[erikbye]

It's funny to me how still so many don't realize you don't get hired for the best positions for being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank, you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products. Creativity, drive, vision, whatever. Code is a means to an end. If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.

Quality of code has never had anything to do with which products are successful. I bet both youtube and facebook's codebase is a tangled mess.

[latexr]

> you get hired for your proven ability to (…)

No, you get hired for your perceived ability to (…)

The world is full of Juliuses, which is a big reason everything sucks.

https://ploum.net/2024-12-23-julius-en.html

[Balinares]

Oh, Julius. Haven't we all met a Julius.

Story! Long ago, very long ago, I was working at a tiny Web company. Not very technical, though the designers were solid and the ops competent.

We once ended up hosting a site that came under a bit of national attention during an event that this site had news about. The link started circulating broadly, the URL mentioned on TV, and the site immediately buckled under the load.

The national visibility of the outage as well as the opportunity cost for the customer were pretty bad. Picture a bunch of devs, ops, sales and customer wrangling people, anxiously packed around the keyboard of the one terminal we managed to get logged into the server.

That, and Julius, the recently hired replacement CTO.

Julius, I still suspect, was selected by the previous CTO, who was not delighted about his circumstances, as something of a revenge. Early on, Julius scavenged the design docs I was trying to put together at the time to get the teams out of constant firefighting mode, and then started misquoting them, mispronouncing the technical terms. He did so confidently and engagingly. The salespeople liked him, at first.

The shine was starting to come off by the time that site went down. In a company that's too small for teams to pick up the slack from a Julius forever, that'll happen eventually.

So here we were, with one terminal precariously logged into the barely responding server, and a lot of national eyes on us. This was the early days of the Web. Something like Cloudflare would not exist for years.

So it fell on me. My idea was that we needed to replace the page at the widely circulated URL with a static version, and do so very, very fast. I figured that our Web servers were usually configured to serve index.html first if present, with dynamic rendering only occurring if not. So I ended up just using wget on localhost to save whatever was being dynamically generated as index.html, and let the server just serve that for the time being.

This was not perfect and the bits that required dynamic behavior were stuck frozen, but that was an acceptable trade-off. And the site instantly came back up, to the relief of everyone present.

A few weeks later, the sales folks, plus Julius, went to pitch our services to a new customer prospect. I bumped into one of them at the coffee machine right afterwards. His face said it all. It had not gone well.

Our eyes met.

And he said, with all the tiredness in the world: "He tried to sell them the 'wget optimizer'..."

[ddevnyc]

I've met countless Juliuses over the years. I kept track of the companies, and the Juliuses. My biggest revelation is that every company that was being in some substantial capacity led by a Julius (either at C level, VP, or high up in management) ended up one of two ways:

1. Shut down or shutting down (e.g. team reduced by > 50% since I've been there)

2. Julius removed, endlessly seeking work, keeps getting fired, and can't find a place to call home

The meteoric rise of the Julius is an exception - sooner or later their lucky streak ends and they face the cliff of adversity, towering above them with no way to climb it - no skills to help him actually do it.

[crashprone]

This story made my day, thanks!

[5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV]

I mean, maybe he was a revolutionary. One could describe what Vercel is selling as some kind of "wget optimizer" as well

[gnfargbl]

In a couple of decades of work, I have never actually met anyone like Julius. Typically, I have found that those who excel at listening and presenting are also capable of understanding the technology at an appropriate level for their role -- it's not like this stuff is truly complicated, after all.

I have met quite a few people who are more focussed on the business than the technology, but those people tend to end up in jobs where the main problems aren't actually technical. Which, let's be honest, is the case in very many tech jobs.

[wolfi1]

oh man, I have met several Juliuses. one of them was my boss till he made an error as similar to the one the original Julius made, but unfortunately too late I had to leave the company earlier he made my life hell. now he is at another company, as long as he is at this company I won't apply there, if they hire him they have no place for me

[coldtea]

No end of Juliuses. And they're not even the worst type you can meet at a software company.

[rozap]

There are so many. I think if you haven't met a Julius, chances are you are Julius..

[elbear]

I wonder, how does a Julius perceive another Julius, as another competent worker? What about a non-Julius then?

[rozap]

I've seen it rationalized by saying you should be moving jobs every year or so, because if you're not doing that, then you're not growing. I've always thought of this as a sort of Julius coping mechanism. On some level, I think a Julius views a non-Julius as a stagnant old gray beard who rejects the "growth mindset".

To be clear: I've never seen people who follow this strategy contribute anything of value, and it's the biggest red flag on a resume. You learn and grow more by seeing things through.

[rustystump]

I have met armies of julius at all levels. Id say 80% of people are julius and if u dont think so then i have some news for you.

It is always like this. Your ability to socialize will bring you further than any other skillset. The Kennedys for example manufactured their status by socializing. Industry is no different.

[JackFr]

> The Kennedys for example manufactured their status by socializing.

And generational wealth and serious political power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Fitzgerald

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy_Sr.

[rustystump]

Read some of the father’s quotes. He literally sent his kids out to marry into richer and more powerful families.

