laurentl

My read is that we're traveling along Gartner's hype cycle. Tokenmaxxing/"who needs developers anymore" is the top of the peak. "oh no we ate our entire budget in 3 months" is heading towards the through of disillusionment. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point we hear about companies quietly walking back AI mandates and even gasp hiring developers again (not that it'll be shouted from the rooftops). And then, eventually, we'll figure out how to use these tools productively and settle in the plateau.

Different companies/industries move along the cycle at different speeds. E.g. the non-tech solopreneurs went from "I can vibecode an entire app in an afternoon, never hiring a dev again" to "whoopsie, Claude deleted my production database" pretty quickly (and loudly). Big tech also seems more advanced in the cycle; cf. Amazon's recent production problems and subsequent backlash, Uber's budget, etc. Larger companies are following the trend a beat late as their C-suite cosplays "we're a tech startup" on LinkedIn. And some companies are sitting this one out for the moment, either out of obliviousness or wisdom, and will adopt the tools once they've matured enough.

Anyway, give it some time; I'm sure the backlash will come to your company as well. Then, eventually, you'll be allowed to use AI rationally.

Old-fashioned I guess: LinkedIn

I applied for a CTO position out of curiosity, had a conversation with the CEO (now my cofounder) and hit it off. I was "lucky" to have worked with a so-so CEO previously so I knew exactly what soft skills and personality I wanted in a co-founder.

I suppose you've fundraised at some point in the past 13 years. If you have, the advice you probably received was to start with the tier 3 VCs, hone your pitch, and move on to the VCs you really wanted to work with once you had your pitch nailed.

The same principle applies here. The more interviews you do, the more comfortable you'll get, the better it'll go. And who knows, it might work out with one of the first companies you interview at!

I have an email address with a personal domain, and my "legacy" Gmail account. I like having an email address with a custom domain, and I think that it's a (weak) signal about your technical aptitude/geekiness. If you want things to just work, Fastmail, protonmail and presumably other email providers will let you manage this without any hassles. I use protonmail and I haven't noticed any dropped emails.

The main pros & cons, apart from vanity, are IMO about security and robustness. With a custom domain you can change email providers, or you can recover from being locked out. (Just read any horror story about the day Google decided to freeze an email account). OTOH the custom domain name adds one more point of failure, either for delivery (if you have to handle SPF/DKIM yourself) or security - if someone gets into your registrar/NS account, they can re-route your emails. So you want to make double extra sure your accounts are locked down tightly.

I signed up for the ChatGPT Premium waitlist a week or 2 ago; I haven't received anything as of today.

In related news, my beta access to Mistral was just approved (I signed up this week).

Define "middle class Americans"? Hard to give a precise answer otherwise.

A few (other) explanations:

* QoL is hard to be rational about, and is something that (I think) has to be experienced first-hand. European salaries are most probably lower for comparable jobs (they certainly are for high-wage workers) but pack more punch because of better social benefits and, depending on where you live, lower CoL. However it can be hard to convince yourself that 40 k€ in Spain affords you a better QoL than 80k$ in California unless you've experienced both. I mean, 40 is much less than 80, right?

* the "American Dream" is still a big part of the American (and global, for that matter) psyche. I would wager most Americans think the US is a place to emigrate to, not from. I don't know if many middle-class Americans would spontaneously envision emigrating to Europe. This is probably even more true for descendants of recent immigrants: if your family struggled to get to the US, why would you consider leaving?

* Ability to live abroad, in particular mastering a foreign language well enough to live and work in the country

* I'm not sure how well employability travels. You can work as a developer in just about any country but I think this is an exception. A medical diploma does not transfer well between countries (e.g. you probably need to start again as an intern, re-take exams, etc.), neither does a law diploma. More "middle class" jobs will have similar barriers to entry. E.g. if you're a plumber in the US and move to Europe you have to deal with different construction codes, installed base, local habits... Same thing if you're an auto mechanic: different car manufacturers, different regulations, etc.

