llm/3a862c31-848e-4e32-be93-99402d2b43b6/batch-1-52ed12c2-de89-466e-aecc-f7e60333d4d3-input.json
You are a comment classifier. Given a list of topics and a batch of comments, assign each comment to up to 3 of the most relevant topics.
TOPICS (use these 1-based indices):
1. Bugs Having Users at Scale
2. Automation Impact on Workers
3. Workplace Politics vs Technical Skills
4. Google's UX Quality Criticism
5. LLM-Assisted Writing Detection
6. Career Advancement and Networking
7. Clarity vs Cleverness in Code
8. User-Focused Engineering Culture
9. Innovation Tokens and Boring Technology
10. Abstraction and Complexity Management
11. Silent Resistance in Debates
12. Glue Work Recognition
13. Performance Optimization Strategies
14. Engineer-Customer Communication Barriers
15. Time vs Money Tradeoffs
16. Psychological Safety in Teams
17. Process and Bureaucracy Critique
18. Code Plagiarism Ethics
19. Big Tech Organizational Dysfunction
20. Goodhart's Law and Metrics Gaming
COMMENTS TO CLASSIFY:
[
{
"id": "46495386",
"text": "And someone don't need to look further than this quite interesting report by the Rand Corp: https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html\n\nWe document the cumulative effect of four decades of income growth below the growth of per capita gross national income and estimate that aggregate income for the population below the 90th percentile over this time period would have been $2.5 trillion (67 percent) higher in 2018 had income growth since 1975 remained as equitable as it was in the first two post-War decades. From 1975 to 2018, the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion."
}
,
{
"id": "46496116",
"text": "Income is the wrong measurement. Total employee compensation is the more accurate one, and averages around 145% of salaries.\n\nTotal employee compensation includes things like the value of employer provided health insurance."
}
,
{
"id": "46496136",
"text": "What's your evidence for that?"
}
,
{
"id": "46495752",
"text": "> removing human labor from production\n\nKarl Marx would argue this evil because this take away the value and job satisfaction from the labour.\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation"
}
,
{
"id": "46496133",
"text": "You might notice that Karl Marx isn't exactly the pinnacle of economics.\n\nQuoting Marx is a bit like quoting Aristotle or Ptolemy."
}
,
{
"id": "46494007",
"text": "\"Laid off\" may be more appropriate than \"fired\", but in essence, removing the need for costly labor is often the main \"value\" of any technology. Society as a whole comes out ahead from it, I mean for all the ice transporters and merchants put out of a job by electric refrigeration, and all the sailors put out of a job by modern cargo ships I think we're better off for it. But at the individual level it does make one uneasy about the prospects of individuals affected by it. My personal conclusion is that people have a personal duty to anticipate and adapt to change, society might give them some help along the way but it doesn't owe them that their way of life will be maintained forever."
}
,
{
"id": "46497283",
"text": "This is putting the apple cart before the horse.\n\nEconomy should be a tool for the society and to benefit everyone. Instead it's becoming more and more a playground for the rich to extract wealth and the proletariats have only purpose to serve the bourgeois lest they be discarded to the outskirts of the economy and often to the literal slums of the society while their peers shout \"you're just not working hard enough\"."
}
,
{
"id": "46495395",
"text": "Very true. We waste alot of valuable labor on “software engineering” that is grossly inefficient. Capital gets allocated to these so called startups that are incredibly inefficient."
}
,
{
"id": "46494821",
"text": "This says a lot as relating to the rise of AI and the fear of job loss. There's going to be displacement in areas we can't predict, but overall it might very well just lead to leveling up the entire workforce."
}
,
{
"id": "46495595",
"text": "> it might very well just lead to leveling up the entire workforce.\n\nHow could that possibly work?\n\nAt some point I could see white collar work trending down fast, in a way that radically increased the value of blue color work. Software gets cheaper much faster than hardware.\n\nBut then the innovation and investments go into smart hardware, and robotics effectiveness/cost goes up.\n\nIf you can see a path where AI isn't a one-generational transition to most human (economic) obsolescence, I would certainly be interested in the principle or mechanism you see."
}
,
{
"id": "46496427",
"text": "Craftsmen will have a resurgence, that's probably a 'leveling up' in terms of resilience against AI takeover. There's just no way of automating quite a few of the physically effective crafts."
