Look, I'm sure focusing on inputs instead of outcomes (not even outputs) will work out great for you. Good luck!
I have no interest in whether a staff member thinks we have a 'toxic culture' or not. They either do the job, or we get someone else to do it. We dont force them to be here as slaves. We are paying them. They either do what they are paid to do, to the standard we expect, or they can go elsewhere. If thats toxic so be it.
>If thats toxic so be it.
Toxic human narcissists are a dime a dozen, and LLMs can emulate them quite well thank you, since they have so much training data to work from, thanks to so many posts from people like you and other lazy wannabe tinpot dictators who aspire to emulate Trump and Musk.
And at least LLMs know how to spell "that's" and "don't" and "we've" and "stolen" and "hamburger" correctly.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/donald-trump-just-committed-one-19...
Since you're so braggadociously proud of your company and management techniques and toxic culture, what is the name of your successful 30-year-old company? Why not post a link here to your hiring page? Or are you embarrassed to?
Why are you so embarrassed and shameful to say, and keep deflecting?
It's obvious and well known to everyone that narcissists have a deep sense of personal shame, humiliating self-hatred, and narcissistic mortification, and yours is showing through quite clearly.
Your swagger collapses the instant concrete identity is requested -- a textbook case of "narcissistic mortification." Your boastful façade (grandiosity) shields a brittle self‑esteem; naming the company would tether your online bluster and naked racism to real‑world scrutiny, triggering the intense shame you work so hard to outrun.
If someone develops an AI that can replace what you do and perform at the same level or higher, then all of your competitors and every hustling scammer will have it too.
So far you've said nothing to prove you're any better than an LLM, so I'd like some proof, please.
If you refuse to say the name of your company after being directly asked several times, then why shouldn't we conclude that you're just another dime-a-dozen hustling scammer?
Is it because you don't want all the racist shit you've posted to Hacker News in the past to be associated with your company? At least LLMs have more discretion and guardrails and better spelling and grammar than you do.
Edit: you've already proven beyond any doubt that your company's culture is toxic and racist, by your own posting history, which ChatGPT o3 was so kind to objectively analyze and summarize, so that is not in dispute, and only proves my point -- but thanks for literally admitting it again just now:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43913944
Narcissistic mortification is the sudden, crushing shame that erupts when a narcissist’s grandiose self‑image is pierced by exposure, criticism, or loss of control; the façade collapses, triggering rage, denial, or withdrawal to fend off the unbearable humiliation. It is clinically distinct from an ordinary ego bruise -- mortification is an identity‑level threat that can provoke extreme, sometimes violent, defensive reactions.
Wikipedia: Narcissistic mortification:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_mortification
Psychology Today: Understanding Narcissistic Injury:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-legacy-distorted...
APA Dictionary of Psychology: Narcissistic Personality Disorder:
https://dictionary.apa.org/narcissistic-personality-disorder
'Racist' in your culture, not in mine.
Arthur Stacks has proven himself to be a textbook case of toxic malignant narcissism, which means all his bluster and self-aggrandizement masks his actual deep insecurity and self loathing, and you can't trust a word he says, because he can't prove any of his outlandish claims.
Notice how easy it was, after all his trolling and bluffing and lying about his so-called successful company, to make him run away with his tail between his legs in shame and narcissistic mortification, by simply asking him what the name of his company is. We haven't heard a peep out of him since then.
All I had to do was to feed his virulently racist posting history into ChatGPT to make a summary quoting his own words, and he was afraid to continue the conversation, because he could not even defend or acknowledge his own self-contradictory posting history and ignorant racist delusional beliefs. ChatGPT correctly concluded:
>Overall: Repeated racism, xenophobia and class disdain; many claims are factually incorrect or ignorant.
>Bottom line: the new comments reinforce the same patterns—overt racism/xenophobia, deep class disdain, bragging about a toxic workplace, and repeated factual ignorance.
