> you get hired for your proven ability to (…)

No, you get hired for your perceived ability to (…)

The world is full of Juliuses, which is a big reason everything sucks.

https://ploum.net/2024-12-23-julius-en.html

I’m rather sure *Airbus* will prefer a programmer which reads and writes reliable code.

The programmer which delivers useful products is probably hired by Microsoft? Or worse, Boeing. Or Toyota. Some NTSB people or Michael Barr are happy to tell you details about the number of dead people they created.

    Restart braking to brake because our code failed.

    One single sensor delivers wrong data. Let us put the trim down. DOWN! DOWN!

    But I’m only programming a text viewer.

I literally got my current cushy gig to fix a codebase that was crumbling under its own unmaintainable weight at a company that, like you, thought that quality doesn't matter. This is not the first time in my career I get a great job that way.

"Quality doesn't matter" people are why I'm not worried about employment. While there is value in getting features out fast, definitely, there always comes a point on your scaling journey where you have to evolve the stack structure for the purpose of getting those features out fast sustainably. That's where the quality of the engineering makes a difference.

(Anecdotally, the YouTube codebase may be locally messy, but its overall architecture is beautiful. You cannot have a system that uploads, processes, encodes, stores, and indexes massive amounts of videos every hour of every day that in the overwhelming majority of cases will be watched less than 10 times, and still make a profit, without some brilliant engineering coming in somewhere.)

> If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.

Hard disagree. I foresee the opposite being true. I think the ability to understand and write secure, well optimized, performant code will become more and more niche and highly desired in order to fix the mess the vibe coders are going to leave behind.

Fully disagree.

There's lots of people that won't care about the code: executives, managers, customers etc. If the engineers don't care either, then who cares?

If we compare with big food companies, that's like their food formula. No one thinks it's useless - it's the source code for the product they sell. Yet nowadays we get so many engineers distancing themselves away from the code, like the software formula doesn't matter.

There are diminishing returns, but overall good code goes hand in hand with good products, it's just a different side of it.

I was nodding my head agreeing with you but then remembered John Carmack, who seems to deliver both... He takes great pride in writing ground breaking code, for industry defining products.

We should all try and be more like John Carmack.

The opposite is not true though: successful products might have messy codebases, but that doesn’t mean, that messy codebases lead to successful products, or that quality doesn’t matter.

I’ve met many more $5M/year “SaaS” entrepreneurs who built a Wordpress plugin than a custom SaaS platform. Your point is well made.

He's not hired to code. He has taste for "what works" in these types of things. They want him to apply that taste - maybe making new services or fixing old.

> If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.

I'm not sure how this follows logically from the comment you are replying to, which states:

> We have someone who vibe coded software with major security vulnerabilities.

I like your optimism but no - you are still hired via "excels at hackerrank", every big tech company first interview is exactly this, no matter how many projects your delivered and how useful you are/were at you previous job.

> Quality of code has never had anything to do with which products are successful. I bet both youtube and facebook's codebase is a tangled mess.

The code’s value is measured in its usefulness to control and extend the Facebook system. Without the system, the code is worthless. On the flip side, the system’s value is also tied to its ability to change… which is easier to do if the code is well organized, verified, and testable.

This is exactly right.

The goal is delivering a useful product to someone, which just requires secure enough, optimized enough, efficient enough code.

Some see the security, optimization, or efficiency of the code itself as the goal. They'll be replaced.

> Quality of code has never had anything to do with which products are successful.

It may look like that, but many of the products with bad code didn't even make it into your vibe statistics because they weren't around for long enough.

Would you feel comfortable flying on an airplane where the programmers don’t care about secure code, correctness, or the ability to reason about and optimize algorithms—where “good enough” is the philosophy? Most people intuitively say no, because in safety-critical and large-scale systems, engineering rigor isn’t optional. Software may look intangible, but when it runs aircraft, banking systems, or global platforms, the same discipline applies.

The “Facebook/YouTube codebases are a mess so code quality doesn’t matter” line is also misleading. Those companies absolutely hire—and pay very well—engineers who obsess over security, performance, and algorithmic efficiency, because at that scale engineering quality directly translates to uptime, cost, and trust.

Yes, the visible product layers move fast and can look messy. But underneath are extremely disciplined infrastructure, security, and reliability teams. You don’t run global systems on vibe-coded foundations. People who genuinely believe correctness and efficiency don’t matter wouldn’t last long in the parts of those organizations that actually keep the lights on.

> If [you] ... take pride in your secure code

I don't object to most of what you're saying, but I take issue with this part.

This happens to be an area where lapse or neglect can be taken as a moral failure. And here you are mocking people who are concerned about it.

If someone uses AI to architect a bridge and the bridge collapses, you couldn't say that the structural integrity of the bridge wasn't the important part.

Yes, Facebook's early PHP code looks pretty bad by today's standards

Facebook PHP Source Code from August 2007: https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406#file-index-php

> you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products.

Ah, right. Write "Brew", which gets used by thousands of devs at Google every day, and then get rejected in an interview.

> your proven ability to deliver useful products

Which is not the case. It's just a useless product, without any real use case, which also introduces large security bugs in your system.

> you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products

Huh, if you make finished products you better start your own company.

And yet most companies don’t hire primarily for vision and creativity. They need far more people who can execute someone else’s vision reliably. You can’t neither win the battle nor the war with only generals.

Visionaries are important, but they’re a small part of what makes a successful organization. The majority hinges on disciplined engineers who understand the plan, work within the architecture, and ship what’s needed

As Victor Wooten once said: "If you’re in the rhythm section, your job is to make other people sound better." That’s what most engineering positions actually are and there’s real skill and value in doing that well.