}
,
{
"id": "46496868",
"text": "So the rich who can afford craftsmen will get richer, spend more on their multiple houses, perhaps. But that's literal crumbs, one or two jobs out of tens of thousands. There's no significant \"leveling up\" there at the societal levels of job destruction we're talking about."
}
,
{
"id": "46497212",
"text": "This will not be unusual for any kind of software engineering work to be honest. A big chunk of work in B2C companies has to do with customer support, for example; building websites, apps, writing content, chatbots, etc with the objective being that people do not call customer support, because people on phones don't scale very well. And the other part is that when they do call, that the CS agent can address the issue quickly and has minimal administrative overhead.\n\nBut it's a weird one, because it costs millions to build features like that."
}
,
{
"id": "46494578",
"text": "I agree. I was brought on as an intern to do automation for a business team. The company had built this gargantuan complex \"programming tool\" to help the boomers who'd been there for 30 years adjust to the new world (a noble endeavor for mortgage holders without college degrees, i believe). I was brought in to basically fuck around and find little things to optimize. In 2 months I wrote a python script to do about 50% of the teams work near instantly.\n\nThey had layoffs every year and i remember when the \"boss's boss\" came to town and sat at our table of desks. She asked me and i excitedly told her about my progress. She prompted how i felt about it and i nearly said \"its very easy as long as you can program\". But mid sentence i saw the intense fear in the eyes of the team and changed subject. It really hit home to me that these people actually were doing a useless job, but they all had children who need insurance, and mortgages that need paying. And they will all be cast out into a job"
}
,
{
"id": "46495261",
"text": "> refer to the only programmer near them as \"the asian\"\n\nIf they ever hired a second one, they’d have to learn actual names. Or maybe it would be “the asian” and “the new asian”!"
}
,
{
"id": "46496263",
"text": "How do you feel about the whole thing years later?"
}
,
{
"id": "46497718",
"text": "I had that on my very first project. I couldn’t understand why the people on site were so hostile to me. Afterwards I was talking to the salesman about this and he told me they were all fired when the project went live."
}
,
{
"id": "46496726",
"text": "Back in the day one company had a dedicated copier operator who was very unhappy after a Xerox service tech did away with the job by enabling the network printing and scan to email functions. The customer had upgraded their old copier out of necessity but had never changed their workflow."
}
,
{
"id": "46491140",
"text": "> So the more I reduced cycle times, the less time they had to sit around and chat.\n\nCouldn't help but imagining Darryl getting mad at you.\n\nThanks for the story!"
}
,
{
"id": "46496711",
"text": "Yup same story here, also warehouse optimization. I was the reason the employees got new scanners and oh my... the scanners didn't have a physical keyboard. Now all the 50yo+ would have to aim on a touch display which is apparently impossible.\n\nAlso we had to introduce some fixed locations and storage placement recommendations. Our storage workers almost revolted. After a few months it settled though."
}
,
{
"id": "46496680",
"text": "insane mindset. This kind of thing is why there is no industry left in anglosphere outside US"
}
,
{
"id": "46496932",
"text": "Insane mindset that people should work modestly, get paid modestly and live in the fruits of a wealthy society? As opposed to breaking their backs to make a boss even wealthier?\n\nThe efficiencies are always to the benefit of the wealthy, the wage gap grows. You work hard, you still get fired.\n\nCap top wages to 5x the lowest, companies can't own housing except socially beneficial housing, individuals get 2 house maximum."
}
,
{
"id": "46491735",
"text": "> The more efficient I made the technical part of the job, the more time they had to spend doing the manual labor part of the job to keep up. So the more I reduced cycle times, the less time they had to sit around and chat.\n\nThe faster the LLM spits out garbage code, the more time I get to spend reviewing slop and dealing with it gaslighting me, and the less time I get to spend on doing the parts of the job I actually enjoy."
