The software industry has gone through a lot of changes in my lifetime. When I entered college, most universities still didn’t have real computer science departments – they were just tucked inside math or electrical engineering as a sub-specialty. The web exploded a few years later, which led in turn to an explosion in non-technical designers […]

The business model is well-understood – the same as any casino or street corner hustler: get the user addicted, then raise the price. But AI is at such a different scale, what with their estimated seven trillion dollar infrastructure needs and – until now – dime bag pricing. So how are they going to pay for all that? […]

There’s a guy I used to work with. He was well-liked, articulate, friendly, but there was this one weird little thing, almost like a vocal tic. If you asked him a question about anything, he’d say, “I have no idea,” then confidently state an answer. “I have no idea. Average monthly growth last year was […]

McDonald’s is objectively delicious. Kids don’t clamor for quarter pounders, fries, and shakes because they’re cheap or convenient. They demand it because it’s the end result of decades of A/B testing to create the perfect combination of fat, salt, carbs, and animal in order to drive the greatest possible sales over the widest audience for […]

Alice completes half as many story points as anyone else on the team. She uses TDD and has never shipped a bug. Her code is clean, easy to review, easy to maintain, and she’s never caused an outage. Is she slow? Bob completes twice as many story points as anyone else on the team. His […]

I believe that this design is better – no need to A/B test. I think that users will like this feature – we can just roll it out. I know what users will respond to, so we can just use this ad copy. In the old days we trusted our gut – after all, we were experienced experts […]

Being a software engineer these days is weird. We used to think that we were the stars of the global economy, impossible to hire without crazy perks and ridiculous packages, but then the Zero Interest Rate Period ended and we realized it was all a mirage bought with cheap money. Now, everyone from high school […]

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague after my last post, about whether it was possible to get the best of both worlds, or if any new tool would necessarily make you dumber. And I had to stop and think – what was it about an IDE with autocomplete that seemed unobjectionable, while LLM-based […]

Having kids is weird. Here are these human beings, with their own interests, likes and dislikes, and absolutely no knowledge. I mean yes, over time they build up experiences, but they start out with literally nothing. You have to teach them how to go to the bathroom, how to use a knife and fork, how […]

There’s a joke I like to tell my teams. Senior engineers nod in gruff acknowledgement, and junior engineers tend to laugh nervously and nod with (I hope) enlightenment. It goes like this: If you’ve been working on a piece of code for a while, and it works the first time you run it, junior engineers […]