criss_cross

Like I’m not the biggest fan of gen ai but a generic computer screen feels like a good use case for filler text.

Yeah I was trying to pull out a nested react component and styles out of a larger component that got to be almost 1500 lines. Claude and GPT both struggled to get down what styles were required and what that subcomponent was actually doing. And generating tests around just made a fuck ton of spaghetti.

Which is fine. LLMs don’t have to be great at everything. But it’d be nice if people stopped saying I’m gonna be out of a job because of em.

Also a good warning: I just had to completely rewrite an mcp server I had Claude build because when I needed to update it, the whole server was one giant if/else statement and utterly unmaintainable.

I’ve noticed that in some of my bootstrapped code (also an MCP server :) ). I think it tends to bias towards single file solutions so it tends to be a lot less maintainable.

They’re great for bootstrapping in my experience but then really fall apart when you need it to do something surgical on a larger codebase.

I would too. It’s just really well crafted world building , story, and side content. There’s so much to do and all of it feels fun.

When they add the ability to pause in I’ll give it a look.

Now that I have kids playing games that don’t let you pause is impossible.

What are the Spotify alternatives people recommend?

The problem is there’s a fair amount of tech CEOs that insist this is the future and everyone needs to hop on which between the hype train, the amount of software peeps out of a job because of layoffs and the amount of snake oils salesmen out of a job because this eats google’s lunch this bubble is just ballooning. You have a lot of people hitching on this bandwagon hoping to sell shovels to the next gold rush.

And for awhile everything is just gonna get shittier.

Oh boy, a button that generates ai shorts. Combining my 2 least favorite things about YouTube.

Is Duke Nukem going to Iraq now?

It’s a bit misleading for engineering.

Every Engineer starts at L4. That’s the junior position.

L5 is the mid-senior level. Most SDEs in Amazon are L5 and that’s considered a terminal position. For management this is the “junior” (for lack of a better term) tier

L6 is Senior but it’s closer to staff engineers at other companies. You tend to do more cross team work. This is also where a glut of managers are at

L7 is Principal engineer and senior manager. Only about 2% of engineers get here. Managers at this lever oversee multiple teams.

L8+ is fancy external hires and directors.

The problem is that Amazon expects a lot of people to churn out before you hit the L6/7 levels. They dangle a carrot of super high pay for those tiers but don’t actually expect to pay it long term. There’s quite a few that have stayed longer than expected. And it’s hard to get out because they know how to game the system to demonstrate “impact”. Now that isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of good managers and engineers at this tier either. There are really good people at this tier. It’s just Amazon doesn’t want that many at this tier for long.

Also if the idea of having an expected churn and dangling pay that no one can hit sounds dystopian and awful it is. Amazon sucks.

When I was last there a while ago people were leaving but they were hoping for a lot more of an exodus. Particularly in the L6/7 level.

Has that changed?

No. Amazon has been trying to cut head count for years now. They were hoping RTO5 would do the trick but because every company is trying to do the same thing people didn’t have a ship to jump to.

“Our AI is so great!” Is a way to mask that their finances aren’t good and they dramatically made the wrong bet in 2021 hiring so much.

Honestly most of the time at Amazon you’re doing more meetings and red tape than you are coding so I don’t expect AI to magically fix shit for them.