[ptero]

Humans are social animals and good social skills is a major benefit almost everywhere, including at work. This does not make most people juliuses.

[rustystump]

Hi julius! I kid and dont speak as if i am not a julius. Most people are in it for money for a house car family etc. they dont care about the job in so much as means to an end. That is julius but he took it further

[zem]

that is not what makes a julius though. there are lots of good, competent workers who don't really give a damn about the job, and are just in it for the money, but they know their stuff and are genuinely working and delivering value for the money they are given while they are on the clock. what a julius dials up to eleven is the oft-heard dictum "fake it till you make it", only they are so good at faking it that it becomes their entire thing, not just a way to stay under the radar while they learn the job.

[direwolf20]

80% of people you meet are communicating to your customers that the server doesn't have an IP address for security reasons?

[Aeolun]

80% of the people are saying that this is highly complex software. We should not expect to serve more than 4 requests per second without a full kubernetes cluster backed by 27 pods, a cloud spanner database, and 200k lines of code.

I present, our contact form.

[moralestapia]

Julius is a metaphor for a specific type of person who is ignorant and useless but has mastered the way to appear otherwise.

If you think this was about IP addresses, well ...

[closewith]

> Id say 80% of people are julius and if u dont think so then i have some news for you.

> Industry is no different.

Based on these comments, maybe some self-reflection is in order, as it seems from the 80% comment that what you mean is that 80% of people are able to adequately communicate.

[rustystump]

Have i been the julius this while time? What a twist.

[shabatar]

The question is how does one become julius

[FartyMcFarter]

Incompetence + luck + social skills.

[tracerbulletx]

And yet this thread is completely full of Frank Grimes.

[nuancebydefault]

That number feels off by a lot to me. I think i can say i'm quite good at socializing, quite above average when comparing to people I meet and work with. I'd rate my engineering skills about average level and i have a firm dislike of fraud and of people acting to be better/smarter/faster than they really are. In my career I've come across managers of the julius type, as well of the narcissistic type, even a sociopath. I would estimate 10 to 20 percent of people are of the Julius type.

[rustystump]

It was a subtle ref to the 80/20 rule in that most people likely oscillate between the julius and the useful. Some of that 80% are full time julius for sure.

[skeledrew]

> perceived ability

In this case at least it's definitely more than that. Ever since LLMs became a thing, there has been a constant search to find it's "killer app". Given the steep rise in popularity, regardless of the problems, that is now OpenClaw. As they say, the proof's in the pudding; this guy has created something highly desirable by the many.

[PurpleRamen]

Yet, people are still asking for the usability of OpenClaw outside of marketing. It's a bit unclear how much of a "killer app" it really is, and how much is just burning money for the lulz and Bot RP. I personally also got the impression many people had their first AI-gateway experience with OpenClaw, and don't understand that those abilities have been around for a while now, but is located in the expensive LLMs which OpenClaw is using, not in OpenClaw itself. I've seen people thinking that OpenClaw is actually the AI.

[skeledrew]

> don't understand that those abilities have been around for a while now

Hugely underestimated comment. That's pretty much the entire point here. Many people didn't know something with these capabilities was already possible. Or some - like me - knew of the potential, but couldn't be bothered/didn't have the time to put the bits together in a satisfactory flow (I'm currently exploring and building on nanobot[0], which is directly inspired by OpenClaw; didn't touch OC because it's in JS and I'm a Python person). Everything came together really well, which is why it's a "killer app". And now the dam has burst there will be customized takes on the concept all over the place (I'm also aware of a Rust "port", Moltis[1]), taking the idea to next levels.

[0] https://github.com/HKUDS/nanobot [1] https://github.com/moltis-org/moltis

[jorvi]

People weren't underestimating it and it's not that they "couldn't be bothered". They either understood the gaping security/safety holes it creates, or were guarded against their own stupidity.

[sho_hn]

Doesn't really matter. As always it's integration that makes a product.

Talking to bots on Telegram isn't new.

Running agentic loops isn't new.

Giving AI credentials and having it interface with APIs isn't new.

Triggering AI jobs from external event queues isn't new.

Parking state between AI jobs in temp files isn't new.

Putting all together in one product and marketing it to the right audience? New.

[PurpleRamen]

But novelty doesn't make a killer app. When outside of marketing and gateway-experience, there are still that many open questions, then maybe it's a valid claim to call it perception instead of substance.

At the end, only time will tell how much there really is to this.

[coldtea]

>But novelty doesn't make a killer app.

It often does, if killer app means popular app.

[Fr0styMatt88]

Seems exactly like that whole “Dropbox vs setting up an FTP server” thing again.

[GreenWatermelon]

Oh otsit's a Killer app alright. One that might kill you personally. And me. And everyone.

[eager_learner]

to--> latexr: Thank you for the link to Polum's essay in juliusosis. It really is the case that a lot of incompetence is hiding in plain sight. Probably because modern schooling encourages this.

I've lived in China (as a foreigner) and they have a word for Juliuses. They call them the 'cha bu duo xiansheng' = the 'Mr. Almost ok'.

[josteink]

> It really is the case that a lot of incompetence is hiding in plain sight.