I did a (regular, non tech-focused) executive MBA at 35, after about 3 years as a developer and 10 as a technical manager. I would absolutely do it again. After my MBA, I transitioned into a CTO role; I'm fairly sure I would have gotten the role without the MBA, but it helped. My feeling is larger companies value MBA diplomas more.

Aside from the career boost, what I got out of my EMBA:

* exposure to new topics, some of which I loved (and use on a regular basis), others that I hated (and now I have better clarity on what I don't want to do)

* finance is high-school math with fancy words; it's really easy to pick up if you have a mind for numbers

* this holds for a lot of topics (e.g. strategy, operations management, etc): a little domain knowledge, good heuristics (both of which you learn during the MBA) + general logic and problem-solving skills (which you probably already have as an engineer) go a long way

* I built a good network and made a few great friends

A few observations from your initial description to maybe help you figure out how you want to handle this.

1. Most people calling the helpdesk are in a very specific state of mind: they have a problem and they want it solved. They're not curious about where the problem comes from, they don't want to know how to avoid it next time, they don't want to learn a better way to do things. They have an interrupt that prevents them from resuming the rest of their day, and they want that interrupt dealt with as quickly as possible. For people in this frame of mind, trying to be helpful usually backfires. You solved their problem, that's what they called for, they're not interested in getting educated. These people will always look for the fastest way to solve their problem and the one which requires the least amount of cognitive activity on their part. Anything that makes the conversation longer than it needs to be or requires them to engage more brain cells is a downside.

2. It seems like there's a status issue as well. You mention that these users "operate beyond [your] abilities" so maybe a bit of inferiority complex on your part? In which case explaining how you know better than them could be a way for you to even the score, so to speak. But then this triggers its own opposite reaction, "I have a PhD so of course I can figure out how computers work if I put my mind to it, stop talking down to me". To which you respond, effectively, "having a big brain and knowing how things work are 2 different things, you may be book smart but I am street smart" and it escalates.

My advice, insofar as it makes any sense, is to let go of all this social context when you're in helpdesk duty. Take the call with the objective to help a human being get on with the rest of their day with as little fuss as possible. Accept that some will be grateful and say thank you, and others will be douchebags, because that's how human beings work. Trust to karma to reward the good ones and punish the douchebags. Accept that you can't teach someone who doesn't want to learn. Don't bring your ego into it, because winning technical arguments with someone shouldn't be how you measure your self-worth.

Good call. A lot of red flags in here, including one I haven't seen in the other comments: the relationship with the brother. If you're both technical, you have more seniority than him but he has more shares and co-founder status? You're in for recurring headaches about who owns the tech, and you'd always be in the minority.

I love 202 for sentimental reasons (latest problem available when I picked up PE, seemed impossible at the time, felt thrilled to solve it) and 422 because I find the solution so elegant. I haven't touched PE in years but I still remember these problems and their solutions off the top of my head.

This problem holds a special place in my heart.

When I first discovered PE* I checked the latest available problem, which was 202 that week. I remember thinking at the time that it was impossible to solve.

Fast forward a couple of years and a lot of solved PE problems. I took another go at 202 and I finally figured it out. The feeling of accomplishment I felt then...

*through an xkcd comic (https://xkcd.com/353/). The alt text mentions 20 small problems, which are problems from PE (IIRC this was specified in the now-defunct xkcd blog)

The answer to this question is almost always: "the stack you're most comfortable with".

In your case, given that you have (apparently) a strong Python background, you should try to see how far you can go with Django and some vanilla js. If your front-end doesn't absolutely have to be a SPA, you'll be up and running and productive much more quickly with a fairly simple (server-side logic and page generation) and user-friendly (Django) stack. No need to jump into node, npm, etc.

If you want or need to get more fancy with the front-end, vue.js is relatively easy to pick-up, fairly future-proof (as another poster pointed out, vue and React are the two main choices), and can be included fractionally in your existing pages without a complete overhaul.

If you want a nice tour of classical CS concepts in bite-size chunks, give the "Advent of Code" a try (adventofcode.com)

It's a collection of 25 vaguely Christmas-themed problems published each December. The 2019 advent requires you to, among others, write an interpreter for pseudo-machine code, navigate around a maze, manipulate graphs... So it's a fun way to play around with algorithmic and data structure concepts.

