colinhowe

In general, yes. I believe there's a difference between writing a performance review based on your memory/notes of how someone was doing 6 months ago vs getting into the weeds of a sample of PRs/specs and reviewing those from a performance viewpoint.

Author here. This is valid feedback, thank you. This post was originally an internal post. Internally, I have credibility as "the guy that does his homework". That doesn't carry over to the broader internet!

I think you're right that the data presented doesn't prove or disprove the thesis that "customer issues remain broadly stable". I think it lends credibility to the idea that "AI didn't lead to an obvious and immediate slopfest of bugs".

As for the bumps, we've noticed them annually and we haven't yet found a solid reason why. There’s no correlation with customer growth, PRs shipped, or features shipped. It's likely a combination of various seasonal effects in our own hiring and customer onboarding. What isn't in this article: we've more than doubled our customer base in this time period, our customers are more mature and raise bugs more readily, we've got ~60% more engineers, and our product surface area has grown a lot too. I'm yet to land on a satisfying metric that normalizes bug rates in a changing environment.

Author here! That opt out issue is definitely not intentional, I just gave it a quick try and it worked for me in a few different browsers. Feel free to ping me on colin AT ashbyhq.com with any additional details and I'll see if we can get a reproduction.

We only hire engineering managers that are deeply technical. This gives us more ability to work closely with engineers and make sure they're using new tools in the ways we want. It's not perfect. Sometimes, it goes wrong. But, that's why we continuously add tests and other tools to help us spot mistakes.

Author here. 100% agree with your sentiment. When we do performance reviews of engineers we take the time to comb over at least some of the PRs the engineer has written. We flag any patterns around code quality (regardless of whether it came from AI or not). This is on top of any other ongoing feedback we're giving.

E.g. in a recent review I wrote I picked up on an engineer not splitting up React components aggressively enough and over-relying on deeply nested ternaries. In that same review I also commended the engineer for being particularly excellent at explaining complex bugs to our support people and called out one example of a nasty race condition.

I think it's relevant, but it's not the only thing.

My personal experience as a Brit is that the UK has a growing trend of anti-intellectualism and being innumerate is "cool" in certain circles.

Eugh :( Why couldn't that person have just let you know far far sooner? Some people just shouldn't be responsible for other people.

I've had burnout. I was 12-18 months in a startup before I realised it was not at all the right fit for me.

I was brought in as CTO to fix some stuff. I fixed that stuff and then realised that how I wanted the business to operate and how the CEO wanted to operate were very far apart.

It all came to a head when somebody got fired and I disagreed with both the decision and how it was carried out. This was just one item amongst a bunch of other things.

This drained me so hard emotionally. I was CTO at another startup for much longer and never got close to this level of burnout. I've talked to someone else about this (talking is helpful) and they had a similar experience. It's not always about the hours or the tenure. 60 hours/week in the right environment is very different to 40 hours/week in the wrong environment.

It took a few years for me to get over this. I took some less complicated jobs with less responsibilities and less personal investment before chucking myself back into the fire. It's going well so far and I'm definitely more resilient as I've been through some pretty dire work shit since then.

Sorry to hear you're having a tough time of it. Getting less personally invested for a while really helped me. I also took on some hobbies that I had total control over and that helped too.

Good luck :)

Thanks for this!

It's almost a rite of passage for a startup to say that they're "revolutionising the world of blahblah"

Hah. Lack of pay on job ads is one of my biggest bugbears!

I've always been of the opinion that nice to haves just shouldn't be there. They don't help self-select in a meaningful way. The must haves must be actual must haves. E.g. must be able to code confidently in Python.

I asked this some time ago and never found a satisfactory answer. There doesn't appear to be much research in this area either :/

I'd say that's just awful UI. Looks just like a normal header for a block of text.

If you're targeting developers then I suspect you'll find many of them have at least heard of the term raycasting from CS degrees at the least.

