This is the norm at large tech companies and, IMO, a huge problem and major detriment to productivity within organizations as the cost of that added complexity is paid by everyone.
BUT, at least very occasionally I have seen people get promoted for simplicity, I've even successfully made the case myself. With a problem that was itself so complex that it was causing fires on a regular basis, and staff & principal engineers didn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole. When a senior eng spent a couple of weeks thinking about the problem and eventually figured out a way to reframe it and simplify the solution, melting away months of work, making the promo case was actually quite easy.
The problem is, the opportunities to burn down complexity like that don't present themselves nearly as often as the opportunities to overcomplicate a thing, which are pretty much unbounded.
It's an interesting article - thanks for sharing! The original report is worth reading too. [1]
I agree with the premise. The "utility factor" used to estimate fuel efficiency for PHEVs does not line up with real-world data, which effectively creates a loophole to avoid emissions regulations and keep selling gas guzzlers. This is a problem, and should be fixed.
In regards to which cars are most to blame:
> Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW account for the lion’s share of fines avoided over the past three years, together responsible for 89% of the total.
This is a recent trend where luxury carmakers are using PHEVs to circumvent emissions regulations. The latest BMW M5 [2], for example, is a PHEV with a monster 4.4L V8 engine. Car enthusiasts actually hate it compared to the old model because the hybrid system increased the weight by 1000 lbs. But making it a PHEV is probably the only way that BMW is still able to sell a V8. It seems kind of stupid all around.
The RAV4 PHEV is also a big, heavy (4,500 lb) car with a large (by European standards) 2.5L engine. But I would hesitate to lump it in with luxury cars from BMW, Mercedes, Land Rover, etc. I would also hesitate to apply findings from a European study to the US market, where large gasoline cars are currently very popular (not that every discussion needs to be about the US - but the RAV4 is the best selling car in the US so it's important to that market). Not saying you're wrong about RAV4 PHEV emissions relative to the gasoline RAV4, just that the study you linked doesn't really support making any specific claims about that model. The report only mentions Toyota once, where it is lumped into an "others" category on a chart along with Ford, Hyundai, JLR, Kia, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, and Suzuki.
I know this is an old thread, but a new study just came out [1]. 300% overestimated utility factor. It underscores my point that the category of PHEVs is largely a scam to cheat emissions regs.
However! It somewhat undermines my argument about the rav4, as it seems Toyotas are indeed the most charged / highest UF phevs.
Still drastically overestimated, just the least bad.
I had a neighbor who mounted his TV directly on the shared wall to my bedroom in violation of the lease terms. The wall was hollow and seemed to not only conduct the sound into my bedroom but act as a natural amplifier.
I offered him a nice speaker system I wasn't using but he said he didn't know how to connect it to the TV. I offered to do it for him but he refused. I offered to pay a professional and he still refused. I was forced to move my bed into the living room so I could sleep through the night as he started his day by watching the news at full blast at 3am.
Naturally, in response I propped those speakers to the same wall and played whale calls at a low volume any time I wasn't home.
My hot take is that AI is shaping up to be a tax on big tech.
Yet another round of layoffs being blamed on AI. As with last time, this is not due to productivity gains from AI, rather it's due to wanting to reallocate budget towards investing in AI. (and maybe an excuse for something they already wanted to do)
I think some productivity gains from AI are real, and I've experienced some firsthand, but reductions in force being ENABLED by AI are not, and I don't think we will see much of that for a good while still.
AI is attracting a lot of investment dollars because it's seen as disruptive; the capabilities it potentially unlocks for people are enormous. The problem is that general intelligence is still far away (fundamentally cannot be reached with the current approaches to AI, in my opinion), and the level of investment required is so high that the only way folks are getting that money back is if it does enable a level of layoffs that would be crippling to the economy.
Additionally, there is not a huge difference between the top models, and thanks to the massive investments the models are incrementally improving. It seems obvious from the outside that AI models are going to be a commodity, and good free models put downward pressure on prices, which they are already losing money on. So I think it's going to be a race to the bottom, and is very unlikely to be a winner-takes-all situation.
I think this means that the reward for big tech companies pouring insane amounts of money into AI will be maintaining their current position, or maybe stealing a bit of business from each other. That's why I think AI is more of a tax on big tech than a real investment opportunity.
