[HN Gopher] My Colleague Julius
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My Colleague Julius
Author : dabacaba
Score : 140 points
Date : 2024-12-23 13:03 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ploum.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (ploum.net)
| oddly wrote:
| Haha, I genuinely laughed, thanks for this gem.
| electric_mayhem wrote:
| At 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I read the whole thing and never saw any twist. What did I
| miss?
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Re-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]
| amelius wrote:
| What I learned from this is that by using an AI, I can have a
| good career with a salary that is above average.
| jjulius wrote:
| _cough_ We 're not all that bad... _cough_
| jpfr wrote:
| seconded
| jparishy wrote:
| we should start a club
| pimeys wrote:
| Yeah. Juliuses who understand the code.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I'd be interested in seeing a presentation detailing how y'all
| actually, very good.
| angarg12 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| In 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...
| kelnos wrote:
| > _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._
|
| This is not a "knack". It's a manipulative skill he has learned
| over time. A way to burnish his reputation at the expense of
| his peers. Petes suck.
| YmiYugy wrote:
| That sounds like a management error, not a Pete problem. If
| Pete was told to get a demo done as soon as possible, that's
| what he did. And in many cases that's not a bad thing for
| management to tell people. Finding product market fit, usually
| trumps tech debt. The thing is, that management should know,
| how time intensive and difficult it can be to turn a cobbled
| together demo into a production system.
| spit2wind wrote:
| This is what John Osterhout calls a _tactical tornado_. It's a
| programmer who only develops tactically. I find his book, "A
| Philosophy of Software Design" provides a good vocabulary to
| think about the technical aspects of this. See Chapter 3:
| Working Code isn't Enough. It may be enough vocabulary to begin
| working on the problem without attacking the person.
|
| As for the psychology of such people, I haven't found a single
| resource. Clearly the system they operate in provides a
| feedback loop that reinforces their behavior. I'm sure
| personality, as defined by the Big Five model, plays a part
| (e.g. orderliness).
| thrance wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| I 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.
| ocschwar wrote:
| That's why the B-Ark was built.
| dgeiser13 wrote:
| Julius 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 wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| Well, 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 wrote:
| Well now we are choosing to inherit a newly contextualised
| word it's appropriate to discuss what grammar we should take
| with it
| bytesandbits wrote:
| we 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.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| If this wasn't about AI, Julius would have been an excellent PM
| or mid-level manager.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| If 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.
| pjbk wrote:
| This 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.
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