It's a self inflicted wound. Companies do not reward loyalty. They do not give out raises congruent with what you can find if you leave. Business-types unirionically think seasonal layoffs is a "good thing." Self hemorrhaging your institutional knowledge is insanity
We have no frame of reference if it's working because basically everyone is doing it. And business only measure on extremely short timelines. Meaning, it could be good right now, and catastrophic on the 10+ year timeline.
I definitely think this is the case. Almost all software is unbelievably bad. Almost all software gets worse the longer it exists. And almost all software does not meet its business purpose - it's merely contorted by the customers to just barely meet their needs.
In the sense that nothing is truly a "proper" hard security barrier outside of maybe airgapping, sure. But containerization is typically a trusted security measure.
> My impression of Block was that it was mostly a one-trick pony (okay, two if you include CashApp) with a bunch of side initiatives that never seemed to pan out,
I worked at Block for ~6.5 years up until 2024. This is mostly correct.
They were the first to market for portable CC readers, and segued that into "high tech" POS systems which, to be fair, were significantly better than the available alternatives at the time. But flashy hardware design and iPads isn't really a moat, and the company never developed a great muscle for launching other initiatives. The strategy was "omnibus" - trying to do everything for everyone and win on the ecosystem efficiencies...but when none of your products are particularly standout it's hard to get and keep customers.
CashApp being the notable exception, because they gave the founder carte blanche. It was effectively 2 different companies operating under the $SQ ticker. They even had their own interview process for internal transfers. Although ironically the engineering standards on the CashApp side of the fence were significantly sloppier than on the Square side...to the point where I stopped using CashApp and stopped recommending it to friends once I transferred to that org and saw how the sausage was made.
Exactly. Square was the first great checkout system, but now a decade and a half later every other system is good enough that retailers aren't going to pay extra for a flashier app.
Over the last 10 years or so in SF and LA, I’ve seen so many countless POS systems at restaurants and small businesses that it’s difficult to believe that Square is anything more than 1 player in an enormous field.
And businesses I frequent over many years seem to change their POS systems often. I’ve always assumed that every year there are a bunch of new startups using their VC funds to give away free iPad minis. When the cheap hardware breaks or the software company goes under, there’s always a new one to take its place.
Square is a great option for selling crafts at a market once a month. I tried to use it for a proper multi-channel retail store and it immediately fell apart:
- the e-commerce integration (Weebly?) is very limited and the resulting sites are dog slow
- the POS itself and the backend don't work when you have hundreds of SKUs and many variants
- there's very little customization or support
My business wasn't huge but we were doing ~300k revenue annually online and in-store. We started on Square, tried Lightspeed (also garbage) and finally ended up on Shopify (best of a bad lot).
Despite making noise about "supporting small business" Shopify makes most of their money from e-commerce for giant brands. They've tried to juice returns from small customers with merchant cash advances but my sense is they make more doing professional services for big e-commerce brands
It’s not extra and their hardware is still far better than the competition. Square is still awesome in the small business PoS space. Their lead has not shrunk.
Toast has already caught up in market share, and dominates the restaurant industry. Square's numbers have been stagnant for many years.
And more importantly, the entire premise when Square launched was that app-based "cloud" PoS systems would replace all traditional cash registers. Except now 15 years later that simply hasn't happened. Existing players in the space all caught up and shipped chip and NFC readers to their retailers, and that's all that was needed.
The ubiquity of NFC has made specialized hardware irrelevant for entire industries. It's set dressing for small businesses. The ruggedized enclosures and swiveling touchscreens are cute, but that's not a moat.
Their lead absolutely has shrunk. In the mid-late 2010s it was either Square, or a bevy of shovelware Windows POS systems loosely stitched together with a tablet for rewards and maybe grubhub. Clover and Toast are both regular sights in that space now.
It has though, by a lot. Toast in particular has eaten Square's lunch in the restaurant industry and now they're expanding to retail. Even NCR has caught up, along with a long tail of newer competitors eating away at market share.
There was a window of time where Square was the default choice for small biz POS and that is most definitely not the case anymore.
Did any of the blockchain initiatives ever go anywhere? I understood that's why they renamed the company to Block, but did that end up a similar rebrand to Facebook -> Meta?
They are heavily invested in Bitcoin and still offer and improve their Bitcoin services. It’s not really “blockchain.” They’re not a crypto company. They are ideologically dedicated to Bitcoin.
I don't think so. I know a couple people that worked in TBD (the bitcoin org) and everyone said it was directionless. Eventually the CTO ~abandoned that org and took on that Goose AI project.
The bought $170m of bitcoin at $50k a pop when their stock was $250, now it’s $67k and their stock is $67 (in after hours trading), so I guess it went pretty far in that respect.
Yes, this. It's unfortunate that anthropic dropped this and it's also exactly how the system is supposed to work. Companies don't regulate themselves, the government regulates the companies.
Now, you may notice that the government is also choosing not to regulate these companies...which is another matter altogether.
