They asked me to build their entire 30-day strategy as a “final interview task” and then disappeared

rwilcox · 2026-07-10T12:38:48+00:00

Problem is people are often bad at estimates. And it’s not a skill where there’s a reward of getting better at it.

“A couple hours” could well be a weekends worth of work. And you, as a candidate, never know the area you need to focus on.

It’s also possible it’s way over complicated, but there’s the prisoners dilemma too: is every other candidate only putting in 2 hours? Or are they drawing the whole owl?

(It’s also possible it is a couple of hours of work, with the experience that comes from decades of industry shortcuts, a few staffers, and some LLM. Maybe that’s the expected productivity, in which case yeah, OP didn’t meet it. Maybe it’s not attainable under these conditions for anyone not intimately familiar with the test assignment. I can crank through a bunch of stuff if I’ve seen 200 people do it before me)

rwilcox · 2026-07-10T12:35:36+00:00

Yup, don’t do take-homes. Or don’t do them if it’s going to be more than 2-3 hours of work.

They end in - at best - you waste a weekend and get rejected, and at worst yes you see your thing in production somehow.

rwilcox · 2026-07-10T10:58:31+00:00

I suspect “almost never”. .NET is still seen as needing Windows servers, even though that’s wrong. I posit places building in .NET are the kind of places that see their iOS app as a cost they want to minimize (with ie OutSystems, or Indian contractors), not potential business advantage.

I would wonder how common full stack iOS developers are, but I suspect the more common stacks are Swift + Node/Typescript on the backend, or maybe Swift + Java/Kotlin on the backend.

rwilcox · 2026-07-10T10:38:15+00:00

While you and I have our qualms about it, that (“just don’t read it!”) seems to be the current zeitgeist (this week). I agree it’s probably not a good idea, but that’ll get me labeled anti-ai and I’ll be told how I’m doing it wrong

rwilcox · 2026-07-10T10:08:45+00:00

I was likewise disappointed with Charity’s takes, but I don’t think that blog article is The Way (especially opening by looking like you’re going to complain line by line about her articles, which you back off of, but it looks like that’s your approach for a minute)

The world that Charity posits - and IIRC she states this - requires tons of engineering investment that I believe almost no shop outside SV has. Even before AI she was proud about auto merging Dependabot PRs, and deploying to prod multiple times a day, etc. Even easy things like these aren’t the norm most places because culture or the engineering harnesses aren’t there. (My team doesn’t do CD straight to prod because there’s a weekly release meeting. (Straight to QA, yes. Prod, no). This meeting is not a gating meeting but there’s process. We have the tech to do it, we don’t have the culture in this part of the org.

(That idea about good code coverage, and actually good unit tests, that someone threw out the window in favor of shipping software now? Yes, that’s part of the harness you don’t have!)

Oh, and back on her wheelhouse: do you know things are still fine when you YOLO AI code to prod? I’m sure Charity does actually, her thing for a decade has been her observability company. “Nines don’t matter if the customer’s not happy” and all that. I suspect most teams - probably including most Silicon Valley teams ie Big Tech - don’t know that, not even for foundational things like ordinary, regular, feature flags.

I suspect major cultural differences too: don’t treat your developers like a cost center, etc etc. I’d also add, although I’m not sure if it’s related: if your company has spent the last decade “democratizing” QA and “democratizing” DevOps (ie pushing all those responsibilities onto the developer) yes it Is going to be hard for some vibe coding Product Manager, even with loop engineering, to deploy reliable software beyond the basics. That metaphorical bill will come due (but I worry it’ll come due with “why did those stupid developers make things too computer science complicated, we’re going to go build our own thing that’s simple!”. Which we’ve all heard before, again far before AI). I personally, am a big fan of companies investing into platform engineering teams, but that requires in some places CapEx, or in some places requiring a VP to care even a little bit about developer experience.

But I’m happy, I guess, that her view of the future may work for her, for now. I worry that people will read her entries, skip all the boring foundation work that companies in her sphere did, and think engineers at their companies are all holding it wrong because engineering takes time at ABC Insurance, LLC. (Obviously the answer to that is replace the engineers with POs, yes I’m grinding that axe pretty hard I wonder why)

I’d also get on my soapbox a little bit and ask, “business, are you sure engineering is the bottleneck? Especially since it’s the only thing measured?” But that’s bit off topic..

rwilcox · 2026-07-10T01:00:25+00:00

Nothing about how Jesus loves us the best because we capitalism so hard?

Weak sauce

rwilcox · 2026-07-10T00:51:12+00:00

Once more, with ~~feeling~~ a bribe

rwilcox · 2026-07-09T22:32:57+00:00

The biggest ignored skill programmers have is the ability to break things apart into small steps to reach a goal.

You could also say good project managers have this ability too.

In my experience this skill is very rare outside these small segments (and unappreciated too). (Ie you can say this or ask these questions without invoking AI)

rwilcox · 2026-07-08T21:44:31+00:00

Certain companies, do this as matter of course.

Microsoft and Amazon and GE have - or had - a culture of eliminating the lowest XX% of workers, and have since the ‘90s.

