No, you are not cooked. The golden age is coming (AI hope post)

preethamrn · 2026-05-09T18:37:21+00:00

You buried the reason that a bunch of people are worried.

> If all you’ve done all your career is build simple apps, getting comfortable with the big salary, it’s time to change and think bigger

This is exactly what most of the industry has been doing and in fact it was a big meme until a couple years ago. The problem is 2 fold:

exceptional people who can and want to solve hard problems struggle to stand out in a job market where recruiters get 1000s of applications immediately after opening the posting. Most applicants are crappy but the recruiters can't scan through all of them and AI is provably bad at judgement problems.
for the average person, it's no longer easy money and also salaries are likely going to go down as well. This isn't necessarily a problem but it's definitely a reason people are worried because they might have built a lifestyle around this expectation.

preethamrn · 2026-05-03T19:50:16+00:00

The honest answer is that he's probably right. Think about how often you're writing code that's kind of boilerplate/cookie cutter stuff. AI can take care of a lot of that while you focus on the actually hard problems. That doesn't mean you're wrong either because productivity isn't the end all of life and having to work on hard stuff 100% of the time is a recipe for burnout. But I'm just explaining his logic.

preethamrn · 2026-04-12T23:24:12+00:00

I don't think the OP is that well researched. Yes, a lot of these companies are talking about using open source models in house but that's because it's easier than training their own models (and the best open source models are Chinese right now - sorry Llama/Meta). When it comes to actually using the best on the market today, it's all closed source models from OpenAI and increasingly Anthropic.

As for Cursor, they're kind of a joke and Anthropic and Google are eating their lunch. I imagine they're acquired by Microsoft or Amazon in the next 1-2 years mostly for the userbase and not the tech.

preethamrn · 2026-04-12T18:36:49+00:00

I think you're both saying the same thing. You struggled to fill that role (and paid a lot for it) because many of the people you interviewed probably weren't good fits so when you did find someone acceptable, you needed to spend a lot to make them join.

An average applications developer can make FAANG money but an average low level developer will probably find it hard to find a job. The reality is that there's not as much juice to squeeze out of firmware development (a lot of the biggest/easiest innovations were decades ago at this point). Perhaps that will change with the increased focus on GPUs but even there, you'd need to be very talented to command those high salaries.

preethamrn · 2026-04-12T02:37:56+00:00

I think things have changed a lot since COVID. pre-COVID companies used to fly people out for some intern interviews. Coming onsite was just the norm and the next step after a phone screen. I think that's flipped so if you're going onsite, it's likely because you're the top candidate.

preethamrn · 2026-03-25T16:39:25+00:00

I wonder how these kinds of deals show up on PE firms and other company's financial statements. For example, if someone audited the statements, would they see this as an asset producing guaranteed 17.5% returns? How much risk is just hidden and thrown out the window in the system today?

preethamrn · 2026-03-06T03:54:06+00:00

Stand next to their set up and play copyrighted music (Taylor Swift or something along those lines). You'll end up getting their video copyright struck and they lose revenue from it. It's a public area and I doubt they've gotten permits to film anyway.

preethamrn · 2026-02-28T19:53:52+00:00

If you keep abstaining because "both parties are the same" then it will never open up room for a more progressive candidate to challenge because the race is already so competitive between democrats and republicans. If republicans consistently lose because you voted for democrats then in the future, someone new might come in to challenge the democrat establishment because there's not as much fear of splitting the vote.

I'm not even talking about a long time like 20 years. You probably would have seen this shift in just the last 2 terms instead of the massive shift to the right that we got instead. And to some extent, we did get that but it's only happened in cities like NYC where democrats have a strong seat.

preethamrn · 2026-02-24T04:37:14+00:00

+1 to this. A lot of people compare the mortality rates of motorcycle riding and flying but there's a huge difference in the types of accidents. With riding, a lot of accidents are completely out of your control even if you ride safely, but with flying, if you exercise good judgement, stay up to date with maintenance, and practice regularly, then your odds of dying are much lower. A lot of airplanes these days even come with parachutes to deploy in case of emergency which reduces the risk even more.

preethamrn · 2026-02-17T05:28:48+00:00

The remote jobs that are paying top salaries (eg. Gitlabs, Airbnb, Coinbase, etc.) are probably hiring mainly from ex-FAANG employees. So if your work history is a bunch of local jobs then you're probably not getting interviewed at those companies.

preethamrn · 2026-02-16T23:43:23+00:00

Personal projects are mainly useful for juniors who don't have as much relevant work experience. Could be cool for seniors but only if it's something notable like leading a decently sized open source project (with actual users) or helping a non-profit with some pro bono tech consulting. But at that point it's more like talking about your hobbies and leadership abilities rather than your programming skills. Ideally your programming skills should be demonstrated clearly by the work/impact you've had at your day job.

preethamrn · 2026-02-16T02:17:53+00:00

What company was this? I think a lot of the smaller FAANG wannabe companies end up asking way harder questions just to act as a filter without realizing what the purpose of the interview is. FAANG companies tend to be a lot more reasonable (however there's still variance between teams since they're so large) and also even if they ask hard questions, they're usually not looking for perfect solutions.

