Agreed. I came in the comments to say something similar. I think the author raises some interesting points worth consideration but their perspective is so incredibly cynical. He mentioned a small team that made the Apollo computer program. Well it took an awful lot more than a computer program to get to the moon. I don’t think anybody would argue that there are people who don’t pull their weight out there but there is so much evidence that people working together actually works that it makes you wonder who hurt the author so much.

I fail to grasp the basis of folks knee-jerk dismissal of just about anything that strikes them as "cynical". Like, what world do you live in that cynicism isn't a signal of clear vision?

There's also a lot of evidence it doesn't work. It's not either/or.

This piece is more of a whine about a certain kind of office culture, which the author - unreasonably - generalises to collaboration as a whole.

There's likely a lot of money to be made by identifying and defining good vs bad collaborative cultures.

Both are real. But a lot of "good" practices are more cargo culty than genuinely productive, and the managers who really do make it work seem to get there more by talent and innate skill than learned effort.

surely you can try a little harder with your post if youre gonna post an ad

there are so many external wars going on right now we all forgot about the internal one

That’s how it was before the pandemic.. Is it unusual that the jobs are where the people are?

The layoffs are not necessarily executed in a way that takes performance into account, but that doesn’t mean that the industry overall doesn’t have too many people for the amount of work that needs to be done.

Its only the part about casting any aspersions at the people laid off for being low performance that bothers me because I know so many incredible people for whom they absolutely did not deserve it and its not fair to assume anything about their value or quality of their work specifically.

> that doesn’t mean that the industry overall doesn’t have too many people for the amount of work that needs to be done.

Not that I disagree with you here, but it is hard to square this with people who are also saying not to worry about AI displacement because there's limitless demand for software.

> it is hard to square this with people who are also saying not to worry about AI displacement because there's limitless demand for software.

Well, that's easy to square: the idea that there is limitless demand for software is nonsense. Pure fiction

Depends on the industry and product, as usual. On an large level, I do not think there's "too many engineers and not enough problems to be solved". Companies are simply hunkering down for a recession we can't say out loud.

Our economy is an oroborous of middlemen all using tariffs and inflation as excuses to raise their prices

The ammount of shrinkflation in the last year is just stunning. Sometimes they bother to make the bottle/box/can incrementally imperceptibly smaller. Sometimes they just put less in. I track macros so I'm always looking at weights, and they're generically down 20%, while prices are up.

yes we know the person you are replying to was just using a turn of phrase.

They ALSO know that and are making a stand about this in particular use of figurative language since anthropomorphizing llms is a thing we're already seeing used for accountability washing. If we, the public, don't let the language shift to acting like these LLMs are actual people then we, the public, can do a better job of keeping our intuitions right about who is responsible for these products doing wacky/destructive/abusive/evil things instead of falling into the trap of "<personified name of LLM product > did/said it".

No that’s not true at all. Humans can deal with ambiguity and operate independently. Claude can’t do that. You’re trading one “problem” for an entirely different one in this hypothetical.

Because nobody actually wants to talk about the core of the problem or how to address it. They see different, seemingly unrelated problems depending on what their priorities are. The democrats are also not on the side of actually solving the problem.

I undestand what you are saying but retirees are not what people mean when they talk about Capital. They are talking about executives, fund managers, billionaires, and so on. People who actually control much of our society. Yes many of the funds are managing the retirements of working people but that does not necessarily need to be the case, nor do those retirees have any active ownership of the companies those funds invest in.

Right but the majority of people holding significant amounts of capital is retirees or people saving for retirement. There is a small minority of people wealthy for other reasons. It doesn't really make sense to strongly associate these people to "capital" since they are a small minority of capital holders.