Absolutely no enterprise - I work in enterprise cloud consulting - absolutely no company would trust Grok with their IP compared to Anthropic or OpenAI with Musk’s reputation on how he runs his businesses.
Anthropic just tolerates the money losing developers who pay $20/$200 for subscriptions.
This is completely illogical. There are a lot more dark pattern tracking that websites can do across websites than native apps without a user’s permission
People have been saying that Apple was going to require apps to be sold through the Mac App Store since 2010. You can install anything you want on your Mac.
And if only mean old Apple is suppressing PWAs, then why are the same companies who make apps for iOS also making apps for Android instead of telling Android users to use the web?
Second point, Apple could care less about random indie developers using a PWA. It came out in the Epic trial that 90% of App Store revenue came from loot boxes and other in app purchases for pay to win games.
Third point, users no more wish they could have shitty PWAs than Electron apps. It’s just what we are stuck with on the desktop
From a usability standpoint. Do you expect everyone to wear glasses? Are people going to all be out in public talking and doing hand gestures as input to their glasses? You don’t need to cater to different people who need different prescriptions for their fingers and for me, I have prescription glasses with two separate prescriptions and transition lenses.
It’s not hard to look at sales volumes of any of those to know that they don’t have mass market appeal - except maybe the Amazon devices and even Amazon cut jobs in that department and the managers there had to fuzz the numbers to get downstream revenue attributed to them.
I agree with his sentiments and his examples. But my fear is that on a place like Hacker News, people might not understand the difference between his advice and trying to have a successful startup.
>You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit.
When I’m applying for a job, I can apply for multiple jobs at once and interview for multiple jobs over a a few weeks. It’s especially easy when I am both interviewing and working remotely. I don’t have to make excuses to leave work during the middle of the day or worse case fly out for an interview.
The same is true for buying a home, I can put bids in for multiple homes - or in my case just have my homes built in 2003 and 2016. I know the world is different now.
>You don’t need every person to want to build a life with you. You just need the one.
This is one place where of course you can shoot your shot at multiple potential partners and date often. What you don’t want to do is try marriage multiple times if it can be avoided. A bad marriage will wreck every part of your life and a divorce will set you back financially. (Happily remarried for 15 years after a horrible first marriage.)
None of his examples are applicable to starting a business. 9/10 startups fail and even out of those that “succeed” only a small number of those have an outsized return for the founder where they wouldn’t be better off financially working a regular old enterprise dev job for those years let alone getting a job at BigTech.
VCs can make multiple bets at one time and be more assured that they capture the 1/10 startups that succeed than a founder.
There is a huge difference between being able to take multiple chances at once in all of those scenarios and being stuck with the 1/10 choices you make for multiple years.
I have been buying cheap knockoff lightning devices since my iPhone 5 at least. I can guarantee that random Chinese manufacturer wasn’t selling lightning cables in bundles of 5 for $10 using officially licensed anything from Apple.
I am working fewer hours. I at most work 4 hours a day unless it’s a meeting heavy day. I haven’t typed a line of code in the last 8 months yet I’ve produced just as much work as I did before LLMs.
If you are “consulting” on an hourly rate, you’re doing it wrong. The company and I get paid for delivering projects not the number of hours we work. A smaller project may just say they have me for 6 weeks with known deliverable. I’m rarely working 40 hours a week.
When I did do one short term project independently, I gave them the amount I was going to charge for the project based on the requirements.
All consulting companies - including the division at AWS - always eventually expand to the staff augmentation model where you assign warm bodies and the client assigns the work. I have always refused to touch that kind of work with a ten foot pole.
All of my consulting work has been working full time and salaries for either the consulting division of AWS where I got the same structured 4 year base + RSUs as every other employee or now making the same amount (with a lot less stress and better benefits) in cash.
I’m working much less now than I ever have in my life partially because I’m getting paid for my expertise and not for how much code I can pump out.
You really think that people at BigTech are doing it for the “enjoyment” and not for the $250K+ they are making 3 years out of college? From my n=1 experience, they are doing it for the pay + RSUs.
If you see what it takes to get ahead in large corporations, it’s not about those who are “passionate”, it’s about people who know how to play the game.
If you look at the dumb AI companies that YC is funding, those “entrepreneurs” aren’t doing 996 because they enjoy it. They are looking for the big exit.
Well I have personally tested it on the green field projects I mostly work on and it does the grunt work of IAC (Terraform) and even did a decently complicated API with some detailed instructions like I would give another developer.
I’ve done literally dozens of short term quick turn around POCs from doing the full stack from an empty AWS account to “DevOps” to the software development -> training customers how to fish and showing them the concepts -> move on to next projects between working at AWS ProServe and now a third party consulting company. I’m familiar with the level of effort for these types of projects. I know how many fewer man hours it takes me now.
I have avoided front end work for well over a decade. I had to modify the front end part of the project we released to the customer that another developer did to remove all of the company specific stuff to make it generic so I could put it in our internal repo. I didn’t touch one line of front end code to make the decently extensive modifications, honestly I didn’t even look at the front end changes. I just made sure it worked as expected.
I’ve been a “software engineer” or closely adjacent for 30 years. During that time, I’ve worked for small and medium “lifestyle companies”, startups, boring Big Enterprise, $BigTech and over the past 5 years (including my time at $BigTech) worked as a customer facing cloud consultant where I’ve seen every type of organization imaginable and how they work.
No one ever gave a rip about “craftsmanship”. They hire you for one reason - to make them more money than they are paying you for or to save them more money than you are costing them.
As far as me, I haven’t written a single line of code for “enjoyment” since the day I stepped into college. For the next four years it was about getting a degree and for the next 30, it was about exchanging my labor for money to support my addictions to food and shelter - that’s the transaction.
I don’t dislike coding or dread my job. But at the end of the day (and at the beginning of the day) I’ve found plenty of things I enjoy that don’t involve computers - working out, teaching fitness classes part time, running, spending time with family and friends, traveling, etc.
If an LLM helps me exchange my labor for money more efficiently, I’m going to use it just like I graduated from writing everything in assembly in 1987 on my Apple //e to using a C compiler or even for awhile using Visual Basic 6.
I’m 51 and have had 10 jobs over 30 years. Those jobs have been everything from startups, to boring stable small and medium “lifestyle companies”, to boring big enterprise, to $BigTech and now I work in customer facing cloud consulting as a staff consultant.
And I’ve never seen a market this shitty. Even after the dot com bust if you were a regular old enterprise dev - and at the time I had 4 years of experience as a Windows developer in Atlanta - it was easy to find a job. 2009-2011 was a shit show but it wasn’t that bad.
While I did find a job quickly after being Amazon’ed in 2023 and again last year, things have gutted worse since then.
My only strategy is to keep our fixed living expenses way down (less than half my income and I’m the only one working by choice), stay out of debt, keep a years saving in the bank, keep my resume updated and a longer form career document [1], keep my skillset in line with the market (I lead a lot of “AI” related non chatbot projects) and keep a strong network.
I feel a tinge of FOMO knowing that an intern I mentored while they were an intern an a year after coming back makes a little more than I make. They are 25 and a mid level SA at AWS - similar to what I do. I have to think about the story of the “Mexican Fisherman”.