The move that I’m fighting in my company now is hiring bargain basement Indian outsourced heads who are very obviously vibe coding slop. It’s a raw deal for us since we’re paying extra for a meat wrapper around an LLM coding agent, but I’m sure it’s a boon for the outsourcing company who can easily put one vibe-coding head on three or four engagements in parallel. It’s hard to imagine LLM coding technologies not being enthusiastically adopted by all of the outsourcers given the economic incentives to do so.
Whether or not they end up losing business long term, it seems like a nice grift for as long as they can pull it off.
I’ve experienced this as well. If management is not competent they can’t tell (or don’t want to hear) when a “star” performer is actually a very expensive wrapper around a $20/mo cursor subscription.
Unlike the author of the article I do get a ton of value from coding agents, but as with all tools they are less than useless when wielded incompetently. This becomes more damaging in an org that already has perverse incentives which reward performative slop over diligent and thoughtful engineering.
Is that really something you are doing in your job?
Most of my teams have been very allergic to assigning personal blame and management very focused on making sure everyone can do everything and we are always replaceable. So maybe I could phrase it like "X could help me with this" but saying X is responsible for the bug would be a no no.
Not really. I was talking more in the context of the parent comment. If your management is dysfunctional, allowing AI slop without the accountability, then you go with this extreme measure.
I don't mind fixing bugs, but I do mind reckless practices that introduce them.
Not the parent, but I take it by going to any pharmacy in Ukraine and asking for it. Prescription not required. In my case it’s part of a treatment protocol for insulin resistance but the pharmacist doesn’t ask and I don’t tell them.
This bullshit Russian propaganda talking point needs to die. “Russian-speaking Ukrainians” are Ukrainians.
I was at a birthday party in Kyiv about a month ago, the only non-Ukrainian guest. Most of the day most the guests were speaking Russian, even when cursing the Russian invaders and toasting to their deaths. These were “elites” economically speaking.
The idea that there are Russian speaking Ukrainians being oppressed like Jews in Nazi Germany is idiotic and not at all based in reality.
Source: I speak Russian but not Ukrainian, my wife is a Ukrainian whose native language is Russian. Every time we wake up in the night to Russian bombardment we curse the Russian invaders—in Russian!
You regurgitated Russian propaganda about Russian-speaking people in Ukraine which is clearly not based on your own experience and I provided a counterpoint based on actually living in Ukraine. If you think I have misrepresented the actual experience of actual Russian-speaking Ukrainians in actual Ukraine then by all means educate me.
Ukraine has a long history of resisting Russian subjugation, long before supposed CIA plots and conversations with Victoria Nuland. I wish there were some sinister plot to vanquish Russia via a proxy war in Ukraine; maybe then the Western powers would finally jock up and put an end to Russian imperialism once and for all. Sadly I’m afraid this narrative of Ukraine as pawn to destroy Russia is only a Russian propagandist’s fever dream.
I had the opposite problem. They closed my account with very short notice back when they decided to purge all customers with any connection to Ukraine. This was an account for a US company owned by me a US citizen receiving payments from the US and paying contractors in Hungary, but once upon a time I had paid contractors in Ukraine. All addresses and legal agreements were in the US.
So if anyone else is having trouble closing your Mercury account I suggest you contact support and ask to change your principal location to somewhere in Ukraine. Your account will be closed in no time.
In almost every restaurant and cafe that I frequent in Ukraine, each table has a unique QR code that links to a site with both the menu and an option to pay the bill. The pay option shows the current itemized bill with options to pay with monoPay (a payment service operated by MonoBank which also operate this QR code system) or Apple Pay or iirc Google Pay. Tip can also be paid here (although it’s not pushed on you with dark patterns like in the US and 10% is reasonable). It felt odd at first to just walk out after a meal without having given money to a person but it quickly become my preferred payment method.
There is no app to install. WiFi is always available so you don’t even technically need to have a mobile data plan.
If you don’t want to use this then you call the waiter over and someone brings the mobile credit card terminal instead.
The “how does the waiter know to come and take payment” problem is unique to how restaurants in some countries handle paying the bill.
I too am impressed by Cloudflare Workers’ potential.
However Workers supports WASM so you don’t necessarily have to switch to JavaScript to use it.
