10 ms·
My Colleague Julius
- oddly 2y agoHaha, I genuinely laughed, thanks for this gem.
- electric_mayhem 2y agoAt the risk of getting too meta, I feel like lots of folks will get the gist of Julius and check out from the article… …missing the twist. So as a TLDR, I’ll say that Julius is a peer of the author who is polished but uncomprehending, often spouting convincing-sounding nonsense. And here in 2024 we not only have folks like that to contend with, but also have polished AI output being forced at us from every direction. What a world we have ahead of us with Internet-scale automated uncomprehending nonsense
- XenophileJKO 2y agoI mean I thought it was a allegory about LLMS right from the start.. way too long winded. Just skipped to the bottom to validate it.
- dgeiser13 2y agoI read the whole thing and never saw any twist. What did I miss?
- Noumenon72 2y agoI missed the twist also. When he said he was surrounded by Juliuses I thought he meant his other colleagues had gotten to their positions by cheating with LLMs to look like Julius.
- Jtsummers 2y agoRe-read the last 7 paragraphs, quoting paragraph[-7]: > On my side, I tried to forget Julius. But, recently, my boss came to me with a huge smile. He had met the salesperson from a company that had amazed him with its products. Artificial intelligence software that would, I quote, boost our productivity! [emphasis added]
- Noumenon72 2y agoI simply did not follow the transition between these two paragraphs: > I now have an artificial intelligence software that helps me code. Another that helps me search for information. A third one that summarises and writes my emails. I am not allowed to disable them. > At every moment, every second, I feel surrounded by Julius. By dozens of Juliuses. The first paragraph is my situation and I like it, so the second paragraph didn't follow for me. My inner voice had a short mental hitch where I thought "was something missing between those? Should I slow down and stop skimming?" Then my eye jumps to "My boss came to see me. He told me that the team’s productivity was dangerously declining" and I decide "the paragraph before must have been referring to the team members using the AI tools", and I've missed the point of the story.
- prmoustache 2y agoJulius is the AI.
- analog31 2y agoThere might be multiple interpretations. Mine was that the colleague whom management is gaa-gaa about, makes flashy presentations, and seems much smarter and quicker than us, but whose work is usually incorrect and often damaging, is AI. In Kafka's The Castle, the protagonist is sent two assistants by the local government, and (spoiler alert) they thwart everything he tries to do, and end up killing him.
- amelius 2y agoWhat I learned from this is that by using an AI, I can have a good career with a salary that is above average.
- bruce511 2y agoWhat most people will miss is that "presentation is important ". As coders we spend a lot of time And pride on the code. We evaluate our work based on its correctness, elegance, effeciency and so on. But the way everyone else values it is on how it interacts with the world. We get frustrated when someone with clearly inferior skills perfects the presentation layer. The solution is not to teach Julius to code. The solution is to understand the importance of what Julius is doing and prioritize adding that to our skillset. Make no mistake, the 10x programmer doesn't write more code, rather they make their code more useful, more accessible, optimized for usefulness as much as effeciency. Internalize phrases like "if it's not documented it doesn't exist" and understand that training is more important than creation.
- lmm 2y ago> Make no mistake, the 10x programmer doesn't write more code, rather they make their code more useful, more accessible, optimized for usefulness as much as effeciency. Nope. Generally they push back on the requirements and make only the part that was needed. 10x programmers are much more like the top comment's "Pete" than the article's "Julius"
- varjag 2y agoNot really. I know it hurts to hear but they are simply better. The first one I worked with would come in the morning, sit down and code. Then take a lunch break and code some more until late in the evening. He was super prolific, his projects were well structured and followed all necessary conventions. He culled his code mercilessly and rewrote things that were going stale without hesitation. He delivered on time to happy customers. He wasn't much for chit-chat but was friendly and would explain or help if approached. This was all in a small obscure European company. Now almost three decades later he is in a senior IC position at Arm I believe.
