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.
I do "computer stuff" as my profession for about 20 years and always for rather small companies. I do everything from wiring a network, any level of supported, programming and administrative stuff... oh yeah, and in my current job I sometimes drive a forklift in the warehouse.
I work now for about 10 years for the same company and have built significant parts of their software ecosystem, and in my professional opinion: Its a Rube Goldberg machine fixed and extended with duct-tape, hotglue and tons of wishful thinking. Nothing, absolutely nothing in the system I had to build was carefully planned, implemented or tested. Most new feature requests were handed in by an stressed out boss on a Friday afternoon telling me that we need feature X / solution for problem Y / bugfix Z ABSOLUTELY URGENTLY because something went terribly wrong. Its not uncommon that this visits were the result of some prior hotfix backfiring.
And I build it. And it works.
I have often told my boss that it would be best to drag the whole system behind the warehouse and shoot it to relief it of its misery... but, well, it works...
Perhaps I should work on having this 'Pete skill' of leaving ship for the raise and promotion thing ;-)
People like you acknowledge and understand the engineering trade-offs. Which you might smirk at, but is true nonetheless. If there is only one example of you not being op's Pete is that you tell your boss about the reality of the situation.
The OP's Pete I have met many. It is exactly as described.
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).
Oh man, I remember the difficulties explaining to management that "but it's working code" is just the absolute minimum requirement(!) for any piece of code and not a real measure of quality - any expectation lower than that, that also satisfies the term "software", just doesn't exist. There is some truly incomprehensible stuff out there to trick the type system into accepting your way of coding, to safe another 2 LoCs, or some assumption where team members didn't want to communicate with each other etc. Specs are hard enough.
As for the psychology: I always assumed that some people just don't perceive the contrast between creation and maintenance as very expressive or strong, the article The Maintenance Race[0] from Works in Progress comes to mind here. That article distinguishes between 3 types: Robin Knox-Johnston, Donald Crowhurst and Bernard Moitessier. Maintenance isn't fun for me, it's just tedious work that needs to be done. The easier and the faster it can be done, the better. There's accidental complexity anyway, and the world sure can be messy, but I'll do my best to keep my produced artifacts in line. My perception to orderliness is probably pretty sensitive, maybe my tendency towards depression plays a role here ("Doing maintenance cures depression" is a quote in the mentioned article above) and I can acknowledge that not all people are like that. But for me it feels somewhat similar as if I would compare real vintage things to things that just have been designed with that certain vintage look. Real vintage has to be accepted, it's history after all, but history just can't be designed and you're better off to work into the time ahead. I'll honor accidental complexity, it feels like history, but incomprensible problem-solving skills aren't somewhat part of it, in my book at least.
I really like that book. A bunch of people I've mentioned it to said there was nothing in there that was new to them and they thought it was a waste of time.
I fear they missed the vocabulary part, which was what I found most valuable.
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.
Mostly agree, although Pete is kind of a jerk if he’s self aware enough to notice exactly what he’s doing to repeatedly and intentionally exploit this pattern of ignorance in management anyway.
But engineers blaming engineers that benefit from being a rational actor inside the mainstream incentive structure of corporate life is basically a distraction, because it gives management a pass for their mismanagement. Like, you don’t have to know the details, but it’s pretty fundamental to understand / recognize / triage tech debt.
We tend to underestimate management's visibility in such situations. I had three senior engineers. One was your Pete (names are not real of course), throw him anything and he'll have something half-working in no time. Ugly but enough function to be called a proof of concept. One was the opposite, call him Paul, give him any problem and he would spend his whole life if possible researching every minute detail of the problem, similar domains and patterns etc. The last one, Mary, was the master combiner. She could collect all kinds of information, abstract and deep as in Paul's, quirky, dirty or non-existent as in Peter's and make them into something deeply practical and down to earth. Can you see how one could manage the work between these 3, all with their teams, in a way that everyone felt respected and admired for their approach? Same with the Julius of the post. Management might be aware of Julius weaknesses, but Julius could still bring a unique delivery skill-set that is required in the context of the overall team's work.
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...
I'm quite scared of being this. I tick a lot of the boxes: I have a good rep for being fast and management likes me quite a bit. And I definitely have spearheaded things that I've since been pulled away from. I try to counter balance all that by writing docs and sticking around though. I do my best to help those who work on the stuff I was involved with.