It's so much worse than that. The government actively encourages a lack of business ethics. Heck, it started the term with a crypto rug pull. Money continues to funnel upward to all the worst players, and watchdogs are being targeted and destroyed. Even if you get new people in power, you're going to find the upper echelons completely full of outlandishly wealthy, morally bankrupt individuals that are very politically active. And now they have access to all of our communications and an AI to sift through it looking for dissent (or to spark its own). I guess this is the end game of "move fast and break things." The situation was never good, but it continues to get worse at an alarming rate.
> Heck, it started the term with a crypto rug pull
If you ask me... that wasn't a rug pull, at least not in the intent - it more was a way for foreign actors to funnel money directly to Trump and his family without any trace.
There is plenty of precedent that companies are expected to regulate themselves. If you are in the US and perform an engineering role without a license or without working under someone with a license, it’s because of an “industrial exemption.” The premise is that companies have enough standards and processes in place to mitigate that risk.
However, there is also plenty of evidence that this setup may no longer work. It seems like the norm has shifted, where companies no longer think it’s their duty to manage risk, only to chase $$$. When coupled with anti-government rhetoric, it effectively socializes the risk to the public but not the profits.
True to an extent, but those regulations tend to downstream of bad things happening.
The exemption means “self-regulation” which is what the OP was speaking to. There are industrial standards, for example, but that’s not a governing body. You can create a design that goes against a standard and there’s nothing to stop you from releasing it to the public. The same can’t be said for those who require licenses and stamped designs. There’s also no explicit individual ethics codes in exempted industries. In contrast, a stamped design is saying the design adheres to good standards.
Apropos to HN, somebody could write safety critical software with emergency braking delays because of nuisance alarms and put it on the street without any licensed engineer taking responsibility for it. The governance only comes after an accident and an NTHSB investigation.
> anthropic dropped this and it's also exactly how the system is supposed to work. Companies don't regulate themselves, the government regulates the companies.
In this case, it's exactly how it's NOT supposed to work because there's no government regulation concerning the issue. It would be bad looks to have regulation that mandates LESS safety thus the issue was forced on commercial grounds.
I called it yesterday, there was never any doubt in my mind how this would end, and it did in less than 24 hours:
Not really. You still have to be an accredited investor AND financially savvy enough to have the awareness of what syndicate deals are and how to find them and participate.
Thanks, I realized after I wrote it that the size of their staff was really the variable I was missing. Agreed that's not a remarkably high rate with such a large engineering org.
I just logged in to mine to see, I also can't remember the last time I looked at my news feed. My experience isn't quite as bad as OPs, but certainly plenty of AI slop and lots and lots of accounts that I don't follow and have never heard of.
I think we're making a mistake by shoving all of this into the cloud rather than building tooling around local agents (worktrees, containers, as mentioned as "difficult" in the post). I think as an industry we just reach for cloud like our predecessors reached for IBM, without critical thought about what's actually the right tool for the job.
If you can manage docker containers in a cloud, you can manage them on your local. Plus you get direct access to your own containers, local filesystems and persistence, locally running processes, quick access for making environmental tweaks or manual changes in tandem with your agents, etc. Not to mention the cost savings.
The thing is that startups often don't have the time or capital to build a data center even though public cloud is just more expensive. If you're bootstrapping a business then it makes sense. My advice would be to always use only those features of the public cloud that you can also use on your private cloud, such as Kubernetes.
How do people think that's the only two options (AWS/cloud or build a datacenter)? It astounds me.
There's _so_ many providers of 'bare metal' dedicated servers - Hetzner and OVH come up a lot, but _before_ AWS there was ev1servers (anyone remember them?).
I'm sure there are lots of Stripe engineers that cruise the comments here. Anyone care to provide some color on how this is actually working? It's not a secret that agents can produce tons and tons of code on their own. But is this code being shipped? Maintained? Reviewed?
Part 1 is linked in this article and explains a bit: “Minions are Stripe’s homegrown coding agents. They’re fully unattended and built to one-shot tasks. Over a thousand pull requests merged each week at Stripe are completely minion-produced, and while they’re human-reviewed, they contain no human-written code.”
I could be wrong, but my educated guess is that, like many companies, they have many low hanging fruit tasks that would never make it into a sprint or even somewhat larger tasks that are straight forward to define and implement in isolation.
The few guys who they haven't laid off are too busy reviewing and being overworked, doing the work of 10 to scroll HN. Gotta get their boss another boat, AI is so awesome!
Stripe hasn't had a layoff in a good while. Stripe is hiring like mad and is planning on growing engineering significantly. Your comment isn't grounded in reality
successful how? the only metric i see is # of pull requests which means nothing. hell, $dayJob has hundreds of PRs generated weekly from renovate, i18n integrations, etc. with no LLM in the mix!
The average tenure of a person in engineering role is so short that very few employers are thinking about developing individuals anymore.
The actual way this gets approached is "If you want seniors, you must hire seniors".
I'm not sure how this plays out now. But it's easy to imagine a scenario like the COBOL writers of the last generation.
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