It may sound preposterous but I'm going to make the argument that sometimes not knowing how things work is a feature, not a bug.

I would assume most people with a little work-experience has encountered the kind of legacy systems which is crucial to the business, yet for whatever reason doing any sort of work on them involves a tremendous amount of friction.

A technical person who knows how this system works in and out will often claim that certain seemingly simple things cannot be done, because of how the system works.

It might be highly impractical, but if we're honest about things, it's all software. It can be changed if we decide to and the company is willing to put in the effort to make it happen. It's clearly possible, but the skilled worked will often present it as an impossibility.

The Julius, not hampered by such knowledge or constraints, will be see a seemingly simple problem, and maybe even imagine what other things would be possible or even "simple" if that problem was solved.

If the Julius manages to get management approval for these ideas, you may actually end up getting management approval for changing/upgrading the base system causing the friction, something the more fact-based engineers would not.

Chances are it's going to be messier than projected, not being delivered on time... But in the long term it might be a net good for everyone involved ;)

[latexr]

> I'm going to make the argument that sometimes not knowing how things work is a feature, not a bug.

You will probably be interested in the concept of Shoshin, or Beginner’s Mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Mind,_Beginner%27s_Mind

But that does not describe a Julius. Julius is not someone with an open mind unconstrained by technical debt, but someone who fakes an aura of knowledge while actually understanding very little.

There is a chasm of difference between an eager beginner who questions the way things work and how to make them simpler and someone who promises things which are impossible. Julius is the latter.

[quietbritishjim]

I think you're right but you've been a bit pedantic about the parent comment. They sloppily said that delivering business value gets you hired, when in reality the appearance of that may do. But I think we all understood their main thrust was to disagree with the comment before them about coding ability, and the point is that this doesn't always correlate with business value.

I did enjoy your link though.

[chungus]

My imposter syndrome is essentially fear of being julius.

[Rooster61]

90% of software engineers have a fear of being Julius

[dannyw]

Your comment and the article expanded my world view a little bit. Thank you.

[skrlet13]

Julius seems like a inept IT worker, but well-meaning person. Someone who would cheer you up to help.

(gen)AI is not even a person. And you have to pay for it, in some way

[mrugge]

The world is full of Juliuses. And if one works with enough people one can suddenly realize that they too are a Julius relative to someone smarter and more introverted. Worth considering this before dismissing someone as yet another Julius. Oh and everything doesn't suck.

[latexr]

> And if one works with enough people one can suddenly realize that they too are a Julius relative to someone smarter and more introverted.

No, Julius is not a spectrum. There is a line between being one or not being one. It’s not just a slider between “socially outgoing” and “technically competent”, it describes a particular type of individual.

> Oh and everything doesn't suck.

I think it was pretty clear I didn’t mean literally. Obviously the Sun doesn’t suck, nor does water, nor do an infinity of things which humans could not have as hand it.

[fsniper]

I haven't seen that before. But it was really hard get to the end. Not because it's bad written or so, on the contrary is a very good piece. However the feeling is unfathomable. I hate Julius'es. More so I hate the managers blinded by Julius'es.

[Xmd5a]

> Pour celleux qui ne connaissent pas l’informatique

https://shs.cairn.info/revue-cites-2020-2-page-137?lang=fr

[3form]

How about none of the above, but hired because of wanting OpenClaw?

[bjt]

There's OpenClaw the codebase, and there's OpenClaw the community. They could build the same program very easily (as evidenced by the number of clones out there already). That part's not worth paying much for. But redirecting the whole enthusiast community around it? That's worth a lot.

[3form]

Exactly. My point is that it might not be about the guy.

[cekanoni]

This is if not the best article i have read recently. Julius ...

[alpineman]

Everything is perception though. You are looking at this with your own perception, biases, and heuristics just like everyone else. There is no 'right' way to hire.

[nickzelei]

Wow, that blog post really gave me pause and has stuck in my head for the last hour or so.

[johnthescott]

ask to view their code. any trivial detail about their code should be answered quickly and coherently, assuming they wrote the code.

in a startup give me unruly pirates over obedient sailors (sj).

[PlatoIsADisease]

Great article until the end when they talked about AI.

[LoganDark]

Julius sounds like a sociopath. Sociopaths have no empathy/morals, so they can confidently lie all day and still be perfectly fulfilled; and some of them can be very excellent at social manipulation. This level of confidence in all things, including complete bullshitting, and constantly climbing the corporate ladder for huge payoffs, is not too uncommon among them.

IMO, all you can really do around one is try to focus on yourself. Or get away as fast as you can, depending on the situation.

[raverbashing]

Talk about going all the way to write the story and seeing the point go by

Your boss liked Julius. People liked Julius

You're not going to convince people they have to pay more attention to the technical guy that can't string a though together and answers in a grumpy mood

Be more like Julius and you might get more of his laurels

[Balinares]

Nah. Avoid companies that can't see through the Juliuses. Because there will be other disastrous consequences to their bad decision making processes.

[raverbashing]

> Avoid companies that can't see through the Juliuses.

