Thank you for the kind words! I did end up taking that five month break in my writing to try and develop a different voice, but it's a struggle. Because our company runs pretty smoothly, the original source of stuff I was angry about has sorta dried up. I still see people do crazy things, but I'm a distant observer.
For the sake of honesty, I should say that these aren't wild amounts of money, it's just a high effective hourly rate. If we achieved 100% utilisation, it would be, but really we're just making enough to get close to our corporate salaries, but on a fraction of the hours. As a business, we need to make more than this in the long-term to be sustainable, as a business is a lot more susceptible to shocks than an employee is. I don't get redundancy if sales dry up!
I've managed to recruit in Perth, which is probably as cursed as it gets. The two things are:
1. I don't bother recruiting on the public market. They're genuinely too incompetent, and you'd have the issue you raised over and over. We sent exactly one candidate to a "normal" company and it was a total waste of time
2. For the remaining companies, I basically consult for free to help them smooth out their process. Places that are already very good but candidate-starved don't need this, but most of them could use a small hand. This is maybe non-trivial to replicate but I have a reasonable psychology background and that has given me some aptitude for feeling out cultural fits. Recruiters have set their rates so absurdly high for no service that I can do this, AND run two hour tech interviews personally with candidates AND undercut competitors and still hit that $1K per hour rate. It's just nuts
My history is all pretty public on the blog, but tl;dr write every day, don't be a coward re: topic, and work hard at writing well. It's easier than ever to meet cool people in tech through writing since almost everyone is spamming nonsense on AI.
It's bedtime in Melbourne, but I write what would be fair to call a well-known tech blog, and very publicly started a consultancy about 1.5 years ago. Pretty much in the same niche you're in. We made enough money to pay two people full -time wages in the first year and I've cracked $1K per hour on some engagements (not many, and each one was <20 hours).
I'm firing you for being unable to adequately commune with the machine spirit.
(But for real, a good test suite seems like a great place to start before letting an LLM run wild... or alternatively just do what you're doing. We definitely respect textbook-readers more than prompters!)
I thought it was harmless(ish) fun, but David Gerard put out a post stating that Yegge used Gas Town to push out a crypto project that rug pulled his supporters, while he personally walked away with something between $50K to $100K from memory.
I suppose that has little to do with the technical merits of the work, but it's such a bad look, and it makes everyone boosting this stuff seem exactly as dysregulated/unwise as they've appeared to many engineers for a while.
I met Sean Goedecke for lunch a few weeks ago, who uses LLMs a bunch, and is clearly a serious adult, but half the folks being shoved in front of everyone are behaving totally manic and people are cheering them on. Absolutely blows my mind to watch.
He was the keynote at YOW! so I can't capture all the nuance and hope I'm not doing him a disservice with my interpretation, but the tl;dr is he:
"LLMs drastically decrease the cost of experimenting during the very earliest phases of a project, like when you're trying to figure out if the thing is even worth building or a specific approach might yield improvements, but loses efficacy once you're past those stages. You can keep using LLMs sustainably with a very tight loop of telling it to do the thing the cleaning up the results immediately, via human judgement."
I.e, I don't think he can relate at all to the experience of letting them run wild and getting a good result.
At my first job, all the applications the data people developed were compulsorily evaluated through Fortify (I assume this is HP Fortify) and to this day I have no idea what the security team was actually doing with the product, or what the product does. All I know is that they never changed anything even though we were mostly fresh grads and were certainly shipping total garbage.
Beck was in Melbourne a few weeks ago, and his take on LLM usage was so far divorced from what Yegge is doing that their views on what LLMs are capable of in early 2026 are irreconcilable.
That's fair. I overstated my point a bit -- if a project was on schedule and it could be delayed by one day to improve something nebulous, many would agree. It's just that the tradeoffs are never that small, so you never actually see it happen, i.e, the preference is extremely minor.
It's important to note that many of those people aren't winning. What you're witnessing is the marketing equivalent of what random government software engineers produce. A good number of the people on HN would be trivially outearning those nerds
Oh, I glossed over that in my response. I've had people at the C-level admit that they don't care about ethics to me, and I especially see startup CEOs lie a lot, or otherwise be so self-deluded to make sales easier that it's hard to tell if they know they're lying.
I think Sean is right that, in the abstract, they prefer good software to bad software, but they won't make any sacrifices if those sacrifices require losing money or status. It's the same "do your what your manager wants" playbook, but run up to board level.
Just wanted to pop in and say that I think Sean is absolutely right here. I've tried the ultra-cynical view at workplaces, and would have had better results with some "idealism", which he rightly notes in his form is just a more effectively action atop a base of clear-eyed cynicism.
However, I think we've got some tactical disagreements on how to actually make society a better place. Namely, I think Sean is right if you have to remain an employee, but many people just don't have to do that, so it feels a bit like a great guide on how to win soccer while hopping on one leg. Just use two legs!
My own experience, especially over the last year, has been telling me that being positioned as an employee at most companies means you're largely irrelevant, i.e, you should adopt new positioning (e.g, become a third-party consultant like me) or find a place that's already running nearly perfectly. I can't imagine going back to a full-time job unless I was given a CTO/CEO or board role, where I could again operate with some autonomy... and I suspect at many of the worst places, even these roles can't do much.
Also Sean, if you're reading this, we'll get coffee together before March or die trying.
I've written about getting out of some giga-depression a few years ago, but having a good therapist was massive. Working out kept me busy and mitigated symptoms, but I don't think I would have improved without a strong psychologist.
Hope that helps a little bit. It gets better sometimes!
I'm a huge fan of https://eblog.fly.dev/index.html. The author, Efron, very graciously advises me on a lot of little things around my engineering practice, and I've learned a huge amount about weird holes in my practice from industry dysfunction in a very short period of time from him.
Yeah, I run into this a lot too, hah. It's depressing but also pretty funny when you've got enough distance from it. My favorite was an ex-girlfriend working in HR interviewed a candidate with 15 years of experience, and was told to ask him to solve FizzBuzz in a language of his choice.
(This is obviously a silly test for various reasons, but she was following orders.)
She called me later that day because the guy couldn't do it, so he instead blew the fuck up at HR and accused them of ambushing him with a super complex interview question. From his reaction, she thought that the company had tricked her into making totally unreasonable demands of someone who hasn't had a month to prepare.
God knows what the hell that guy did at his previous role.
PS: I have laughed every time I've seen your username for the past year, and can't remember if I've told you this before.