Seems I can't reply to parent so putting the link here: https://www.tlt21.com/the-product-leader-reading-list/

Moonshot-Internet | Lead developer | Paris, France | ONSITE (WFH 3 days/week) | Full-Time

Hi, I'm Laurent, the CTO of Moonshot-Internet. We're an Insurtech aiming to make insurance simple, easy to use and useful.

I'm looking for our next lead developer to oversee both front-end and back-end development work, mentor the junior devs in the team, and help us improve our development practices. The tech team is fairly small (9 persons) so you'll be instrumental in shaping it and helping it grow.

Our stack is Python and vue.js hosted on AWS, mostly on serverless. The job is based in Paris although we do have a partial work from home policy (2 to 3 days a week). I have a complete job description in French, I'll do a quick translation if you're interested.

You can reach me at laurent.leconte [at] moonshot-internet.com

Also, you might find the Rand leadership Salck (https://randsinrepose.com/welcome-to-rands-leadership-slack/) to be a good place to have discussions with peers on all sorts of topics.

Unless I misunderstand your concept, using your website would entail granting it rights to my AWS account to access billing info and shutdown pretty much any service. So, something close to the Administrator policy. I guess you could do something more granular e.g. stop but not start, specify resources, etc but in any case I need to grant you enough rights to shut down my account, which is the entire premise of your service. What are the chances that I’ll grant this type of access to a 3rd party I don’t know about? Snowball, meet Hell.

Also, I don’t want my production account to be shut down. Notified, sure. But if my spending takes off because Elon Musk tweeted about my website and I’m getting a lot of hits (and hopefully a lot of new paying customers) I definitely do not want my service to go down.

In other words, your idea isn’t for me, but it might well work for side projects where you don’t want to spend too much and don’t care about the service going down. In any case the security aspect is going to be tough to manage properly, and is going to make your service a juicy target for hackers.

Daniel Jarjoura recently published a fairly complete reading list that might be useful: https://techleadership.substack.com/p/the-product-leader-rea...

Some books I’ve read and enjoyed and/or found useful: The hard thing about hard things, the innovator’s dilemma, High output management, Accelerate, The Phoenix project (though I much prefer The Goal)

Matt Levine (Bloomberg) gives a convincing explanation in a recent newsletter: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-01/stocks...

In a nutshell, he argues that stock price is a reflection of the long-term value of a company (“the present value of the company’s expected future earnings”, which is what stock price theoretically is). With low interest rates, the bad results of 2020 are drowned out by the expected return to normal earnings in the coming years.

> A pandemic crushes revenues. Stocks fall on general uncertainty and a fear of financial crisis and widespread bankruptcies, which would wipe out profits in perpetuity. The fears of financial crisis are resolved, more or less by the Fed and Congress pumping money into companies to prevent panic, so the bankruptcy risk is more contained. Stocks return to a price level that suggests a terrible year, followed by mostly normal.

As an aside, I highly recommend subscribing to his Money Stuff newsletter. Entertaining and pedagogical, it’s a great way to learn about the theory, inner workings and quirks of modern finance.

I would start with a basic question: what do you want to do? Your current job let you explore a lot of topics and roles: which did you like best? Which do you see yourself pursuing for the next few years? Your post seems to imply that you’re looking for management roles but it’s unclear as whether it’s because that’s what you like to do or because that’s what you feel you should do to grow your career. Word of advice: it’s much easier to have a successful, fulfilling career doing what you love than eating shit every day doing something you don’t like (management, architecture, product, whatever) but that you think is good for your career.

Once you’ve figured out what you want to specialize in (and make no mistake, in a larger company you’ll have a narrower role than in a startup), write your resume around those skills. Market yourself (write a blog, try to speak at conferences, etc) as an expert in that topic. Identify what shortcomings you still have and work on them through side projects, reading books, taking an online course, etc. When you get to the interview stage and people point out your lack of expertise, explain (better yet, demonstrate through relevant examples) that working at a startup has taught you to pick up new skills quickly. Convince your future manager that it’s in her benefit to recruit someone who knows how to learn new skills rather than a one-trick poney, even if the poney is very good at its one trick.