> 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.
I worked with someone like this at my first job out of college, he did build a lot before leaving the team. But what he left behind in our systems was a string of technical decisions that really hamstrung us, like building our core service around the API of an extremely inefficient protocol buffer library he wrote himself, resulting in a service that could only handle 4-5 QPS per node. One of our other services used an application specific enum that for some reason existed in its own separate RubyGem that he published, so in order to update it we had to update the gem and then change the dependency reference.
> I've seen this behavior more than once and it seems too specific to not be intentional.
I mean, why not, this sort of quick delivery is super valuable to companies. But management needs to understand that the solution is more like a prototype, difficult to scale (in features, team) and that's where it is the engineer's responsibility to be transparent.
The last telco I worked at had a project manager like this.
She would take on a dozen small-ish projects (~6 months / $1M), and just jam them through by buying some off the shelf managed solution and using an external contractor who would write spaghetti to run tentacles to everything. She would routinely deliver projects early and under budget, which made her a stand out STAR. No other projects in the entire company were remotely close - normal was double time and budget. Green ticks next to her name, promotions, bonuses, etc.
Once I was invited to a conference call with a dozen people I didn't really know.
Her: We've tapped you as the main support person for this new system we've just deployed into production as part of this new project. I has customers live now.
Me: OK, great. Where's the documentation (there is none). What server does it run on? (Huh?). What credentials do I use to login (what?). Who is managing this SSL certificate? (What?). And so on.
I was told later that was a Career Limiting Move (CLM) on my part, because I wasn't being a team player, and I was adding friction to The Greatest Project Manager(TM).
She did this for at least 50 projects, always getting accolades while creating an absolute shit-storm for support to deal with. As the years rolled on I learned this is perfectly normal for a telco.
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.
In the non-tech world they're called schmoozers. They were either former athletes, quick witted, good looking, well spoken and/or cockie. Everyone knew they were incompetent, but they seemed to always get away with it because they were likable.
When they were in over their head on a project, they were always assigned someone who could bail them out. Because of this they always increased the work load of others, thus they were loathed. What usually helped us was they would get promoted, then they became useful because then we could control the projects.
Perhaps I am becoming overly cynical as I approach middle age, but it seems to me that this phenomenon exists because the people who have the ultimate decision making powers in businesses are business people. Businesses exist to serve the egos and goals of the people who run them - from their perspective things like technical competence and honesty are often secondary to achieving business outcomes or impressing upper management (it is telling that these are somehow different things). Julius is clearly better at this than the sad programmers who merely know how to code.
I would dearly love to believe that an alternative is possible, but there seem to be powerful incentives pushing the world towards this scenario. For many of us the best we can hope for is a work place that is not too dysfunctional, that respects your personal boundaries while paying an ok salary. I count myself fortunate to work at such a place, while dreaming of other things.
The counter agreement often made is that if there was a better alternative to this then, like a company run by people who understand the fundamentals of what they actually make, then they would outcompete all these lazy bones, self-serving business people. My observation however has been that in fact many such companies have come, they have indeed dominated their competitors, only to later become infiltrated by the same business types they had once trounced.
It’s frustrating to simultaneously be able to perceive this and also do nothing about it. There are a lot of Juliuses out there. Still work doesn’t have to be one’s whole identity. If one happens to be there at the right place and at the right time then awesome. They probably got the experience of their lifetime. But if not then it’s ok! I think we can all do work that we’re proud of still, and it’s probably best to not get too worked up over this stuff. I don’t think Julius has that same option.
- A company run by Julii from the outset comes to dominate the market.
This is because "what we actually make" is a specialist skill, whereas business, sales, operations, financial planning and governance, HR, culture, legal are broadly generalist; and the bigger you get, the greater the important all that stuff becomes, relatively, to core execution on the product and its tech.
Which is not to say the importance of the latter ever goes to zero, but as a ratio it's like 1/log N or so.
I've met some grossly incompetent colleagues that were kept in the team just because they were willing to do certain kind of work that we didn't like, but management only pretended to not notice.
As for AI being the new version of this, I don't think so. The effect of this tech is more likely to remove one layer in the hierarchy. But maybe it's your boss, not you, that will get replaced.