I wrote some Rust code that I run in Cloudflare Functions, which is a layer on top of Cloudflare Workers which also supports WASM. I wrote up the gory details if you’re interested:
School for me was a gladiator academy. Useful for producing gladiators I suppose but at the expense of any genuine intellectual curiosity or love of learning. Thankfully I had an informal opportunity to stay after school when the budding gladiators all went home to torment small animals or whatever it was they did, when I could sit in peace and play on the school’s Apple II. That opened my eyes to an entirely different world, which I now have the privilege of inhabiting.
Some of my siblings liked school, and my parents were wise enough to make the homeschool/government school decision on a child by child basis. I’m very grateful that they had the courage to make that decision in my case against fierce opposition by all of polite society.
When reading BigTech career ladders like this one, I immediately fall into the trap of projecting myself onto the ladder, and getting upset when the level I've chosen for myself is described as something that sounds far removed from what I want to do. I must remind myself to frame this as how Dropbox describes the things that they value in each position. An L7 SWE is the most valuable SWE in Dropbox, as measured by the comp that they are will to offer to L7s.
When I see that "code fluency" expectation tops out at L3, "design" at L5, and "architecture" at L6, I'm taken aback. So in Dropbox, L7s and L3s have equivalent code fluency?? Heresy! Nonsense! Dysfunction!
But I try to see this from the perspective of the (I assume) execs who maintain this document. Is the value of an L7 that they write better Python or React or Rust code than the other Ls? Or is it that they are expected to navigate the bureaucratic maze that Dropbox has become, making things happen and getting things shipped instead of throwing up their hands and blaming corporate dysfunction? I imagine myself as a Director in this same environment, bucking for a promotion which could easily have a seven-figure impact on my comp; who do I want implementing the projects that I am going to put into my promotion packet? Probably I want whoever will make things happen, I doubt I care very much about how finely crafted the code is or how many CPU cycles that hot new feature is going to consume in prod. In fact the document is explicit that all roles are measured on impact, which is only vaguely related to technical excellence.
This kind of thing used to upset me, as I've spent decades refining my craft as a SWE, I consider myself to be very good at it, and here's a Dropbox document telling me that they value my skills at about an L3-L5 level which would typically be 20-somethings on a traditional SWE career path. If I want to work at Dropbox with a title that matches my own self-assessed level (L7, naturally!), I will apparently be expected to do very little of the craft that I love and have honed over decades, and instead should attend a lot of meetings, craft long-term visions, influence strategies, and probably cross-functionally synergize paradigms or something.
But thinking more deeply about this, setting aside emotion, it makes a certain kind of sense. After all, at this point in the lifecycle of Dropbox or any other BigTech, what would have a bigger impact: another hot-shot software engineer shipping code day and night, or a smart technically-minded operator navigating the corporate hierarchy and political minefield to get the right things done in spite of the dysfunctional structures that seemingly every big org evolves into order time? The answer is obvious from my framing, the only confusing thing about this is that they use the title "SWE" for both of those things.
I would be interested in a Dropbox L7 SWE level of compensation, and I've already self-assessed myself as L7, yet my impression from reading this document is that I would be miserable as an L7 in Dropbox. Perhaps not coincidentally, I've spent almost the entirety of my career in startups without rigid career ladders, or vesting-in-place at the big companies that acquired those startups, or most recently founding my own software startup. That this career framework has convinced me that Dropbox isn't the right place for me is probably a good thing, as it saves me and Dropbox interviewers quite a bit of wasted time and effort.
> instead should attend a lot of meetings, craft long-term visions, influence strategies, and probably cross-functionally synergize paradigms or something
I never understand how this is supposed to happen. As an employee of a company, no matter the level, don't I need to do the tasks that are assigned to me by the higher level? Be they "write code" or "attend meetings" or "write an architecture document" or whatever? If I am at L4 and whish to grow, can I just skip my coding tasks and instead join meetings uninvited, high-level ones? How can I "influence other teams" if I am not already empowered to influence other teams? As a team member, would I do what some external "influencer" says, or what my team leader / manager says?
It sounds to me like for most advancement, the actual requirement that can be read between the lines is "know how to navigate the rules and people to do what you want instead of what you are told to do". I would guess you would find plenty of people with this skill at NASA right before the Challenger disaster. People who knew how to "make things happen" despite lowly engineers telling them there are problems. Acknowledging problems isn't anywhere in the career ladder document.
Usually the levels don't say "you cannot do X until you are level Y" but instead are "if you are level Y you must be doing X".
This means that if you want to be promoted you go to your boss and say "hey, I want to work towards the next level." They then find opportunities for you to attempt the various things required for the next level and if you succeed you can be promoted.
