llm/3a862c31-848e-4e32-be93-99402d2b43b6/batch-10-6fdacf7f-0ef0-4fc4-b3fd-d0e1dffd5dcb-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": "46494187",
"text": "Biggest lesson is you will get mass fired. So look for whats best for you, because you are the only one who can?"
}
,
{
"id": "46492031",
"text": "Here's the lessons all ex-Google colleagues I've worked with have brought with them to their new jobs:\n\n1. Use Bazel for everything. Doesn't matter that the documentation sucks and it's unbelievable bloat for smaller companies: use it anyway. Use it for everything.\n\n2. Write things from scratch. Need a protobuf parser in C? Just write one up instead of using any of the battle-tested open source options.\n\n3. Always talk down to frontend engineers and treat them as lesser/ not real engineers. Real engineers are backend engineers. Frontend is so easy that they can do a perfectly fine job if needed. Make sure to use Bazel for all frontend builds.\n\n4. Did I mention Bazel? It's the solution to all problems for all companies."
}
,
{
"id": "46496010",
"text": "very good thoughts. learned a lot of these lessons the hard way over the last 20 years."
}
,
{
"id": "46490627",
"text": "I feel like the best lesson in here wasn’t numbered, but in the opening statement:\n\n> the longer I’ve stayed, the more I’ve realized that the engineers who thrive aren’t necessarily the best programmers - they’re the ones who’ve figured out how to navigate everything around the code: the people, the politics, the alignment, the ambiguity.\n\nI have been banging on about this for _years_. I’ve seen engineers much smarter than me and who write much better code fall afoul of this too. Being personable and easy going and insightful for one hour in a meeting can do more for your reputation within a company than a month of burning yourself out completing more tickets than anybody else. I really wish more people understood this.\n\nAt the end of the day, a manager or a project director who _wants_ you to join a meeting just because you’re a joy to be around and you may have some insight, shows you’re more valued than the best coder on the team if they’re a pain to bring into a meeting because the"
}
,
{
"id": "46490645",
"text": "I manager that invites people in meeting based on how obedient they are, is a bad manager. Multiplied by the number of reports. Fix that."
}
,
{
"id": "46496475",
"text": "I didn’t mention obedience, I mentioned pleasantness. Not sure what you’re on about with reports either. You ok?"
}
,
{
"id": "46491957",
"text": "> Focus on what you can control. Ignore what you can’t.\n\nThat's why I left Google for HFT. Much better life."
}
,
{
"id": "46491986",
"text": "Where you can serve corporate interests more directly and with less overhead? (:shrug:)"
}
,
{
"id": "46493293",
"text": "Insightful take on career progress. Most engineers don't talk about this."
}
,
{
"id": "46497047",
"text": "Main lesson from 14 years anywhere should be don't spend more than two years at one job.\n\nBecause otherwise you start thinking that politics matters."
}
,
{
"id": "46495626",
"text": "As much as we meme about it internally, one of my favourite things about AWS was the leadership principles. I always worried I've became cult like biased. Seeing how these converge to similar great ideas is a relief.\n\nIMO the most common denominator among all these is trust, in order for many of these to work. From policy setting at strategic level, hiring, to tactical process refinement, the invariant must always be building an environment and culture of trust. Which isn't trivial to scale."
}
,
{
"id": "46490855",
"text": "> 1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems.\n\nComplete bullshit. Sorry, but the reason why people use Google is because of the ecosystem + value proposition. Google Drive & Calendar are some of the most outdated pieces of SaaS software that only gets used because of the greater ecosystem they live in - and price. They (along with the other Google products) are also some of the poorest designed user interfaces online. Let's cut the crap for once here. If I were Google I would be worried because companies like Fastmail, Notion & Proton are quickly catching up."
}
,
{
"id": "46490863",
"text": "> If I were Google I would be worried because companies like Fastmail, Notion & Proton are quickly catching up.\n\nlol do you honestly think Google is worried about Fastmail, Notion or Proton?"
}
,
{
"id": "46490880",
"text": "> are quickly catching up.\n\nIf you were Yahoo a few years before Google it would sound the same."
}
,
{
"id": "46490893",
"text": "the writing was already on the road w.r.t to user mindshare among normies. I see no evidence of the same happening with fast mail. why would anyone switch from gmail to fast mail other than privacy, which regular people couldn't care less about?"
}
,
{
"id": "46490907",
"text": "Privacy, as well as overall product experience. Btw, I didn't just mention Fastmail."