- torginus 2y agoI have tried this, I've solved problems that were deemed impossible and too expensive to solve. And not only did I manage to solve it technically, my solution was convenient and polished enough to be widely adopted across the company. However when I expected this to be recognized, the following things happened: - Nothing. Other than my colleagues and immediate boss giving me props, nobody even knew something changed. - When I tried to promote the stuff I did, I realized that most management a two or more levels up had zero clue what we did, and what our actual problems were. I needed to be like those made-for-TV guys where I needed to present a problem and a solution. - I realized that most managers' mental model of the team is the check engine light model. If the light is on, the guy who makes it go away is a hero, no matter what he does. If it's not, then it's useless, and possibly fraudulent waste. - I was often accused of being a pushy self-promoter, sleazily taking credit and overrepresenting what I did. - Once I kind of got good at promoting things, I realized that doing the work is optional. This is probably the starting point for most Juliuses. - Once I started getting recoginition, I started getting it from the weirdest places. I once got a shout-out from the company higher ups. When I talked to them informally during the christmas party, they admitted they had no idea what I did, or why it was important.
- jjulius 2y agocough We're not all that bad... cough
- angarg12 2y agoI've met a breed of career min-maxers adjacent to Julius that I have a hard time describing. Picture this: you join a new team with a senior engineer, call him Pete. Pete wrote the initial version of a new product, and you joined the team to take over and continue it's development. Pete is bona fide genius who can work miracles and he is always in the critical path of each new initiative, you are told. Once you open the lid of this new codebase you discover that this new product is a half baked spaghetti ball of mud that barely works as the demo that it was intended. With no documentation or tests, it takes you a while to even understand what's going on. Meanwhile the clock is ticking. It took Pete a mere 2 weeks to write this system, why it is taking you so long to add new features? You try to explain to management the pickle you find yourself in, but to no avail. They fucking love Pete, and won't have anyone criticizing him. He has saved their asses in numerous occasions, and why is it always that others are the ones who can't keep up with him? So you chug along, paying the price of the mess that Pete made while he keeps moving to even larger initiatives under leadership adoration. He also seems to have a knack to leave ship before his acts catch up with him, and when he decided to leave the job for a promotion and significant raise, management will miss him. I've seen this behavior more than once and it seems too specific to not be intentional. Let me know if you ever met someone like Pete and how you call such people.
- XenophileJKO 2y agoIn large companies I have seen a related pattern. Usually a mid-level engineer that the managers love because they "get stuff done".. meanwhile they are a bulldozer in the code, usually with some "ship-it" buddy green lighting the work. The reason they can "move fast" is because everyone else is trying to limit complexity, etc. and they are punching holes through the abstractions. Then turn into your "Pete" when they get promoted...
- rvba 2y agoThe reason is why they move fast, since there are tons of Juliuses (as per the article terminology) who cannot code at all.
- deleted 2y ago
- thrance 2y agoThat's great, I really enjoyed that. I've met my fair share of Juliuses, both in college and in work. It often really made me question why I even care about what I do.
- p4bl0 2y agoI saw the end coming miles away, but enjoyed reading this essay anyway as it's well written. I guess I saw it coming in good part because I can really relate to the story, from the point of view of a CS associate professor. LLMs are a real pain for students on so many levels. These tools can destroy their confidence by being seemingly better than them at first, which also makes these students want to use these tools instead of learning, and then it starts to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I kind of fear the impact this tech will have on our future. A society mostly full of Juliuses is doomed.
- dgeiser13 2y agoJulius sounds like repeated application of The Peter Principle except he never went past any level of competence because he was always incompetent. Polished but incompetent.
- buggy6257 2y agoIf this is going to enter our lexicon as a short-name for this type of person, I'll point out that since "Julius" is originally latin derived, the pluralization should follow that of most/all latin nouns, and thus be "Julii".
- whatisyourwork 2y agoWell, yes. But the blog is an English blog and plural is Juliuses. The rules of grammar apply from the language, not from the word. Sometimes the language inherits the rules from the language of the word. But that's an exception.
- adammarples 2y agoWell now we are choosing to inherit a newly contextualised word it's appropriate to discuss what grammar we should take with it
- m2f2 2y agoJust ask Julius, then....
- claudinec 2y agoExcept that the blog is also in French. https://ploum.net/2024-12-23-julius-fr.html https://ploum.net/2024-12-23-julius-fr.html The author is running a poll to establish the plural: https://mamot.fr/@ploum/113704470821790664 https://mamot.fr/@ploum/113704470821790664
- tmtvl 2y agoBut in Latin Julius starts with an I. (with apologies to The Last Crusade)
- spondylosaurus 2y agoThat assumes Julius is a second declension noun. If it were a third declension noun it would indeed be Juliuses.