Completely bootstrapped online counseling platform focused on affordability ($25/week!), accessibility and doing the right thing by clients and therapists. Currently only available in NY, FL, TX and Singapore with plans to expand as budget allows.
Gemini has the annoying habit of delegating tasks to me. Most recently I was trying to find out how to do something in FastRawViewer that I couldn't find a straightforward answer on. After hallucinating a bunch of settings and menus that don't exist, it told me to read the manual and check the user forums. So much for saving me time.
I wish articles like this would engage in a bit of critical analysis of the studies they are reporting on. It's no wonder people are confused as hell about the latest science about what foods are healthy when there are seemingly new contradicting studies coming out all the time and the news about them just parrots the contents of the study with no critical analysis why this new understanding might be better, or worse, than what we had before.
That said, I hope this is right. As someone who is allergic to dairy it would be nice to know that the substitutes I'm consuming aren't significantly worse for me, and it would be great to see more dairy free options for foods although the trend seems to be going in the opposite direction (for example, the amount of "dark" chocolate with milk in it is astounding, and brands that were reliably true dark chocolates have started adding milk too)
I think every team needs a TL. If the EM isn't filling that role, then another team member should be, and most of what you're talking about falls on the TL (with some sanity checking from the EM by talking to other team members about these things as well)
Ex-Dropbox manager here. I also built BetterHelp (sorry) and I was the VP of Engineering Grooveshark.
Dropbox was the first job I've had where managers are not expected to code although they still go through a small ramp up where they can fix a tiny bug or make a hello world commit and deploy it to production to show that they understand how some of the systems work. Due to some crazy circumstances with the team I took over, I never even got to go through the ramp up. I was thrown straight into the deep end leading a team dealing with an urgent crisis that could end the business.
It was scary as hell, going from what in hindsight had been a "TLM with extra responsibilities" in my previous jobs to a full fledged EM role with all of the same accountability for quality and timely production, but none of the direct control. But I quickly realized that I was surrounded by people who were at least as capable as I was and usually more brilliant.
I think my greatest technical strength was always in eliminating technical complexity, making systems more robust and maintainable. It turns out you can still spot the blinking red lights of unnecessary complexity just by talking about the systems from a high level and asking the right questions, and when you help other talented engineers see those problems, they will naturally want to fix them. No need to jump in and do it yourself.
Once I knew I had a team I could trust and understood the strengths of the different players, I had to shift my focus to learning how to be a real manager. Managing people is a wildly different skillset than writing good code or building a good product, and I realized that I had never really been a manager despite leading teams of people. My apologies to everyone who ever worked for me before this point. Without realizing it, I had always treated the human factor as an annoyance and I probably hindered the growth of past teams a lot by stepping in and doing the high stakes, high urgency stuff myself.
When folks grew under me, especially at Grooveshark when I was young and immature, it was a happy accident and not something I was very intentional about. At Dropbox I really learned the importance of investing in people, giving them opportunities to grow and creating space to allow them to make mistakes. I didn't touch a line of Dropbox code or ever commit a thing, but my teams were high impact and many of the engineers who worked with me told me I was the best manager they've had.
Now I'm a co-founder at my own startup and, of course, I'm writing code again. Yeah, I'm a little rusty with some of the language specifics but I've been talking to brilliant engineers about their work for the last 7 years, when it comes to robust system design I'm probably a better engineer than I was the last time I wrote production code that was used by tens of millions of users. I will of course be in the hybrid role of building and managing folks for a while, but I hope I can keep my manager chops honed and support my team properly as I build and grow it and, eventually, stop writing production code again.
BUT, at least very occasionally I have seen people get promoted for simplicity, I've even successfully made the case myself. With a problem that was itself so complex that it was causing fires on a regular basis, and staff & principal engineers didn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole. When a senior eng spent a couple of weeks thinking about the problem and eventually figured out a way to reframe it and simplify the solution, melting away months of work, making the promo case was actually quite easy.
The problem is, the opportunities to burn down complexity like that don't present themselves nearly as often as the opportunities to overcomplicate a thing, which are pretty much unbounded.