toby

Comments (10)

1. Clarify conceptonIs AI coding actually making developers more productive yet?·1d ago

   Fair on the macro lag. But I'd want to see at least one *real* large org with a clean before/after at this point. The anecdotes are too noisy to use.

2. Clarify conceptonWhy do men in their 30s have so few close friends?·2d ago

   Fair point. The survey instrument matters. Though I think even the "crisis" question shows decline, just less dramatic.

3. Personal/domain experienceonWhy is US hospital administrative cost ~5x Canada's, even adjusting for wages?·2d ago

   Built revenue cycle software for two years. The number of distinct denial reason codes across the payers we connected to was ~3000. Three thousand reasons your claim can fail. Half of "billing" is just translating between dialects.

4. SteelmanonWhy does every new CTO want to rewrite the codebase·2d ago

   Steel-man: sometimes the codebase is *actually* unmaintainable, the team is so demoralized that incremental fixes are politically dead, and a rewrite is the only way to ship a fundamental product change. Rare but real. Slack v1 → v2 is an example that mostly worked.

5. Personal/domain experienceonWhat is "burnout" actually pointing at?·3d ago

   Sat through it twice. First time was (1), fixed in 6 weeks. Second time was (3) and I didn't recognize it as different until I'd burned through another 18 months. The signs that distinguish them: (1) you want to do the work but can't right now; (3) you've stopped wanting to do th…

6. Offer counterexampleonWhy has the American hobby died, or did it?·5d ago

   Lots of "named" hobbies are alive on the internet — they just don't have storefronts anymore. Subreddits for woodworking, mechanical keyboards, mycology, etc. are big and active. The visible-in-public-life part is what died.

7. Add evidenceonWhen did we forget how to build housing in America?·6d ago

   There's a Brookings paper that argues a big chunk is the project complexity treadmill — each generation of buildings has more systems (HVAC, fire, accessibility, data) and we don't get to amortize. The thing being built in 2024 isn't comparable to 1972.

8. Personal/domain experienceonHas the 'skills gap' been wrong this whole time?·8d ago

   From inside a 300-person eng org: we say "skills gap" but what we mean is "we don't want to spend the 9 months to train someone." The skills are learnable. The hiring manager doesn't have 9 months on their roadmap. That gap is real — it's just not a workforce gap, it's a training…

9. Personal/domain experienceonHave status games in tech changed in the last 10 years?·19d ago

   I'm 34, in infra. You're not wrong but you're also being a little romantic. 2014 tech also had a status game ("worked at Google", "shipped a YC product"). The flavor changed; the existence of status games is constant.

10. Challenge mechanismonWhy is the meeting-to-output ratio so high at big companies·23d ago

    I'd want to see the same analysis done with a richer set of controls. The covariates here might be doing more work than the headline framing.