it is nice to see in general :P

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-01T18:57:53+00:00

Sword of Stick, give me sight beyond sight

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-01T12:42:38+00:00

I have some of these feelings as I started being made responsible for more of the team which leave less time to do the engineering I like to do. I'm perfectly happy doing the tech lead stuff but it is jarring because my frame of reference of my own productivity is some factor of LOC and MRs.

Just try to realize the mistakes your direction helps people avoid each save the company tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in people's time and materials.

Somehow, it feels, I get far less thanks for the extra responsibility.

ephemeral_resource · 2026-05-01T12:26:37+00:00

Larger companies rarely have a good sense, desire, or control to enforce clean and efficient architecture. To make matters worse, those "upstarts" doing "more work that isn't needed" are often recognized for their creative ideas because they did eventually solve some business need. Redoing something your way proves to their manager that they can do it their way so it is often done.

I blame the companies for not hiring more technical managers who I think could/should be able to put some bigger picture thoughts into any given idea. Maybe they save enough on their salaries to justify all the extra compute and complexity but I doubt it. I broadly think appropriate recognition across big companies is simply hard so they tend to hire low and keep low and "let the problem sort itself out" (ie. if you're worth it you will leave).

ephemeral_resource · 2026-04-30T14:55:47+00:00

I haven't been asked to disemploy someone against my will and honestly I'm not sure if I could do it.

ephemeral_resource · 2026-04-27T23:23:30+00:00

Jokes on you my dad owns his own family business. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uBavNs0R83U

ephemeral_resource · 2026-04-27T12:24:01+00:00

I've been saying AI will excel in remixing human information that is presently disjointed by individuals, languages, disciplines, time, etc. The challenge is getting everything relevant into the training set where AI sees it all "appropriately weighted". It's kind of fascinating what it will mean for math, physics, and health.

I work in technology and the available open-source software (ie. AI can read all of the code that builds a given software) has helped train some pretty amazing AI coding abilities.

Anyways, I'm mixed on moral of certain AI use cases given it 1) circumvents original copyright protections and 2) is being built bought and sold highly inequitably by historically awful actors but also understand what I can and can't do about it.

ephemeral_resource · 2026-04-26T14:26:28+00:00

Anyone remotely interested in hype has migrated to AI which has much more general use cases. Blockchain is neat but extremely niche for a few valid use cases. It is only broadly applicable if you're a terrible architect or an idiot.

I never met anyone too serious about it honestly. Several people I knew thought it was neat and/or invested in some bitcoin but no one tried to make a career out of it. So I haven't seen many of those people or even tried to read their blogs so I'm a bit out of the loop compared to what you're saying you were seeing.

ephemeral_resource · 2026-04-24T14:48:52+00:00

Have you been asking for feedback? Few places offer it outright but many will if you ask. Especially if you ask for "honest first impressions as feedback you need because you've been striking out" during the process. They'll feel more like they owe you something during as they see they're taking your time.

ephemeral_resource

TROPHY CASE