3 ms·

It must be a distinction between engineer-type brains and leader-type brains. If you're focused on social status climbing, the fact that you produced a report,

by inigyou 4mo ago

It must be a distinction between engineer-type brains and leader-type brains. If you're focused on social status climbing, the fact that you produced a report, and the length of that report, is far more important than whether the contents of the report have any relation to reality beyond the surface level. This is true if you're trying to get VC funding as well. It's even in institutional academia, as seen by the Sokal affair.

bayindirh 4mo ago
To be frank, I neither live/work in an environment or live for "climbing" anything, so fluffware is not something I produce or understand. On the other hand, I have friends who play that game, and I don't talk with most of them, because their life views and mental states continually drift to a state which makes no sense whatsoever for me, so we grow apart.
- b112 4mo ago
  Eventually, enough engineers will breed with enough engineers, that we'll be a different species, incapable of communicating with weirdo humanity.
  - bsenftner 4mo ago
    You are describing the bifurcation of society that is the moral lesson of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. The Morlocks are the scientific and engineering "gender" (so to speak) of the human race while the Eloki are the child-like humans kept around because they are the food the Morlocks consume to survive in that future.
    - b112 4mo ago
      Yes, I've read the book, the two movies (one modern one from the 60s?), and the sequel, very well done!, by Stephen Baxter. It's a good concept, but for some reason I thought of a military movie I watched recently, where someone was going on about how they were third generation military. And how their friends and family were military. Sort of the same kind of siloing there.
      - bsenftner 4mo ago
        Stephen Baxter, I loved his "The Light of Other Days". I need to read more of him.
        b112 4mo ago
        Ilium by Dan Simmons was an exceptionally good read, if you're looking for another review. Often people just haven't heard of him, even well and widely read people, though he has several great series. I don't read info on books ahead of time, and sometimes don't even read the summaries. I've read a LOT of scifi, must be in the thousands of novels by now, but I was completely unsure what was happening for the first 4 chapters at least, and in a very, very good way.
      - tough 4mo ago
        If you look at history you might find that's very much the case in the real world too https://acoup.blog/2026/07/18/collections-pre-modern-armies-for-worldbuilders-part-iva-leadership/ https://acoup.blog/2026/07/18/collections-pre-modern-armies-...
actionfromafar 4mo ago
I thought for a second you were going the opposite way with the brain thing. Good leaders are very much concerned with accurate and timely communication. It can be a very engineer thing to point at a vanilla Doxygen dump and call that thing "documentation".
- skydhash 4mo ago
  It is documentation. This week, I looked at the Laravel API docs[0], just as much as I looked at the framework guide[1]. It all depends on the question you have and the answer you need. It's like the car manual (Do they still ship with one?) where every detail is laid out. It's not important for daily driving, but when you to fix an electrical problem, that's the reference you need. [0]: https://api.laravel.com/docs/13.x/index.html https://api.laravel.com/docs/13.x/index.html [2]: https://laravel.com/docs/13.x https://laravel.com/docs/13.x
  - actionfromafar 4mo ago
    It is documentation, but unless someone writes it, there's nothing "meaty" there explaining why certain choices were made, which APIs which will be deprecated, the overall design, where new things should go depending on what they do etc etc.
Aurornis 4mo ago
> is far more important than whether the contents of the report have any relation to reality beyond the surface level. This only works in broken companies where leadership is already overrun with other status climbers. If someone tries this trick at a functional company and is discovered, their reputation takes a huge hit that can take years to overcome, if ever. At high performing companies reputation is everything. It can be a real problem to even get people to work on difficult or risky problems because they’re afraid of having a failure attached to their reputation. Throwing unreviewed LLM slop around would be a reputation death sentence if your peers are good at what they do, because by now we all know that it’s easy to generate long reports with LLMs. The secret is out and anyone who follows technology knows it. There are some companies where you can LLM report-slop your way to prestige. Those are not companies you want to stay at.
- zbentley 4mo ago
  > This only works in broken companies The promotion of LLMs is, I believe, basically a referendum on how many companies are broken in that way. So far, the adoption statistics are looking like it’s most of them.

