You don't have to impress anyone

I don’t know if this happened to you in college: sometimes you had an exam and the professor told you that during it you could use all your notes and even bring whatever books you wanted.

It happened to me. I had an epic exam that I walked into in the morning and must have walked out of some 8 or 9 hours later. It was on design with microprocessors. They gave us three insane designs. I think we even had to write the microcode, but I don’t remember the details. Despite that torture, that course was one of my favorites.

Even so, it’s wrong that exams that long were given (or are given). I suppose today’s students don’t put up with that kind of abuse. But because they don’t put up with that abuse, because they claim their right to mental health, we call them the “fragile generation”. We need to get our heads examined, because these “snowflakes” are right.

That idea that the spirit is strengthened by this kind of thing is wrong. Neither study nor work should kill you. I think even Nietzsche himself would agree that his famous line, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, has been abused.

That mentality that you have to push until a person’s endurance hits its limits is one of the reasons I decided to leave the “executive” path.

A few years ago, after Chile’s 2019 social uprising and also during the pandemic, when the whole world was going to hell, I decided my professional life didn’t satisfy me. The whole “being the boss” thing no longer fulfilled me, and I discovered that the dream of being an executive was stupid. A professor in my master’s program said something in class that struck me: “a manager’s only motivation is to keep being a manager”. And that is a truth as formidable as any line from Proudhon or Nietzsche himself. You only have to read a book like “Bullshit Jobs”, by David Graeber.

That was when I decided to go back to being what I like: a software engineer. I won’t bore you with the details of that transition, because it really isn’t the subject of this post.

Today I’m “in charge” of a team again, and we’re recruiting. So I’m back to being a “boss”, something I hate, but it is what it is. But now, with more gray hair and a different, radical view of what work means, the parameters I look for have changed somewhat.

To me, being in charge of a team means I’m the one responsible, that is, “the one who answers” for what that team does or builds. My role isn’t to go around telling them what they have to do, much less to go around evaluating their competencies. That corporate bullshit isn’t for me anymore. Why hire smart people if you’re then going to tell them what to do? To me the best metric is seeing that we bill more, and that when there’s a “fuck-up” they own it and it doesn’t happen again.

What I care about most is that they know how to program, that they’re so smart that I have a lot to learn from them, and that we have a good time building something we’re proud of, because it gets used.

I’m not saying we won’t have stressful moments. I’m convinced that stressors help you; the key is not to overdo it, to measure the cortisone in your blood and make sure it doesn’t spike. But if you’re in a business that’s attractive, challenging and where you’re learning a lot, some stress is fine.

Now an observation, which has to do with the first paragraph of this article.

When I interview, I tell the candidates they can lean on AI to solve the challenge I give them in the technical interview.

And it turns out some of them interpret this as “I have to use AI to solve this”, and if they have no experience using AI it works totally against them.

So here’s my advice: if you go to an interview and you have no experience using AI to program, or you’ve used it very little, don’t try to do it right then. Use what you know how to use. You don’t have to impress anyone.

I know you’ve been sold the idea that those who aren’t using AI are going to be left behind and all that. Those are lies. AI is a tool, but one you should adopt at your own pace. If you don’t feel it adds anything for you, that’s fine. More important than being efficient is being effective, and those who understand that are the ones who stand out in this world of technology, in my not at all humble opinion.

A bit of inside gossip. In my troll style I put up a lot of posts critical of AI, especially last year. A friend privately showed me some screenshots from a group where they were “pelando” me, as we say in Chile: trash-talking me behind my back. Something like “Eduardo knows a lot about software engineering, and I followed him for a while, but he’s falling behind and doesn’t understand AI”.

A comment I found funny, because not only did I have the chance, just a few years ago, to study with some of the people who know the most about AI in this country (and who are also my friends), but at that time at Uber I was working with AI every day. Even today at Shinkansen my team is integrating AI into the heart of the product we’re building.

There are two takeaways from this situation. The first: the Chilean IT world is still small and everything gets around. The second is that a lot of people don’t understand what critical thinking is. They’re used to consuming without questioning.

I took my time adopting AI into my workflow, and I’ve been very selective. I don’t use AI for everything. This article is written entirely “the old way”, without even using AI to review it afterwards. It comes out the way it comes out.

I use very few AI tools, but I use them effectively, and they make me very productive along the way. But I have a critical view, because there are things about this industry I don’t like. For example, I’ve decided not to use ChatGPT and I avoid OpenAI’s products as much as possible.

I can’t abandon my ethics for the comfort and power this new tool gives me, which is why this article has so many statements of where I stand on certain things.

In the next articles I’m going to go deeper, with concrete examples, into how I use AI in my day-to-day, but I wanted to start with this statement of my position.

I hope that came across. If it didn’t, that’s because it comes out the way it comes out; you can always hand it to an AI to explain it to you. :p