Not necessarily. Didn’t Microsoft port the TS compiler to Go and they did it by translating the TS? It wasn’t idiomatic Go.
And most executives are figuring this into their calculus right now because they were burned badly during COVID. Meta, Google, etc were loose with hiring and engineers flocked from their lower-paying companies in droves. The brain drain was real.
One public company I was at lost nearly 2/3rds of their engineers and mostly to Meta (granted, they had other problems but it was mostly about money -- the offers were excessive). Then market conditions forced them to freeze hiring and they've had a slow exodus of senior talent since as the firefighting has become constant.
AI adoption has only accelerated problems for them.
We've taken this "only two years and then leave" philosophy to an extreme and now companies are totally justified in not investing in their engineers anymore.
It was purely about maxing your compensation because changing jobs nets you more than promotions & raises.
I've never met an engineer in my life who truly earned a promotion every year and very few every two. Very few companies have org charts that even support that or have that many levels. This logic/advice only really applies at a few companies and people have adopted it no matter where they work. There's not enough growth/hiring at 95% of companies to even come close. The Peter Principle is also a real thing. Everyone's competence has a ceiling.
There's even an implicit understanding of this that people at smaller companies have inflated titles and you typically rank them down 1-2 levels when hiring/acquiring at larger companies.
Now I do agree that companies haven't been investing in their engineers, but that doesn't also mean this isn't a vicious cycle. Employers and employees are in a mexican standoff and things are only going to get worse until one side comes to its senses. Employers have all the leverage for it to not be them.
For the vast majority of companies the average tenure of an engineer sits between 18 and 30 months. They're also mostly hiring young engineers in their 20s. As an employer what is your upside to making such investments before they're at least mid-career? A lot of people seem to want the world and offer nothing in return for it.
You don't view it as a problem that companies consistently compensate new hires higher than they are their experienced employees?
Hell, I would have been perfectly happy to never change employers in my entire career to date, if my salary had anywhere near kept pace with my peers who were job-hopping.
It depends on the current employee and the incoming employee. They are not interchangeable cogs. Also not everyone consistently provides good value over their tenure -- a lot tend to work hard early and then for various reasons taper off. It's not necessarily their fault, but companies definitely are aware of this.
Personally I tend to value growth of my skillset over growth of income and that has largely informed my movement. I move when there's no longer interesting work if the compensation is at least fair. I've never been about comparing myself to others -- especially when most of my peers' left the industry after 5-10 years.
And you don’t think that has anything to do with incentives (or lack thereof)?
> I've never been about comparing myself to others
Doesn’t have to be about comparing oneself to others. More about the cost of living increasing because software engineering salaries are rising around you…
No, that's almost never it. It's mostly life circumstances, burnout, frustration with management, etc.
> More about the cost of living increasing because software engineering salaries are rising around you…
We're already talking about very well-paid software engineers here. Appealing to a sense of sympathy over cost of living concerns of 1% earners and them trying to become 0.5% earners isn't exactly a strong argument here...
I use more (albeit cached) when centering a div.
Also worth noting simple horizontal centering of divs was never a problem, margin: auto was defined in CSS Level 1 in 1996 [1].
It was vertical centering that took a very long time to crack, which really became trivial with Flexbox which was first drafted in 2009[2] but became available unprefixed in browsers between 2012 and 2014 [3] about 13 years ago.
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1-961217
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-css3-flexbox-20090723/
[3] https://caniuse.com/flexbox
Subnote: I'm not counting the display: table hacks.
I will have to steal it for an upcoming AI tools meeting I have at work.
Also, pretty clever as centering a div w/ CSS has been notoriously difficult to achieve.
I think with sequential approach (translate -> make idiomatic) it is easier. However, I am not sure that monetary difference is going to be as stark as $165k vs 3 engineers/year. Especially, if you consider that no one knows that is what in the code at the end.
Sure, you can argue that now it doesn’t matter — agents and all that, but I am not so sure.
I keep seeing this. What is "un-idiomatic" rust?
To actually get the safety benefits of Rust in a real way you have to rework those files to not treat eachother as C code. This is the interesting and the difficult part of a rewrite in Rust, and one that an unsupervised LLM rewrite is probably not even going to attempt.
I don't think this latter stage has actually happened with Bun's codebase. The result of the Rust rewrite in Bun's case is actually less safe than the Zig it is replacing, especially because (I am told) a lot of the new Rust code is unsound (introducing UB).
You can use deterministic linting for `unsafe` usage, have agents target `unsafe`, etc. It's pretty easy. You can even run `miri` against the code and give that as a tool for LLM feedback. I've done this all before and it works fine.
> The result of the Rust rewrite in Bun's case is actually less safe than the Zig it is replacing, especially because (I am told) a lot of the new Rust code is unsound (introducing UB).
I'm unconvinced that this is true. How could you tell? You only know about the rust bugs because rust makes them grep'able/ trivial to verify, there's no way of knowing which bugs existed in zig that didn't translate. Regardless, the problem is now trivial to understand in Rust and start to target.
Why not? A complete test suite exists, so it just boils down to "reimplement this code to reduce the number of 'unsafe' references, while keeping the tests passing" (the last part isn't even needed since Claude loves to run tests and linters anyway).
That's a really strong motivation for the Rust port. It's literally impossible to take a path not leading to an unacceptable outcome because the Rust compiler fails the compile if code no longer marked "unsafe" is still actually unsafe, and the tests fail if the implementation is incorrect. The compiler actively helps to force the LLM to do things properly.
How odd. Lot of mental gymnastics going on there.
Do the rewrite that looks like we transpiled our Zig code to Rust. We can gradually refactor it to reduce unsafe usage and look more like idiomatic Rust after Bun v1.4 ships.
The original version of Bun was already a line-by-line (manual) port of esbuild from Go to Zig (also mentioned in this post), so the Zig code already wasn't "Zig-idiomatic" and apparently riddled with problems. That doesn't inspire much confidence in the LLM-translated Rust version tbh.
And yet Claude Code, which is the primary consumer, continues to chug away without any issue (that I, as a fairly heavy user, have encountered).
that is indeed a roughly accurate definition of what "unidiomatic" means
Eg. goto/jump, bare "except" statements in python, etc... In Rust, unsafe has its uses and is a first class language feature, but it certainly isn't idiomatic to use it to mimic access patterns from other languages (unless absolutely necessary).