Really worth actually reading, very nicely done. I think the point is being made that real Julii exist, and also, that the mechanisms being used to get AI into workplaces and such are the same methods used by the Julii of the world to get ahead as well.
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.
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.
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".
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.
What most people will miss is that "presentation is important ".
As coders we spend a lot of time
And pride on the code. We evaluate our work based on its correctness, elegance, effeciency and so on.
But the way everyone else values it is on how it interacts with the world. We get frustrated when someone with clearly inferior skills perfects the presentation layer.
The solution is not to teach Julius to code. The solution is to understand the importance of what Julius is doing and prioritize adding that to our skillset.
Make no mistake, the 10x programmer doesn't write more code, rather they make their code more useful, more accessible, optimized for usefulness as much as effeciency.
Internalize phrases like "if it's not documented it doesn't exist" and understand that training is more important than creation.
> Make no mistake, the 10x programmer doesn't write more code, rather they make their code more useful, more accessible, optimized for usefulness as much as effeciency.
Nope. Generally they push back on the requirements and make only the part that was needed. 10x programmers are much more like the top comment's "Pete" than the article's "Julius"
Not really. I know it hurts to hear but they are simply better.
The first one I worked with would come in the morning, sit down and code. Then take a lunch break and code some more until late in the evening. He was super prolific, his projects were well structured and followed all necessary conventions. He culled his code mercilessly and rewrote things that were going stale without hesitation. He delivered on time to happy customers.
He wasn't much for chit-chat but was friendly and would explain or help if approached. This was all in a small obscure European company. Now almost three decades later he is in a senior IC position at Arm I believe.
There might be multiple interpretations. Mine was that the colleague whom management is gaa-gaa about, makes flashy presentations, and seems much smarter and quicker than us, but whose work is usually incorrect and often damaging, is AI.
In Kafka's The Castle, the protagonist is sent two assistants by the local government, and (spoiler alert) they thwart everything he tries to do, and end up killing him.
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.
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]
I simply did not follow the transition between these two paragraphs:
> I now have an artificial intelligence software that helps me code. Another that helps me search for information. A third one that summarises and writes my emails. I am not allowed to disable them.
> At every moment, every second, I feel surrounded by Julius. By dozens of Juliuses.
The first paragraph is my situation and I like it, so the second paragraph didn't follow for me. My inner voice had a short mental hitch where I thought "was something missing between those? Should I slow down and stop skimming?" Then my eye jumps to "My boss came to see me. He told me that the team’s productivity was dangerously declining" and I decide "the paragraph before must have been referring to the team members using the AI tools", and I've missed the point of the story.
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.
My 10+ years professional life in software has seen me both thinking I am Julius and thinking I am working with Julii.
What I try to tell myself is that I am working in a state where I am at best ~75% sure of what I am doing. I assume others are in a similar situation with a varying percentage value.
Mistakes happen more often than I would like (not quite of the IP-less internet caliber, but still) and both when I make mistakes, and other make mistakes, I try to remind myself of this.
I value highly anyone that takes the time to tell me I made a mistake and why, I try to offer the same courtesy when I get the chance.
I only am worried when people _repeatedly_ make no attempt to learn from mistakes and just shrug them off, or worse leave the hot potato to someone else and still get the credit. But I can also see how sometimes we make mistakes and don't even realize.
...more on the topic, I guess, I have stopped using AI tools while coding almost completely
> I now have an artificial intelligence software that helps me code. Another that helps me search for information. A third one that summarises and writes my emails. I am not allowed to disable them
Wtf, are places actually making this nonsense mandatory now?!
Hey Clau^HHHHDev^HHHJulius, summarize for me how did rsynnott spend most of his working hours for the past quarter. Stack rank against rest of department, and output a cost-reduction strategy as a powerpoint presentation for my next meeting.
This is not a comment about the main story in the article, but about a paragraph at the end:
"My boss came to see me. He told me that the team’s productivity was dangerously declining. That we should use artificial intelligence more effectively. That we risked being overtaken by competitors who, without a doubt, were using the very latest artificial intelligence."
This is the oldest scam in the book. A boss will never talk to you if there is any kind of problem with your productivity, they will fire you and that's it. Any boss talking about needing to work harder etc. is only trying to squeeze out some extra juice from workers who are already working perfectly fine.
