This is super common with startups and is usually called an orderly shutdown. You don’t want to wait until you are insolvent, but stop when there is enough money left to pay all outstanding liabilities as well as the people that will shut down the business entity, do a final tax return and so on. Then whatever is left eventually gets paid back to investors, who usually have a liquidation preference requiring this as well. The alternative, running truly out of money, no one shutting down anything, a ghost entity that continues to accumulate taxes and penalties, creditors chasing whoever they can get a hold of, is much worse. Just because everyone quits doesn’t mean the entity ceases to exist.
> This is super common with startups and is usually called an orderly shutdown
Perhaps now, but during the Zero Interest Rate era, the received wisdom was founders ought to keep going until there bank account was empty, in the hope that they may salvage returns for investors. Vendors, partners, clients and employees would be screwed, naturally, but it didn't matter because VC preferred it because losing all the money in a desperate gamble was preferable to lending money to startups at 0%
The lost+found folder saved our backs once way back when. We had a 1TB NAS running Linux, an enormous amount of storage back then. It was shut down unexpectedly and disorderly and ran a multi hour fsck upon reboot. The volume must have had a shot root inode, as after the machine booted and mounted the volume it was empty. All directories were luckily under lost+found with all their contents.
Please look up what fatalistic means. It doesn’t mean that one believes things are going badly. It means one believes that events are already predetermined and as a result it doesn’t matter what you do.
Domain expertise has always been the path to advancement in most SWE jobs. You’ve always had to understand the domain and have judgment to not be stuck as a “code monkey” in almost every company barring the big tech outliers where you can be on a generic framework or library team.
In practice, at any larger corporation with an HR department, despite the law saying so, you can absolutely not fire anyone for any reason. As a manager you’ll have to go through a 1+ month process of documented coaching, performance improvement plan, etc to gather evidence in case the employee sues after being let go. So not sure if Steve is technically correct here, but he is very much practically correct. It’s been like this in big tech, which is what Steve is talking about, for a long time.
Like walmart, mcdonalds, amazon, target, home depot? It’s incredible how insulated the HN audience is to the real life day-to-day concerns of workers in the United States.
These companies do PIPs for software engineers, which is what Steve is talking about. He isn’t talking about a warehouse or fast food job interview. I am not insulated, I am merely staying on topic.
But what problem does this actually introduce? If you are applying a patch you must already trust the source anyways and this isn’t harder to spot than a rogue file anywhere else in the patch as it looks the same.
Field confusion. If you manually reviewed the diff in GitHub but did not pay attention to the commit message (which GitHub already collapses when long or may start doing any day they want), you are screwed.
Imagine the diff only has
if (someIntParamThatShouldHaveBeenUInt < 0)
throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException();
Except on the go, I don’t see the point for Bluetooth headphones. Due to the built in batteries that are uneconomical to replace they are essentially consumables, even high end ones like AirPods Max. Pairing and (re) connecting is a never ending pain. For less than $200 you can get a set of wired open back headphones that sound so good that unless you are in the audiophile niche they are your forever headphones. Models like Beyer Dynamic DT990 are built to last and very repairable, it just makes sense.
The root of the issue is that Tailwind was selling something that people can now recreate a bespoke version of in mere minutes using a coding agent. The other day I vibe coded a bespoke dependabot/renovate replacement in an hour. That was way easier than learning any of these tools and fighting their idiosyncrasies that don’t work for me. We no longer need Framer because you can prompt a corporate website faster than you can learn Framer. It is, fortunately or unfortunately, what it is and we all have to adapt.
I want to be clear, it sucks for Tailwind for sure and the LLM providers essentially found a new loophole (training) where you can smash and grab public goods and capture the value without giving anything back. A lot of capitalists would say it’s a genius move.
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