We’ve lost an icon. Margaret Hamilton, a computer science pioneer best known for her work at MIT leading development of the flight software for the Apollo missions to the moon, has died at 90. Read about her legacy via MIT News: https://t.co/ODkbdIsoHw
I’ve been impatiently waiting to tell you that my brand new single “Patient Zero” will be out on September 25 (!!!!!!!!!!!!) and it’s available to pre-order now at https://t.co/zSHpnhUTAJ for 24 hours. 0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣
As someone who had been an engineering manager in the past, it's laughable for anyone to compare AI agents management to people management.
Engineering management is as close to this as The Minions and Gru is to the real word (and AI agents *are* like those Minions, seriously)
we built pdf-inspector so agents can process PDFs without waiting on OCR. it classifies any PDF in ~20ms and extracts clean markdown locally
→ 200 PDFs processed in 2.8s
→ top quality in extracting tables + graphs
→ built in rust
→ open source
https://t.co/Wjp9kpTHXJ
The fallacy of this is that more creates more. More hours, more hiring, more something.
And it is true in a sense. If you put in more work, more work will happen. But I think for most startups, the leverage is really in how differently you approach the problem, how well you cultivate your team, and the strategy.
Any large company can outspend you on hours. They have thousands or tens of thousands more people, spending more hours. If hours worked were the metric, every large company and government organization would always win and do the best work. More hours, better output.
This thinking is often representative of younger founders, where the startup becomes their identity and life. They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you. But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work.
I’ve never worked this way. As a designer, I always saw the need to take a step back, to take a break. At times, I might work 12 hours or 16 hours, or whatever amount was needed, but it wasn’t the norm. You just can't grind design, you need inspiration. But taking that step away from the work, would give me more perspective, inspiration and I could approach the problem differently or I could just see the solution.
Grinding is never good for any creative problem, and startups or creating new products are often mostly about creative problem solving. Grinding works ok for email jobs, or where you just executing on very clear playbook.
With Linear, we’ve never worked this way. We work reasonable hours, 5 days a week. All of us founders have families. Many of our employees have families. I personally stop every evening, spend time with the family, cook dinner for the family, eat dinner together, and focus on things outside of work. Sometimes I work in the late evenings or weekends, but to me the pride is that I don’t need to. Company should be succesful without it.
My goal is to build a company that is sustainable in the long term, and doesn’t require heroics or personal sacrifices every single day.
There are times when our team is heroic. Launches, incidents, some other work that just needs to be done. They will work late into the night because they know it is the right thing. But we don’t require that every day or every week, and the more this happens, the more I think it is a failure of our company and leadership. The team and the leaders should always keep a reserve to use when something is needed.
Our thinking was also that quality, which we value, doesn’t emerge from working more or stressing people more. It emerges when you create the conditions for it to emerge. Often it is the appreciation, space, time, and how the person feels. A person who is rested will do better work.
I wouldn’t attribute much of our success to working a lot. The success came from having clear thinking, ideas, and focus to do the right things.
I sometimes wish we could move the culture more toward a Zen master.
Real mastery is not exerting the most effort. It is achieving the outcome with the least necessary effort.
Cada R$ 1 investido no Bolsa Família gera R$ 1,78 no PIB (Ipea). O programa também reduziu a pobreza extrema em 28% no Brasil (Banco Mundial).
Luciano, as bets que você divulga e o Familhão prejudicam a vida financeira da população pobre e brincam com os sonhos.
Narrative violations abound:
- Demand for software engineers is rising
- Software devs are rising as a share of new jobs
- AI exposed industries are seeing above-trend wage growth
- Open PM jobs haven't been higher since 2022
More from a16z's David George on the "AI job apocalypse" myth: https://t.co/7sbadmEElG
Btw there's some parallels in how AI makes it possible for anyone to create software, and how smartphones + their cameras made it possible for anyone to create movies
So look to how filmmaking changed thanks to smarthpones to get a sense how sw dev could change
Got this analogy from @simonw
Saying not knowing how to code gives you an advantage in building software (thanks to AI) is like saying not knowing anything about filmmaking gives you an advantage in making films (thanks to having a smartphone + apps to edit stuff)
Ignore this stuff and keep learning+building
AI can make work faster, but a fear is that relying on it may make it harder to learn new skills on the job.
We ran an experiment with software engineers to learn more. Coding with AI led to a decrease in mastery—but this depended on how people used it.
https://t.co/lbxgP11I4I
Fátima & Sueli, inseparáveis, dóceis, pequenas adoção conjunta.
Elas são irmãs. Tem 6 anos, passaram por 2 famílias e foram descartadas em um abrigo, viveu lá meses e chegou até nós
Então e missão da casa um lar lindo e seguro para elas
Compartilhe e adote
Eles precisam de nós+