Christian Grail

We will soon see horror stories of very expensive mistakes done by accepting code suggestions from AI coding tools - by people who believed "AI does better work than SWEs" Companies will soon learn the lesson that an SWE using AI coding tools >> a non-SWE using AI coding tools

A good reminder why you can pick up GenAI - and you probably should. Real story: Small company, 5 devs. Last time they hired was 12 years ago. AI comes out: company wants to add AI feature. But they don't have the expertise. So hire an AI agency. Agency spend 3 months planning:

"Leetcode-style / DSA / algorithmical interviews are useless and don't measure what's really expected on the job. They are also inefficient, and companies using these are hiring for the wrong people." Heard this SO many times. The responses almost always miss the point. I'll do a longer post one day, but a few thoughts: 1. YOU are not Big Tech. You probably don't have 1,000+ qualified applicants show up for an entry-level job posting and 100+ for a senior posting - in just a day or two, without advertising it 2. When a company gets large enough combined with #1, the game becomes not reducing false negatives but reducing false positives to zero 3. "LeetCode-style interviews are BS and don't measure what you do on the job." Yes. This is part of the reason. Guess what else is BS at Big Tech? A lot of stuff? Do you think people who are unwilling to put up with BS (that has historic context and can be internalized) would last at these companies? No: they would quit shortly or be pushed out as they refuse to do what everyone else does. These interviews conveniently self-select for people who can and do put up with BS 4. Career ladders. There is a notion that a Principal engineer should be as good or better than a new grad in every area - including algo coding. Like it or not, it's how it is 5. Technical managers. Many of these companies expect managers to pass the same bar. Like it or not, again: the reality is at these places many (probably all) line managers can code, and can do it very well. 6. Scalability of process. Have you ever had the challenge of onboarding 120 new interviewers in a month? Every quarter? These companies have this problem. 7. If it ain't broken: don't fix it. Look at the business results of Big Tech. If the interview process would be broken, it would show up in eg shipping slower and being outcompeted by competition etc. In reality: Big Tech is more nimble than ever. E.g. Threads, Copilot, Gemini etc. Their interview process works *for them* 8. You are probably not Big Tech and don't have to solve for this very distinct set of problems.

Asked @simonw what the biggest productivity boost has been, throughout his 20-year software engineer career. He answered, without hesitation: Open source. (Clip from @Pragmatic_Eng Podcast from the episode "AI tools for software engineers, but without the hype")