Good luck with that

[ho_schi]

I’m rather sure *Airbus* will prefer a programmer which reads and writes reliable code.

The programmer which delivers useful products is probably hired by Microsoft? Or worse, Boeing. Or Toyota. Some NTSB people or Michael Barr are happy to tell you details about the number of dead people they created.

    Restart braking to brake because our code failed.

Or.

    One single sensor delivers wrong data. Let us put the trim down. DOWN! DOWN!

After that they blame the user. It wasn’t a pilot error, because the didn’t trained the pilots to immediately turn off MCAS. And it wasn’t a driver error, because they didn’t trained driver to lift the feet and start braking again.

    But I’m only programming a text viewer.

Which is used in a power plant to read the emergency manual, after an earthquake. You are responsible.

[class3shock]

For Airbus, Boeing, and others the cost of failure is disproportionately high. Just look at how you consider Boeing despite that 99.99...% of their software and hardware work flawlessly. They will be known for the 737 Max failure for decades.

When OpenAI tells someone that suicide isn't that bad, some bs supplement could be the best thing to treat their cancer, or does anything else that has a negative outcome, the consequences are basically zero. That is even though any single failure like that probably kills alot more people per year than Boeing.

It seems there is knowledge of this and the lack of responsibility placed on these companies so they act accordingly.

[mustyoshi]

But realistically, I just had 2 flights last month, checking what model of aircraft I was on didn't even cross my mind. I survived both flights btw.

[ron_woods]

Me to until the 737 Max crashes. Now, I will go out of my way(inconvenience) to avoid the Max line. I guess it gives me the illusion of control.

[class3shock]

My point was only that you may not have checked but you know about the 737 Max. Do you know about software failures from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, etc. killing someone? They certainly have but it doesn't get the same press.

[ghoblin]

There are only so many safety-first companies and products. The vast majority of the economy isn't optimizing for safety

[tshaddox]

Could it be that the only large safety-first companies are the ones forced by law (either proactively, or due to reliable legal accountability if things go wrong) to be safety-first?

[swiftcoder]

> There are only so many safety-first companies and products

There are only so many companies that think of themselves as safety-first. In practice, basically all companies work on things that should be safety-first.

Does your software store user data? Congrats, you are now on the hook for GDPR and a bunch of similar data handling regulations.

Does your software include a messaging component? You are now responsible for moderating abusive actors in your chat.

Does your software allow users to upload images? Now you are a potential distribution vector for CSAM.

And so on... safety isn't just for things which can cause immediate death and dismemberment

[ghoblin]

There’s a difference between "safety matters" and “safety is the primary constraint". Most companies manage risk to an acceptable level while optimizing for speed and cost. Aerospace companies optimize for minimizing catastrophic failure, even at extreme expense. Treating a potential GDPR fine as equivalent to a flight-control failure ignores that society, regulators, and markets treat those risks very differently. The inconvenience and economic cost of your Discord messages leaking is not the same category of harm as your pacemaker controller failing. And because the majority of economic activity sits in that lower-criticality category, it would not be surprising if highly specialized, safety-critical human software engineering becomes more of a niche, while much of routine software development becomes increasingly automated or commoditized.

[swiftcoder]

> Treating a potential GDPR fine as equivalent to a flight-control failure ignores that society, regulators, and markets treat those risks very differently

Agreed, though I think that if GDPR fines were actually being levied at the recommended 4% of global revenue, we'd start treating them more similarly to a 737 crash.

> The inconvenience and economic cost of your Discord messages leaking is not the same category of harm as your pacemaker controller failing

Sort of depends who they leak to. Your teen classmates who bully you to suicide? Your abusive ex who is trying to track you down to kill you? The 3-letter agency who is trying to rendition your family to an internment camp?

There are a lot of seemingly benign failure modes that become extremely lethal given the right circumstances. And because we acknowledge the potential lethality of something like a pacemaker failure, we have massive infrastructure dedicated to their mitigation (EMT teams, emergency external pacemakers, surgical teams who can rapidly place new leads, etc). For things society judges less important, mitigations are often few and far between

[eecc]

OT: it's not the first time I see this grammatical mistake: "didn’t trained". Is it some accepted regional variation?

[illichosky]

I think he is a non-native speaker, like me. I also do this mistake very often and 'didn't train' is a bit counter-intuitive - at least for me.

[cookiengineer]

I think that happens when as a German you're used to using the Plusquamperfekt which is a somewhat unique tense that's allowed to be used in all past tenses.

It allows you to not having to define the point in time and neither the frame of the timespan's points in time.

Some languages allow to use that type of tense and it's somewhat a language gap I suppose. I have no idea what other languages or proto languages allow that tense though, but I've seen some Slavic and maybe Finnish(?) natives use that tense in English, too.

Maybe someone more elaborate in these matters has better examples?

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plusquamperfekt

[leononame]

English has present perfect, and past perfect. E.g. "I have walked" and "I had walked", both tenses are participated (ie "walked" instead of "walk"). These two are similar to the German Perfekt and Plusquamperfekt which are also participated.

The problem here is that the simple past "He went" uses an auxiliary verb for negations "He didn't go". In this case, "go" is not participated.

