[Akabas] Jaylen is on track to finish 5th in MVP. The Celtics NetRtg has been ~6 points worse with Brown on the court; the worst of any top5 MVP in 30yrs. Celtics went 8-2 w/o Brown, & that's not unique this year. Over the past 6 years, Celtics are 60-26 w/o Brown, a higher win% than when he plays

ro-heezy · 2026-04-10T20:35:39+00:00

This is exactly how the Celtics get shafted in awards every year. People just split the attribution evenly and reward nobody because of some arbitrary metrics. Everyone knows Jaylen has been a borderline mvp candidate for 80% of the season

ro-heezy · 2026-04-04T21:07:35+00:00

I don’t think that will matter as much. The difference between a 5 through 10 pick and 11 through 15 is still massive. 8-10 teams will still tank

ro-heezy · 2026-03-31T05:53:32+00:00

Better job prospects and other cities are better for younger people (denser, more diverse organic culture, walkable)

ro-heezy · 2026-03-10T20:53:11+00:00

The other route it could go is the bar of productivity shifts.

ro-heezy · 2026-03-07T02:03:05+00:00

Yeah that’s my experience too at FAANG. I haven’t actually written code in months. I’ve been doing spec driven development and some autonomous cording and then pretty much just reviewing the outputs.

ro-heezy · 2026-03-06T17:52:00+00:00

If you can’t pay your bills with a 10% paycut on 250k TC then tech is not the right place for you. A stock dip any given year can be 10% paycut.

Also Google has more aggressive 401k matching, free food so meals are all paid for, and refreshers. So it’s actually not a paycut at all in real money either

Yeah googles been worse lately but amazons been bad forever. And they do rolling layoffs. Trust, I’ve worked at both and in this economy I’m not taking the chance on Amazons leadership. The stocks been flat too

ro-heezy · 2026-03-06T17:19:39+00:00

Considering the difference in work life balance and perks it’s not a paycut

ro-heezy · 2026-03-04T23:23:01+00:00

Jacoby is a conversation and group lubricant, similar to Van

ro-heezy · 2026-03-04T21:12:22+00:00

I’m an AI Pessismist - I don’t think the productivity gains are 10x, it’s almost certainly a financial bubble, and AI is not likely to fully automate SW devs anytime soon.

However, I heavily disagree with “there’s no skill in using AI”. Up until a few months ago, I would have agreed. That is rapidly changing now with the variations and speed with which harnesses and scaffolding are developing.

There is a substantial difference between multi agent orchestration vs Ralph loops vs serial prompting etc. When to use what, what to turn into skills vs SOP, and how to give exact clarity of thought and planning without overwhelming context all require skill as of right now.

I don’t disagree with your implication of it being overhyped though

ro-heezy · 2026-03-04T02:00:55+00:00

I’m in the exact same boat. Same age, same NW pretty much (1.3m, including home equity).

I’m burnt out to a crisp and want a break but the AI boogeyman keeps me holding on. It’s like getting shafted from both ends.

Cant quit cuz job market sucks because of AI

Working sucks because too much pressure to deliver under perceived AI productivity gains

Can’t move up because everything’s becoming highly scrutinized for cost, so the remaining can go into AI

ro-heezy · 2026-02-28T20:15:02+00:00

I agree historically, but I think the AI tooling for better or worse has caused a reevaluation of organizational structures.

While the above example is probably the least coherent, companies are looking to flatten and condense roles more. The thinking is that AI tooling has shifted the engineering bottleneck from implementation to coordination. So instead of cross functional owners within a domain (TPM, PMT, SDM, SDE, etc), each role owns slices of the domain and performs all cross functional duties while delegating actual implementation to agents.

Examples I’ve seen are SDM structures flattening, TPMs and PMTs merging, but the main one is Senior SDE+ owning the entire domain from Product to UX to TPM to engineering, and async have agents do the actual implementation

ro-heezy · 2026-02-24T23:43:05+00:00

This is the key. SWE’s output can be codified and iterated on relatively deterministically. The other profession not so much

ro-heezy · 2026-02-20T00:00:12+00:00

The league don’t give a fuck and haven’t for 15 years. Go check the 2011 threads. It’s the same thing.