1) I usually bike on a low-resistance setting where I can talk without being out of breath (similar to talking and walking). If I’m on a higher setting and I need to talk, I just stop biking.

2) I was going to insert a joke about meetings and meaningful contributions here. But more seriously a lot of meetings are about synchronisation, which means that I spend most of my time listening. Believe it or not, it’s easier to concentrate on what everyone is saying when biking rather than, for instance, reading your emails or browsing the internet.

I have an exercise bike to which I added a tablet (an old bookshelf plank I had lying around) on which I can put my laptop. It’s pretty hard to type but it’s perfect for conf calls and a bit of light document reading. I have a lot more conf calls since we went into lockdown so I can manage at least 30 minutes of biking every day while sitting in meetings. I have never gotten so much exercise so regularly!

I also do HIIT (high-intensity interval trainings), which is basically series of body weight exercises (burpee, squat, sit-up, etc.). Doesn’t require anything except some room and a video or training guide to follow.

Microsoft Powerpoint (and to a lesser extent Word). I lost count of the number of days I spent trying to make my presentations and documents look good (which for me means pixel perfect).

To be clear, this isn’t a failing of the software per se. PowerPoint is powerful and lets you do a lot of stuff, but I took desktop publishing lessons in high school, and I’m a bit obsessive to start with. I just have to have everything lined up and evenly spaced and just so. Which PowerPoint lets you do easily enough, but then you need to add another box to your diagram... and resize and reposition everything more or less manually.

Similar story for Word, which almost lets you do professional(ish) documents once you know where all the typesetting options are hidden. I’ve given up on Word for technical documents and now use Markdown + pandoc to convert to Latex and then pdf.

I went through the same question a few months ago. I settled on OCaml.

Pros: it's reasonably straightforward to pick up, and it shines as a functional programming language. There are some good learning resources out there, e.g. Real World OCaml. I like the syntax much more so than, say, Haskell, but YMMV.

Cons: a very small std library, meaning you need to go with one of several 'battery' libraries. Feels less polished than mainstream languages in terms of user-friendliness (to be fair my reference point on both subjects is Python). A whiny post on these shortcomings: https://medium.com/@laurent.leconte/advent-of-code-2019-its-... (hopefully this gets me motivated enough to finish the follow-up post)

BeyondCompare (cited in the original thread), especially the folder comparison feature. Saved my sanity when our team's shared directory stopped syncing silently on my laptop and I had to figure out which files I needed to sync manually.

WizTree (https://antibody-software.com/web/software/software/wiztree-...) is a freeware Windows utility (man, typing this took me back to 1997) that lets you quickly see which files are hogging your disk space. Think "df GUI for Windows". Especially useful to track down large application files hidden in the depths of system folders.

As a hiring manager, I’ve had success with WttJ, LinkedIn, and talent.io

I gave up on ChooseYourBoss, I don’t know how it is for candidates but the UX for recruiters is awful. Never tried Glassdoor, to be honest it never crossed my mind.

(PS: no open positions at the moment but we’re moving forward with the hires we made in the last 3 months)

You don't have to speculate, there have been several cases where the Prudhommes re-qualified contractors as full-time employees. It usually takes 1) a well-organized union in company Y to help with the legal process, round up candidates, etc. and 2) an actual desire from the contractors to be hired by company Y. (Just mentioning 2 because some contractors I know, who've been posted to the same company for a long time, wouldn't dream of working there as an FTE).

I've been (remotely) involved in such a mass (about a dozen FTE) requalification 10 years ago. Needless to say, the rules for contract duration and conditions were strongly tightened up afterwards.

We configure all our test addresses to [email protected] (or whatever the simulator address actually is) so we don’t spam or get banned by inadvertance

> Better books have followed in this zeitgeist

Any suggestions?