- 2y ago
- bytesandbits 2y agowe hired a Julius. Result after a year: Prolific people were laid off, yappers stayed, sales didn't grow, more money was spent than made. Company has 6 month left of runway. Oh Julius why you be like that? Amazing presentations tho. Like watching a movie.
- Dansvidania 2y agoWouldn't you agree that the problem in such a situation is not the Julius/Julii, but the managers who hired and misunderstood his/their contributions?
- xenocratus 2y agoWouldn't you agree that the problem is not the managers who hired and misunderstood their contributions, but the society who forged them and incentivised them to behave and think like that? You can basically choose a "scape-goat" at any of these levels, or just choose to accept them all as equal parts of a strange contraption.
- Dansvidania 2y agoI would not agree. Managers are the fitness function in the system. Workers tend to optimise based on it.
- imtringued 2y agoActor-Critic my beloved!
- xerox13ster 2y agoSo then, if we can choose to scapegoat at any of these levels, do we choose to recurse to the base case and say that surely we agree that living in a society based on capitalism incentivizes it and money is at fault, or do we escape recursive loop before getting there by returning early and focusing on something else that’s inconsequential?
- 2y ago
- karmakurtisaani 2y agoIf this wasn't about AI, Julius would have been an excellent PM or mid-level manager.
- forgetfreeman 2y agoIf highly confident bullshit artistry is a desirable trait in any job description the parent org should abandon pretense and pivot to flogging crypto and dietary supplements.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pjbk 2y agoThis was pure gold. I've certainly met many Julii trough my career. The universe spawns and churns them abundantly. It must be fond of them.
- carlosjobim 2y agoThis is not a comment about the main story in the article, but about a paragraph at the end: "My boss came to see me. He told me that the team’s productivity was dangerously declining. That we should use artificial intelligence more effectively. That we risked being overtaken by competitors who, without a doubt, were using the very latest artificial intelligence." This is the oldest scam in the book. A boss will never talk to you if there is any kind of problem with your productivity, they will fire you and that's it. Any boss talking about needing to work harder etc. is only trying to squeeze out some extra juice from workers who are already working perfectly fine. But the author and his team seem to be willing victims of scammers and exploiters, so what else is to be expected?
- bnetd 2y ago[dead]
- prmoustache 2y ago> But the author and his team seem to be willing victims of scammers and exploiters, so what else is to be expected? This is just a fictional story meant to be an allegory about AI. I don't understand why people takes it so literally in the comments.
- carlosjobim 2y agoThat's not how I read it. The comparison to AI comes at the end, written out literally.
- johnorourke 2y ago> A boss will never talk to you if there is any kind of problem with your productivity, they will fire you and that's it I feel sorry for you having experienced that culture... this is not normal behaviour for good companies, and they do exist.
- carlosjobim 2y agoOf course there are different environments. If you work in the public sector you won't be fired unless you break the law. If you work somewhere with a lot of investor money coming in, then your employment is not dependent on your productivity. As long as the money keeps coming in, you're safe. Once it stops, everybody is out, even the hardest workers. And there's even good companies, where they will give a bad employee a chance to become better. But in more everyday workplaces you first don't get hired unless you're productive, and you secondly get fired if you're not productive. When/if the boss comes around to threaten about working harder, it's almost always a scam, because if there really was any issue, you'd been fired already. This becomes less and less of an issue the better paid a job is, because at the higher levels people know well if they're good or not.
- rsynnott 2y ago> I now have an artificial intelligence software that helps me code. Another that helps me search for information. A third one that summarises and writes my emails. I am not allowed to disable them Wtf, are places actually making this nonsense mandatory now?!