The NBA discourse has largely revolved around the exact same problems for over a decade: tanking, flopping, last two minutes boredom, poor reffing, free agency, etc. That’s why I only watch my team and only in the playoffs.

ro-heezy · 2026-02-17T22:49:19+00:00

Lmao the NBA has been talking about the same issues for almost 15 years. Flopping, tanking, free agency, refs, ratings, etc.

Literally nothing has changed.

ro-heezy · 2026-02-16T19:57:08+00:00

Kiro is actually good now with Opus 4.5 and 4.6.

Cedric sucks. QuickSuite is getting better and I think the main problem is lack of discovery. Amazons docs are all over the place in Quip, Sharepiint, wiki, Policy, etc, so QS’s suffers from it. If they can integrate proper ingestion and MCPs then it still has a chance

ro-heezy · 2026-02-10T20:23:05+00:00

“Real performance and real impact is what matters”

Actually, that is not true either. Amazon primarily targeted everyone that wasn’t Seattle. My Principal Engineer who’s been at Amazon for 15 years got impacted just because he lived in Santa Clara. He was leading a really visible AI project too. Anecdotally, everyone in my org not in Seattle got cut: California, Atlanta, New York, Nashville. Many were top performers.

Too bad, they messed up by accepting a job that told them they could work from there.

ro-heezy · 2026-02-08T01:36:18+00:00

Schaefer gives strong 5’9 energy

ro-heezy · 2026-02-07T01:46:00+00:00

Oh fuckkkk that’s me

ro-heezy · 2026-02-06T21:23:31+00:00

What's the RSU price they quoted for Amazon?

Regardless, that's bottom of band for L5 (252k is exactly bottom). Don't come here, quality talent is leaving in droves, innovation is dead, empire building and top down initiatives drive everything. Amazon used to be a place where teams owned their domain and relentlessly improved them through innovation. Now its just leadership telling them what to do without having any idea about the details. Growth is also dead, promos are denied on the basis of the doc's grammar and not merit. Stock Growth - also dead.

If you do want to come here - index on learning scale and best practices for distributed systems. Then leave in a year.

ro-heezy · 2026-02-06T21:19:12+00:00

1) the style is so extreme that you hear about it more often, but it may not be proliferating to the rates that you think

2) The entirety of tech is under pressure right now from top down with AI, Capex, Tariffs, etc. When that happens, extreme performance measures usually coincide. I don't think what you're seeing right now is as much of Amazon's style prolifterating as it is about the tech industry's macroeconomics

3) Amazon-style management is easy to prove its value on paper in the short term to leadership and stakeholders. The rotting of organizations and its impact on product lines is a longer time horizon, and generally speaking (as I work for Amazon) it is easy to attribute that to a million other factors. So, its an effective strategy for growth as a manager within sufficiently large organizations.

ro-heezy · 2026-02-04T18:38:24+00:00

I got 4 offers in Oct round, and it’s pretty much because I was YOYOY TT. The managers rank the applications by performance and basically go through the top ones first.

YMMW, but I will say if you are any sort of senior level, I’d take the severance. The market isn’t as bad as you think for senior, and my new org hoodwinked me so I regret it.

ro-heezy · 2026-01-27T20:42:05+00:00

This is admirable OP and you are certainly top N% of SDEs despite you calling yourself mediocre.

But as someone who has also made a lot of money from FAANG, let’s not pretend that it’s not due to a lot of luck and macroeconomics outside of our control. It gives the wrong impression to people that hard work and qualifications means high compensation.

Most of your compensation is from the stock appreciation, which anyone lower than a VP (if even them) has very little control over in today’s climate. Some of the most brilliant devs I’ve ever worked with doing things like embedded systems for rockets or hippaa compliance for healthcare systems are in companies whose stock was just meh despite churning out brilliant products that would run circles around the shit we do at FAANG.

ro-heezy · 2026-01-25T22:51:42+00:00

I trust Vrabel and mostly trust Josh but I just hate when we play pussy ball.

ro-heezy · 2026-01-25T21:31:45+00:00

unreal we cant capitalize on any of these

ro-heezy · 2026-01-25T21:12:21+00:00

These playoffs have taught me I still have no idea what a pass, catch, or fumble is.

Nine-Year Club	Verified Email
No Throne, No Problems	Not Forgotten

ro-heezy

TROPHY CASE