I think this is largely off the mark for most engineering teams built around roughly-aligned peers.

Sure, if your team is extremely lopsided or unfocused, and e.x. has one person from every discipline, you don't want to cross train everyone into everything else. This is a sign to reorg. Youre not asking your department heads to cross-train to other departments, your PMs/devs to cross train/...

But when you have a 1-to-2-pizza engineering team of e.g. C++ engineers and a tech lead, the lead should absolutely be encouraging this "everyone is a leader" mentality. Anything else means that your tech lead is irreplaceable and if they e.g. get hit by a bus or resign tomorrow you are SCREWED. You essentially are promoting learned helplessness as soon as the subject matter leaves your narrow areas of expertise and the "leaders" are not available to offload decisions to. The best thing a tech lead can do is encourage his workers to make him redundant -- no regular process/decision/... should ideally be blocked by their absence.

As an IC, your manager dreams of you approaching him not like "I have a problem, solve it for me", but instead "I have a problem, here is my recommended fix, how does that sound?". This would be AMAZING. You can then sync on goals/reasoning/approach/... and catch out fundamental misunderstandings on both ends. If one truly is at a fork and someone NEEDS to make a decision (really only if there is conflict as to the preferred approach) then the buck stops at the designated leader. However in most situations your engineers should be empowered to make decisions when they are confident, with review/reflection helping improve/align these decision making skills with their leads/peers over time.

Defaulting to "youre the lead, I cannot-or-willnot walk down the path unless you proceed me" is shit. Sure, when starting off it's great to have an example to follow, but eventually you gotta learn to walk the path yourself (or get off my team).

I want to be promoted one day, and the only way that's going to happen is if I can ensure I have a team of reports who prove they can survive without me (and one of whom hopefully is able to step up and fill the hole).

The problem is you have a very different understanding of what a leader is, than what i think is a more correct definition. a person hoarding information is not a leader. making decisions in a way no one else can reproduce how you made decisions, lacking transparency, making it about your ego is not leadership. matter of fact, that sort of mentality where you have an irreplacable tech lead usually results from poor leadership skills on their part, as were as their people manager's. i.e.: leaders are often actually highly replaceable. For tech lead roles, even in a 2 person team, it would be the one that has more experience, but ultimately they are responsible for their technical leadership, they own outcomes so long as their followers trust them to lead and actually follow their direction. They have to be able to for example reject PRs, but do it in a way that doesn't lost the teams' trust of their competence. If they resign tomorrow, the next guy in the line that is most experienced can take over and lead, perhaps with a different style, but they should spend much time making decisions and leading, and less time hoarding knowledge and doing actual work, making them more replaceable.

> "I have a problem, here is my recommended fix, how does that sound?"

Couldn't agree more, I've lived by this principle myself. leaders are not problem solvers though, a leader gets to reject the really good idea of someone that does come up with a seemingly great idea without letting them down harshly, and also encourage that atmosphere of continuing to suggest solutions. They also set the direction (tactically for technical leaders, and strategically for people leaders) of the team, so that the problems an IC does focus on is aligned with the leaders' priority.

If your engineers are making their own decisions, there is the problem of conflicting changes (even in Git the concept of conflict resolution exists, someone has to decide to merge the changes into main/master after resolving conflicts). There is also the problem of ultimately them spending a lot of time on something, only for that being low priority, or rejected outright because it doesn't make sense strategically, that demoralizes people and creates a terrible atmosphere. A very clear chain of command is important at work as it is on the battlefield. And just as in a battlefield, due to the clarity of that chain of command, a general being killed by the enemy does not decapitate a battalion, the person next in the chain of command takes over. Not only should leaders be replaceable by design, they're often rotated from team to team to ensure such an informal dependency on them never forms.

I think what you're describing to the most part is also the problem I outlined in my first post: The spreading of blame by supposed leaders creating an over dependency on them and credits for work they didn't contribute to much, and creation of actual leaders that end up being irreplaceable because their role wasn't formally designated or acknowledged, but assumed, they're not part of the planned structure of the chain of command.

We're the employees taking advantage of that trust? Seems a strange thing to mandate unless that trust has been severely broken.

Still the wrong response. Discipline the people abusing your trust.

Part of being a good manager is knowing when to step in and have a private conversation with people before things get too bad. If the bad behavior continues then you follow the process of formal write up’s and eventually termination.

Collective punishment is the sign of a manager who doesn’t know what they are doing and will kill a team.

No argument there, id eject from any company that even started to consider such measures (unless they're adding a few zeroes to my paycheck)

Why does this link me to the homepage of the blog instead of the article that matches the HN title?

It's just a system rigged to further discourage economic mobility by those that don't already have wads of family wealth.

Because I've seen AI do it myself? It will very readily take a lofty aim from the brainstorming phase, maybe mentioned off-hand or out of context in a planning doc somewhere, and regardless of if it's implemented it will claim it's part of the delivered product.

You're looking a massive selection bias. Most people in tech are _not_ saying those things (e.g. most software engineers in my circle would agree learning to code at a non trivial level is decidedly NON trivial). The vocal elite at the top of the tech pyramids (who have a vested interest in sweeping externalities under the rug) are the ones spewing that shit.

I mean it's almost like having a moral stance on the assembly line, or calculators. If they truly do provide massive technological benefits, and it turns out the externalities aren't as bad as some are projecting, it's hard to argue AI is not another extremely useful tool in your tool belt.