}
,
{
"id": "46497367",
"text": "Worked on public transport ticketing (think rail gates and stuff) with contactless last 30 years, when guys would tell me that the software was \"ready\", I'd ask:\n\n> Is it \"stand next to the gates at Central Station during peak time and everything works\" ready?\n\nWe were working on the project from a different city/country, but we managed to cycle our developers through the actual deployments so they got to see what they were building, made a hell of a difference to attitude and \"polish\".\n\nPlus they also got to learn \"People travel on public transport to get somewhere, not to interact with the ticketing system.\"\n\nMeant that they understood the difference just 200ms can make to the passenger experience as well as the passenger management in the stations."
}
,
{
"id": "46490091",
"text": "This was well talked about in Hyrums Law, which came from a Googler as well.\n\nhttps://www.hyrumslaw.com/\n\n> With a sufficient number of users of an API,\nit does not matter what you promise in the contract:\nall observable behaviors of your system\nwill be depended on by somebody."
}
,
{
"id": "46490739",
"text": "I believe it.\n\nI also believe an off the shelf example of how to use the library correctly will save everyone a lot of pain later."
}
,
{
"id": "46495268",
"text": "I always strongly suggest sample code to people designing new APIs. Can be a very revealing exercise."
}
,
{
"id": "46489981",
"text": "For close to a decade my business revolved around a common bug in both Microsoft and Netscape, the dominant browsers of the day. With every release we were thinking 'this time they'll fix it' and that would have caused us some serious headaches. But they never did!"
}
,
{
"id": "46490438",
"text": "I was curious what the commenter's business was, and found this post about HTTP protocol latency: https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-several-million-dollar-bug/"
}
,
{
"id": "46495257",
"text": "What a cool guy https://jacquesmattheij.com/domains-for-sale/"
}
,
{
"id": "46496029",
"text": ">FREEDRUPALWEBSITEHOSTING.COM\n\nYeah that's not gonna work nowadays.\n\n>DOWNLOADWEBCAM.COM\n\nIs that like Download More RAM?\n\n>BROWSEHN.COM\n\nHey, I'm browsing that place right now!\n\n>MUZICBRAINZ.COM\n\nThis sounds 100% legit no virus softpedia guaranteed."
}
,
{
"id": "46494868",
"text": "> This makes it critically important that you, the software engineer, understand the purpose and real world usage of your software. Your job isn’t to complete tickets that fulfill a list of asks from your product manager. Your job is to build software that solves users problems.\n\nYou actually described the job that Product Managers _should_ be doing: \"understand the purpose and real world usage of your software\"."
}
,
{
"id": "46497448",
"text": "Everyone in the team should have that.\n\nObviously at different levels of focus and completeness, but the Product Manager is supposed to be communicating in both directions and they rarely do, they just take the feature list and tick them off.\n\nTelling the customer that they can't have something or it needs to be different and having their trust that you aren't doing it just to cut corners is what good Product Managers do."
}
,
{
"id": "46495264",
"text": "As a developer of new things, if you allow someone else to capture this value from you, you become fungible; additionally, for your group, having technology designed to solve problems without grounded but expansive ideas of how much is possible, limits your team's ability to the mundane rather than the customer delighting. Some product folks have internalized the possibilities but some haven't."
}
,
{
"id": "46495363",
"text": "Ideally its a mix, a good PM should understand the customer/market more than the developer has time to do, and then they can have conversations with devs about how to most effectively fill needs. In reality, these PMs seem more like unicorns rather than expected table stakes, but hey."
}
,
{
"id": "46490617",
"text": "> Your job isn’t to complete tickets that fulfill a list of asks from your product manager. Your job is to build software that solves users problems.\n\nVery important with this, is that not every work place sees your job as that, and you might get hired for the former while you believe it to be the latter. Navigating what is actually expected of you is probably good to try to figure out during the interview, or worst case scenario, on the first day as a new hire."
}
,
{
"id": "46494609",
"text": "This is huge advice for people who want to climb a given career ladder.\n\nThe overwhelming majority of organizations will say they want you focused on real user problems, but actually want you to make your boss (and their boss) look good. This usually looks more like clearing tasks from a list than creating new goals.\n\nAt Google there are both kinds of teams."
}
,
{
"id": "46494696",
"text": "I worked on some software that provided results to some calculations to general web users, not experts. The calcs were done in miliseconds.\n\nWe had to introduce an artificial delay of ~30 seconds to make it seem like it was taking a while to calculate, because users were complaining that it was too fast. They either didn't believe we really did the calcs, or they thought the system must have broken so they didn't trust the results."