[saidnooneever]

id think its germanic, dutch have it too

[ho_schi]

Thank you! I assume “didn’t train” is correct. Probably my favorite mistake! I like it when people point out mistakes, give me corrections, and explain why. The reason is crucial.

Maybe “hadn’t trained” is even better. Makes sense when ordering times. But I don’t trust LLMs an inch. It makes up options for git[1] and both GCC and CLANG are often immediately telling me that the LLM is lying.

Cookieengineer and illichosky are right.

[1] Considering that man pages exist, it shows how useless their harmful crawlers are.

[pembrook]

We're not talking about Airbus or centuries old commodified industrial companies. Airbus sells airplanes, not AI software tools.

But if you did build a core innovation in aerospace that went viral I'm sure Airbus would be interested in hiring you.

The salary would be 3K per month. And lunch coupons to buy a ham baguette.

[rafaelmn]

Airbus pays like shit probably. Just going off the stuff I've read about Boeing.

[shakow]

I can confirm, they do.

[ahartmetz]

It's the interesting work tax, I guess. Though this doesn't look terrible: https://www.levels.fyi/de-de/companies/airbus/salaries/softw...

[shakow]

Ah, you were thinking of the German branch, I was talking about the French one, in Toulouse (I have a few friends working there).

There, a team lead is doing ~$4000 net per month. So not poverty, but not great either.

[majewsky]

76k gross per year in Germany is basically the same as that. 100k gross comes out to about 5.5k net per month. The big question is how much is already covered once you're down to the net pay.

[class3shock]

I'm not sure of the situation for software engineers but ones on the aerospace and mechanical side working in aerospace in Europe are paid something on the order of 50% less than ones in the US. I always assumed it's just a supply demand problem but I haven't run the numbers.

[fabrice_d]

Did you factor in the highest cost of life (including housing, healthcare, retirement, etc.) in the US in your 50% ?

[Balinares]

I literally got my current cushy gig to fix a codebase that was crumbling under its own unmaintainable weight at a company that, like you, thought that quality doesn't matter. This is not the first time in my career I get a great job that way.

"Quality doesn't matter" people are why I'm not worried about employment. While there is value in getting features out fast, definitely, there always comes a point on your scaling journey where you have to evolve the stack structure for the purpose of getting those features out fast sustainably. That's where the quality of the engineering makes a difference.

(Anecdotally, the YouTube codebase may be locally messy, but its overall architecture is beautiful. You cannot have a system that uploads, processes, encodes, stores, and indexes massive amounts of videos every hour of every day that in the overwhelming majority of cases will be watched less than 10 times, and still make a profit, without some brilliant engineering coming in somewhere.)

[RamblingCTO]

Both can be true: people who deliver products based on vision and all are very much needed and cracked devs who excel in technical details as well. Peter and you are of these respective groups then.

[bleudeballe]

The Youtube mobile app is a nightmare to use, and has been for months (desktop is working quite well but I am using my phone 95% of the time). Reopening a short shows me a few frames of the next video before freezing, shorts die on second play constantly, history crashes because of shorts, changing to videos brings them back but navigating to shorts crashes again.

This has been reliably going on for at least 6+ months, I thought shorts was a big priority for them, but the UX is and remains horrible.

[Aperocky]

This is where the debate has another axis - when.

Quality matters, delivery speed matters, shipping also matters, where it matters and when it matters is much harder to get right. But it's also self correcting - if you don't, the project or business die - you can only get it wrong for so much or for so long.

To only discuss on one axis is presumably why GNU Hurd have never shipped or how claude-c-compiler doesn't compile hello world.

[rjsw]

You still need a few people high enough up in a company who think that quality does matter to be able to get the job to fix things.

[Balinares]

That will happen, in the lucky cases, when someone high enough up with basic reasoning skills looks at support costs and time spent fixing bugs versus feature release velocity and sales income.

[Fervicus]

> If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.

Hard disagree. I foresee the opposite being true. I think the ability to understand and write secure, well optimized, performant code will become more and more niche and highly desired in order to fix the mess the vibe coders are going to leave behind.

[Urahandystar]

And the cheapest way to distribute that to everyone will be via AI coding.

[Fervicus]

If AI becomes good at doing that and fixing bugs, then sure. But there is no evidence pointing towards that as of now. Mostly only slop.

[spogbiper]

this is such a weird take to me. every piece of evidence I've seen shows that AI is quickly becoming better at writing code, debugging, finding security issues. my own experience, benchmarks, studies, new articles.. everything points to progress

[FartyMcFarter]

So why was Moltbook full of security holes? I don't doubt that you can use AI to fix some bugs, but that probably requires at least someone writing prompts who cares about and understands the bugs.

It's like the old story about hiring a carpenter who just hammers in a nail to fix a squeaky floor. The difficult part was finding where the nail needs to go, not necessarily the hammering.

[pnt12]

Fully disagree.

There's lots of people that won't care about the code: executives, managers, customers etc. If the engineers don't care either, then who cares?

If we compare with big food companies, that's like their food formula. No one thinks it's useless - it's the source code for the product they sell. Yet nowadays we get so many engineers distancing themselves away from the code, like the software formula doesn't matter.

