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Mangers and executives have better tools now to track a tech workers output/performance, they will cut the useless/low performers/in over their head people who were hired during preceding years. A small tech team with proficient intelligent devs augmented with AI can replace 100's of duds.

My experience has been that a good small team, even full of people who’d stand no chance in a FAANG interview (fwiw) can outperform at least 5x as many devs in your median bigco, while maintaining a relaxed pace.

The reason for this has nothing to do with how productive the devs are per se and everything to do with bloated decision making processes and extremely high communication overhead. “AI” does nothing for that (in fact, I’m seeing integrated suggestions in ticket tracking tools making things spammier and reducing quality of tickets, so if anything, it’s making it worse)


No what happens from using those metrics is that you filter out all the people that care more about doing their job well than gaming metrics. Fraudsters tend to do really well in those situations.

It's baffling that with current iteration of hype mania all of the lessons about metrics were thrown out of the window. Goodhart's law anyone?

All of a sudden all of the terrible, horrifying methods of measuring lines of code, commits, tasks etc. resurfaced, like world was hit with an amnesia meteor.


You sweet, innocent child.

Managers understand that metrics are meaningless. The idea is to have something to point at to scare engineers into jumping higher.


Exactly. All these internal “AI Leaderboards” are a proxy for “who is working.”

Google might not like you scraping their product. Is this legal?

Yes, I used to love hacker news but seeing every Trump/Elon related post brigaded by bots/haters/far left loons is disturbing, may as well just use Reddit.

Not sure these and other editors have a future when the SOTA models can generate code better than 99% of the best devs in the world 100x faster, 10x cheaper and never get tired or want pesky time off. Maybe the use case it to view code while humans are still required in the loop (I think they just about still are) or to edit a commit msg.

"You can use my model to kill others if Dario won't do it sir"

I guess the trope in movies of masked bank robbers going in and threatening a scared bank teller will be a thing of the past soon. Pointing a gun at an iPhone doesn't have the same vibe.

I think this is true in the short/medium term, hence the confusing picture of layoffs but growing number of tech roles overall. The limit maybe be just millions of companies with one tech person and a team of agents doing their bidding.

Maybe software engineers will be like your personal lawyer, or plumber. Every business will have a software engineer on dial, whether it's a small grocery store or a kindergarten.

Previously, software devs were just way too expensive for small businesses to employ. You can't do much with just 1 dev in the past anyway. No point in hiring one. Better go with an agency or use off the shelf software that probably doesn't fill all your needs.


Not to jump to conclusions but I wonder if this is in any way related to outsourcing/AI replacing traditional experienced UK tech workers. Never seen anything like this happen before.

Really weird, you'd think all API calls are tied to the user ID. Unless some hard-coded debugging ids crept out to prod. But again, code reviews? integration test?

Recently Lloyds Banking Group has upgraded their apps so that you can see details from all your accounts with them in every app (some functionality still needs the right brands app though).

There's obviously some magic to glue different accounts together without user input, so I can see my Scottish Widows pension and Halifax credit card balances in my Lloyds Bank app[1], even though I have separate logins for each brand's website and app. Possibly my National Insurance number and address I'd guess? But I can see it going badly wrong if they get the magic merging wrong...

[1] Clearly I need to open a Bank of Scotland account to get the full set.


Technically, not much magic, apart from Mortgage and Pension, OpenBanking is quite solid in the UK, and you can connect any bank account from any bank. This is now supported by many banks in the UK. You can connect all other bank accounts directly. There are apps for that, too, for a small fee.

But I suppose you mean connecting these directly based on the national insurance number, rather than relying on user consent to use OpenBanking to see them all together in one place.


Yes, this isn't OpenBanking, I'm sure the Lloyds app could do that at one point to link to my Halifax account (or others), but it was flaky IIRC (and seems to have disappeared from the app?), this is a separate automatic thing.

This is probably in response to the new App first banks like Monzo/Starling (I use Monzo) Where you can open an account, see savings, current account, business account, CC etc all in one.

My daughter opened an account using the app only (Scan passport, video clip to authenticate) got the card the next day and setup up savings, investing ISA's with a few clicks. Again incumbents not willing to innovate until someone disrupts, but probably too late.


You could see all your accounts with an individual brand in one website / app, and doing things like opening new accounts online or applying for credit cards isn't exactly new functionality either. I'm sure Monzo is slicker because it isn't talking to a bunch of COBOL in the backend, but traditional banks aren't behind so that basic functionality is missing.

The issue is that Lloyds Banking Group was basically bifurcated by brand, so that the Lloyds app and website only had your Lloyds current / savings / credit cards etc. whilst the Halifax website and app only had Halifax current / savings / credit cards. They're clearly trying to merge things so you only need one app / website.

I noticed my soon to be closed nearest Lloyds branch gained a "Halifax customers can use this bank." poster in the window, I'm not sure if that's just a reaction to the fact that physical bank branches are getting kinda rare, or if it's really taken them about 17 years to merge the Lloyds and Halifax backend systems to the point where branches are interchangable.


Yes the backend for Monzo is indeed very performant. I have a dev app connected using their api and can read all my accounts/transactions over an API. As soon as I make a transaction it appears in my web app within a few seconds. Compare that with older banks it can take a day for it to appear.

Maybe some session sharing issue? Wouldn't show up if you weren't testing multiple users at the same time.

Yes, hope they publish a post mortem of the cause, will be interesting to see how this could have happened.

A year ago, they announced that half of their engineers will be in India by 2026:

https://www.ft.com/content/a304cf5a-5d91-4d4d-a41f-16651b59e...


Well at least there Opex will be low enough to handle the outflows of customer as they close their accounts.

The grass is always greener, even if you find a good partner you have to put a lot of effort and attention to the relationship to keep it going well, also doing things you may not want to do but have to as its a two way street.

Then there are bad relationships, kids etc. It's all about tradeoffs. One thing I like about being single now (divorced) is I can do what I want when I want but also have socialisation when I want it. Would never go back to a live in relationship just too stifling. My adult daughter lives with me though so I have daily social time which, along with other family, friends, is enough for me (sometime too much and I have to decline).


I think the opposite, US is safer now with less crime/illegal immigrants so tourism is probably up, also with the 250th birthday and World Cup it's likely to be a record breaking year.

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