I don’t get why people think 996 is even optimal for productivity in the medium or long term. If I work hard past 8pm I can’t sleep - my brain is still whirring. That results in worse sleep -> less memory creation & skill consolidation -> lower productivity.
In my mind, if you cared ONLY about productivity in the medium and long term, you’d probably do something like 9-7-6. So you still get a day off, and don’t work past like, dinner time. Still give yourself time to exercise, still give yourself time for social interaction, sleep can stay dialed in. I think someone doing 976 probably out-competes someone doing 996 in short order.
He was right tho. AI is doing all the coding. That doesn’t mean you fire junior staff. Both can be true at once- you need juniors, and pretty much all code this days is AI-generated.
It would be badass to get that same tattoo today. To carry the artist’s legacy forward. And also because it still looks cool. Talk about “timeless” artwork
I would say, yes there is a flaw there, because salaries are often a huge chunk of R&D expenses, and for the sake of long term growth, we want to disproportionately incentivize R&D spending
Honest question, is there a community / grassroots effort I can participate in so that this this section 174 change can be reverted to its pre-2022 state?
I'm wondering, if such a movement doesn't doesn't exist already, do I need to start it myself?
- Gather up about 10 million dollars (more will help)
- Bribe the right people
I hate to provide such a cynical and lazy response but we've got until midterms (maybe) before you really have a shot at 'democratically' influencing the system. For the time being you'll have to work with the mafia that's currently running things and outbid whoever wanted this to happen in the first place.
No one on this site or on earth has any idea what the next 5, 10, or 30 years will bring. They will likely bring a world which is so radically different from today it's incomprehensible. But that doesn't mean strictly worse.
Consider that with such extreme randomness the future has an unknown probability of introducing enormous improvement in daily life, for you specifically and for society in general. Are you pricing in the odds that within your lifetime, humanity could find a cure for aging? What are the odds that democracy makes a huge comeback, driving authoritarianism down across the world, even in China and North Korea? Nonzero, to be sure. Have you priced that in as well?
Don't over-focus on the things that you'll miss about the past, or the negatives aspects of the future which you expect will come. They may, but if they do, they'll likely be bundled with incomprehensibly good things, and the net effect may be quite, or even extraordinarily, positive.
I loved this article and it is the strongest argument I’ve ever heard for “why I shouldn’t be freaking out about the future of my engineering career”.
Now just for the heck of it I’ll attempt to craft the strongest rebuttal I can:
This blog misses the key difference between AI and all other technologies in software development. AI isn’t merely good at writing code. It’s good at thinking. It’s not going to merely automate software development, it’s going to automate knowledge work. You as a human have no place in a world where your brain is strictly less capable in all realms of decisionmaking compared to machines.
I loved this article. But for some reason my gut is telling it will age like milk. Can you imagine how effective these coding agents will be in, say, 2036? The concept of coding things by hand for the sake of higher quality will seem so outdated
I feel like the fundamental bottleneck of software dev velocity will be human brains ability to understand the code being made. We can’t deploy code / packages / systems / apps we don’t deeply understand, no matter if those components were written in 3 weeks by a team of devs or in 3 seconds by GPT-7, we’re still responsible for it when it gets into users hands, and we’re not gonna deploy stuff that we don’t know how it works. Because at the end of the day it’s our necks on the line if something goes wrong and we’re asked to fix it. We can’t just point the finger at AI, which means we’ll always have to understand what we’re putting out there in the world, and that’s essentially what our jobs will be in the future. The one who’s accountable for the software systems put into production.
They may not have been alluding to violence; perhaps something like democracy itself would be enough to take that lifestyle away from the middle class. If billionaires consolidate enough power & resources and push the tax burden onto the middle class which makes yearly vacations unaffordable
In my mind, if you cared ONLY about productivity in the medium and long term, you’d probably do something like 9-7-6. So you still get a day off, and don’t work past like, dinner time. Still give yourself time to exercise, still give yourself time for social interaction, sleep can stay dialed in. I think someone doing 976 probably out-competes someone doing 996 in short order.