It doesn’t matter how good you are as a developer, you can only have so much impact coding 40 hours a week. I wanted to move up both to increase my autonomy and my vision is much larger than the amount of work I can physically do with my own hands.
As a 50 year old who has been doing this for awhile, I can and have:
- spent time on zoom calls and flown out to customer’s sites to gather requirements and help close a sale (cloud consulting).
- developed and managed implementation plans
- been both a dev lead and a lead for cloud architecture projects
- can be your standard, experienced enterprise developer
- I know almost every type of database out there and best practices for each
- can set up a “Well Architected” AWS account from an empty account including pipelines to deploy to EC2, Lambda or Kubernetes (EKS).
But I can only do one at a time. My “impact” comes from companies knowing that I can credibly speak to all of the individuals involved and they can fly me out to a customer’s site without me embarrassing them
What you're describing is actually not that different from my own conception of what a senior principal SWE is. Simply stated, I would define that level as a very experienced, knowledgeable, competent SWE whose main value to the org isn't in KLOCs they personally write but as a force multiplier who sees around corners (but also writes their fair share of KLOCs).
What turns me off about the version of an L7 SWE as described in the OP's link is the extent to which it doesn't sound like that at all. Maybe it's my bias against BigTech career ladders, but reading between the lines it sounds to me like it's more about navigating organization, political, and bureaucratic obstacles and attending a lot of meetings and generally being seen to be doing these things.
The point of my comment is that perhaps it is rational for an org like Dropbox to value the ability to do that more highly, but I've been in those roles and I found them personally to be soul-crushing.
When I am managing very large cloud projects, I still have to deal with the client’s different departments priorities, fiefdoms, dealing with the operations side wanting everything locked down and the developers wanting the freedom to do what they want. It’s part of dealing with any large organization.
I got an offer to be a “staff architect” at the company that I acquired the startup I worked for before going to AWS. I would have been responsible for strategy across all of their acquisitions.
While the technical requirements didn’t worry me. I had never seen how a large product company worked at that level and didn’t have confidence I could pull it off from an organizational level. Before going to AWS I worked at small companies.
I did know the expectations in consulting. But in all large organizations you have to deal with that. It’s the nature of the beast.
It is true that war can rage in a country and people not on the frontline can live reasonably normal lives. I returned to Kyiv in August of last year, and lived for over a year during some of the worst air attacks on the country.
It’s not so much that there is no danger or the war is far away. I woke up many times to explosions in the distance and air raid alarms in the capital are a daily occurrence. Attacks are absolutely not limited to critical infrastructure. Even if Russia didn’t deliberately target civilian populations (and they definitely do), air defenses don’t vaporize enemy ordnance so it’s going to fall down somewhere, and when attacks are happening in cities then it’s likely that it will land on something populated.
It’s more that the odds of being killed or wounded as a civilian in the capital are higher than in a peaceful country but low enough that the mind just gets used to it and you go on with life.
I finally left Ukraine a few weeks ago, for fear of how bad the winter will be with the infrastructure bombing. My wife and I moved to Budapest. Believe it or not, we miss Kyiv and want to move back in the spring, war notwithstanding.
Having said all that, I was in Baghdad in 2006 and I do not understand why any Iraqi family would move back there during that time, unless they were Kurdish and moved to the northern Kurdish territory.
That’s a long story. Mostly just a series of unexpected turns and a search for meaning in my professional life.
As for why I stayed, it’s hard to believe but even today, modulo the air raids, my life in Kyiv is just better than the life I led before in Miami, and vastly better than my life now in Budapest. I fell in love with that city when I started traveling there on business in the 2010s, and decided to move there to build my next company in 2018. The people, infrastructure, services, startup culture, healthcare, etc are all much better than a country with Ukraines history and geographical fate would suggest. That’s down to the Ukrainian people who have by force of will achieved some remarkable things with very little.
The war is already destroying some of what they have achieved, and depending on how it ends may destroy it all. But as I said, even now in a brutal and relentless war, life goes on.
I should also point out that as recently as last month I heard a lot of American accented English from obvious tourists on the streets in Kyiv. I was at a trendy restaurant with a Ukrainian colleague and nearly every other table had at least one foreigner. Some are there to cash in on the wartime opportunities with drones and other offensive and defensive technologies, some are deniable operators doing god knows what, but my sense is that a fair number are just tourists. Go figure.
Whether or not they end up losing business long term, it seems like a nice grift for as long as they can pull it off.