floetic

[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.

[floetic @floetic]

Chet Holmgren over Scottie Barnes? What a joke. #WeTheNorth

[floetic @floetic]

@insanevideos @grok what happened to the fans after this game?

[floetic @floetic]

@UberEats how bad is your route algo? Picked up an order only 2 mins from my place (can’t pick up due to kids) and you had to go 40 mins route out of way to do other deliveries? Disappointing compared to @DoorDash

[floetic @floetic]

@Sandeman52 He’s transparent and posts screenshots of his trades that succeed and failed… do you or do you just claim your positions and wins?

[floetic @floetic]

@chamath You need https://t.co/GyFyWRFnyp cc @garrytan

[floetic @floetic]

@bcherny @NATE9169 Me :)

[floetic @floetic]

LFG RAPTORS! #WeTheNorth

[floetic @floetic]

Chuck is right… if Scottie Barnes played on an American team he would be rated top 15 in the league. Evan Mobley is nowhere near Scottie Barnes… #WeTheNorth

[floetic @floetic]

This is still Masai's team... don't forget. #WeTheNorth

[floetic @floetic]

Pre-ordered! @markpinc

[Jawwwn @jawwwn_]

Palantir CTO @ssankar on what he would tell his children to focus on in the age of AI:

"Agency. Extreme agency."

"All the other skills, you'll be able to figure out as you go."

[Balaji @balajis]

AI is a shortcut.

So it’s useful.
But it’s lazy.

So it speeds execution.
But it hides complexity.

So you want to use it.
But definitely not overuse it.

So the user of AI often loves it.
But the reader of AI often hates it.

[Eric Jorgenson 📚 ☀️ @EricJorgenson]

My 3.5-hour conversation with @naval.

Fresh takes on every idea from The Almanack of Naval: happiness, judgment, knowledge, leverage.

Now in one episode, available on Spotify, Youtube, etc.

[Liam Gill @realLiamGill]

🇨🇦 Engineers behind AI were educated in Ontario

OpenAI: Co-Founder Ilya Sutskever (UofT)

xAI: Co-founders Elon Musk (Queen's), Zhang Guodong (UofT) and Zihang Dai (UofT)

In 10 years we'll all agree failing to attract them to build in Ontario is our biggest policy failure ever.

[floetic @floetic]

@brian_armstrong @grok what should I do now? :)

[Greg Brockman @gdb]

Software development is undergoing a renaissance in front of our eyes.

If you haven't used the tools recently, you likely are underestimating what you're missing. Since December, there's been a step function improvement in what tools like Codex can do. Some great engineers at OpenAI yesterday told me that their job has fundamentally changed since December. Prior to then, they could use Codex for unit tests; now it writes essentially all the code and does a great deal of their operations and debugging. Not everyone has yet made that leap, but it's usually because of factors besides the capability of the model.

Every company faces the same opportunity now, and navigating it well — just like with cloud computing or the Internet — requires careful thought. This post shares how OpenAI is currently approaching retooling our teams towards agentic software development. We're still learning and iterating, but here's how we're thinking about it right now:

As a first step, by March 31st, we're aiming that:

(1) For any technical task, the tool of first resort for humans is interacting with an agent rather than using an editor or terminal.
(2) The default way humans utilize agents is explicitly evaluated as safe, but also productive enough that most workflows do not need additional permissions.

In order to get there, here's what we recommended to the team a few weeks ago:

1. Take the time to try out the tools. The tools do sell themselves — many people have had amazing experiences with 5.2 in Codex, after having churned from codex web a few months ago. But many people are also so busy they haven't had a chance to try Codex yet or got stuck thinking "is there any way it could do X" rather than just trying.
- Designate an "agents captain" for your team — the primary person responsible for thinking about how agents can be brought into the teams' workflow.
- Share experiences or questions in a few designated internal channels
- Take a day for a company-wide Codex hackathon

2. Create skills and AGENTS[.md].
- Create and maintain an AGENTS[.md] for any project you work on; update the AGENTS[.md] whenever the agent does something wrong or struggles with a task.
- Write skills for anything that you get Codex to do, and commit it to the skills directory in a shared repository

3. Inventory and make accessible any internal tools.
- Maintain a list of tools that your team relies on, and make sure someone takes point on making it agent-accessible (such as via a CLI or MCP server).

4. Structure codebases to be agent-first. With the models changing so fast, this is still somewhat untrodden ground, and will require some exploration.
- Write tests which are quick to run, and create high-quality interfaces between components.

5. Say no to slop. Managing AI generated code at scale is an emerging problem, and will require new processes and conventions to keep code quality high
- Ensure that some human is accountable for any code that gets merged. As a code reviewer, maintain at least the same bar as you would for human-written code, and make sure the author understands what they're submitting.

6. Work on basic infra. There's a lot of room for everyone to build basic infrastructure, which can be guided by internal user feedback. The core tools are getting a lot better and more usable, but there's a lot of infrastructure that currently go around the tools, such as observability, tracking not just the committed code but the agent trajectories that led to them, and central management of the tools that agents are able to use.

Overall, adopting tools like Codex is not just a technical but also a deep cultural change, with a lot of downstream implications to figure out. We encourage every manager to drive this with their team, and to think through other action items — for example, per item 5 above, what else can prevent a lot of "functionally-correct but poorly-maintainable code" from creeping into codebases.

[Stuart Blitz @StuartBlitz]

VC vs. founder

[floetic @floetic]

@Klein25 lol