[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'..."

[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.

[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.

[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'.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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

[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.

[ghoblin]

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

[eecc]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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