Former quant dev. K8s contributor. OMSCS alumni in computing systems. Distributed systems enthusiast. Anime enjoyer. Employed at big tech as a staff swe.
All comments are my own and represent my own opinions.
The irony to me is Apple did the exact same thing to Motorola back in the day, which I saw firsthand as a Mot eng. Poached employees and IP. I doubt the iPhone would have happened otherwise.
Jobs was absolutely ruthless and would do anything for his goals.
As an old timer, I saw this firsthand happen with Motorola. Apple did the same shenanigans, stealing IP and engineers. I doubt the iPhone would have happened otherwise.
Jobs was absolutely ruthless and would do anything for his goals.
The harness is so much better than cc which is a buggy mess. Gpt is also way faster than Claude. I’ve been using gpt for a while now and I know a lot of people that swapped away from Anthropic for multiple reasons. However - fable still seems to be the best coding agent, it’s just slow and the harness sucks. So I still use it in some rare cases like to review codex. I’m hoping 5.6 lets me drop it entirely.
This is the one great feature about Gmail I think.
But I haven’t touched Gmail in years, been on fastmail for about 6 years now.
I’ve solved this by using the fastmail-mcp plugin and have a skill that organises all my mails for me and highlights high priority ones. Works great - I run it every few days, takes about 5-10 minutes.
I honestly think the rise of LLMs will be the death of open source in the long run. Already, apparently, quality of OSS has dropped significantly since 2025 (so most models stop training on github after this).
I don't think a lot of OSS authors quite understand the extent to which models like claude/codex rely on their work. I'd bet money there are extensive curated tasks using your tooling for post-training. With 0 attribution or anything, these models are using your work wholesale to build sophisticated agents that can do your job.
Yeah it's depressing as hell. I guess it's the same thing for artists and musicians and writers.
P.S. I can symphathise with the old house issues! I bought a 1901 terraced property, it's an absolute money pit.
Yeah it was a bit reductionist. I guess it was my reaction to the negativity.
I think his experience is
quite common in big tech, and even swapping teams doesn’t seem to help in my own experience. It’s the rare teams that have any agency, or even clear ownership over the code. It seems by design but as a craftsman it is very frustrating.
I haven’t read anyone put it in words quite as well as Sean’s posts. This really is the nihilistic side of big tech that is rarely written about.
So I think it’s a unique insight - hence why I’m kind of baffled at the reaction. I think if you can relate to what he’s saying (it hits really close to home for me), it’s easy to sympathise with.
Imagine an entire world of interactive, colourful ascii art.
I mostly started on my local BBS on Long Island playing tradewars in my teens, around 14 (where I memorably won as top player for a few months and got tons of credits).
I actually have no memory of how I discovered BBSs, I think I found some directory at the library then found my local one.
I expanded from there to some bigger ones (requiring a special telephone plan so it didn’t cost a fortune!). I played some rpg (maybe lotrd?) with like a hundred players and it was an absolute blast.
Other highlights:
I found a credit card generator and used it try getting free credits which got denied. The owner called my parents house and they had no clue what they were talking about.
Another time I was trying some exploits to get ops access and the admin caught me (BBS servers would echo the remote session). Admin interrupted my session and we started chatting. He recognised I was a naive script kiddie and we chatted about love of BBSs and computers. Pretty cool.
Everyone's circumstances are different right? It's not always so simple.
Big tech was a bit of an experiment for me in my 40s, I always worked at small/med size companies before. I think it was worth it (for the learnings and comp). I get a lot more choices in the future when I'm financially secure.
Sean, I wonder why people are so negative here. I think they’ve never worked in big tech.
As a staff swe in big tech your blog posts resonate strongly and reflect my own experience. But I can see if I didn’t have that experience I’d be unable to relate or even understand.
Maybe it is nihilism - but I think that’s also a natural result of working for big corps.
You can buy good quality replacement batteries. I got Cameron Sino "CS-EC003XL". It lasts at least a week before needing a charge, depending how much you use it.
Former quant dev. K8s contributor. OMSCS alumni in computing systems. Distributed systems enthusiast. Anime enjoyer. Employed at big tech as a staff swe.
All comments are my own and represent my own opinions.