But the author and his team seem to be willing victims of scammers and exploiters, so what else is to be expected?
Are you sure? I'm always assuming that the Julius's aren't self aware, they don't know that they are like that. If they know, then they aren't Julius, it would be impossible to act this way if you were aware of it, without being a psychopath.
Maybe that should be the discussion. Is Julius a psychopath, and that is what bubbles to the top of corporate hierarchies.
This sounds made up and actually written by an AI. "I now have an artificial intelligence software that helps me code", can't see anyone working in the field writing like that.
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.
Oh, i know him... it's me!
I do "computer stuff" as my profession for about 20 years and always for rather small companies. I do everything from wiring a network, any level of supported, programming and administrative stuff... oh yeah, and in my current job I sometimes drive a forklift in the warehouse.
I work now for about 10 years for the same company and have built significant parts of their software ecosystem, and in my professional opinion: Its a Rube Goldberg machine fixed and extended with duct-tape, hotglue and tons of wishful thinking. Nothing, absolutely nothing in the system I had to build was carefully planned, implemented or tested. Most new feature requests were handed in by an stressed out boss on a Friday afternoon telling me that we need feature X / solution for problem Y / bugfix Z ABSOLUTELY URGENTLY because something went terribly wrong. Its not uncommon that this visits were the result of some prior hotfix backfiring.
And I build it. And it works.
I have often told my boss that it would be best to drag the whole system behind the warehouse and shoot it to relief it of its misery... but, well, it works...
Perhaps I should work on having this 'Pete skill' of leaving ship for the raise and promotion thing ;-)
The key issue of Petes is when they don't stay and make sure management knows that it's a prototype that needs more love.
They milk the credit and move on, leaving the next engineer explain to management that what they have is not what they believe they have.
I don't think you are the same Pete.
People like you acknowledge and understand the engineering trade-offs. Which you might smirk at, but is true nonetheless. If there is only one example of you not being op's Pete is that you tell your boss about the reality of the situation.
The OP's Pete I have met many. It is exactly as described.
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).
Oh man, I remember the difficulties explaining to management that "but it's working code" is just the absolute minimum requirement(!) for any piece of code and not a real measure of quality - any expectation lower than that, that also satisfies the term "software", just doesn't exist. There is some truly incomprehensible stuff out there to trick the type system into accepting your way of coding, to safe another 2 LoCs, or some assumption where team members didn't want to communicate with each other etc. Specs are hard enough.
As for the psychology: I always assumed that some people just don't perceive the contrast between creation and maintenance as very expressive or strong, the article The Maintenance Race[0] from Works in Progress comes to mind here. That article distinguishes between 3 types: Robin Knox-Johnston, Donald Crowhurst and Bernard Moitessier. Maintenance isn't fun for me, it's just tedious work that needs to be done. The easier and the faster it can be done, the better. There's accidental complexity anyway, and the world sure can be messy, but I'll do my best to keep my produced artifacts in line. My perception to orderliness is probably pretty sensitive, maybe my tendency towards depression plays a role here ("Doing maintenance cures depression" is a quote in the mentioned article above) and I can acknowledge that not all people are like that. But for me it feels somewhat similar as if I would compare real vintage things to things that just have been designed with that certain vintage look. Real vintage has to be accepted, it's history after all, but history just can't be designed and you're better off to work into the time ahead. I'll honor accidental complexity, it feels like history, but incomprensible problem-solving skills aren't somewhat part of it, in my book at least.
[0]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-maintenance-race/
I really like that book. A bunch of people I've mentioned it to said there was nothing in there that was new to them and they thought it was a waste of time.
I fear they missed the vocabulary part, which was what I found most valuable.
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.
Pete's just a rational actor in this scenario, the real issue is management with no insight into the reality of what they're 'managing'.
Mostly agree, although Pete is kind of a jerk if he’s self aware enough to notice exactly what he’s doing to repeatedly and intentionally exploit this pattern of ignorance in management anyway.
But engineers blaming engineers that benefit from being a rational actor inside the mainstream incentive structure of corporate life is basically a distraction, because it gives management a pass for their mismanagement. Like, you don’t have to know the details, but it’s pretty fundamental to understand / recognize / triage tech debt.