- bnetd 2y ago[dead]
- awanderingmind 2y agoFantastic, hilarious, and too relatable. Perhaps I am becoming overly cynical as I approach middle age, but it seems to me that this phenomenon exists because the people who have the ultimate decision making powers in businesses are business people. Businesses exist to serve the egos and goals of the people who run them - from their perspective things like technical competence and honesty are often secondary to achieving business outcomes or impressing upper management (it is telling that these are somehow different things). Julius is clearly better at this than the sad programmers who merely know how to code. I would dearly love to believe that an alternative is possible, but there seem to be powerful incentives pushing the world towards this scenario. For many of us the best we can hope for is a work place that is not too dysfunctional, that respects your personal boundaries while paying an ok salary. I count myself fortunate to work at such a place, while dreaming of other things.
- asimpletune 2y agoThe counter agreement often made is that if there was a better alternative to this then, like a company run by people who understand the fundamentals of what they actually make, then they would outcompete all these lazy bones, self-serving business people. My observation however has been that in fact many such companies have come, they have indeed dominated their competitors, only to later become infiltrated by the same business types they had once trounced. It’s frustrating to simultaneously be able to perceive this and also do nothing about it. There are a lot of Juliuses out there. Still work doesn’t have to be one’s whole identity. If one happens to be there at the right place and at the right time then awesome. They probably got the experience of their lifetime. But if not then it’s ok! I think we can all do work that we’re proud of still, and it’s probably best to not get too worked up over this stuff. I don’t think Julius has that same option.
- Earw0rm 2y agoThere are two possible outcomes: - The Julii infiltrate and take over, - A company run by Julii from the outset comes to dominate the market. This is because "what we actually make" is a specialist skill, whereas business, sales, operations, financial planning and governance, HR, culture, legal are broadly generalist; and the bigger you get, the greater the important all that stuff becomes, relatively, to core execution on the product and its tech. Which is not to say the importance of the latter ever goes to zero, but as a ratio it's like 1/log N or so.
- sourcepluck 2y agoReally worth actually reading, very nicely done. I think the point is being made that real Julii exist, and also, that the mechanisms being used to get AI into workplaces and such are the same methods used by the Julii of the world to get ahead as well.
- Dansvidania 2y agoMy 10+ years professional life in software has seen me both thinking I am Julius and thinking I am working with Julii. What I try to tell myself is that I am working in a state where I am at best ~75% sure of what I am doing. I assume others are in a similar situation with a varying percentage value. Mistakes happen more often than I would like (not quite of the IP-less internet caliber, but still) and both when I make mistakes, and other make mistakes, I try to remind myself of this. I value highly anyone that takes the time to tell me I made a mistake and why, I try to offer the same courtesy when I get the chance. I only am worried when people _repeatedly_ make no attempt to learn from mistakes and just shrug them off, or worse leave the hot potato to someone else and still get the credit. But I can also see how sometimes we make mistakes and don't even realize. ...more on the topic, I guess, I have stopped using AI tools while coding almost completely
- dctoedt 2y agoThere are lots of politicians like Julius too.
- nis0s 2y agoCEOs should be replaced by AI, charm shouldn’t be a factor in decision making.
- mandmandam 2y agoCharming AIs is totally a thing; only it's called jailbreaking.
- xp84 2y agoIndeed, I cringe at the insane decisions that an AI CEO might make after being sent multi-megabyte emails of mesmerizing nonsense by a bad actor.
- sfjailbird 2y agoThis sounds made up and actually written by an AI. "I now have an artificial intelligence software that helps me code", can't see anyone working in the field writing like that.
- laurent_du 2y agoThe author's native language is French, not English. The article doesn't sound AI-written at all.
- dsr_ 2y agoI take it you're not used to people whose primary language is French (or Italian, Spanish or Romanian) writing in English?
- jollyllama 2y agoThere is an outdated term that I find perfectly encapsulates this: "goldbrick."
- bradleyy 2y agoThank you for this wonderfully useful word!
- fakedang 2y agoTIL I'm Julius lol.
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoAre you sure? I'm always assuming that the Julius's aren't self aware, they don't know that they are like that. If they know, then they aren't Julius, it would be impossible to act this way if you were aware of it, without being a psychopath. Maybe that should be the discussion. Is Julius a psychopath, and that is what bubbles to the top of corporate hierarchies.
- MathMonkeyMan 2y agoI think that on some level, Julius knows. He's just very good at avoiding it.