Interesting! What makes it hard for you to develop trust? For me, I think that if I can't trust someone than I don't want them working for me in any capacity (office or remote!)

> Report on first six months of scheme confirms no increase in pollution around the ULEZ boundary

Except if you're already deep into work because you start earlier than everyone else then they just rip you out of your flow.

They also tend to be longer than five minutes in terms of herding people to them etc.

I got to 5 minutes. I have a kid so this was easy :D

Once upon a time there was a banana. That banana was called bob. Bob the banana used to have fights with other fruit. His arch nemesis was Oscar the orange. Oscar was a very orange orange. He was so orange that everyone else was jealous. Bob the banana wasn't very yellow. He was kind of yellow with dark splotches on. That is why Bob used to fight the other fruit. He was jealous of Oscar's orangey orangeness. He was also jealous of Adam Apple's shiny red skin. Finally, he was jealous of the grape gangs lovely green skin.

One day Bob was busy fighting Oscar, Adam and the Grape Gang. All at once. That's right. He was a very good fighter as he practiced a lot by fighting the other fruit.

Percy pineapple saw the fight and came up to Bob and intervened. He said, 'Oi. Bob. What you doing?'

'I'm fighting!'

'Why?'

'I don't know.'

Bob was sad. Bob shrugged. He didn't know why he was fighting.

'You never fight me' said Percy pineapple.

'You're right, I don't.'

'You only ever fight the fruit with lovely skin. Did you notice that?'

'Oh. You're right. I do'

'Do you think maybe you wish you had perfect skin like them?'

'You're right. I wish I did have lovely perfect skin without any blemishes. Instead, I have this grotty yellow skin with dark patches all over it.'

'That's ok. I have spiky skin. Nobody can even touch me and I never get any cuddles.'

'Oh.'

'Mmmhmmm'

Bob felt bad.

'Maybe I could try and hug you'.

'I wouldn't advise it, I'm very spikey. I've got used to just having high fives and fist bumps instead'

'Oh. That sounds like a good idea'.

Bob and Percy have a nice high five session. Bob isn't very good at high fives so it took a lot of practice. After about four thousand attempts they get it right and do one of the awesome high fives from top gun. That's right, a top gun high and low high five. They both feel really cool.

Bob isn't feeling sad any more.

Bob then looks around and notices the other fruit that he was decking. The fruit is looking a bit bashed up. He apologises for what he has done and then asks 'Can anyone do anything to help me?'

Just a brief addition to this as a user of APIs. Allow me to create a new token and have two tokens for the same account. This makes rotation of tokens without loss of service possible :)

Resurrected my old account just to reply to this. I just started playing 9 months ago or so. I was sceptical as I've always felt poor at acting/drama.

Turns out, it's really fun.

You're not making a story alone. You're in a group with 2-5 other 'heroes' and a DM. You're all making the story together and it's easy to go along with the flow until you think of something that pops into your head and you can then do whatever it is you want to.

In my experience, good DMs aren't going to judge you for what you do or don't do.

For me, D&D is way more lighthearted than I thought it would be. I guess this depends on the group, but, I've now bounced around a few and it seems to be a common thread. It sounds ridiculous, but, last night the group I DM'd 'invented' brunch before taking on a quest to save a girl that had been abducted by goblins (but, not before finishing their brunch and making a little picnic for themselves).

It's surprisingly easy to try D&D - there are often people running 'one shots'. These are small stories designed to start and end in a few hours so that you get a feel for it without needing to invest a huge amount of time.

I've seen this happen at companies before. The other side I've seen is:

  HR bod: sorry, you can't give everyone a 5 on your team, someone has to have a 1
  Manager: but, I've hired my team sensibly!
  HR bod: sorry, you can't give everyone a 5 on your team, someone has to have a 1

:(

Seeing it bounce up/down from the UK... brief moments of "IT WORKS" followed by sadness. Long night ahead I think :(