Nobody wants to work for a boss like that, which shows that he was just flat out lying about how successful his 30-year-old company actually is, and why he was so terrified to admit the name of his company, because he doesn't want his own toxic words and unrepentant racism being associated with it.
LLMs are perfectly capable of replacing narcissistic deadwood dime-a-dozen Dilbertesque pointy haired lazy toxic managers and executives with low-value skill sets, who are merely self-aggrandizing parasites who disrespectfully exploit and leach value from hard working software developers, whose jobs are much more secure than his, because actually developing high quality software takes so much more skill and effort than he is capable of, even assisted by the best LLMs currently available.
He knows very well that he could easily be replaced by an LLM, and his employees would be much happier work for an AI than him. So he's simply projecting his own fears and inadequacies onto his employees and the rest of us, when he's the one who actually has the most to fear from AI replacing him.
The point I made in my previous post about how LLMs are nowhere near being able to replace software developers, but completely capable of replacing people like him, flies in the face of his false beliefs that he can maintain his lazy do-nothing job running his un-nameable company into the ground by replacing his software developers with LLMs.
Edit:
If you're to embarrassed to say what the name of your company is because of all the racist shit you've posted to Hacker News in the short time you've been here, then that says a lot about how wrong you are, and how horrible you are to work for, and how trivially easy you are to replace with AI.
So is it just because of your many racist comments on Hacker News, or for some other reasons, or all of the above, that you refuse to say the name of your company?
The overwhelming objective consistent evidence is your own words you've posted to Hacker News today and in the past (of course you have to be logged in with showdead=true to see the most vile downvoted flagged examples), and your most recent predictably self-owning replies just prove my point.
Even ChatGPT o3 agrees with my assessment of your posting history, quoting your own vile, violent, and flat-out racist words -- it's no wonder you are afraid and embarrassed to name your company:
Arthur Stacks – Key themes and why they’re objectionable:
Contempt for artists: Calls them “whiney creatives” and tells them to “suck it up.” Bigoted tone, ignores economic reality, factually wrong that “nothing can be done.”
“Foreign riff‑raff” remark: Claims outsiders would “corrupt our culture.” Open xenophobia; ignores Switzerland’s reliance on foreign labour.
Hiring comments (“all white, no blacks to hire”): Says he won’t “go out and find” Black developers. Flat‑out racist, dismisses structural barriers, contradicted by UK census data.
Denies systemic inequality: Insists Black Britons have the same education and status as whites. Racist minimisation, disproved by official poverty and attainment statistics.
Elitist, violent rhetoric: Refers to “peasants” and says elites will “mow them down with drones.” Class‑contempt, normalises violence, wildly speculative.
Country insults (“your country is a shithole”): Blanket derision of entire nations. Xenophobic and evidence‑free.
Overall: Repeated racism, xenophobia and class disdain; many claims are factually incorrect or ignorant.
Arthur Stacks – fresh batch of quotes and what they show:
• Still contemptuous of whole groups
– “whiney creatives,” “cheap Indian” coders, Kerala is “a dump,” 87 % of people are “useless, lazy,” posters are “grifters.”
– Racist/xenophobic and class‑contempt continues.
• Boasts of authoritarian management
– Forces staff back to the office; must use LLMs “or be surplus.”
– “Our way or the highway… not a social club… if they don’t like it they can go.”
– Calls remote staff lazy; says only outcome that matters is profit.
– Freely insults developers (“wouldn’t be working at my company”).
• Wants AI to undercut employees
– Celebrates Gemini letting a junior build a distributed system so he can “reduce the dependency and power of the senior devs.”
– Predicts coding is “gone in a few years,” plans to cut staff sharply.
• Denies responsibility while demanding results
– “We don’t care if an AI builds it or a cheap Indian… they’re still responsible.”
– Claims you can “fully test” distributed systems; belittles anyone who disagrees.
• Repeats racist hiring stance
– “All white… no blacks to hire… not going out to find them.”