Now, if AI leads to global ruin/... obviously some people will be able to say "See! I knew this would happen!", but again, at this point it feels AI is no worse morally than the existing allocation of upside/downside that big-techgopolies have had for at least the last decade.

Calculators give you the right answer. AI gives you any answer. I work within a bureaucracy and instead of optimising processes and getting rid of useless documents, AI is being used to generate more useless text. It is the industrialisation of bureaucracy and it is a turbo powered waste of resources.

Then your issue isn't with AI, it's with your bureaucracy. Just because your company is holding it wrong doesn't mean the entire technology is morally fraught.

If your company's goal is to generate "more useless text" they would have done it with or without AI. AI just let's the peons responsible for producing that text do so significantly faster, with some percentage loss in "quality" baked in. Are you mad their jobs are easier? Was their text once not useless and now it is?

Again, it's like saying the conveyor belt is evil because it lets us generate more useless toys/candy/guns/... and research into improving the conveyor belt should instead be going toward more valuable things. However it ALSO has those effects on EVERYTHING. It lets you produce more drugs, books, food, clothes, necessities, and yes, some useless items too.

Same with AI. Sure you can use it to spew cat pictures, but you can also use it to generate significant quantities of non-trivial useful (not necessarily bullet proof, but undoubtedly _useful_) output in a fraction of the time and/or HUMAN capital (butts-in-seats, time-on-task, ...) than before. Now, as always, value is in the eye of the beholder (which is why your C suite gets giddy at all the useless text output).

Imo those are not nearly as mutually exclusive as you're presenting, as would be evidenced by anyone seriously reviewing the output of these systems, to the point it feels like a bad faith argument or an uninformed one

Isn't it to some degree? My understanding was with index funds was that the index is required to be backed by some in-kind holding of the component index products by whomever minted the index share. If more people buy the index then more of those in-kind backing products must be held e.g. as collateral. If you're REQUIRED to buy this stock because of your index/etf positions, necessarily the demand goes up, and necessarily the price goes up too. Companies _definitely_ materially benefit from stock price increases.

No, that's not correct, in general.

When people buy into an index fund/ETF, they are buying existing shares of that fund (which are already backed by the component stocks of that index) from other people who already have them. If there are 1M shares of an index fund that tracks the S&P500 floating around out there, and you go into your brokerage account and buy 1,000 shares, you have not increased that 1M figure by 1,000. There are still 1M shares; you have just bought 1,000 shares from an existing owner (perhaps another individual investor with an eTrade account just like you) who wanted to sell them.

In a case where an index fund does have to buy more shares of the underlying components (for rebalancing purposes or whatever), they are buying shares from other people on the open market: institutional investors, hedge funds, prop traders, etc. They are not buying from the company behind the stock ticker.

Yes, companies do sometimes issue new shares to the open market in order to raise cash. But that's not a daily activity; some companies may go years (or even forever) without doing another public offering beyond their IPO. Other companies do it somewhat regularly, perhaps a couple or few times a year. And some just do it when their stock price is high and they think offering more shares would be a good deal for them.

You’re making this unnecessarily complicated. Whether you purchased shares of a company through an ETF or directly, through your personal trading account, that money only goes to the person or entity that you bought the shares from. Maybe with some trading fees going to your broker (uncommon now thanks to the trend set by Robinhood).

Or it really just speaks to the fact no one can stand working with her for a prolonged period of time.

Exactly. It doesn't matter how smart or talented you are if you have no soft skills. You can't treat employees as black boxes where business needs go in and business value comes out. Soft skills are the vehicle through which someone interfaces with the company, which is ultimately "just a bunch of people".

You can isolate folks without soft skills to some extent to avoid them butting heads with other people, but at some point they still need to be able to take direction and work with some people.

Softness has not produced anything worth discussion. We're falling over ourselves trying not to hurt each other's feelings as economic dispossession drives the masses closer to killing each other for a portion of rice. It's perverse.

Every iconic output of the past was mercilessly whipped into production by a Torvalds, a Romero, or a Ballmer. Assholes that people hate to work with, yet have just enough soft skills that people put up with them despite it (God knows it's why my wife stays with me).

The death of meritocracy turns every industry into a crab bucket of mediocrity. The weak gang up on the strong and ensure we'll never see another Doom or Linux again, only overvalued middleware (commoditized digital bureaucracy, so sexy) and Chinese shovelware about flightless birds.

There are assholes, and then there are dysfunctional assholes. Modern therapy fails everyone here too, by opting for softness and affirmation instead of just telling people nobody likes them because they're too much of an asshole and they need to figure their shit out. Jart has always struck me as someone with an undiagnosed personality disorder that I'm going to get yelled at for even suggesting, which should say a lot about what outcome they wish to see. This is how systems fail brilliant people enough to fall through the cracks. We're not allowed to say anything until they commit suicide, and then it's "just a shame." I've only ever seen such deliberate dysfunction within female social circles.

Terry Davis wrote an entire operating system despite being a homeless, elder abusing, schizophrenic racist. The transphobic Nazis at Kiwi Farms write a game for it every year just to celebrate his memory and achievement and prove his architecture sound. We are told these are the worst people on the planet, yet they uplift the fringe characters of society and push the boundaries of experience-- the spirit that used to belong to hackers.

But today's "hackers" are a cult of HR, while demented racists with no patience for their lies, abuse and orthodoxy get to have all the fun beyond the wall. No wonder leftists hate them. You people are about as fun as Jehovah's Witnesses.

Jart might as well create a KF account. She'd be well-received by the terrible transphobes who'd appreciate her technical chops.