> Finding product market fit usually trumps tech debt
This, 100 times.
We tend to underestimate management's visibility in such situations. I had three senior engineers. One was your Pete (names are not real of course), throw him anything and he'll have something half-working in no time. Ugly but enough function to be called a proof of concept. One was the opposite, call him Paul, give him any problem and he would spend his whole life if possible researching every minute detail of the problem, similar domains and patterns etc. The last one, Mary, was the master combiner. She could collect all kinds of information, abstract and deep as in Paul's, quirky, dirty or non-existent as in Peter's and make them into something deeply practical and down to earth. Can you see how one could manage the work between these 3, all with their teams, in a way that everyone felt respected and admired for their approach? Same with the Julius of the post. Management might be aware of Julius weaknesses, but Julius could still bring a unique delivery skill-set that is required in the context of the overall team's work.
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...
The reason is why they move fast, since there are tons of Juliuses (as per the article terminology) who cannot code at all.
I'm quite scared of being this. I tick a lot of the boxes: I have a good rep for being fast and management likes me quite a bit. And I definitely have spearheaded things that I've since been pulled away from. I try to counter balance all that by writing docs and sticking around though. I do my best to help those who work on the stuff I was involved with.
> 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.
I worked with someone like this at my first job out of college, he did build a lot before leaving the team. But what he left behind in our systems was a string of technical decisions that really hamstrung us, like building our core service around the API of an extremely inefficient protocol buffer library he wrote himself, resulting in a service that could only handle 4-5 QPS per node. One of our other services used an application specific enum that for some reason existed in its own separate RubyGem that he published, so in order to update it we had to update the gem and then change the dependency reference.
Damn, I saw that dozens of times already, especially in relatively successful startups/scaleups in eu
> I've seen this behavior more than once and it seems too specific to not be intentional.
I mean, why not, this sort of quick delivery is super valuable to companies. But management needs to understand that the solution is more like a prototype, difficult to scale (in features, team) and that's where it is the engineer's responsibility to be transparent.
The last telco I worked at had a project manager like this.
She would take on a dozen small-ish projects (~6 months / $1M), and just jam them through by buying some off the shelf managed solution and using an external contractor who would write spaghetti to run tentacles to everything. She would routinely deliver projects early and under budget, which made her a stand out STAR. No other projects in the entire company were remotely close - normal was double time and budget. Green ticks next to her name, promotions, bonuses, etc.
Once I was invited to a conference call with a dozen people I didn't really know.
Her: We've tapped you as the main support person for this new system we've just deployed into production as part of this new project. I has customers live now.
Me: OK, great. Where's the documentation (there is none). What server does it run on? (Huh?). What credentials do I use to login (what?). Who is managing this SSL certificate? (What?). And so on.
I was told later that was a Career Limiting Move (CLM) on my part, because I wasn't being a team player, and I was adding friction to The Greatest Project Manager(TM).
She did this for at least 50 projects, always getting accolades while creating an absolute shit-storm for support to deal with. As the years rolled on I learned this is perfectly normal for a telco.
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.
That's why the B-Ark was built.
This comment made my day. Thank you!
In the non-tech world they're called schmoozers. They were either former athletes, quick witted, good looking, well spoken and/or cockie. Everyone knew they were incompetent, but they seemed to always get away with it because they were likable.
When they were in over their head on a project, they were always assigned someone who could bail them out. Because of this they always increased the work load of others, thus they were loathed. What usually helped us was they would get promoted, then they became useful because then we could control the projects.
Fantastic, hilarious, and too relatable.
Perhaps I am becoming overly cynical as I approach middle age, but it seems to me that this phenomenon exists because the people who have the ultimate decision making powers in businesses are business people. Businesses exist to serve the egos and goals of the people who run them - from their perspective things like technical competence and honesty are often secondary to achieving business outcomes or impressing upper management (it is telling that these are somehow different things). Julius is clearly better at this than the sad programmers who merely know how to code.
I would dearly love to believe that an alternative is possible, but there seem to be powerful incentives pushing the world towards this scenario. For many of us the best we can hope for is a work place that is not too dysfunctional, that respects your personal boundaries while paying an ok salary. I count myself fortunate to work at such a place, while dreaming of other things.