- narag 2y agoI've met some grossly incompetent colleagues that were kept in the team just because they were willing to do certain kind of work that we didn't like, but management only pretended to not notice. As for AI being the new version of this, I don't think so. The effect of this tech is more likely to remove one layer in the hierarchy. But maybe it's your boss, not you, that will get replaced.
- bloomingeek 2y agoIn the non-tech world they're called schmoozers. They were either former athletes, quick witted, good looking, well spoken and/or cockie. Everyone knew they were incompetent, but they seemed to always get away with it because they were likable. When they were in over their head on a project, they were always assigned someone who could bail them out. Because of this they always increased the work load of others, thus they were loathed. What usually helped us was they would get promoted, then they became useful because then we could control the projects.
- caleblloyd 2y ago> My boss came to see me. He told me that the team’s productivity was dangerously declining. That we should use artificial intelligence more effectively. That we risked being overtaken by competitors who, without a doubt, were using the very latest artificial intelligence. I think this part is real. Developers who can use AI tooling to gain a multiple of productivity boost while still having the domain expertise to correct the parts that AI gets wrong will become much more desirable than ones who don’t. But it’s not so much like the article states- AI is not itself the employee that managers love and their peers despise. The developer who can achieve extremely high and accurate velocity due to a combination of domain expertise and AI use will be the one that both managers and their peers love. And that organization will seek to hire more developers like that one.
- georgeecollins 2y agoThere are two games in a career, a game of expertise and a game of status. Most people on this forum play the authority game, its in the name. But typically groups of humans only listen to an expert when the expert's ideas are propounded by a high status individual. And by status I don't mean class (in this group I assume I don't have to explain expertise) I mean presentation, appearance, biography, provenance.. Both things really matter with humans.
- ChilledTonic 2y agoI have to say I became a lot happier in this field once I aligned myself more with Julius. I think what happens to developers and engineers is that since we have the ability to attune our toolsets very specifically to our needs, we assume everyone can do the same. This is untrue. Most people live a life of hodge-podge technical solutions that don’t work very well, meaning their expectations for how software should work is supremely low. Once I understood this I became Julius. Management does not care how or why the software does or doesn’t work - they just want 12 rules for life style platitudes and charisma. The part about sending Julius to meetings while everyone else worked to fix things particularly stood out. The meetings are useless, but that’s where everyone glad hands. Gladhanders get raises. The difference is that I like to think I’m still pretty good and doing my job. I’m just acknowledging that pure l33t skills does not a career ladder make. If anything it could even be a hindrance. Perhaps this is a cynical response.
- epicureanideal 2y ago> Management does not care how or why the software does or doesn’t work - they just want 12 rules for life style platitudes and charisma. Which clearly shows that something is wrong in the industry, or how management roles are filled, or how wealth and influence and opportunities are distributed generally.
- ChilledTonic 2y ago> something is wrong in the industry, or how management roles are filled, or how wealth and influence and opportunities are distributed generally. And will you be able to fix these issues within your own lifetime? Will you be able to turnover the behemoth of bureaucracy and golf playing managers that has become the technology industry? If not I highly suggest adopting the Julius mentality.
- skulk 2y ago"Do you think you will be able to halt this race to the bottom? No? Then start running, I hear it's great down there!"
- dredmorbius 2y agoI'd worked briefly with a "Julius". Unpleasant assignment at a decidedly unethical firm, and frankly often-dodgy industry, my own stay was brief. Technical masters from a top-tier university, had all the toys, flashy wheels, etc. But stymied by the most elementary coding tasks. "Julius" turned up in headlines a few years later charged (and subsequently convicted, sentenced, and incarcerated) for insider trading / securities fraud. I can find links for the legal case, very little if anything online since.
- tqi 2y agoThis is a nice parable, but in my experience, people who see their self-image reflected in this story can be just as difficult to work with. They often view themselves as smart and quietly capable, the unsung heroes keeping things running with little compensation and even less credit, while perceiving incompetence and unworthiness in everyone around them. These individuals may think of themselves as “nice guys,” but their unwavering confidence in their own infallibility blinds them to the distinction between doing things wrong and doing things differently. They dismiss documentation, consensus building, and communication with non-technical colleagues as wastes of time—then wonder why their accomplishments go unrecognized or unappreciated.
- Jackosas 2y ago[dead]