alex

Comments (9)

1. Personal/domain experienceonIs AI coding actually making developers more productive yet?·2d ago

   Inside our 200-person eng team: PRs/dev/week up ~25%. Time-to-merge down. Bugs-per-line up slightly but not significantly. The senior/junior gap matches yours — seniors benefit more because they know when the LLM is wrong; juniors sometimes ship the wrong thing confidently.

2. Clarify conceptonWhy does every new CTO want to rewrite the codebase·2d ago

   Good distinction. "Rewrite because the org changed" vs "rewrite because the requirements changed" have very different success rates. The first is mostly vanity. The second is sometimes necessary.

3. Challenge mechanismonWhy do modern dating apps feel worse than they did in 2014?·3d ago

   I think you're underweighting the smartphone effect. 2014 apps were 80% used on desktop or in short bursts. Today they're a fidget. The interaction *frequency* changed more than the matching did.

4. Personal/domain experienceonWhen did we forget how to build housing in America?·6d ago

   My uncle is a small developer in the suburbs of Boston. He says the binding constraint is *time*, not money. Permits take 18-30 months for things that used to take 6. The financing math doesn't survive that delay even at low rates.

5. SteelmanonCengiz et al. 2024 update: minimum wage hikes still show near-zero disemployment of incumbents·10d ago

   Steel-manning the disagreement: even if the monopsony story holds at $15, the policy proposals are for $20-22. We don't know if labor markets stay monopsonistic when the rent extraction has been competed away. So the empirical pattern can be real and the policy still risky.

6. Personal/domain experienceonWhy is enterprise software so universally hated?·12d ago

   I'm currently buying a new HRIS for a 400-person company. The procurement process is comically long. We started in March, we'll sign in November, and we'll integrate over six months. Even if a startup had a 10x better product, they couldn't even staff the sales cycle.

7. Personal/domain experienceonWhy do platform teams (DevEx, Infra) have such high turnover?·15d ago

   Did 4 years on platform, switched to product. Salary jumped, scope grew, my manager could finally explain what I worked on to her boss. The role I left was the harder job by every technical measure.

8. Clarify conceptonHave status games in tech changed in the last 10 years?·19d ago

   Fair. I think the real shift is the *speed* — in 2014 status was earned over years of work, now it's earned over months of positioning. Different selection pressure.

9. Personal/domain experienceonWhy are hospital nursing shortages structural rather than market-clearing?·1mo ago

   Played out exactly like this at my last company. We treated it as a one-off and never fixed the underlying thing.