In some ways it’s sad to see, but I’d be lying to say I didn’t have a little happiness seeing the actions of politicians in the U.S. catch up with them.
It’s like there was this belief, we are the most powerful country in the world and we can do whatever we want. Meanwhile we see countries very much question that as we flounder in the Middle East for the umpteenth time in a few decades. We see countries start to get away from the dollar, we see countries call out our military leaders for poor planning.
It’s not like the American public deserve this, but America itself might.
What you are shipping is not the same as what Coinbase is shipping. These are vastly different things. Making a shiny app with AI is great, I'm doing it as I type this. But I am under no delusion that what I make can sustain a multi-million dollar or even billion dollar business in the case of Coinbase. That's plain silly.
I agree with you. I didn't intend to make the argument that what my company does and what Coinbase does are on the same level, if that's what came across.
> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports.
As someone who did have 15 direct reports for a while, it’s a joke.
You basically are their manager in name only. Your time is so split you can’t give any one direct reports the attention they deserve. Quarterly and annual reviews are a farce because you genuinely don’t really know how people are doing except the signals you can receive when you’re not in a meeting with one of your 15 reports.
Just goes to show how far up their own asses some CEOs are. Meanwhile real people just want a boss who cares. Hope Brian feels happier with an extra billion dollars or whatever this year!
> As someone who did have 15 direct reports for a while, it’s a joke.
> You basically are their manager in name only. Your time is so split you can’t give any one direct reports the attention they deserve. Quarterly and annual reviews are a farce because you genuinely don’t really know how people are doing except the signals you can receive when you’re not in a meeting with one of your 15 reports.
Don't forget "No pure managers". So, it's 15+ direct reports while also being "a strong and active individual contributor".
I've seen more than one pitch for knowledge products for "AI-enhanced managers", which are basically prompt templates that enable you to slop your way through 1:1s, ceremonies and reviews.
At that number I’d argue what you’re doing is not management. It’s basically “you’re the guy who fires people in this group”. For some companies, that’s fine, but those people will essentially never have your ear, and you’ll only have theirs in group settings.
Have fun trying to get your funds out of Coinbase. I managed after about 3 days and 10 support tickets. The process seems intentinally broken. What a nasty company.
It would be functionally the same as what you described if the parent company took on the debt, but that’s not how they do it. They make the purchased entity take on the debt. Hence why you often see mass layoffs in the company that was acquired soon after the deed was done. The company has so much debt it can barely function and the easiest way to pay some back is redirecting salaries at it.
Then once you realize why private equity firms do this, how their leaders have extreme monetary incentives to squeeze value out of companies in ways not limited to this, you realize why it’s insane how we have basically zero regulation on it.
Airlines basically were a regulated utility until they were unregulated to the point where normal people can barely fit in a seat and there’s basically no amenities anymore. It used to be kind of nice to fly. That’s laughable now.
On the other side of that coin, when airlines were heavily regulated, most people couldn't afford to fly at all.
The "regulation vs. no regulation" stance is the wrong way to look at it. Airlines are still regulated, of course. Maybe some of the regulations we do have are unnecessary, some of the regulations we got rid of we should really bring back, and perhaps there are others that we never had that we need.
I don’t find this with sonnet at all. As long as I have a solid Claude.md and periodically review the output and enforce good code practices via basic CI gates I’ve rarely ever found myself having to switch to opus
> The jams are built for one continuous arc of attention. The work is staccato.
Couldn't agree more. I'm personally okay with how engineering is changing. At the end of the day, the code is a means to an end for me. That said, the "queue" aspect of how software development is headed is so real. It's a different way of working, and I find the biggest challenge is staying engaged and tuned in while you might have agents take 30 seconds here, 2 minutes there, 5 minutes there, etc. It's easy to get distracted when waiting.
Lots of negativity in the comments and while I'm as distrusting of VC funding as the next guy I think competition in this space is something we should encourage, and bootstrapping that is hard if not impossible at this point. Obviously this post was timed well with the 2-3 GitHub-hating posts that made it to the top of HN yesterday, but I commend the attempt here. I hope it takes off in a meaningful way.
