Ironically, being anti-science is pro-science. Skepticism of institutions and consensus is the scientific method.

The main reason being scientific consensus can lag reality significantly, especially when career incentives discourage dissent. The history of science includes many cases where consensus was wrong and critics were marginalized rather than engaged.

Deference to science as an authority is the opposite.

Feynman has a quote on this:

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says, 'Science teaches such and such,' he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn't teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, 'Science has shown such and such,' you might ask, 'How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?' It should not be 'science has shown' but 'this experiment, this effect, has shown.' And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments — but be patient and listen to all the evidence — to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at."

Scott Adams died today. I want to acknowledge something complicated.

He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.

His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.

You don’t choose family, and you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous.

For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution. I hope I can represent the good things: the humor, the clarity of thought, the compounding good habits with health and money. I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.

Taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest.

It’s a bit strange how anecdotes have become acceptable fuel for 1000 comment technical debates.

I’ve always liked the quote that sufficiently advanced tech looks like magic, but its mistake to assume that things that look like magic also share other properties of magic. They don’t.

Software engineering spans over several distinct skills: forming logical plans, encoding them in machine executable form(coding), making them readable and expandable by other humans(to scale engineering), and constantly navigating tradeoffs like performance, maintainability and org constraints as requirements evolve.

LLMs are very good at some of these, especially instruction following within well known methodologies. That’s real progress, and it will be productized sooner than later, having concrete usecases, ROI and clearly defined end user.

Yet, I’d love to see less discussion driven by anecdotes and more discussion about productizing these tools, where they work, usage methodologies, missing tooling, KPIs for specific usecases. And don’t get me started on current evaluation frameworks, they become increasingly irrelevant once models are good enough at instruction following.

I have two young children. I'm objectively less happy than I used to be, mostly because I lost the freedom to do whatever I wanted and the time to do whatever I wanted, on top of gaining all of these new stressful responsibilities, and I've always liked to travel, be productive and create things.

That said, when I look back at how I was using that freedom and time, it wasn't very efficient, but even if I optimized my use of it, I would have reached a local maximum of happiness, because I think there's only so much happiness one can bring onto themselves by mastery, shipping products and having hobbies, and, in order to experience additional happiness, major external factors must influence your life.

Having children is that external factor that initially introduced a ton of responsibility and cost (monetary, health, mental and time), but, if the early data points are any indication, the maximum happiness level should exceed the previous local maximum by an order of magnitude. The instant happiness I experience right now just from interacting with them already makes the responsibility worthwhile.

With time, I expect to get back some of the previous freedom and time, and, with that, the happiness it brings me, which should be an additive operation, pushing the overall happiness to a much higher level than the previous local maximum.

Some notes from a former FB engineer (DE, E5, London).

First of all, congrats to the author of the post! Even having worked there, seeing these numbers is a bit shocking :)

Some comments to help cool down EU emotions in this thread.

As the author points out, there are very few engineers at FB who have this sort of career path or income. The author says that from year 2-8, every single year he got an "additional grant" over the refresher stock. I asked a friend who is a former Eng.Man. at FB, he says that these "additional grants" are given to very few people every year by the executive team, so this makes the career path even more of an outlier. He says this level of income is unusual even for E7-E8s. This career path is probably the statistical quivalent of building a successful startup and cashing out.

Also, to end up with the these W2 numbers (W2 is a tax form in the US, by W2 the author means "total gross compensation"), you need to join early, to get the nice stock appreciation. Having said that, so far it's never been the wrong time to join: in 2016 when I joined (FB was a 10+ yo company) stock was at ~$100, now it's at ~$300 :)

How are these numbers in EU offices: in London (in 2016-17), number were significantly lower than in US, both base salary (and hence bonus, since it's a multiplier) and stock grants, and also opportunities (products) and visibility (eg. every 6 months I got my rating from an unknown quorum of people at the Menlo Park HQ, and I had mostly remote managers who didn't have much time for me). Expect to make -25-50% if you're in London vs Menlo Park for the same work/effort. Per my recollection, as an E5 back then, everything added up (base, bonus, stock), my net salary was around 7k GBP/mo. If I would have stuck around at FB, without levelups, just because of stock appreciation and refresher stocks I'd probably be making >10k GBP/mo now. SWEs make ~20% more than DEs.

Also, to put the author's promotion track into perspective, I found that it's very hard to get promoted at FB. When I was hired (35 yo, working as a SWE/Data/Manager since 23), I felt E5 is under-leveling me, so I worked very hard throughout my time there, working weekends, doing SWE projects, etc. While working there, I saw how strong the talent pool is at FB, and how steep the expectations are (wrt measurable and consistent impact of your work), so I knew that I'm definitely not at an E7 or above, but I did feel that I'm an "entry E6 level" (which is significantly more money than E5). But getting leveled up was out of the question, there were simply no opportunities, either work or visibility for DEs in London at that time. So I left after ~20 months. In retrospect, the right thing to do psychologically, assuming you stay for the long-run, is just ignore the levels, collect the refresher stocks, hope/wait for the stock to appreciate, make/look for/wait for impactful projects, but take the long view (it's a marathon, not a sprint).

Overall, my advice for EU people: if you get a chance to interview at a FAANG, take it, it's a good experience! If you get an offer, take it, you'll come out ahead wrt learning, money, and you'll have a big stamp of approval on your CV. If you don't like it, you can always leave and it'll be easy for you to get another job.