by inigyou 4mo ago

bayindirh 4mo ago

To be frank, I neither live/work in an environment or live for "climbing" anything, so fluffware is not something I produce or understand. On the other hand, I have friends who play that game, and I don't talk with most of them, because their life views and mental states continually drift to a state which makes no sense whatsoever for me, so we grow apart.

b112 4mo ago
Eventually, enough engineers will breed with enough engineers, that we'll be a different species, incapable of communicating with weirdo humanity.
- bsenftner 4mo ago
  You are describing the bifurcation of society that is the moral lesson of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. The Morlocks are the scientific and engineering "gender" (so to speak) of the human race while the Eloki are the child-like humans kept around because they are the food the Morlocks consume to survive in that future.
  - b112 4mo ago
    Yes, I've read the book, the two movies (one modern one from the 60s?), and the sequel, very well done!, by Stephen Baxter. It's a good concept, but for some reason I thought of a military movie I watched recently, where someone was going on about how they were third generation military. And how their friends and family were military. Sort of the same kind of siloing there.
    - bsenftner 4mo ago
      Stephen Baxter, I loved his "The Light of Other Days". I need to read more of him.
      - b112 4mo ago
        Ilium by Dan Simmons was an exceptionally good read, if you're looking for another review. Often people just haven't heard of him, even well and widely read people, though he has several great series. I don't read info on books ahead of time, and sometimes don't even read the summaries. I've read a LOT of scifi, must be in the thousands of novels by now, but I was completely unsure what was happening for the first 4 chapters at least, and in a very, very good way.
    - tough 4mo ago
      If you look at history you might find that's very much the case in the real world too https://acoup.blog/2026/07/18/collections-pre-modern-armies-for-worldbuilders-part-iva-leadership/ https://acoup.blog/2026/07/18/collections-pre-modern-armies-...

actionfromafar 4mo ago

I thought for a second you were going the opposite way with the brain thing. Good leaders are very much concerned with accurate and timely communication. It can be a very engineer thing to point at a vanilla Doxygen dump and call that thing "documentation".

skydhash 4mo ago
It is documentation. This week, I looked at the Laravel API docs[0], just as much as I looked at the framework guide[1]. It all depends on the question you have and the answer you need. It's like the car manual (Do they still ship with one?) where every detail is laid out. It's not important for daily driving, but when you to fix an electrical problem, that's the reference you need. [0]: https://api.laravel.com/docs/13.x/index.html https://api.laravel.com/docs/13.x/index.html [2]: https://laravel.com/docs/13.x https://laravel.com/docs/13.x
- actionfromafar 4mo ago
  It is documentation, but unless someone writes it, there's nothing "meaty" there explaining why certain choices were made, which APIs which will be deprecated, the overall design, where new things should go depending on what they do etc etc.

Aurornis 4mo ago

> is far more important than whether the contents of the report have any relation to reality beyond the surface level. This only works in broken companies where leadership is already overrun with other status climbers. If someone tries this trick at a functional company and is discovered, their reputation takes a huge hit that can take years to overcome, if ever. At high performing companies reputation is everything. It can be a real problem to even get people to work on difficult or risky problems because they’re afraid of having a failure attached to their reputation. Throwing unreviewed LLM slop around would be a reputation death sentence if your peers are good at what they do, because by now we all know that it’s easy to generate long reports with LLMs. The secret is out and anyone who follows technology knows it. There are some companies where you can LLM report-slop your way to prestige. Those are not companies you want to stay at.

zbentley 4mo ago
> This only works in broken companies The promotion of LLMs is, I believe, basically a referendum on how many companies are broken in that way. So far, the adoption statistics are looking like it’s most of them.