The counter agreement often made is that if there was a better alternative to this then, like a company run by people who understand the fundamentals of what they actually make, then they would outcompete all these lazy bones, self-serving business people. My observation however has been that in fact many such companies have come, they have indeed dominated their competitors, only to later become infiltrated by the same business types they had once trounced.
It’s frustrating to simultaneously be able to perceive this and also do nothing about it. There are a lot of Juliuses out there. Still work doesn’t have to be one’s whole identity. If one happens to be there at the right place and at the right time then awesome. They probably got the experience of their lifetime. But if not then it’s ok! I think we can all do work that we’re proud of still, and it’s probably best to not get too worked up over this stuff. I don’t think Julius has that same option.
There are two possible outcomes:
- The Julii infiltrate and take over,
- A company run by Julii from the outset comes to dominate the market.
This is because "what we actually make" is a specialist skill, whereas business, sales, operations, financial planning and governance, HR, culture, legal are broadly generalist; and the bigger you get, the greater the important all that stuff becomes, relatively, to core execution on the product and its tech.
Which is not to say the importance of the latter ever goes to zero, but as a ratio it's like 1/log N or so.
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I've met some grossly incompetent colleagues that were kept in the team just because they were willing to do certain kind of work that we didn't like, but management only pretended to not notice.
As for AI being the new version of this, I don't think so. The effect of this tech is more likely to remove one layer in the hierarchy. But maybe it's your boss, not you, that will get replaced.
Really worth actually reading, very nicely done. I think the point is being made that real Julii exist, and also, that the mechanisms being used to get AI into workplaces and such are the same methods used by the Julii of the world to get ahead as well.
Ah yes, a masculine proper noun of the second declension in the nominative plural. Just one macron away from nailing it ;)
;)
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.
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.
Wouldn't you agree that the problem in such a situation is not the Julius/Julii, but the managers who hired and misunderstood his/their contributions?
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There are lots of politicians like Julius too.
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.
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".
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.
Except that the blog is also in French. https://ploum.net/2024-12-23-julius-fr.html
The author is running a poll to establish the plural: https://mamot.fr/@ploum/113704470821790664
Well now we are choosing to inherit a newly contextualised word it's appropriate to discuss what grammar we should take with it
Just ask Julius, then....
In the subject, but e.g. 'Surely you're joking, Juli?' or 'I feel surrounded by Julios.' My Latin is pretty rusty, though.
But in Latin Julius starts with an I. (with apologies to The Last Crusade)
That assumes Julius is a second declension noun. If it were a third declension noun it would indeed be Juliuses.
Haha, I genuinely laughed, thanks for this gem.
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
What most people will miss is that "presentation is important ".
As coders we spend a lot of time And pride on the code. We evaluate our work based on its correctness, elegance, effeciency and so on.
But the way everyone else values it is on how it interacts with the world. We get frustrated when someone with clearly inferior skills perfects the presentation layer.
The solution is not to teach Julius to code. The solution is to understand the importance of what Julius is doing and prioritize adding that to our skillset.
Make no mistake, the 10x programmer doesn't write more code, rather they make their code more useful, more accessible, optimized for usefulness as much as effeciency.
Internalize phrases like "if it's not documented it doesn't exist" and understand that training is more important than creation.
> Make no mistake, the 10x programmer doesn't write more code, rather they make their code more useful, more accessible, optimized for usefulness as much as effeciency.
Nope. Generally they push back on the requirements and make only the part that was needed. 10x programmers are much more like the top comment's "Pete" than the article's "Julius"
Not really. I know it hurts to hear but they are simply better.
The first one I worked with would come in the morning, sit down and code. Then take a lunch break and code some more until late in the evening. He was super prolific, his projects were well structured and followed all necessary conventions. He culled his code mercilessly and rewrote things that were going stale without hesitation. He delivered on time to happy customers.
He wasn't much for chit-chat but was friendly and would explain or help if approached. This was all in a small obscure European company. Now almost three decades later he is in a senior IC position at Arm I believe.
What I learned from this is that by using an AI, I can have a good career with a salary that is above average.
I read the whole thing and never saw any twist. What did I miss?
There might be multiple interpretations. Mine was that the colleague whom management is gaa-gaa about, makes flashy presentations, and seems much smarter and quicker than us, but whose work is usually incorrect and often damaging, is AI.