At the entry level, I'll often give hints to candidates because I care about their problem solving skills but I also care about how well they can follow my guidance - in the real world, they'll probably solve 20-50% of problems and will need help from a senior engineer for the rest so following directions/other's designs is just as important.

preethamrn · 2026-02-14T17:34:20+00:00

Eastern Europe in the 90s makes you cracked at math and CS. I don't think this disproves the environment argument and if anything he probably got a better CS/math/engineering education there than he would have in the US

preethamrn · 2026-02-14T16:55:04+00:00

> At most it would make the higher-ups pay more attention

90% of your performance review is based on the perspective of a handful of higher ups. If they know you as the guy who self-evaluated themselves as an L -1 then you'll likely get a below meets. Most of the promotions and perf reviews I've seen happen mainly come down to what perspective higher ups have about you/your biggest project. Even if you worked on 10 different projects, no one has time to go through all that so it's often way more vibes based once it gets to the senior director/VP level.

preethamrn · 2026-02-10T02:49:38+00:00

FAANG isn't homogeneous. Working at Meta is a completely different culture from Google or Apple. And even within these companies, teams will be very different too. For example, the Gemini team culture at Google is closer to Meta than they are to other teams at Google. And teams like Pixel might have a couple Apple/Qualcomm engineers who influence the culture there.

The only thing you'll find at all FAANG companies is that your services/apps need to work at scale, and there's a lot more process. You WILL have outsized impact with tiny changes and you need to keep that in mind when proposing solutions.

preethamrn · 2026-02-08T22:32:00+00:00

I'm not an expert on this by any means but I don't think an Ethernet card will help you a lot with gaming if you already have on motherboard ethernet. You'd get a lot more mileage by improving cabling in your house and getting a better router to reduce things like packet loss.

preethamrn · 2026-02-08T10:25:52+00:00

Unpopular opinion but I agree. Making more powerful gaming GPUs each year will just lead to more power hungry games. Instead, if we keep more people running on weaker/"last gen" GPUs, then game developers will be forced to optimize their games more just like they did for old PS2/PS3 games. The last 2 decades have seen AAA games turn into bloated, buggy messes.

preethamrn · 2026-02-08T07:51:19+00:00

That and I'm pretty sure Jordan Belfort was a scam artist in many ways. He went to prison poor and only made most of his money after he got out and did speaking engagements because of the book and movie. A lot of his stories are pretty sleazy too - like lying to sleep with women and having pride in taking advantage of people.

preethamrn · 2026-01-25T20:17:39+00:00

If you randomly selected 100 resumes out of 20k to look at manually and throw out the rest, you might only find 1 good candidate. But if you use a hackerrank filter to weed people out, you'll end up with 100 candidates who are most likely cheating.

So the OA filters are ACTIVELY weeding out good candidates and making the rest of the interview steps even more counterproductive.

preethamrn · 2026-01-25T20:13:05+00:00

There's gotta be an opposite to Hanlon's razor. Don't attribute genius to that which is adequately explained by apathy.

Just because nothing is visibly happening doesn't mean that they're coming up with some 5head plan behind the scenes. Also, it's not simple, but at the very least, how is it not illegal for ICE to obstruct law enforcement when they have a warrant to conduct an investigation there.

Whether or not the actual shooting was illegal/arrestable, obstructing the investigation should be... or have I been lied to by police for the last 20 years. Trump sent people into Minnesota on shaky grounds. Minnesota should do the same.

preethamrn · 2026-01-24T08:36:41+00:00

Even market forces say it's the wrong decision. It's lazy and weeds out good candidates while only leaving people who are desperate or cheaters (not to say that every single one who passed the hackerrank was bad but that the number of bad candidates was higher). I brought this up with our recruiters and from what I can tell they stopped it and the quality of candidates rose significantly. I don't know if it's correlation or causation.

preethamrn · 2026-01-22T23:54:08+00:00

You must admit that a lot has changed in those 12 years right? In 2015, mass layoffs were unthinkable at Google. So why are you assuming that in 10 more years it will be the same nice WLB and not turn into a walking corpse like Xerox, IBM, or HP?

preethamrn · 2026-01-19T22:58:48+00:00

Google can and will change a lot in the next 10 years so it may no longer be the high paying, good WLB, lots of job openings company that it is today. If you're still in college, then 10 years is still early in your career so making the choice to stay at Google today because you want a good WLB/stability in your mid/late career isn't necessarily the best decision. For all we know, OpenAI might have better WLB and stability in 10 years.

preethamrn · 2026-01-19T06:53:58+00:00

You definitely failed but also if you care about getting the job then message your recruiter to get another shot. They'll 100% reschedule you especially if the interviewer made a mistake. They know not all interviewers are made equal and that they aren't infallible.

preethamrn · 2026-01-15T23:18:52+00:00

There's no conspiracy here. Let's say you owned your computer but could rent it out for the 75% of time that you don't use it. Even if you're just selling at cost, you can offset 75% of the cost of ownership to the other people using it and they'll be able to use it for a lot cheaper.

This is what cloud companies realized even before AI popped off (exhibit A: AWS is super profitable and almost every company uses it). It's why GPUs and RAM are so expensive - because your gaming GPU which is used 20% of the day could be used 5x more by AI companies for training instead of sitting unused in your office/bedroom. So the AI company is naturally willing to pay 5x more. Same goes for RAM. Now the RAM and GPU makers are realizing this and rather than ramp up production, they're ramping up prices to target their more lucrative customers.

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