I live in Seattle now, and have lived in San Francisco as well.

Seattle has more “normal” people and the overall rhetoric about how life “should be” is in many ways resistant to tech. There’s a lot to like about the city, but it absolutely does not have a hustle culture. I’ve honestly found it depressing coming from the East Coast.

Tangent aside, my point is that Seattle has far more of a comparison ground of “you all are building shit that doesn’t make the world better, it just devalues the human”. I think LLMs have (some) strong use cases, but it is impossible to argue that some of the societal downsides we see aren't ripe for hatred - and Seattle will latch on to that in a heartbeat.

Edit: are -> aren't. Stupid autocorrect.

Seattle has always been a second-mover when it comes to hype and reality distortion. There is a lot more echo chamber fervor (and, more importantly, lots of available FOMO money to burn) in SF around whatever the latest hotness is.

My SF friends think they have a shot at working at a company whose AI products are good (cursor, anthropic, etc.), so that removes a lot of the hopelessness.

Working for a month out of Bali was wonderful, it's mostly Australians and Dutch people working remotely. Especially those who ran their own businesses were super encouraging (though maybe that's just because entrepreneurs are more supportive of other entrepreneurs).

The full quote from that section is worth repeating here.

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"If you could classify your project as "AI," you were safe and prestigious. If you couldn't, you were nobody. Overnight, most engineers got rebranded as "not AI talent." And then came the final insult: everyone was forced to use Microsoft's AI tools whether they worked or not.

Copilot for Word. Copilot for PowerPoint. Copilot for email. Copilot for code. Worse than the tools they replaced. Worse than competitors' tools. Sometimes worse than doing the work manually.

But you weren't allowed to fix them—that was the AI org's turf. You were supposed to use them, fail to see productivity gains, and keep quiet.

Meanwhile, AI teams became a protected class. Everyone else saw comp stagnate, stock refreshers evaporate, and performance reviews tank. And if your team failed to meet expectations? Clearly you weren't "embracing AI." "

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On the one hand, if you were going to bet big on AI, there are aspects of this approach that make sense. e.g. Force everyone to use the company's no-good AI tools so that they become good. However, not permitting employees outside of the "AI org" to fix things neatly nixes the gains you might see while incurring the full cost.

It sounds like MS's management, the same as many other tech corp's, has become caught up in a conceptual bubble of "AI as panacea". If that bubble doesn't pop soon, MS's products could wind up in a very bad place. There are some very real threats to some of MS's core incumbencies right now (e.g. from Valve).

I know of at least one bigco that will no longer hire anyone, period, who doesn't have at least 6 months of experience using genai to code and isn't enthusiastic about genai. No exceptions. I assume this is probably true of other companies too.

I think it makes some amount of sense if you've decided you want to be "an AI company", but it also makes me wary. Apocryphally Google for a long period of time struggled to hire some people because they weren't an 'ideal culture fit'. i.e. you're trying to hire someone to fix Linux kernel bugs you hit in production, but they don't know enough about Java or Python to pass the interview gauntlet...

I "spoke" it to myself while reading, and instantly heard "Wonderfuckle".

It's wandering bird in Norwegian

Its not. I know some ex bay area devs who are the same mind, and i'm not too far off.

I think its definitely stronger in MS as my friend on the inside tells me, than most places.

There are alot of elements to it, one being profits at all costs, the greater economy, FOMO, and a resentment of engineers and technical people who have been practicing, what execs i can guess only see as alchemy, for a long time. They've decided that they are now done with that and that everyone must use the new sauce, because reasons. Sadly until things like logon buttons dis-appear and customers get pissed, it won't self-correct.

I just wish we could present the best version of ourselves and as long as deadlines are met, it'll all work out, but some have decided for scorched-earth. I suppose its a natural reaction to always want to be on the cutting edge, even before the cake has left the oven.

HN guidelines ask commenters to avoid name-calling. You can critique the article without slurs.

one reason is that startup culture is cringe as hell

I'm being course, but like... it is though.

My pet theory is that most of the investor class in seattle is ex microsoft and ex amazon. Neither microsoft nor amazon are really big splashy unicorns. Amazon's greatest innovation (aws) isn't even their original line of business and is now 'boring'. No doubt they've innovated all over their business in both little and big ways, but not splashy ways, hell every time amazon tries to splash they seem to fall on their ass more often than not (look at their various cancelled hardware lines, their game studios, etc. Alexa still chugs on, but she's not getting appreciably better to the end user over even the last 10 years).

Microsoft is the same, a generally very practical company just trying to practical company stuff.

All the guys that made their bones, vested and rested and now want to turn some of that windfall into investments likely don't have the kind of risk tolerance it takes to fund a potential unicorn. All smart people I'm sure, smart enough to negotiate big windfalls from ms/az but far less risk tollerant than a guy in SF who made their investment nestegg building some risky unicorn.

I think you hit the nail in the head there. There's absolutely nothing we can do with AI that we can't do without it. And the level of understanding of a large codebase that a solid group of engineers has is paramount to moving fast once the product is live.