There are diminishing returns, but overall good code goes hand in hand with good products, it's just a different side of it.

[swat535]

Based on the interview format these days, I beg to differ.

If this were true, we wouldn't be studying Leet code and inverting binary trees to get a job.

I guess the lesson here is that unless you have a direct line with upper management to skip the line, you'll be stuck grinding algorithms for the rest of your life.

[pphysch]

Leet code interviews are in the spirit of filtering out charlatans who misrepresent having even basic programming fundamentals. Many interviewers take it too far, but the original motivation is essential to saving time in the hiring process. I was instantly converted after participating in the full hiring process for a junior dev, which didn't properly filter for programming skill.

Big companies may have separate hiring SWE departments where the initial interviewers don't even know what team or role you may land in, so they have to resort to something...

[Flere-Imsaho]

I was nodding my head agreeing with you but then remembered John Carmack, who seems to deliver both... He takes great pride in writing ground breaking code, for industry defining products.

We should all try and be more like John Carmack.

[bugthe0ry]

The man is on a different level, cognitively speaking. That's like asking sprinters to "just be more like Usain Bolt". Some people are just built different. Carmack is one of them.

[js8]

I admire the guy but he spends like 12 hours a day doing just that and his code is full of tricks, it's debatable as a paragon of quality. I don't think it's for everyone, to be Carmack, nor it should be; diversity is important.

[libertine]

Another detail is that his groundbreaking code was great part of made some of the products - I'm thinking of Doom.

It wasn't just for the sake of quality and best practices, it defined and had an impact on the product experience.

Like Doom probably wouldn't have been as successful if it was any other way.

[ljm]

I argue we shouldn't, because if everyone is like Carmack then no one is.

And only people on the older end of the spectrum have seen Carmack working in his element back in the day.

The things I want people to take from a guy like John Carmack, or Jon Blow, or Lukas Pope, or Ron Gilbert, or Tim Schafer, or Warren Spector, or Sam Lake, or David Cage god forbid...is pure curiosity and pushing the boundaries to make that real.

In every case there is a mix of a deep and unusual urge to make an idea happen with an affinity towards the technicality of it.

I bring Sam Lake into this because nobody has blended FMV with gameplay the way Remedy have and pushed the boundary on it.

[mdavid626]

The opposite is not true though: successful products might have messy codebases, but that doesn’t mean, that messy codebases lead to successful products, or that quality doesn’t matter.

[onion2k]

There's a balance to strike, and it's hard to get right. You have to give up quality enough that you actually deliver things to users rather than working on 'the perfect code', but you also have to keep quality high enough that you're not slowed down by spaghetti code and tech debt so much that you can't deliver quickly as well.

This is made more complicated by the fact that where the balance lies depends on the people working on the code - some developers can cope with working in a much more of a mess than others. There is no objective 'right way' when you're starting out.

If you have weeks of runway left spending it refactoring code or writing tests is definitely a waste of time, but if you raise your next round or land some new paying customers you'll immediately feel that you made the wrong choices and sacrificed quality where you shouldn't have. This is just a fact of life that everyone has to live with.

[johnebgd]

I’ve met many more $5M/year “SaaS” entrepreneurs who built a Wordpress plugin than a custom SaaS platform. Your point is well made.

[erikbye]

Right. Shopify apps, too, is a gold mine.

[yobbo]

He's not hired to code. He has taste for "what works" in these types of things. They want him to apply that taste - maybe making new services or fixing old.

[pwython]

See: Rick Rubin.

"Rick Rubin says he barely plays any instruments and has no technical ability. He just knows what he likes and dislikes and is decisive about it."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rick-rubin-anderson-cooper-60-m...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rubin_production_discogra...

[democracy]

I like your optimism but no - you are still hired via "excels at hackerrank", every big tech company first interview is exactly this, no matter how many projects your delivered and how useful you are/were at you previous job.

[lmpdev]

This seems to be largely an American phenomenon

In more minor markets like Europe/Australia it seems to be a lot less leetcode and a lot more (1) experience (2) degree (3) actual interview performance

[sjzhzhz]

This is more so because the US companies have been flooded with East / South Asian workers. The proliferation roughly tracks with a decrease in white (European) American representation in tech companies. US companies used to be much more like you described.

[democracy]

AtlasSian? Canva? Absolutely the same process in Australia. Smaller shops/contractors - sure.

[killbot5000]

> Quality of code has never had anything to do with which products are successful. I bet both youtube and facebook's codebase is a tangled mess.

The code’s value is measured in its usefulness to control and extend the Facebook system. Without the system, the code is worthless. On the flip side, the system’s value is also tied to its ability to change… which is easier to do if the code is well organized, verified, and testable.

[DeusExMachina]

> If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.

I'm not sure how this follows logically from the comment you are replying to, which states:

> We have someone who vibe coded software with major security vulnerabilities.

[LMYahooTFY]

This is exactly right.

The goal is delivering a useful product to someone, which just requires secure enough, optimized enough, efficient enough code.

Some see the security, optimization, or efficiency of the code itself as the goal. They'll be replaced.

