> Is “unagentic engineer” a euphemism for human/not-AI?
No, it refers to people that are not "high agency", i.e. they might be smart and competent but need guidance on what to work on, as opposed to taking initiative themselves.
That's beside the point, we all know that one terrible engineer who is just incredibly productive and completely lacks any self-critical instincts. With LLMs this type of output becomes much more easy to produce, so what are you going to do if you're asked to review 10x the amount of code that you're reviewing right now?
Something similar happened in my job. I reported the over-engineered, completely senseless solution, after the "dev" got really angry at me about simply reviewing his code. He was gone the next week. If you have a boss, tell him when this happens. If you don't, fire him/her yourself. If the amount of complexity introduced is not worth the use cases it covers, in a business sense, then that's a review that rejects the code on that basis.
Great article. I have an observation to the "engineers should know this and do good engineering" though: I work for a payments company and there is a fundamental career problem with becoming the ledger ninja: It's not enough work, and it's eventually done!
I've seen the following major phases of this work: 1) Build the ledger (correctly), and it will work well for a while. 2) Add convenience code for the callers, assist finance in doing reports/journaling, fix some minor bugs, take care of the operational bits (keep the database up). 3) Reach the scaling limits of your initial approach, but there are some obvious (not trivial) things to do: re-implement the transaction creation directly in the database (10x perf gain), maybe sharding, maybe putting old tx into colder storage, etc.
This is spread out over a while, so I haven't seen it be a full-time job, even at real startup-level (+10% MoM) growth. Even if it was, that's one person, not a whole team. I understand engineers that instead are pulled towards projects where they are in higher demand.
In another comment somebody said ledger systems are trivial when done right and super hard when done wrong - so if you did a good job it kinda looks like you just created 3 tables and some code. That seems thankless, and job searching as this type of specialist is harder than just being a generalist.
I suspect this is a "small company" problem which don't sell too many different things. A larger enterprise might have a platform for connecting businesses with businesses and businesses with customers. They might sell services (subscriptions) but also one-time purchases which require different forms of revenue recognition. Those might even be split up across different revenue streams. You end up building sub-ledgers for each one of them because the ERP can't handle the scale. Oh, and you're a public company so make sure everything is SOX compliant and easy to audit. Ah, and you operate on a global scale so do all those things in different currencies for different legal entities.
There's a reason Stripe is as successful as it is. And then there's a world where a company outgrows Stripe.
There are worse career choices ("prompt engineer" LOL) than financial engineering.
I’ve built my career on cleaning up should-have-used-a-ledger messes. it’s hard but there’s always another company that needs it, and I get bored staying in one place.
recently I discovered that in a medical billing context the system is way, way weirder than I had seen before. I shipped the three tables, but getting everything into it seems like it might be an endless battle
I mean, tigerbeetle looks extremely cool (I've watched the project develop since its inception), and I trust them to be rock-solid. But saying "just use this project that is very new and unproven, written in a new and unproven programming language" is just pretty unserious. At least talk about pros, cons, risks, and tradeoffs.
>very new and unproven, written in a new and unproven programming language
while i'd generally agree with this, in the case of TigerBeetle i think it's safe to trust their tech based on their test-suite/practices - one of the most impressive things I've seen in the past 5 years.
they extend the testing practices of FoundationDB (now spun out into Antithesis[0]), going a layer deeper to test for data integrity when there is disk io corruption. check out from ~20:30 in this demo:
I love Crocotile. It's got very opinionated, kind of weird UX, but it gets me in the zone so so well. I haven't used it in ages, I should give it another spin.
Sorry if this is ignorant, but I never understand what serverless Postgres means. What's different from a hosted Postgres instance? Some scaling characteristics or the fact you interact with it via an API instead of some library, ORM, or plain SQL?
Serverless in that context essentially means “somebody else's server(farm)”. It frees you from some of the infrastructure/admin involved in server sizing & upgrades, backups, availability management, and so on.
It can be very attractive to teams who don't want to have an internal expert for all that, or to buy huge hardware to deal with spikes in activity that only happen occasionally⁰. Just being able to spin up a large DB for some tests without worrying about available space, how much it will compete for this like CPU/IO with your other DBs¹, etc, can be very convenient.
It can work out quite expensive in terms of price/performance ratio, if those factors are not a benefit to you.
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[0] or happen regularly but usually for only a short time
[1] usually these things are capped, or have a burstable cap, so “noisy neighbours”² are not the huge problem they can often be on cheap shared hosting
[2] unless you have explicitly pooled resources (like Elastic Pools for Azure SQL) without per-object limits, in which case your own activity could be harmful noise
A lot of "serverless" things are really on-demand timesharing.
One example of "serverless postgres" in my opinion would mean data is on a blob store and you only pay when running queries and for the static storage.
Maybe as a slight input to why your comment would get downvoted: You're expressing a few semi-related frustrations, but it reads pretty incoherent, since you seem to assume folks already know the concepts you're talking about and agree with that worldview.
As such you're not really making sense, and human to human suggest the following: Try to get a different perspective and mingle more with offline people. The whole culture war topics and politics can really lead you down a crappy path, and it doesn't really reflect most of reality.
thanks. there's plenty pro-constructivism in my humanist-marxist circles. They are either openly hypocrites or too young still (like utilitarianism, it is a good thing if possible after all)
But yeah, if you don't still agree it is fringe, and still think so after reading the only link on my comment, then you might as well downvote me. But that is one i'd take gladly.
it is just an intro though. my point is that they are posting several academic articles on that one wikipedia which hunt "succcess" story. and somehow i've seen all of them on the front page here.
Do you in general assume that to be a pro-constructivist or humanist-marxist, one has to be a hypocrite or too young still?
What in constructivism is bugging you? The basic idea is that concepts get their meaning through their relations to other concepts. I find that a very reasonable perspective.
A while ago my team needed exactly this kind of auth solution, so the eng team reached out to Ory to clarify some technical questions that weren't covered by the docs. We were super enthusiastic about Ory. It looked solid, was open-source, and ticked all the right boxes.
We got an immediate response by a very motivated sales person who insisted to be connected with management and refused to put us in touch with anybody technical. It was a pretty off-putting experience, because it basically presumed that our eng team wasn't the decision maker (it was). I know a lot of companies throw their sales people at you, wanting to get in touch with somebody higher in the org chart, but it's still a pretty insulting experience for a tech-driven organization.
Needless to say we went with something else (not Auth0 either) and have been very happy.
Hey, Founder here. Sorry to hear that. The sales process should be a net benefit for anyone involved. I’m really keen on fixing this (and had my fair share of bad sales calls too). Would you mind sending me a quick email to aeneas@ory.sh - I just want to figure out what needs to change for the org to become better. Appreciate it! I won’t sell you anything, promised ;)
Can't share that experience.
We are in the process of migrating from Azure B2C to ORY Network and had also some initial doubts if their products are a good fit for our enterprise company.
Our company is three hours away from their office in munich, but they were willing to send us an experienced engineer to answer all of our questions. This was very much appreciated and helped us a lot. They also offer the possibility to purchase dedicated slack channel support.
> ...basically presumed that our eng team wasn't the decision maker (it was).
I work at an auth company as well, Stytch, and this is something that we treat as obvious but we've seen a lot of reports like yours. Auth is such critical infrastructure, it is always going to come down to the technical team in the end.
No, it refers to people that are not "high agency", i.e. they might be smart and competent but need guidance on what to work on, as opposed to taking initiative themselves.