John Loeber 🎢

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

New Podcast!

Natural disasters make the Insurance Commissioner California's most important office after Governor.

But insurance is broken in California. Homeowners can't get decent coverage. Why? And how do we fix it? I interviewed Patrick Wolff for answers.

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

When I did my voter registration and ballot last week, I never had to show a utility bill or anything to prove that I live in California.

I found that weird: it's not a high bar. I have shown my utility bill for lots of ordinary things. I'm not even sure if I had to show my ID to register?

This feels like an obvious double standard, and it calls into question the integrity of our elections. Even if there's no cheating occurring, this means that some people will think there is, which is deeply corrosive to the legitimacy of our political system. Whatever the trade-off is in requiring proof of residence, surely it'd be worth it.

[Daniel @growing_daniel]

It's genuinely amazing that our one party state has an un-auditable post election process that takes weeks where they tell us vote numbers that are oddly convenient for them and we just accept it

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

(this is a joke, i know this is for the saas monaco. but seriously i wonder when are we going to see billboard ads for Dubai/Guernsey/etc.)

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

I guess it makes sense for tax havens to start advertising within eyesight of the OpenAI and Anthropic offices

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

I’ll be on MTS today at 3pm PT! Tune in if you want to hear me, @theojaffee and @gbrl_dick go deep on the state of tech hiring

[MTS @MTSlive]

DR. MIKE ISRAETEL | DEEPSEEK RAISES $7B | META ENTERPRISE AI | RAMP CPO | MILES BRUNDAGE https://t.co/QZSoQPrB6n

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

@johnawahba This is like legalizing powerful drugs or decriminalizing petty theft: seems like not-a-big-deal when you have lots of counterveiling forces, but when it's turned into actual policy and the restraints are removed, it explodes a trillionfold and the results are worse than expected

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

Whenever I notice a bad public policy, I ask "why won't they just implement {good policy}?"

But then I look into it and I find that the intent of the bad policy is pretty good. Execution is the problem. And my "good policy" would be just as big a disaster if executed poorly.

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

@Noahpinion The great enemy of good policy is the reality that its execution will be at the 20th percentile of competence

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

An increasing percentage of people in the "working class" or voting for "labour parties" are in fact no longer working or performing labour, but rather collecting state subsidies. Curious

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

@FangYi11101 @mblasterx Yes, not only is IMO a great signal, it's relatively stronger than before because it's one of the few signals that haven't gotten ablated over the last few years 😂

[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.

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

@KelseyTuoc Congratulations Kelsey! 🥳

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

@weswinham Yes, I ran 100+ technical interviews for Bay Area roles starting in early 2017 and up until Covid

I concur that the overall market dynamic has always been like this, but it feels more severe now. Standard resume signals are much more muddled, and FAANG means much less now

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

@medjedowo @distributionat UBI is already here, just not in the ways that people expected or consider fair and desirable 😦

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

@distributionat ah but they’ll believe that they’re not taking it away, but rather taking control of it, and then bestowing themselves even more UBI

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

Yes, that's correct. It's a classic market for lemons. Most strong engineers already have jobs, often ones which they enjoy and/or are well-paid. And if they're on the market, they're only briefly so.

The market is an accumulator, mostly consisting of people who've been on it for a long time -- the weakest candidates.

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

This seems likely. Though I expect that the sinecure-collecting lifestyle will be nice and enjoyable (I expect to be among that set btw fwiw), it seems likely that this group will constantly vie for control, afraid that its subsidies could be revoked. There’s a nasty political asymmetry there that I fear.

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

@distributionat power laws rule everything around me