How to Talk to Your Date versus Your Customer

Conversation

Introduction

When I was younger, I thought dating was primarily about “impressing” someone enough that they would somehow find you attractive. After discussing this with my therapist, I now understand that my lack of self-confidence led me to feel like I had to “deceive” others to be liked because I didn’t like myself. Thus, inauthenticity.

That line of thinking and mindset led me to be single for a long time, and since then I’ve always paid attention to how I communicate and how I might communicate better. Coming from a nerdy, introverted, engineering background, it has taken me some time to reach my somewhat adequate level of socialization, but I’m enthusiastic to inform the reader that a psychologist friend recently dubbed me “almost certainly not autistic” šŸ˜ŽšŸ‘


No More Code Monkeys

In the fast-paced world of software engineering, an industry characterized by an average tenure between 1-2 years1, the notion of seniority has always been somewhat fluid. It is an environment where you’re expected to go from “new grad” to “senior” within 36 months, which presents a pace much faster than in most other professions. But this swift movement through ranks, and perhaps the structure of seniority itself, faces disruption at the hands of emerging technologies, namely Language Learning Models (LLMs) like Copilot and ChatGPT.

The Changing Dynamics of Workflow

To understand the seismic shift that’s underway, you only need ask the seasoned engineers in your team: has Copilot or ChatGPT had an impact on their workflow? Anecdotal evidence2 will tell you that in a vast majority of cases, these tools have indeed been game-changing, despite the shaky early criticisms of Copilot. LLMs have the potential to churn out low-level code, provide debugging insights, and even advise on high-level architecture, amplifying productivity in an unprecedented way.

The immediate repercussion is a trend toward hiring fewer interns and junior engineers. In a world where an LLM can provide most of the heavy lifting and augment the efforts of a mid-level or senior engineer so effectively, the traditional utility of the junior engineer as a “code monkey” diminishes.

Therefore, as a young engineer you may be worried about your career prospects, especially considering the spate of recent layoffs in big tech companies.3 4 5


How Naming Shapes Our Conversations

At dinner the other day my Chinese dad brought up whether English had a term for the Chinese word 鲜. In fact, there is: umami. But it’s not a word common for English learners, and I think even native speakers may not use the word frequently or have encountered it at all, unless they have an interest in cooking.

The word itself, as you may be able to tell, is loaned from Japanese, which leads me to speculate that it wasn’t a concept that anglophones thought much of until more recent times.

But does that mean the taste didn’t exist? Presumably those taste buds were there the whole time. And yet, before I knew of the word umami I would kinda just round to the nearest concept, approximately “saltiness” or “savoriness”, and my understanding is that others do the same.

But that’s less than ideal.

Fish are very umami and salty, but a food doesn't have to be both


Why Does Creation Happen in Silence?

This morning I read Creation happens in silence, a short and sweet blog post about how the vital moments of the creative process happens in silence, and often in isolation.

I think there are advantages to sharing your work as quickly as possible, but I agree that the initial synthesis should be done alone with one’s thoughts.

Procrastinators like me often don’t realize the importance of this space and may not understand why it’s so hard to get started. The reason why we need this tranquility to begin the process is because the first steps are messy and weak. You see, procrastinators are perfectionists who see this grand perfect vision, and the first draft never lives up that expectation. 1

But you can’t get started without making a first, ugly move, and so you just get stuck.


ChatGPT Pro Gamer Tip

So if you know me, you know I love self-help books and I collect too many and don’t read enough of them (as they’re overfilled with anecdotes and only a few actual points). Also I keep finding new ones I’m interested in.

Well, ChatGPT solves this problem. You can ask it for a summary of a book that you don’t have any access to, and it will miraculously generate the contents for you. And that’s with as much detail, in whatever format. For example:

Thanks again, ChatGPT!