}
,
{
"id": "46490955",
"text": "Thats a poor characterization to choose 2 of the least talked about apps from that company. Also your response to the claim \"the best engineers do X\" is logically flawed. Maybe google doesn't use their \"best engineers\" to build out those cherry-picked examples? maybe they used them for Search or infrastructure or something else?"
}
,
{
"id": "46491181",
"text": "I'm commenting on the article, and the first point in the article doesn't sound like search or infra. Maybe read that before assuming things. And why would it be \"logically flawed\"?"
}
,
{
"id": "46491714",
"text": "google has a lot more products besides the 2 you picked. Some of them are wildly successful, even. Maybe they use their \"best engineers\" on the more successful products?"
}
,
{
"id": "46494257",
"text": "A lot of lessons from Google are really lessons from a historically unique monopoly era that no longer exists. Useful context, but dangerous to treat as timeless advice."
}
,
{
"id": "46490688",
"text": "This sounds like an accumulation and reiteration of other peoples ideas and blogs, barely changing or adding anything. Fair, but I was interested in the author’s own ideas or how those ideas they’re reiterating matter within the context of Google."
}
,
{
"id": "46489964",
"text": "> Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call.\n\nThen they are bad abstractions. I get where he is coming from, but the entire field is built on abstractions that allow you to translate say a matmul to shuffling some electrons without you doing the shuffling."
}
,
{
"id": "46490775",
"text": "The first paragraph reads like LinkedIn slop, so I scanned the rest of the titles - they indicate that the rest of the article reads the same."
}
,
{
"id": "46491053",
"text": "Interview voice:\n\n- How do you actually grow being in one company for 14 years?"
}
,
{
"id": "46496927",
"text": "What a mediocre article. Its just enough for people to agree and nod and go \"wow yeah true!!\" while offering almost zero value to people who don't already agree. These are not useful to juniors. Yes, almost all of this is true and well said, but it offers no additional value. It's like a smell test: Show this article to engineers and those who disagree with lots of points should be given a senior mentor.\n\nThese points are really good, but they often miss context and further info and caveats. I would have liked if the Author just added a little bit more content.\n\nLike, for example, the point about \"Being right is cheap. Getting to right together is the real work\". Yes, it's certainly true that a decision made in agreement is better than one that isn't. However, how do you get there? Does everyone else give up their (weakly held, according to the article) opinions? I would argue it should be acceptable for your opinions to hold, to be factually based, and still to not align with the fina"
}
,
{
"id": "46490411",
"text": "#12 is so simple yet so true. Great list thanks for sharing."
}
,
{
"id": "46490445",
"text": "Wish I'd read this before I started at Google."
}
,
{
"id": "46489876",
"text": "Thank you for sharing this. Well articulated."
}
,
{
"id": "46494843",
"text": "Love love love this. So much wisdom I wish I’d had 30 years ago.\n\nHere’s the tl;dr in my opinion, with my own paraphrase:\n\n> Approach [life] with curiosity and generosity, not transactional hustle.\n\nEverything else essentially follows."
}
,
{
"id": "46492032",
"text": "Worked at an AI training company for a few months. Enshittification is real. Idiots who never deserved to be here coming up with new policies every week, sometimes twice a week. Absolutely spineless when receiving nonsense from the client which is one of FAANG but will screw colleagues with no remorse."
}
,
{
"id": "46494580",
"text": "most generic advice oat"
}
,
{
"id": "46491017",
"text": "excellent article and appreciate the author sharing his perspective which is very valuable.\n\nFor me the main lesson is, don't let your ego develop from success. Any human is vulnerable to narcissism. It is an interesting phenomenon, where you can originate as a humble person who becomes successful, only to lose your great qualities, when your identity changes. With success you attract different people in your life who may be attracted only to your success and who don't have the stones to confront you on your bs.\n\nDeveloping healthy self awareness comes from surrounding yourself with people that love you, but are not afraid to keep you honest if you do something out of character."
}
,
{
"id": "46491176",
"text": "GREAT ARTICLE!"
