Seems like rationalization - PE firms establish regional monopolies and jack up rates. They do it with every type of service. Just accept that we're all serfs under the billionaires who extract rents over every aspect of our lives.
Google pays their oncall a % of their full-time base salary depending on the oncall tier (5 min response time vs 30 minutes).
This should probably be required - there is a different mindset and set of restrictions when you're expected to pick up a page. It also forces companies to use on-call judiciously - not every service needs a 5 min SLO.
What are the odds this is going to become another avenue for grift - magically any companies the trump family invests in are going to get access. Any companies that aren't sufficiently 'loyal' to the regime will have to wait or may never get access.
The reality is that there is no escaping management. A high level IC is pretty much just an unofficial manager. You are responsible for a large technical area - it's your job to meet with stakeholders, design the roadmap, build durable team processes to maintain velocity, mentor and identify the right work for the right people. You may not have back to back meetings but between 1:1s, stakeholders, projects, and ad-hoc fires they're likely still a majority your schedule. You are expected to lead without authority. Leadership will change priorities and reorganize the teams every six months. If you're focused and deliberate, you can maybe get can your project landed before the next reorg.
Randomly I was thinking about how to "prove" you are a distinct engineer who works at a company without revealing your identity.
I feel like labor organizers should offer employee verification as a free service to get people to sign who fear retaliation. Essentially upload your W2, get a token, sign petition with token. Or maybe just mail out a QR sticker to place in an employee-only area...
I don't see how more advanced models won't get gated to specific known KYC'd entities. Classification-style guardrails will never be sufficient. Distillation attacks too are really hard to prevent. Open-source models can have their guardrails easily stripped away so it'll be incredibly dangerous to continue to release more and more capable OSS models that can and will be used to give bad actors 100x leverage.
I had a similar experience after a recent job search and started working on a 'kube-lite' that just uses object storage for coordination and normal cloud primitives like auto-scale groups (skiff.pages.dev).
I ended up in a different non-SRE role but if you're interested in working on it, please let me know and I'd love to walk you through it.
Remember when the admin tried to kill anthropic with a ridiculous national defense supply chain order that the courts blocked - I'm not sure why anyone would believe them credible now
The market is supposed to do that. Once an opportunity is identified there is a rush to compete and margin disappears, so the people still get the new, better thing, but for much cheaper.
What can happen though is that companies figure out how to prevent meaningful competition to preserve high margins. They're worth millions for the innovation but they get to billions through anti-competitive and extractive practices.
The admin just tried to kill anthropic with a ridiculous national defense supply chain order that the courts blocked - I'm not sure why anyone would believe them credible now.
I wonder if this is specific to the animus toward anthropic or if this is the new industry wide level cap. Seems like a pretty big problem for the AI market in general, a lot this investment is predicated on better and better models.
I can't really see wide adoption of local LLMs unless prices really start to climb. It makes sense to use cheaper hosted smaller models like Sonnet or even Kimi but these won't run a Kimi-class model and that is really the floor for non-toy agentic tasks. Spending 5k to avoid a $20 subscription really only makes sense for niche security reasons.
Just do one project. Ask them for an interesting or challenging problem they had, go over it at a high level from a business and technical perspective, and then dig in as deep as you can on specific parts. Ask about business impact, how was that measured, what were the tradeoffs, what made it especially difficult, what were the alternatives, what they'd do differently, etc. If they can go deeper than you can, then that is a good sign.
I use the $100/mo sub but my 30 day API cost is about $1700/mo.
It really depends how you use it, if you're using prompts to generate detailed designs, breaking those into lists of tasks, and then feeding those to multiple agents - it's really easy to burn through many thousands.
If you're being more deliberate and using a few agents at a time interactively, having it review PRs/resolve issues, automated clean-ups and performance optimization, etc it could be more like $1500.
If you're just throwing it one-off questions like a better stack-overflow that is well under a $100.
I've really gotten into /goal, if you can find something verifiable and leave it overnight - it's kinda like christmas morning to see where it landed.
I like take home projects the candidates then need to present and answer questions about. LLMs just mean you can be more ambitious here (though you should pay for their tokens).
The problem with provisional employment is that it can take quite awhile for a new hire to be productive. In a complex FAANG environment I'd wager it's about six months before they're not a net drag on the team and maybe 1-2 years until they're close to fully productive. These are complex not just technologically but organizationally and there are tons of hidden rules and micro-decisions that are the difference between a project stalling vs moving forward.
It would be hard to give up on tech as I genuinely enjoy building, watching systems come alive, figuring out the puzzles through when they break. I do like the term Neo-Amish though and definitely relate.
I do recommend people get outside activities to balance things out - just walking my dog 1-2 miles a day is like therapy for me (and a good way to get unblocked and energized with a new idea).
These are essentially sociopath screens where they expect you to memorize some STAR stories and regurgitate them on demand. And I don't mean screen out.
I recommend spending some time getting a few parts of the codebase idiomatic and then @-ing those files as exemplars. This works a lot better than trying to steer it with markdown. This works reasonably well for like FastAPI but JavaScript seems to be the worst, even with guidance and exemplars it'll prefer in-lining a bunch of garbage rather than use the APIs as directed.