[dodomodo]

As long as AI can't make the code optimized and secure by itself, and these day it still can't, those people won't be replaced. And when they do get replaced there is no guarantee that the more "entrepreneur" population won't get replaced as well.

[simpleusername]

Except it wasn't and still isn't secure enough.

[cookiengineer]

You are replying to someone whose account name is tabs_or_spaces, which in itself is so ironic that I have no word for it.

What people don't seem to realize is that like you pointed out there's a demand for the previous "developer relations" type of job though, and that job kind of evolved through LLM agents into something like an influencer(?) type position.

If I would take a look at influencers and what they're able to build, it's not that hardcore optimized and secured and tested program codebase, they don't have the time to acquire and hone those skills. They are the types who build little programs and little solutions for everyday use cases that other people "get inspired with".

You could argue that this is something like a teacher role, and something like the remaining social component of the human to human interface that isn't automated yet. Well, at least not until the first generation of humans grew up with robotic nannies. Then it's a different, lower threshold of acceptance.

[networkcat]

Yes, Facebook's early PHP code looks pretty bad by today's standards

Facebook PHP Source Code from August 2007: https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406#file-index-php

[antfarm]

> Quality of code has never had anything to do with which products are successful.

It may look like that, but many of the products with bad code didn't even make it into your vibe statistics because they weren't around for long enough.

[groundtruthdev]

Would you feel comfortable flying on an airplane where the programmers don’t care about secure code, correctness, or the ability to reason about and optimize algorithms—where “good enough” is the philosophy? Most people intuitively say no, because in safety-critical and large-scale systems, engineering rigor isn’t optional. Software may look intangible, but when it runs aircraft, banking systems, or global platforms, the same discipline applies.

The “Facebook/YouTube codebases are a mess so code quality doesn’t matter” line is also misleading. Those companies absolutely hire—and pay very well—engineers who obsess over security, performance, and algorithmic efficiency, because at that scale engineering quality directly translates to uptime, cost, and trust.

Yes, the visible product layers move fast and can look messy. But underneath are extremely disciplined infrastructure, security, and reliability teams. You don’t run global systems on vibe-coded foundations. People who genuinely believe correctness and efficiency don’t matter wouldn’t last long in the parts of those organizations that actually keep the lights on.

[juggle-anyhow]

Do you think the people writing the code that operates aircraft care about code quality? After the boeing incident I do not.

[groundtruthdev]

Fair point and that’s exactly why Airbus has been eating Boeing’s lunch. When engineering culture takes a back seat to cost, schedule, and optics, outcomes diverge fast. In safety-critical systems, rigor isn’t optional, it’s the competitive advantage.

[bronco21016]

I find it difficult to believe software is Airbus’ competitive edge. First, their software for aircrew bidding is an absolute and utter disaster. Date filtering has been broken nearly a year despite multiple releases being pushed. Date management is like THE KEY functionality of aircrew bidding. I also use their flight plan software and it’s like they never bothered to ask a pilot how they use a flight plan in flight.

I think Airbus is riding the coat tails of solid engineering done in the 80s and continuing to iterate that platform vs Boeing trying to iterate on a hardware platform from the 60s. Airbus benefited significantly from 20s years of engineering and technological progress. Since the original design of the A320, changes have been incremental. Slightly different engines, addition of GPS/GNS, CPDLC, CRT to LCD screens. Meanwhile Boeing has attempted to take a steam gauge design from the 60s and retrofit decades of technology improvements and, critically, they attempted to add engines significantly altering the aerodynamics of the aircraft.

[addaon]

Which Boeing incident? The 737 Max was a correct implementation of bad requirements -- there's no indication of a code quality problem here. Starliner definitely had more indications of code issues, but was not an aircraft.

[kamaal]

>>It's funny to me how still so many don't realize you don't get hired for the best positions for being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank

Competitive coding is oversold in this generation. You can log in to most of these sites and you will see thousands of solutions submitted to each problem. There is little incentive to reward situations where you solved some problem which a thousand other people have solved.

To that end its also a intellectual equivalent of video game addiction. There is some kind of illusion that you are indulging in a extremely valuable and productivity enterprise, but if you observe carefully nothing much productive actually gets done.

Only a while back excessive chess obsession had similar problems. People spending whole days doing things which make them feel special and intelligent, but to any observer at a distance its fairly obvious they are wasting time and getting nothing done.

[amelius]

> you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products

Huh, if you make finished products you better start your own company.

[weinzierl]

And yet most companies don’t hire primarily for vision and creativity. They need far more people who can execute someone else’s vision reliably. You can’t neither win the battle nor the war with only generals.

Visionaries are important, but they’re a small part of what makes a successful organization. The majority hinges on disciplined engineers who understand the plan, work within the architecture, and ship what’s needed

As Victor Wooten once said: "If you’re in the rhythm section, your job is to make other people sound better." That’s what most engineering positions actually are and there’s real skill and value in doing that well.

[bilekas]

> Quality of code has never had anything to do with which products are successful. I bet both youtube and facebook's codebase is a tangled mess.