> If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.

The most successful engineers are the ones who can accurately assess the trade-offs regarding those things. The things you list still may be critical for many applications and worth obsessing over.

The question becomes can we still achieve the same trade-offs without writing code by hand in those cases.

That’s an open question.

>It's funny to me how still so many don't realize you don't get hired for the best positions for being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank, you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products

For a programmer, that's based on them "being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank".

For manager types it might be "Creativity, drive, vision, whatever".

>Code is a means to an end

For a business in general.

When hiring developers, code IS the end.

But it also looks like these companies value and pay for the tech bro version of a snake oil consultant. And that you still have to have a lot of things going in your favour for your own brand of slop to elevate you to tech celebrity status. I don't see anybody who isn't already well-connected or financially comfortable pulling this off because nobody who has something to lose will slop their way to the top.

I don't think it's a good thing that the craft of software engineering is so easily devalued this way. We can quite demonstrably show that AI is not even close to replacing people in this respect.

Am I speaking out of envy or jealousy? Maybe. But I find it disappointing that we have yet more perverse incentives to hyper-accelerate delivery and externalise the consequences on to the users. It's a very unserious place to be.

Delivering a product is one thing. Continuing to upgrade it and maintain it indefinitely is another. Good quality code makes it easier to make improvements and changes as time goes on. Doesn’t matter if you’re a human or an LLM.

Also, has anybody looked through the Openclaw source? Maybe it’s not so bad

>you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products

Tell that to the guy that made brew and tried to interview at Google

> Code is a means to an end.

Product is a means to an end.

Being good at something is a means to an end.

That end? Barter for food and shelter, medicine.

The means to do so; code or delivery of a product; are eventually all depreciated, and thrown away. You eventually age into uselessness and die.

Suddenly having an epiphany it's not about code but product! way too late in the game, HN... you're just trying to look like you got it figured out and bring deep fucking value to humanity right as "idea to product without intermediary code layer" is about to ship[1]. You already missed your window.

You still don't get the change that's needed and happening due to automation; few of us want to put you on their shoulders and sing songs about you all.

Hop off the Hedonistic Treadmill and get some help.

[1] am working on idea to binary at day job, which will flood the market with options and drown yours out

> Quality of code has never had anything to do with which products are successful. I bet both youtube and facebook's codebase is a tangled mess.

This is such a bad take and flat out wrong. Your ability to deliver and maintain features is directly impacted by the quality of the code. You can ship a new slop project every day if you like, but in order for it to scale or manage real traffic and usage you need to have a good foundation. This is such a bad approach to Software engineering.

> you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products

Or, in this case, just because they need a poster boy for their product, which isn't as good as they say it is.

It took me a while to realise that most people don't care how it's done or how it works they just want something useful and working (even if it's vibe coded or duct taped)

You also believe that AI will replace mathematicians?

This is so not true.

You are replying to someone whose account name is tabs_or_spaces, which in itself is so ironic that I have no word for it.

What people don't seem to realize is that like you pointed out there's a demand for the previous "developer relations" type of job though, and that job kind of evolved through LLM agents into something like an influencer(?) type position.

If I would take a look at influencers and what they're able to build, it's not that hardcore optimized and secured and tested program codebase, they don't have the time to acquire and hone those skills. They are the types who build little programs and little solutions for everyday use cases that other people "get inspired with".

You could argue that this is something like a teacher role, and something like the remaining social component of the human to human interface that isn't automated yet. Well, at least not until the first generation of humans grew up with robotic nannies. Then it's a different, lower threshold of acceptance.

Should I be sad or rather relieved that grifters will be able to grift without my help? I would just accept the reality and reeducate myself to some other field where hard engineering is still required, but I'm afraid AI will advance faster than my degree.

> Quality of code has never had anything to do with which products are successful

This is just wrong. Plenty of examples of crap code causing major economic losses.

>>It's funny to me how still so many don't realize you don't get hired for the best positions for being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank

Competitive coding is oversold in this generation. You can log in to most of these sites and you will see thousands of solutions submitted to each problem. There is little incentive to reward situations where you solved some problem which a thousand other people have solved.

To that end its also a intellectual equivalent of video game addiction. There is some kind of illusion that you are indulging in a extremely valuable and productivity enterprise, but if you observe carefully nothing much productive actually gets done.

Only a while back excessive chess obsession had similar problems. People spending whole days doing things which make them feel special and intelligent, but to any observer at a distance its fairly obvious they are wasting time and getting nothing done.

Tell that to the creator of Homebrew, Max Howell

> "Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off."

Yeah you’re right, the engagement factories probably don’t care about code quality. The customer isn’t the customer after all.

I mean, you're right but at the same time you're talking about something completely different. Software with security vulnerabilities is not a useful product. You don't address the raised issues.

...huh?

10x programmers aren't the ones grinding hacker-rank.

Neither are the programmers like me who actually focus on building good systems under any significant threat.

And Facebook's codebase is pretty decent for the most part, you'd probably be shocked. Benefits of moving fast and breaking things include making developer experience a priority. That's why they made Hacklang to get off PHP and why they made React and helped make Prettier

I think you are really just describing an outlier. Most people really do get hired for the first thing. This is a situation where someone went viral and got a job. I don't think this is sort of the rule. The thing about "proven ability to deliver ..." is just kind of cope recruiters tell themselves and other people. It's nice but its not how things cache out in the real world.