I’m not poster above but I work at Meta and they are doing this unfortunately. Wish it was a joke.

I am in a regular company that has fortunately a tech department for in-house software and this is the absolute opposite; we're currently trying to convince leadership that using tokens is part of the game for LLM adoption.

This is nitpicking his point.

But anyhow, you can buy large-ish burlapped trees but they aren’t as healthy, often die, and nothing close to a 100+ yr old estate oak tree or a decades old rose garden. You just can’t make it faster, transplanting plants that old will kill them.

You're moving the goalposts on his poor analogy :)

Most of the trees do just fine, and these nurseries will typically provide a warranty.

Besides nitpicking, even your original point isn't even true. You cannot transplant a 100 year old tree (which has not been constrained in size dramatically) and expect it to survive for any reasonable length of time.

I work at Meta

It’s definitely about AI enabled efficiency to some degree. Big internal push to measure and monitor how much people are using AI tools, people being stack ranked on token usage (more = = better). Big push to go to leaner teams so there is less difficulty in partitioning work.

Lots of competing teams fighting for scope in the same areas. Even before this didn’t make sense. At the very least they are hoping fewer people means less communications overhead.

But there is also truly psychotic fervor in AI thinking too. Meta is obviously poorly managed and they are doing the same here too. There is such a strong push and intense layoff fear, that people are chiefly focused on showing vast volume of output to justify their existence. Even if the code itself is unused or unwanted.

> Even if the code itself is unused or unwanted.

It will be better for Meta if the slop code is left unused.

I always said it, companies should be thankful that employees are lazy, an infinitely motivated idiot can be very destructive.

I have 10+ YOE, staff at FAANG, work on AI infra.

My strategy is:

- study/learn and try to be as close as possible to the valuable skills required to keep AI systems improving and working, even more than I am now. Should buy slightly more time than the average dev.

- own a house

- save as much money as possible

- make time to learn a employable physical skill which is AI proof. Won’t share mine but you can figure it out there aren’t that many options that will be left

> Fortunately, I learned how to live without a job, found other things to do and how to live a life. Welfare is generous

Oh to be French

Yeah this sounds like a curse. You can’t get hired after being unemployed for 3 years in tech, he likely would have been better off being forced to work in IT or something to make ends meet. This isn’t a reflection of the state of French tech, it’s a reflection on how to end a career in tech

Don’t need the EU for that, they are hitting everything in 2026 including unemployment, though nothing passed yet.

The title is “The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession", why was this changed? Not really fair to the author.

I actually posted with that title. Not sure what happend.

@dang could perhaps help?

The title of the blog post is "A Series of Vignettes From My Childhood and Early Career". The heading for the first section is "The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession". It makes sense to me to use the title of the blog post, not one of the section headings.

That's not the title, that's the subheading.

Have you visited ophthalmologist? I’d start there. Your situation sounds too specific for good advice on HN…

I have visited two or three of them, but each one just gave a different prescription though turns out I have a little blood clot in one eye due to an accident I had a few years ago and a cataract in the other one, though it is to the side and not directly in the front, so no operation is required for that as of now.

Also, currently a broke college student, so don't really have the money to visit a good ophthalmologist :)