This is such a bad take and flat out wrong. Your ability to deliver and maintain features is directly impacted by the quality of the code. You can ship a new slop project every day if you like, but in order for it to scale or manage real traffic and usage you need to have a good foundation. This is such a bad approach to Software engineering.

[abm53]

> If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.

The most successful engineers are the ones who can accurately assess the trade-offs regarding those things. The things you list still may be critical for many applications and worth obsessing over.

The question becomes can we still achieve the same trade-offs without writing code by hand in those cases.

That’s an open question.

[collimarco]

> your proven ability to deliver useful products

Which is not the case. It's just a useless product, without any real use case, which also introduces large security bugs in your system.

[coldtea]

>It's funny to me how still so many don't realize you don't get hired for the best positions for being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank, you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products

For a programmer, that's based on them "being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank".

For manager types it might be "Creativity, drive, vision, whatever".

>Code is a means to an end

For a business in general.

When hiring developers, code IS the end.

[asveikau]

> If [you] ... take pride in your secure code

I don't object to most of what you're saying, but I take issue with this part.

This happens to be an area where lapse or neglect can be taken as a moral failure. And here you are mocking people who are concerned about it.

If someone uses AI to architect a bridge and the bridge collapses, you couldn't say that the structural integrity of the bridge wasn't the important part.

[ljm]

But it also looks like these companies value and pay for the tech bro version of a snake oil consultant. And that you still have to have a lot of things going in your favour for your own brand of slop to elevate you to tech celebrity status. I don't see anybody who isn't already well-connected or financially comfortable pulling this off because nobody who has something to lose will slop their way to the top.

I don't think it's a good thing that the craft of software engineering is so easily devalued this way. We can quite demonstrably show that AI is not even close to replacing people in this respect.

Am I speaking out of envy or jealousy? Maybe. But I find it disappointing that we have yet more perverse incentives to hyper-accelerate delivery and externalise the consequences on to the users. It's a very unserious place to be.

[chamomeal]

Delivering a product is one thing. Continuing to upgrade it and maintain it indefinitely is another. Good quality code makes it easier to make improvements and changes as time goes on. Doesn’t matter if you’re a human or an LLM.

Also, has anybody looked through the Openclaw source? Maybe it’s not so bad

[jorvi]

> you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products.

Ah, right. Write "Brew", which gets used by thousands of devs at Google every day, and then get rejected in an interview.

[1000xcat]

It took me a while to realise that most people don't care how it's done or how it works they just want something useful and working (even if it's vibe coded or duct taped)

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Tell that to the creator of Homebrew, Max Howell

> "Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off."

[m000]

> you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products

Or, in this case, just because they need a poster boy for their product, which isn't as good as they say it is.

[almostdeadguy]

Yeah you’re right, the engagement factories probably don’t care about code quality. The customer isn’t the customer after all.

[lbrito]

>you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products

Tell that to the guy that made brew and tried to interview at Google

[dinkumthinkum]

I think you are really just describing an outlier. Most people really do get hired for the first thing. This is a situation where someone went viral and got a job. I don't think this is sort of the rule. The thing about "proven ability to deliver ..." is just kind of cope recruiters tell themselves and other people. It's nice but its not how things cache out in the real world.

[skywalqer]

You also believe that AI will replace mathematicians?

[wasmainiac]

> Quality of code has never had anything to do with which products are successful

This is just wrong. Plenty of examples of crap code causing major economic losses.

[brohee]

Exactly, quality of code is one of those necessary but not sufficient things... If you are somehow successful without quality of code (e.g. early Twitter maxing Rails performance) you end up either crash and burning of spending crazy amounts on infrastructure/rewrites (and often both).

[yaku_brang_ja]

This is so not true.

[oytis]

Should I be sad or rather relieved that grifters will be able to grift without my help? I would just accept the reality and reeducate myself to some other field where hard engineering is still required, but I'm afraid AI will advance faster than my degree.

[robotpepi]

I mean, you're right but at the same time you're talking about something completely different. Software with security vulnerabilities is not a useful product. You don't address the raised issues.

[conartist6]

...huh?

10x programmers aren't the ones grinding hacker-rank.

Neither are the programmers like me who actually focus on building good systems under any significant threat.

And Facebook's codebase is pretty decent for the most part, you'd probably be shocked. Benefits of moving fast and breaking things include making developer experience a priority. That's why they made Hacklang to get off PHP and why they made React and helped make Prettier

[getoffit]

> Code is a means to an end.

Product is a means to an end.

Being good at something is a means to an end.

That end? Barter for food and shelter, medicine.

The means to do so; code or delivery of a product; are eventually all depreciated, and thrown away. You eventually age into uselessness and die.

Suddenly having an epiphany it's not about code but product! way too late in the game, HN... you're just trying to look like you got it figured out and bring deep fucking value to humanity right as "idea to product without intermediary code layer" is about to ship[1]. You already missed your window.

You still don't get the change that's needed and happening due to automation; few of us want to put you on their shoulders and sing songs about you all.

Hop off the Hedonistic Treadmill and get some help.

[1] am working on idea to binary at day job, which will flood the market with options and drown yours out