An AI may be making an ultimately random choice (prove the CEO isn't) but it's actual options are weighted on statistical grounds from much wider sources of data than a human can knowingly handle.

I say knowingly because actually the sum total of accumulated info for just a month or two of human activity eclipses even today's LLM.

And the CEO decisions are frequently flawed because there's a strong filter of the information from below.

Perhaps a crowd sourced (employee sourced) decision making process would be best with the wisdom of crowds.

No because it would be too well informed to make biased (company focused/favouring) decisions. (Joking)

But it does leave me wondering how would we know if it hasn't already happened in some company?

It strikes me that software has become a bit like law and accounting used to be. "We had to suffer and so must you". Making it pointlessly hard to keep people out.

Rather than dealing with people on real problems.

I'm currently getting interviews. For work that I know from having done it for twenty years that coding is only a small subset of. But the emphasis is far more on coding than application of experience gained to overcoming similar problems quicker the second, third or fourth times I'd be working them.

It's sad. I'll certainly just say no to leetcode for the kind of engineering I'm looking for. Rather go do some (paid) gardening.

I've never looked at any Rust. But this mini thread leaves me expecting the Rust world to be like Perl. The experienced Rust/Perl user uses every feature and short cut for magnificently dense expressive (alt. incomprehensible gibberish to anyone else) and doesn't comment it because the code is self evident. When actually they just want to code wank showing how clever they are and how lazy anyone else is if they haven't take the time to understand the details and thus understand.

But like I said, I've not looked at any Rust despite its marketing success.

I've read a lot more Rust than I've written at this point... A lot of what I've seen has been really easy to reason with and follow. There are a few features that are a bit harder to grok, especially with complex access lifetimes. Generally those complexities have been more from the inexperienced as a lot of what I've seen from more experienced devs simplifies those complex points of interaction making the entirety more easy to reason with.

I find a lot of the complexities tend to come from devs with more experience in communities that tend to add complexity by nature (C# and Java devs in particular). YMMV of course, that's just been my take so far. I've written a few simple web (micro)services in Rust and a couple of playground Tauri apps. I will say the simpler tasks have been incredibly easy to work through.

Though I may not have always taken the absolutely most performant, least memory path of work, it's been smaller/faster than other platforms and languages I have more experience with. And that's without even getting into build/compile time optimization options.

frama-c

Which is terrible for kernel development, and is generally very hard to work with, unfortunately.

Indeed. My daughter did a couple of games in Scratch when she was 8 (possibly younger).

But from other comments Scratch seems to have picked up a lot of extraneous crap like social and tiktok in the intervening years (decade).

My variation of what you say is read lots, look at what people are doing, then make sure you have a big space that lets you stop thinking. Once I'm in that "hey I'm not distracted by a million things" space ideas and solutions just pop to mind as I manage to focus on one thing.

What do you mean by "a big space that lets you stop thinking"?

I wouldn't call it diagnosing. Just suggesting they consider it.

Personally it all sounds very familiar. So familiar I'd admit I'm mildly depressed. But I do still have a pad of good ideas that I add to.

Also very interesting is that yes even with ideas I'm not good at doing them - but the suggestion that their thing might be the enabling others to achieve theirs really sticks out for me. I'm definitely at my best helping others to do better.

All in I'd say it was a good response.

Thank you.

Most of my former colleagues just ignore it. Big USA company and turns out they only started mandating it because the USA offices were going in so little.

Others go in, have lunch (free canteen), then go home. Having ticked the system for enough days in. Then do their work from home because the office is such a disruptive place to get anything done.

Most managers don't care so long as the work is getting completed on time.

I'm not sure your point "3." is wholly correct.

They do also go much wider than just combinatorial math.