Pete's Log: Some Thoughts
Entry #3049, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff, Work)(posted when I was 47 years old.)
Below are just some thoughts, not to be taken as any stance, position or opinion.
Ten or so years ago, for reasons that are still unclear to me, my employer at the time took me along on a visit to a web consulting business in downtown Chicago. I went with my then boss as well as our CEO.
I wish I remembered the name of the company or any details of why we were there, but to the best of my knowledge, we never had any further interactions with them. If anything, they were a competitor. What stood out to me, though, was their hiring/training model. As I understood it, anyone at the company could bring on an apprentice (provided they didn't already have one) at any time. That apprentice would then go through the process of writing an entire web server from scratch to ensure they had a deep understanding of the entire web stack. If I recall correctly, this usually took between 6 and 18 months, and only once completed would they start doing customer work.
There is probably a lot more to this, either facts that were omitted or that I have forgotten, but at least at the time they seemed to be doing well. Every so often I remember the experience and appreciate the commitment to deep understanding. I wonder how they're doing now in the age of vibe coding.
I have a colleague at my current job who in the past would call me roughly once a week for help when he encountered a particularly thorny problem. We'd brainstorm and troubleshoot together and figure out a solution. It wasn't until a recent call when he was singing the praises of an AI agent that I realized we hadn't had one of our calls in a while. And now I can't help but feel a small sense of loss.
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