Alex Raihelgaus

Forget all the reasons why it won't work and believe the one reason why it will.

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

In private conversations I have with Founders and tech leads, they share similar insights.

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

Notes on 100+ Recent Technical Interviews

I interview a ton of engineers. Recruiting is the single most important technical CEO activity. Here are a bunch of impressions

1. There is a severe ZIRP engineering overhang that is currently washing out. They're getting laid off, managed out, etc. after having been massively overhired around 2020-2022. This is worst for Tier-2 big tech (think PayPal, Bill, etc.) but also FAANGs. These are overwhelmingly bad engineers.

2. This flood of unqualified but good-on-paper candidates makes this the hardest SF hiring market I have ever seen, due to the amount of nominally strong-looking candidates that you need to grind through.

3. I am highly skeptical of "AI as a cause for engineering layoffs". I think this is a large-scale polite fiction -- the companies don't want to admit they overhired, the engineers don't want to admit they are bad at their jobs. Everyone's blaming AI when it's really just the market rectifying itself.

4. Many of these engineers appear never to have had a real engineering function at their corporations. They're sitting in meetings, "making decisions about technology" but are unable to write software. I leave many interviews baffled by what exactly they were doing for so many years, let alone what their manager was doing.

5. I have interviewed some engineers from FAANG companies so shockingly nontechnical that I am forced to conclude that there is either (1) a lot of resume fraud going on or (2) that there are kickback grifts within those organizations -- people hiring their cousins and splitting the pay, that kind of thing. I have no other explanation.

6. There's a fun side-effect where after interviewing 20+ people from certain small but public companies, I actually feel like I am gaining a short sellers' advantage: there are financial technology companies out there that, knowing what I now know, I would never deposit a single dollar into.

8. Based on this "exhaust" data, and extrapolating a little bit, maybe aggressively so: I think folks like @pmarca are basically right when they say that ~every tech company is overstaffed by a factor of 2-4x. Whatever the reason -- staffing ahead of need, monopolizing certain engineer types (Google-style), headcount-driven promotion incentives, the reality is that a lot of these companies are not being run for the shareholders. The aggregate SBC expense is insane, and I expect this is going to get rectified eventually.

I'm sure that AI will play a role in rectifying this -- but I fear that people are going to blame AI for taking people's jobs when the reality is that the jobs were already long-gone, possibly always useless, but the highly-paid butts-in-seats remained. People will be mad at AI for taking away their lucrative sinecures. Maybe that's the same effect from a public policy perspective, but it feels different morally.

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

in most orgs I've walked through in the past year: 6x more code, 2-3x more bugs, 0 ownership of the workflow.

AI doesn't need more capability.

It needs the same boring infrastructure you'd give any senior hire - a spec, a review gate, a quality bar, and a named owner.

Until that exists, the speed isn't speed.
It's compounding rework.

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

You wouldn't hire a senior engineer, hand them a laptop, and say, "go build whatever, no specs, no review, no standards."

But that's exactly how most teams are deploying AI right now.

The result, >>>

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

Forget anything you know about anything

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

@rotempe4 או תשלם...
זה לא שלא מקבלים תמורה

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

seriously, F you @Google .
I want to sign in, my ipad is not near me, my phone is, my computer, my everything is, just not the bloody ipad, why won't you let me in!!!!!
How can you be so awful at that.

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

Textual summary -
https://t.co/eIV5nrIjXh

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

Textual summary - https://t.co/eIV5nrIjXh

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

@rotempe4 מיד אחרי שיסיימו את נושא קיפול המפתחים

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

@rotempe4 יש לך בן חכם.
והוא הסביר לך בצורה מאוד יפה שזה שיש בינה מלאכותית, זה לא אומר שאין לאנשים צרכים ורצונות אחרים.
בינה זה כלי, לא תחליף

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

Noticed that the terminal takes forever to start up recently?
Installed openclaw recently?

Check it out -

https://t.co/E1oLytWjJS

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

@rotempe4 יש אחלה אחלה אחלה פתרונות לזה, ברח לי השם מהראש, סומך עליך שאתה יודע להריץ חיפוש, יש כלים מהמממים

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

@Yan_Yanko אז ככה נראית קנאה

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

@Apple does everything in their power to make us hate them.
I own an MBP M1 Max.
Was thinking about upgrading to M5/M6.

But no, I will not pay money to a company that does everything to force me into their crappy ecosystem.

I don't want your fucking 5,000$ monitors.
Assholes.

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

And the classic
"You got a sex?", to a female.

[Dr. Clown, PhD @DrClownPhD]

Been there, done that! 😂

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

https://t.co/2JBD6s5nzI

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

Was the API on port 4323 or 4321?"

I got tired of this mental arithmetic every time I switched projects.

Now I just type https://t.co/RPQ9E2Gqxa.localhost. No ports. No guessing. Green padlock.

The trick: Caddy + *.dev.localhost wildcard routing.

5 minutes to set up. Never think about ports again.

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

@theamelia__ That's what educated people call "add 40%"

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

@rotempe4 מלמדים, פשוט אנשים לא מבינים שזה מה שהם לומדים והמלמדים לא מבינים שזה מה שהם מלמדים.

בבית ספר מלמדים אותנו לפתור בעיות מילוליות.
זה ב-ד-י-ו-ק המנגנון הזה.
לקרוא. לנתח, לפשט ולמדל, לראות איזה כלים עומדים לרשותנו ולבחור את הכלים הנכונים.

לצערי הרב, זה עובר מתחת לרדאר.

[Alex Raihelgaus @ar7casper]

Cursor gave us the VS Code experience we know plus AI superpowers. Then reality hit. I wrote a blog post on why the tool that exploded AI coding adoption also killed developer trust—and what actually works better.

https://t.co/TJyaPjOvIy