> Lots of negativity in the comments and while I'm as distrusting of VC funding as the next guy I think competition in this space is something we should encourage, and bootstrapping that is hard if not impossible at this point.
What you are calling "negativity" are genuine concerns to me. I was excited at the headline first. But as soon as I found it is VC-funded, it became a complete non-starter for me.
Look, I'm going to make my labor of love available to the world on your platform. I'm not going to earn a dime from it. It's just free work I'm gonna put out there. If I'm going to do that, I'll choose a platform where I can be reasonably sure that there won't be a rug pull 5 years down the line.
The problem with VC-funded projects is that there is definitely going to be some kind of rug-pull. Because the investors need their money.
The Git hosting services I use today are those where I can pay as a paying customer or I can pay as a paying member. As a paying customer, I know what I am getting into. As a paying member, I have the right to vote on decisions that affect the platform.
I agree with everything you wrote, but wanted to add to:
> The problem with VC-funded projects is that there is definitely going to be some kind of rug-pull. Because the investors need their money.
If you can tell me up front what the rug-pull will be in N years, then I could potentially look past it for certain use cases.
But if all you say is "I know you don't like VC-funded companies, but ours really is different because of X" then that's pretty much a slap in the face to users who've been through the hamster wheel of enshittification before.
The thing with VC-founded projects is that there's some kind of rug-pull, ads, privacy violation or "feature enhancing" subscription likely coming and as users we should know.
I don't really like services that stress how idealistic they are when this is the upcoming reality.
Better charge money for services or if you're truly idealistic start it as a non-profit. At the very least communicate what's the monetization plan.
The big question is (and I don't know the answer, so not rhetorical) whether the protocol being open can be sufficient to prevent the rug-pull from being too bad...
If their technology choices are holding them back it just means the product becomes more turbulent as they desperately thrash for a way to make more money.
A protocol isn't a good enough reason for investors not getting their payday. They'll just force aggressive and reckless changes to see a return.
The only way this kind of thing works is if profit isn't in the equation, or the easiest path to profit lines up with what's best for the customers.
This is why I'm skeptical about bluesky in general. Despite the protocol, it's incredibly centralised. If they wanted to make money it won't be long before they start putting up the walls around their garden. The same thing applied here as well, if investors demand a return the open protocol usage will shrink or become less open.
When did Bluesky rug-pull? Seemingly they seems hellbent on making it harder for themselves to rug-pull, at least judging by the developments of the protocols and ecosystem so far.
> and bootstrapping that is hard if not impossible at this point.
What points towards bootstraping being impossible? Sure, it's difficult, that's almost in the name so makes sense, but impossible? Especially if you're aiming for the federation-angle, then you should be able to build cheaper infrastructure, not the same/more expensive.
>What points towards bootstraping being impossible?
Even just the security concerns and having any confidence in the implementation is likely a specialized skill, so you'll need to convince someone to work for free or be able to pay them. Now do that for other major lines of work like UI/UX, Ops, and QA.
Take a look at all of the features from GitHub or any code platform that you'd need to get people to sign up these days (because they are used to GitHub/others) and it's a very tall list. Think something like https://www.enterpriseready.io/ but definitely larger (maybe 2x, 3x as large).
Oh and if someone writes a long rant about it and it gets to the top here, it likely becomes dead in the water, and you can't get the time back, making it a risky proposition. At least with VC money, you got paid a salary.
You could theorize about all those things, or you could look at Codeberg, sr.ht or others that already are doing what you claim to be impossible, yet haven't took on VC money. People are signing up and using these already, despite not offering 100% the same features.
The aim doesn't have to be "Be the next GitHub", but something else, and that's just as valid and "successful" as anything else, as long as they survive as communities.
It’s like there was this belief, we are the most powerful country in the world and we can do whatever we want. Meanwhile we see countries very much question that as we flounder in the Middle East for the umpteenth time in a few decades. We see countries start to get away from the dollar, we see countries call out our military leaders for poor planning.
It’s not like the American public deserve this, but America itself might.
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