– Says US concern with Black inequality is “irrelevant” and a mere “obsession.”
– Again uses “foreign riff‑raff” line.
• Mockery and personal abuse
– Replies with taunts like “You should have spent more time in school” and “Written by someone utterly clueless.”
– Refuses to name his company: “None‑of‑your‑business LLC.”
• Fact‑free proclamations
– Kerala, UK demographics, distributed‑testing claims, AI timelines—all asserted without evidence and often contradicted by publicly available data.
Bottom line: the new comments reinforce the same patterns—overt racism/xenophobia, deep class disdain, bragging about a toxic workplace, and repeated factual ignorance.
The field of software engineering might be doomed if everyone worked like this user and replaced programmers with machines, or not, but those are sort of above his paygrade. AI destroying the symbiotic relationship between IT companies and its internal social clubs is a societal issue, more macro-scale issues than internal regulation mechanisms of free market economies are expected to solve.
I guess my point is, I don't know this guy or his company is real or not, but it passes my BS detector and I know for the fact that a real medium sized company CEOs are like this. This is technically what everyone should aspire to be. If you think that's morally wrong and completely utterly wrong, congratulations for your first job.
My point actually has everything to do with making money. Making money is not a viable differentiator in and of itself. You need to put in work on your desired outcomes (or get lucky, or both) and the money might follow. My problem is that directives such as "software developers need to use tool x" is an _input_ with, at best, a questionable causal relationship to outcome y.
It's not about "social clubs for software developers", but about clueless execs. Now, it's quite possible that he's put in that work and that the outcomes are attributable to that specific input, but judging by his replies here I wouldn't wager on it. Also, as others have said, if that's the case, replicating their business model just got a whole lot easier.
> This is technically what everyone should aspire to be
No, there are other values besides maximizing utility.
Everything between landing a contract and transferring deliverables, for someone like him, is already questionably related to revenues. There's everything in software engineering to tie developer paychecks to values created, and it's still as reliable as medical advice from LLM at best. Adding LLMs into it probably won't look so risky to him.
> No, there are other values besides maximizing utility.
True, but again, above his paygrade as a player in a free market capitalist economy which is mere part of a modern society, albeit not a tiny part.
----
OT and might be weird to say: I think a lot of businesses would appreciate vibe-coding going forward, relative to a team of competent engineers, solely because LLMs are more consistent(ly bad). Code quality doesn't matter but consistency do; McDonald's basically dominates Hamburger market with the worst burger ever that is also by far the most consistent. Nobody loves it, but it's what sells.
Total drivel. It is beyond question that the use of the tools increases the capabilities and output of every single developer in the company in whatever task they are working on, once they understand how to use them. That is why there is the directive.
But yes, I also once worked at a company (Factset) where the CTO had to put a stop to something that got out of hand- A very popular game at the time basically took over the mindshare of most of the devs for a time, and he caught them whiteboarding game strategies during work hours. (It was Starcraft 1 or 2, I forget. But both date me at this point.) So he put out a stern memo. Which did halt it. And yeah, he was right to do that.
Just do me this favor- If a dev comes to you with a wild idea that you think is too risky to spend a normal workday on, tell them they can use their weekend time to try it out. And if it ends up working, give them the equivalent days off (and maybe an extra, because it sucks to burn a weekend on work stuff, even if you care about the product or service). That way, the bet is hedged on both sides. And then maybe clap them on the back. And consider a little raise next review round. (If it doesn't work out, no extra days off, no harm no foul.)
I think your attitude is in line with your position (and likely your success). I get it. Slightly more warmth wouldn't hurt, though.
Maybe you did, and as a developer I am sure it is more fun, easier, and enjoyable to work in those places. That isnt what we offer though. We offer something very simple. The opportunity for a developer to come in, work hard, probably not enjoy themselves, produce what we ask, to the standard we ask, and in return they get paid.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait