20 year industry vet here. Yeah, no thank you. In the age of AI, developer productivity and job security will involve your proprietary workflow. It no longer makes sense to share your knowledge with the world.
I'd highly advise people don't do this.
20 year industry vet here. Yeah, no thank you. In the age of AI, developer productivity and job security will involve your proprietary workflow. It no longer makes sense to share your knowledge with the world.
I'd highly advise people don't do this.
I've also worked 20 years in the industry, and if feel completely the opposite. Having a great setup and pipeline that works for you is a huge plus, but nothing can replace the intuition and knowhow you have built up with experience. Sharing is still caring, and we should not stop caring
Serious question, why? Nobody gives a fuck if I'm out of a job, especially OpenAI and Anthropic. They stole the worlds knowledge to put us out of a job and arguably took away what it means to be a human. Why should I contribute anything more to that?
Solving hard problems will be the only thing that separates you from others. Your mindset and tools should be a trade secret at this point.
You're not going to lose your job because you shared your AI setup / tools with your colleagues. You're going to lose your job because management over-hired and is being pressured by shareholders to reduce employee salary expenses. It won't matter what hard problem solving moat you think you have if management is forced to have layoffs and you're in an unlucky situation. If you're worried about job security, you should consider joining a union and not be fixated on knowledge sharing.
> It won't matter what hard problem solving moat you think you have
This is false on its face. There's a reason why a company, even today, would hire John Carmack over a person with no reputation, or offer him a higher salary if employing both people.
Unionising is definitely something worth considering. But, as with the question of whether it's better to compete or cooperate with other people in your field, is a nuanced question that depends on details you aren't acknowledging.
I think you've introduced a new dimension that is irrelevant to the original argument -- namely the original debate in this thread fork was that "knowledge sharing" is not what is killing your job security. Your comparison to John Carmack, is more an argument about competency rather than knowledge-sharing, and so yes that's pretty much a trivially obvious and true statement: a highly competent employee has more job security than a less competent one. Great, you win that point, nobody is arguing against that.
But also, do you not see the irony in the fact that, aside from John Carmack's obviously high degree of individual competency, another huge aspect of Carmack's value as an engineer, is how he's dedicated a huge portion of his career and his time to -- wait for it -- SHARING his knowledge and his approach (and yes, his personal setup? [1]). Carmack is actually an excellent proof-point of the positive value of knowledge-sharing and building a career on a foundation of openness, rather than an argument that engineers should selfishly guard their secrets and retreat into their own personal caves to guard their perceived local/private moats.
[1] Just one random example, out of probably thousands of such interviews or blog posts or whatever that he's probably done over his career: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzr7hRXcwkw
I was only objecting to this claim in the parent post:
> It won't matter what hard problem solving moat you think you have
If that is "a new dimension that is irrelevant to the original argument", you'll have to take that up with them. (I think it is a load-bearing part of their core argument.)
It's a great point. At 36, Steve House released a video in 2006 about all his climbing equipment (someone talked him into it.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCKK-e4gVVA (reupload) I thinked he helped a lot of people with that video in the super competitive world of mountaineering. This was after a legendary ascent of Nanga Parbat. May well have shot himself in the foot but also cemented his status as YT was taking off at the time. Moreover, I think he likes/liked teaching.
A year or two ago there were some very precise workflows documented here. The reluctance now would mark the transition away from "sharing helps me" to "sharing hinders me" ...it's an interesting topic. Sharing with strangers may be the problem because the favour will never be returned - at least not in a direct way. But, metaphysically according to natural laws it might be. Because sharing a valuable secret openly is such a powerful way to express abundance. It grants someone followers. It also prevents people from filing a patent on it.
4 years later House survived a 25m climbing fall.
It's all about one's internal motivation. "Those that can, do, and those that can't, teach."
Well, what happens if "those that can," actually teach?
Just imagine if all sporting stars shared their secrets.. what would happen? Secrets just occur naturally, if you don't share, they'll likely be stolen unless protected - and that requires effort too.
6 months ago I would have agreed wholeheartedly with you. Lately however I've observed coworkers vibe coding massive band-aids over broader architectural issues in our codebase without any prior context.
They have no understanding of (nor any desire to understand) what they're doing, but they are being given kudos by management for their "initiative" to solve the organization's "big problems." Guess who will be asked to clean up the mess if (when) it blows up.
It's getting cheaper and cheaper to kick the can down the road, and standing in front of that risks making you look like a dinosaur. It's going to be an interesting few years...
I have exactly same observations and perspective.
Seeing how these kids walk around with smug faces telling everyone they will "do IT now" just because claude told them so and manament wants ai everywhere made me sad at first, but then hey - everything this world keeps being destroyed, no matter how intelligent creators were. Perhaps there is some fundamental law in it.
I'm also tending towards the generous stance:
1. The value of software is tending towards nil while it's ever easier to tailor bespoke solutions.
That suggests to me that I'm losing less by sharing, and it's probably not even going to be taken wholesale and kept verbatim.
2. The labs have already trained on everything and will keep on doing so.
Therefore continuing to contribute to OSS doesn't just benefit my own future self but the entire ecosystem.
(Yes, I need to get over how it appears a select few are making off with the lion's share but that only differs in degree in comparison to the past)
At least now the cards are being shuffled elsewhere...
completely agree. Same 20 years in the industry
Two years ago, I'd consider this attitude as ungrateful. Today, this attitude is 100% correct and I slowly start to be like that.
People might think I'm a dick, I don't care, my tools, my knowledge, my job security. I actually recently thought of nuking the entire IaC setup and go back to shell scripts on random virtual machines. Too bad that Claude can figure things like that out pretty easily. Well, the world sucks now.
I've landed here as well, but by force. I've actually tried to share some of the productivity and workflow tools I've built with AI that help automate portions of my work, specifically on target firmware debugging, and everyone at work just...ignored it. Didnt care. Of the small number of people who even stopped to look, a few of them were actively negative. Maybe I didnt sell it hard enough, but my job isnt to sell productivity tools internally (or even make them, i did it for myself). So, I'll keep making myself more productive and build tools for myself. And everyone else will just have to figure out their own path. I tried to help, but oh well.
I can appreciate why you'd come to this conclusion, but may I offer one idea that I think you've potentially overlooked?
Unless you are a solo founder running your own company by yourself (in which case ignore the rest of this comment!), then your fundamental job security is likely to be predicated on the survival of your company as well as the survival of your own individual job itself.
From the company-survival POV, all companies are engaged in competition (unless they have a total monopoly).
Therefore I ask you to consider the competitive scenario, of whether a competitor to your company who adopts a more collaborative culture, might be more likely to outcompete your company (assuming everyone you work with in your own company adopts a similarly "dick"-ish stance, to use your own words), and therefore you lose your job due to being out-competed, rather than due to internal politics or due to a failure to guard your personal expertise?
Maybe you say -- I don't care if my company is out-competed, I'll just get another job. Ok fair enough, but might it not be possible that, in a future job interview, they may ask you for examples of collaboration? And if you commit to a monk-like devotion to solitude and privacy, then maybe you are undercutting your own future hireability?
There are no free lunches [1]. By optimizing for one thing (what you view as protecting yourself), you might be sabotaging another dimension (your company's overall competitiveness, or your future hireability).
Anyway, nobody knows shit about shit. I certainly don't pretend to be an authority, but I would caution you to avoid coming to a hasty conclusion, especially since it seems emotions are involved and possibly clouding your judgement. You may also consider whether this decision to protect yourself in this way, is in itself a premature (micro?) optimization of a sort, and if whether you might be failing to optimize on a more macro level.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch
That's a fair judgement, thanks. Sure - if we consider the entire economy, then it is definitely true that more collaborative companies will outcompete companies full of self-centered monks. I am only considering the local situation, and I certainly hear similar voices from friends at many other organizations.
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[1]: anywhere from the fathomable "my harness didn't come up in my layoff email nor in any of my failed interviews following that" to the realistic "the entire concept of employment shifted under our feet so quickly and so profoundly that a dash of solidarity & luck outweighed even the shrewdest preparations".
What is job security? Who even offers this?
People think that job security means "I'm unfirable god and king". What it really means is "I am sitting comfortably mid-low on a sorted to-fire candidate list, if it needs to happen at some point for some reason".
Exactly this. I've worked hard year after year, paid too much taxes, and still haven't gotten job security in return. Living costs are still rising.
No thanks to sharing anything for free.
Maybe once I have retirement levels of money, and when I'm not actually working for the money, I'll be interested in sharing.
> involve your proprietary workflow.
Until the next model update...
This is true. I also think part of your job security will be constantly racing on this treadmill to make sure you're able to incorporate that next model (if applicable). Meaning incorporate your tools, existing knowledge, harnesses, configs etc...
I’ve felt for a long time that the things I loved when I first started programming aren’t really there anymore. This comment made me realize that world truly is completely gone.
There's zero chance you have some secret sauce a motivated employer / your replacement couldn't figure out (using AI) if they wanted to fire you.
20 years ? already vet ? I though that I'm still young :)
You should check the provenance and licenses of your dependencies -- I bet there's a few irrational gifts in there from the nerds in the "open source" community ;)
Or, in SVese: are you a taker or a maker?
Exactly. In fact, hiring may be conducted almost entirely based on what kind of tools and skills you build that no one else really has access to.
This is really disappointing. I love programming community because they just share or open(-source) their knowledge with an absolute no cost. There's tons of resources about how to build a OS, DB, Apps, etc. I'm curious why would you think differently about AI workflows.
> they just share or open(-source) their knowledge with an absolute no cost.
You need to consider how they were able to do that. For many people, it’s because they had highly paid, secure jobs that essentially funded their open source activity.l, even if only as a side project or personal project. If you take away that security and reliable funding, you destroy the environment that supported people sharing like that.
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