In Kafka's The Castle, the protagonist is sent two assistants by the local government, and (spoiler alert) they thwart everything he tries to do, and end up killing him.
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.
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]
I simply did not follow the transition between these two paragraphs:
> I now have an artificial intelligence software that helps me code. Another that helps me search for information. A third one that summarises and writes my emails. I am not allowed to disable them.
> At every moment, every second, I feel surrounded by Julius. By dozens of Juliuses.
The first paragraph is my situation and I like it, so the second paragraph didn't follow for me. My inner voice had a short mental hitch where I thought "was something missing between those? Should I slow down and stop skimming?" Then my eye jumps to "My boss came to see me. He told me that the team’s productivity was dangerously declining" and I decide "the paragraph before must have been referring to the team members using the AI tools", and I've missed the point of the story.
Julius is the AI.
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.
If this wasn't about AI, Julius would have been an excellent PM or mid-level manager.
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.
CEOs should be replaced by AI, charm shouldn’t be a factor in decision making.
cough We're not all that bad... cough
I'd be interested in seeing a presentation detailing how y'all actually, very good.
seconded
we should start a club
Yeah. Juliuses who understand the code.
I would like to be included in this collection of Julii.
I would also.
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.
There is an outdated term that I find perfectly encapsulates this: "goldbrick."
Thank you for this wonderfully useful word!
My 10+ years professional life in software has seen me both thinking I am Julius and thinking I am working with Julii.
What I try to tell myself is that I am working in a state where I am at best ~75% sure of what I am doing. I assume others are in a similar situation with a varying percentage value.
Mistakes happen more often than I would like (not quite of the IP-less internet caliber, but still) and both when I make mistakes, and other make mistakes, I try to remind myself of this.
I value highly anyone that takes the time to tell me I made a mistake and why, I try to offer the same courtesy when I get the chance.
I only am worried when people _repeatedly_ make no attempt to learn from mistakes and just shrug them off, or worse leave the hot potato to someone else and still get the credit. But I can also see how sometimes we make mistakes and don't even realize.
...more on the topic, I guess, I have stopped using AI tools while coding almost completely
> I now have an artificial intelligence software that helps me code. Another that helps me search for information. A third one that summarises and writes my emails. I am not allowed to disable them
Wtf, are places actually making this nonsense mandatory now?!
Hey Clau^HHHHDev^HHHJulius, summarize for me how did rsynnott spend most of his working hours for the past quarter. Stack rank against rest of department, and output a cost-reduction strategy as a powerpoint presentation for my next meeting.
This is not a comment about the main story in the article, but about a paragraph at the end:
"My boss came to see me. He told me that the team’s productivity was dangerously declining. That we should use artificial intelligence more effectively. That we risked being overtaken by competitors who, without a doubt, were using the very latest artificial intelligence."
This is the oldest scam in the book. A boss will never talk to you if there is any kind of problem with your productivity, they will fire you and that's it. Any boss talking about needing to work harder etc. is only trying to squeeze out some extra juice from workers who are already working perfectly fine.
But the author and his team seem to be willing victims of scammers and exploiters, so what else is to be expected?
> A boss will never talk to you if there is any kind of problem with your productivity, they will fire you and that's it
I feel sorry for you having experienced that culture... this is not normal behaviour for good companies, and they do exist.
> But the author and his team seem to be willing victims of scammers and exploiters, so what else is to be expected?
This is just a fictional story meant to be an allegory about AI. I don't understand why people takes it so literally in the comments.
> This is the oldest scam in the book.
Sounds like you were born yesterday.
TIL I'm Julius lol.
Are you sure? I'm always assuming that the Julius's aren't self aware, they don't know that they are like that. If they know, then they aren't Julius, it would be impossible to act this way if you were aware of it, without being a psychopath.
Maybe that should be the discussion. Is Julius a psychopath, and that is what bubbles to the top of corporate hierarchies.
This sounds made up and actually written by an AI. "I now have an artificial intelligence software that helps me code", can't see anyone working in the field writing like that.
The author's native language is French, not English. The article doesn't sound AI-written at all.
I take it you're not used to people whose primary language is French (or Italian, Spanish or Romanian) writing in English?