}
,
{
"id": "46494917",
"text": "This is one reason UIs have animations added, the kind that technical users like to complain about or remove. By making things feel more physically grounded they prevent users from getting lost and confused and give them more intuition about things.\n\nIn your case you could show more intermediate values, graph things, etc."
}
,
{
"id": "46496616",
"text": "I often chuckle when (our) animations may have more complex math that consume more resources than the awaited logic/call that they gate."
}
,
{
"id": "46490568",
"text": "Lehman talked about the developer-software-user triad. Each of the three have a different understanding of the problem to be solved.\n\nDevelopers misunderstand what the users want, and then aren't able to accurately implement their own misunderstanding either. Users, in turn, don't understand what the software is capable of, nor what developers can do.\n\n> Good intentions, hopes of correctness, wishful thinking, even managerial edict cannot change the semantics of the code as written or its effect when executed. Nor can they after the fact affect the relationship between the desires, needs, and requirements of users and the program […] implementation; nor between any of these and operational circumstances – the real world.\n\nhttps://entropicthoughts.com/laws-of-software-evolution"
}
,
{
"id": "46496602",
"text": "This is a perfect example of a \"bug\" actually being a requirement. The travel industry faced a similar paradox known as the Labor Illusion: users didn't trust results that returned too quickly.\nCompanies intentionally faked the \"loading\" phase because A/B tests showed that artificial latency increased conversion. The \"inefficiency\" was the only way to convince users the software was working hard. Millions of collective hours were spent staring at placebo progress bars until Google Flights finally leveraged their search-engine trust to shift the industry to instant results."
}
,
{
"id": "46491282",
"text": "Yes nice but also very naive. Most developers do not have that level of ownership, nor know how their users interact with the software. Their job is precisely to complete tickets from the product manager. The product manager is the one who should be in charge of UX research and “build a software that solves users problems.” Sure, in abstract that is the mission of the developers too, but in any structured (and hopefully functional) team, product strategy is not what the software engineer should be concerned with."
}
,
{
"id": "46493874",
"text": "Good software engineers are concerned with product strategy. They might not be able to decide things but they can help inform product about options because they're closer to actually building things.\n\nIf you just implement product tickets you'll probably get replaced by LLMs."
}
,
{
"id": "46495784",
"text": "You need to be a product-minded engineer."
}
,
{
"id": "46494908",
"text": "It’s crazy how fast the tables turned on SWE being barely required to do anything to SWE being required to do everything. I quite like the 2026 culture of SWE but it’s so much more demanding and competitive than it was 5 or 10 years ago"
}
,
{
"id": "46497473",
"text": "Developers shouldn't test, they should throw it over to QA who will test it precisely to meet the defined requirements.\n\nThe Product Manager's job is to communicate the customers needs to the developers/designers and the developers/designers constraints back to the customers.\n\nIt's up to the developers and designers to understand those constraints and make sure they are communicated back."
}
,
{
"id": "46494697",
"text": "I have never seen a pure ticket based / zero ownership approach ever work."
}
,
{
"id": "46497383",
"text": "Tell us you've never worked in a faang without telling us."
}
,
{
"id": "46496287",
"text": "It's wild to me that a lot of people consider that SWE need to be knowledgeable in business requirements and interact with clients all day.\n\nJust try to imagine construction workers doing the same thing when building a skyscraper. Instead of laying bricks, mortar and beams, now every worker loses 1-2 hours each day asking each stakeholder separately what they want, if they like how it's going so far etc. And then make changes to the layout when the clients ask! What kind of monstruous building will emerge at the end?\n\nEdit: if you downvote, at least provide a counter argument. Or is etiquette dead?"
}
]
Return ONLY a JSON array with this exact structure (no other text):
[
{
"id": "comment_id_1",
"topics": [
1,
3,
5
]
}
,
{
"id": "comment_id_2",
"topics": [
2
]
}
,
...
]
Rules:
- Each comment can have 0 to 3 topics
- Use 1-based topic indices
- Only assign topics that are genuinely relevant to the comment
- If no topics match, use an empty array:
{
"id": "...",
"topics": []
}
50