}
,
{
"id": "46491646",
"text": "it's sad that startups become corps and decay. this article is the perfect illustration, from the bio, to the llm slop content of the article. Just sad it has to be this way"
}
,
{
"id": "46490052",
"text": ">Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call.\n\nDamn that's a real one. Nothing like struggling through a bunch of indirection to figure out what the heck a clever abstraction was supposed to do"
}
,
{
"id": "46493620",
"text": "Thought occurred to me to throw this at ChatGPT 5.2:\n\nGiven the article at https://addyosmani.com/blog/21-lessons/ , find a short list of points which summarizes and touches on all of his lessons\n\nAnswer:\n\nHere’s a short “umbrella list” that still covers all 21 lessons (each bullet is doing a lot of work on purpose):\n\n- Start with the user, not the toy. Get unreasonably concrete about real user pain (tickets, observation, “why” drills), and let solutions fall out of that—otherwise you’ll build complexity to justify a preconceived answer.\n\n- Engineering is a team sport: alignment beats being right. The job is getting to “right” together: create shared understanding, reduce misalignment (the real cause of “slow” teams), avoid “winning” debates into silent resistance, use metrics carefully (they get gamed), and design process to reduce uncertainty rather than produce paperwork.\n\n- Ship early, then iterate—clarity over cleverness. Bias to action: drafts and MVPs teach faster than armchair "
}
,
{
"id": "46495992",
"text": "The fixation with AI really harms the signal-to-noise ratio on HN lately. The author of this article very clearly used an LLM to generate much of it, which makes it read like the clickbait you see a ton of on LinkedIn. Then a commenter posts an LLM-generated bullet list summary of the LLM-generated article, which really adds nothing to the discussion.\n\nUltimately the author had some simple ideas that are worth sharing and discussing, but they're hidden behind so much non-additive slop."
}
,
{
"id": "46491302",
"text": "> 1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems.\n\nA little bit of sarcasm here: “well there probably isn’t a lot of great engineers at google then”"
}
,
{
"id": "46491421",
"text": "I don't believe any of this."
}
,
{
"id": "46490337",
"text": "It's funny that I agree with most or all of these principles but don't feel like my 10 years at Google accord with most of this. I wouldn't say I learned these things at Google, but learned them before (and a bit after) and was continually frustrated about how many of them were not paid attention to at Google at all?\n\nIncentive structure inside Google is impaired.\n\nI do think Google engineering culture does bias against excessive abstraction and for clean readable code and that's good. But acting in the user's interest, timely shipping, etc... not so much."
}
,
{
"id": "46490718",
"text": "Maybe OP learned these things precisely because he saw the consequences of them not being done"
}
,
{
"id": "46490324",
"text": "This has to be the 50th or 100th version of this article that repeats the same thing\n\nEvery single point in this article was already explicitly described between roughly 1968 and 1987: Brooks formalized coordination cost and the fallacy of adding manpower in The Mythical Man-Month\n\nConway showed that system architecture inevitably mirrors organizational communication structure in 1968\n\nParnas defined information hiding and modularity as organizational constraints, not coding style, in 1972\n\nDijkstra *repeatedly warned* that complexity grows faster than human comprehension and cannot be managed socially after the fact\n\nNone of this is new, reframed, or extended here; it is a faithful re-enumeration of half-century-old constraints.\n\nThese lists keep reappearing because we refuse to solve is the structural one: none of these constraints are enforceable inside modern incentive systems.\n\nSo almost like clockwork somebody comes out of nowhere saying hey I’ve I’ve observed these things that a"
}
,
{
"id": "46490410",
"text": "The fact that people don’t learn from the older books is somewhat annoying, but rewriting them makes sense precisely because people will likely trust it more.\n\nSoftware engineers are prone to novelty bias. Thats in contrast to some other demographic groups who very much prefer ancient texts."
}
,
{
"id": "46490777",
"text": "Well both of them are wrong because they can’t walk the middle path"
}
,
{
"id": "46490712",
"text": "Yeah but what do you want to do about it? The engineers I see making these mistakes day-to-day are not going to connect the dots if I just point them to the seminal writings. Heck, half of their complaints are of the same form as yours: if only the majority of [engineers, colleagues, stakeholders] were aware of [A, B, C principles] then we could avoid repeating [X, Y, Z failures]. Yeah it's exhausting, life is exhausting, and it doesn't inherently get better with knowledge and experience as the gap to the lowest common denominator only increases; the only balm I've found is focusing on what I can control."
}
,
{
"id": "46490767",
"text": "Well for starters I literally organized our company and all engineering around Conway‘s law and it’s working great\n\nThat’s like the absolute bare minimum you can do, it’s trivially easy and solves a good half of these “problems.”"
}
,
{
"id": "46491291",
"text": "How big is your company?"
}
,
{
"id": "46491360",
"text": "A better question is how quickly are we growing…\n\nWe’re currently around 30 in engineering full time and 40 if you include ops, logistics etc…with new funding and coming out of stealth etc we expect to hit the dunbar number (~150 this year)"
}
,
{
"id": "46490689",
"text": "lgtm"
}
,
{
"id": "46490134",
"text": "that was an amazing read"
}
]
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