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Every scala code base I have worked on, that wasnt written by small team of experts, turned into a huge pile of crap. A small squad of people that treat the language like a religion create an impenetrable masterpiece

A lot of work has been done in Scala 3 to simplify everything.

And with the arrival of virtual threads in the JVM there are new concurrency libraries e.g. Ox [1] and Gears [2] which remove the need to use FP concepts like monads. Which have been the major source of much of the complexity.

For all its problems it is a seriously under-rated platform especially Scala.js which IMHO is far better and simpler than Typescript.

[1] https://github.com/softwaremill/ox

[2] https://github.com/lampepfl/gears


Every <insert any language here> code base I have worked on, that wasnt written by small team of experts, turned into a huge pile of crap…

:-)

You're going to have that problem with any codebase written by people who don't particularly know the language. Typescript written by PHP programmers, Python written by Java programmers, you'll quickly get a huge impenetrable pile of crap.

You can optimize your codebase to be modified by an ever rotating group of people who don't fully understand it, or by a smaller group of people who do. Both are legitimate choices in specific contexts. But if you take a codebase written one way and try to maintain it the other way, your productivity will tank.


well aligned scala teams are a great thing, impenetrable code is not - maybe a poor choice of adjective?

I feel the same about Javascript codebases. As I like to say, hell is other people's Javascript.

o1 is much better at finding complex needle in the haystack bugs/fixes. sonnet 3.5 better at shallow generic coding

agree!

The new model is almost certainly a cheaper version of the older model, where they tried to maintain quality.

Interesting, but isn't the older model still available?

Maybe through Poe.com?

Engineers are increasingly commoditized, and businesses like google no longer need outlier talent

I build a RAG system with voyage and it crushed openai embeddings, the difference in retrieval quality was noticeable

What evaluation metrics did you use?

None, I just tested it over and over, with 100 users.

Theres generally no room for "high performance" in large corporations like Amazon and Google. There is room for getting work done quickly and to spec, but that's different than high output creative problem solving. The value in many businesses is that they have compartmentalized employees into high output replaceable cogs. High performing employees outside of startups and "innovation teams" are a risk to a business

It's also a lot harder to recognize high performance at these companies because of the natural impediments to getting anything done. If you aren't on the right project, or if your leadership doesn't understand/advocate for your work, or if you're just constantly churning through reorgs, etc. Large complex systems breed large complex bureaucracies to manage them and the skills to understand and manipulate one don't necessarily translate to the other.

yeah its a total crapshoot whether things play out correctly or not

I’m at a FAANG right now and this couldn’t be further from the truth.

We basically bought out a ton of A- to A+ players from the rest of the industry and there are many high performers developing entire modules of core functionality themselves with a team of juniors and contractors supporting them. I also have a hunch they make $350-$750k.


Didn't they make John Carmack leave? Obviously I do not know Meta's internal projects, but the open source ones often have a poor quality and the main metric appears to be LOC (or KLOC in the case of those geniuses).

“High performers” in this article mean, to me, something like the 5% best.

John Carmack is not a “high performer.” He’s in the vanishly small <0.001%. We all know his name, and what he did and where he works.


Have you ever worked in faang? I disagree

I worked there much longer than you and 100% agree.

Most people here just confuse high output with actual high performers.

Google no longer is able to place high performers because the current elite class of execs either see them as a threat or narrative disruptors.

Likely you never climbed high enough to see this.


It can even be seen from the outside if you observe the actual output of high ranking Googlers in open source projects and compare that with their status at Google.

Some are just nasty politicians that produce neither quality nor quantity.


People lower down on the ranks never realize that this is going on. They also have no exposure to what people are like higher up, and how much of it is bullshit politics

You’ve criticized me twice (wrongly on both counts) with only speculation as your source. This typically reveals confidence issues

Huh. Worked for two decades at a very high level in the final years at Google. I’m almost entirely positive you never did either.

Sounds like a problem at google then, now that they’re on their “final years”. Why didn’t you fix it at your “high level”?

Is English not your first language? You seem to be repeatedly misunderstanding.

Also you sound new to the company. Also just naive.


Any company with bigger than three people will end up with compartments that have different internal cultures.

In that case, say no more.

Build something valuable and get users. Investors will be knocking on your door. The real world is capitalist

We all know netflix was built for static content, but its still hilarious that they have thousands of engineers making 500-1M in total comp and they couldnt live stream a basic broadcast. You probably could have just run this on AWS with a CDK configuration and quota increase from amazon

Its all ego when these companies think they hire the best.

This is such a terrible opinion, im so tired of reading the LLM deniers


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