So says a former VP of product design who spent 14 years at Facebook. Say what you will about Facebook, I'm sure she learned a lot about product design at that FAANG, as well as at Stanford and the startups since.
But guess what. The average person isn't going to want to build every piece of software they use. And if they do want to build it, they sure as heck won't want to maintain it.
I saw a colleague build a custom marketing workflow a few months ago using AI. It was cool, but I thought to myself "welcome to the world of software debugging".
> If I have a team in pain and we need more people on it, or different people, I don't know if I can wait six months for the one person I want to hire to become available and willing. Sometimes, you gotta go with who is available.
I think the point is that you should be building your network of folks before you need them. And that you should go to your network with a specific ask rather than "who is a good engineer?".
Related, slightly: I had a business idea a few years ago when things were tighter for engineers to build a system that collected interested engineers email addresses and send them content about what the company was building. Basically a drip campaign tool for engineering talent rather than sales. I still think this would work for a company that was hiring regularly but that wasn't sexy enough to have name recognition.
I don't know if he's right, but Peter Zeihan thinks the breakdown in globalization will negatively affect the ability to continue to improve the chips that AI depends on[0]. Too many steps in the supply chain, too widespread, too vulnerable to deglobalization.
An invasion of Taiwan would definitely slow progress but it wouldn’t stop it.
We already have sufficient hardware that algorithmic (software) improvements alone should get us to GPT 7 / Greek Reference 6 even if not a single new chip is delivered to an AI data center ever again, starting today.
tl;dr: even if you don't tell a speaker you like their talk, definitely pay attention. Or leave. People work hard on this stuff!
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