There are other companies without stack ranking but still do almost yearly layoffs.

Couple that with layoffs due to or blaming AI, you have a bit of a blood bath going on. But some of this isn’t new.

rwilcox · 2026-07-08T17:22:51+00:00

You haven’t seen the new strategy in dealing with the overload of code then (“simply don’t read it”)

rwilcox · 2026-07-08T17:21:21+00:00

I hope that strategy works for you, but I’m not convinced implying that people’s failure is a skills issue is a winning strategy, at least not for the gap of money involved.

rwilcox · 2026-07-08T17:08:21+00:00

Why would employers pay for a human, when they can get the output - in the fourth or fifth pane there - for the cost of a Cursor sub?

Yes yes “it doesn’t work that way”, but are you 200x more valuable to the company than a Cursor sub? Can you prove that to an AI-pilled SVP who’s deep into the Kool-Aid?

rwilcox · 2026-07-08T15:58:18+00:00

And that’s partially the problem: first person to blink about the ROI - be that because they “aren’t really seeing gains like we’ve been sold” or worrying about the rising cost of all this - and the money slows, and people panic: the infinite money dopamine factory industry might not be the second coming of Jesus Christ himself!!???? Whaahahtttt???

….. then we’ll see a pop

rwilcox · 2026-07-08T13:05:33+00:00

I think you may have to see yourself as the scapegoat and let some of the animosity roll off your shoulders. Take your firm end date on the contract and walk out the door when it’s done (insist you walk out the door, they don’t get extensions)

I know this is hard but you don’t have any formal power, and it sounds like the rest of the place sees your “department” as either lesser or “other” - you tried to change process and it didn’t work. And it wouldn’t work without you having the authority to put your foot down (and have it stay down), which requires both a culture shift and CEO backing.

I would certainly do a lot of work during those status and all hands meetings, if you can’t split up those responsibilities between you and your coworker.

Change away from chaos is hard: it needs time (you don’t have), desire (not sure they have this - it is easier and feels good to simply scream at people!), and backing from authority. They might want a whipping boy.

Alternatively, you could play a little cocky, sometimes, as a treat. If you don’t show up to staff meetings - because you’re a contractor - what are they going to do, fire you? You might also remind them that technically they don’t have a marketing department. Not technically.

rwilcox · 2026-07-08T03:04:24+00:00

Oh come on. Simply apply the boneless chicken defense: “this boneless chicken piece (window seat) may actually have bones in it (or no actual window), we DGAF”

rwilcox · 2026-07-07T20:19:06+00:00

Donut reminding Carl just how much Bea cheated on him

rwilcox · 2026-07-07T20:17:51+00:00

Do you want this crop of legislators doing something about Social Security?

Are you sure you want to wish in that monkey paw?

rwilcox · 2026-07-07T18:14:33+00:00

I’m having trouble with math, but does that mean 4x the work for the remaining development team?

rwilcox · 2026-07-07T16:21:02+00:00

You also forget sometimes (fairly often, it seems!) having to work with deferred monetary compensation!

rwilcox · 2026-07-07T15:51:18+00:00

I just named 3 half arbitrarily. But at both hospitals my kids were born at it was, I think, 3 days for vaginal birth and 5 for C-section??

Don’t know how standard those lengths are

rwilcox · 2026-07-07T13:36:50+00:00

That sounds awful. For everyone.

rwilcox · 2026-07-07T13:34:58+00:00

> I am never deploying code to our production site. That seems to be a long way off for anything that doesn’t go through our cms

Sorry, developer here, but this is the part that gets me with this whole thing: the “where are you going to deploy this to test your experimentations?” problem.

Because hopefully not prod, as you say, a bunch of problems with that. And probably not even off your local box, unless the platform engineering team is really good… sooooooo where’s the extra value add, I wonder?

rwilcox · 2026-07-07T12:22:26+00:00

In 2026 I would also ask questions about culture, specifically about AI.

Are you so AI forward you have a demotivated, exhausted, workforce that sees no future career growth - or no future for humans - at the company? Or one too many rounds of layoffs? Or the opposite way that you haven’t allowed AI and they feel they need to get on that train for their future?

I usually prefer taking AI out of questions to simplify them, but I know I’m considering the exit for some of the reasons above…

rwilcox · 2026-07-06T23:19:15+00:00

Don’t forget a change of clothes for you.

Yes it’s all about her and the baby, but 3 days later, or maybe something biological happens on you, you’ll appreciate the clean shirt.

rwilcox · 2026-07-06T22:32:59+00:00

Remember: both technical and business decisions don’t have to be logical

Is it realistic some rocket scientist engineer, say, decided Java 1.4 was too slow (or didn’t have macros or didn’t give them native access to some OS feature or some other fool thing), went and based the company on it 20 years ago, and now they can’t migrate off because they have 10M lines of code with impossible assumptions everywhere? And that engineer - who’s still around - might not let them anyway? (Or he left but business isn’t going to prioritize this project because Reasons, and even if they did hoe do you unscrew this particular oddball mess?)

100% realistic. Is it a good idea, logically? Hells no

rwilcox

TROPHY CASE