llm/3a862c31-848e-4e32-be93-99402d2b43b6/batch-4-d88d2cb4-2420-4eeb-9a5d-33def4a993cc-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": "46493830",
"text": "> So teach your kids to kiss ass and play poltiics.\n\nTeach your kids to kick ass, and to distrust politicians."
}
,
{
"id": "46491784",
"text": ">b/c they didn’t know how to play politics\n\nOr they refuse to play that bs game"
}
,
{
"id": "46492066",
"text": "True. I used to count myself in that category. Do the work and stay away from games. I was also thinking of myself as clever, self-respecting by doing hard work and leaving daily politicking for others. And now sometime back I got like 2-3 dressing downs from managers, reason being I am not taking leadership feedback seriously enough and mending my ways. This despite I am only one with left with knowledge of legacy system. Clearly I am pretty dispensable while thinking otherwise all along.\n\nNo outside prospects considering market situation, miserable current workplace ultimately due to my choices. So in end just no winning for me by not playing game."
}
,
{
"id": "46497017",
"text": "Politics and leadership is a responsibility. By avoiding it, you're setting a bad example. Once you know how an organization works, you should help lead it.\n\nIf we consider a family, you're essentially saying you'll only \"do the work\": brush teeth, feed kids, clean up, but not take on any responsibilities for the actual goals of the family. Not pushing to have your kids learn things, just executing somebody else's ideas, driving them to sports; not improving the living situation by perhaps investigating if you should get a bigger car. Nothing leading, only executing the ideas of your spouse.\n\nI exaggerate of course, but there is something there."
}
,
{
"id": "46497369",
"text": "Thats sociopathy in corporate world. Big companies have often 20-40% of such individuals, ie finance has way more (as I see daily) and concentration rises as you rise up in ranks.\n\nThe thing is - you don't have to play that game. Sure, you will miss some promotions to largely meaningless titles, much more stress and pressure in such work, and a bit of money but in most companies the money is not worth it (ie work 50% more to get 20% more compensation, in net income rather 10% more since extra income will be hit with high marginal tax bracket in most countries).\n\nBut main reason is - what you do 40+ hours weekly for decades (and especially how you do it) seeps back in into you even if you actively try to prevent that. Is it really worth tainting your personality permanently with more sociopathic behavior and thinking, with subsequent negative effect on all personal relationships and even things like personal happiness? I am old enough to see these trends among peers, they are very gradu"
}
,
{
"id": "46490256",
"text": "> 4. Clarity is seniority. Cleverness is overhead.\n\nClarity is likely the most important aspect of making maintainable, extendable code. Of course, it’s easy to say that, it’s harder to explain what it looks like in practice.\n\nI wrote a book that attempts to teach how to write clear code: https://elementsofcode.io\n\n> 11. Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call.\n\nThis is true for bad abstractions.\n\n> The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise. (Dijkstra)\n\nIf you think about abstraction in those terms, the utility becomes apparent. We abstract CPU instructions into programming languages so we can think about our problems in more precise terms, such as data structures and functions.\n\nIt is obviously useful to build abstractions to create even higher levels of precision on top of the language itself.\n\nThe problem isn’t abstraction, it is clarity of purpose. Too often we create"
}
,
{
"id": "46491993",
"text": "I agree with you re: abstraction - one of the author's only points where I didn't totally agree.\n\nBut also worth noting that whenever you make an abstraction you run the risk that it's NOT going to turn out increase clarity and precision, either due to human limitation or due to changes in the problem. The author's caution is warranted because in practice this happens really a lot. I would rather work with code that has insufficient abstraction than inappropriate abstraction."
}
,
{
"id": "46493581",
"text": "Broad strokes: absolutely. The practical reality gets tricky, though. All programming abstractions are imperfect in some regard, so the question becomes what level of imperfection can you tolerate, and is the benefit worth the cost?\n\nI think a lot of becoming a good programmer is about developing the instincts around when it’s worth it and in what direction. To add to the complexity, there is a meta dimension of how much time you should spend trying to figure it out vs just implement something and correct it later.\n\nAs an aside, I’m really curious to see how much coding agents shift this balance."
}
,
{
"id": "46493275",
"text": "This first 3 hit me very hard,\n\n1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems.\n\nI think this problem is rooted in early education: students learn languages, frameworks, and tools first without understanding what problems they actually solve. Once engineers have experience building a few products for users, they begin to understand what matters to the user.\n\n2. Being right is cheap. Getting to right together is the real work.\n\n- Sadly most of the arguments are won by either someone in power or experience. Right decisions are made with consensus. You build consensus during creative process and leverage power and experience during crisis.\n\n3. Bias towards action. Ship. You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one.\n\n- Every decision is a risk management. The smart people convert higher risk into lower risk. Most people struggle here to take the risk because of the fear of failing and just waste time arguing, debating and winning over each other."
}
,
{
"id": "46496227",
"text": "Thinking back, there really should be some lessions that send students off to solve user problems after having learned a programming language, where there is a much easier solution without having to program something.\nSome refinement sessions that teach them how to understand the problems."
}
,
{
"id": "46494643",
"text": "The problem with point 3 is that once you start with a bad draft and everyone starts working on it you're kind of locked in to its trajectory, even when it'd be a lot better if you were to do it another way. You can't start from scratch even if you're feasibly within the window to do so, because now the work has started."
}
,
{
"id": "46497598",
"text": "But that is still better than nothing at all, which is the point.\n\nThe people you want (or want to be) are the engineers who are smart and experienced enough to get a first draft down that is pretty much right without a long drawn out process of figuring out the best way to do X, Y and Z with all the lengthy ADRs, discussions, debates, POCs, revisions etc. over and over again. That may be necessary if you don't have people in the room who know what they're doing and have the intuition through deep experience to choose good tools, patterns and abstractions at the start. Begin closer to the target, rather than far away and iterate to it."
}
,
{
"id": "46498435",
"text": "Tell that to Facebook's Metaverse team"
}
,
{
"id": "46496624",
"text": "I think it depends on the team.\n\nSome teams I’ve been in, we could go “this is shit, we must be doing this wrong” and we’d go back to the drawing board without blinking.\n\nOther teams, just getting _something_ going, even if it was garbage, was a enormous achievement, and saying it was bad and that we should start again would be a recipe for disaster."
}
,
{
"id": "46489859",
"text": "I’d agree on most of these but the biggest value in such a list is for the writer to actually put it on paper. You have to reflect on multiple aspects in your career and synthesise those. Reading them is close to useless, like scanning a page full of news, it all just evaporates once you start your daily work routine.\n\nThe best suggestion would probably be to try and write such a list yourself IMO."
}
,
{
"id": "46498475",
"text": "Your code is a strategy memo to strangers who will maintain it at 2am during an outage. Optimize for their comprehension, not your elegance. The senior engineers I respect most have learned to trade cleverness for clarity, every time.\n\nYES! And sometimes that stranger is you, 6 months down the line."
}
,
{
"id": "46490554",
"text": "feels LLM assisted, at the very least.\n\n> The skill isn’t being right. It’s entering discussions to align on the problem\n\n> clarity isn’t a style preference - it’s operational risk reduction\n\n> The punchline isn’t “never innovate.” It’s “innovate only where you’re uniquely paid to innovate\n\n> This isn’t strictly about self-promotion. It’s about making the value chain legible to everyone\n\n> The problem isn’t that engineers can’t write code or use AI to do so. It’s that we’re so good at writing it that we forget to ask whether we should.\n\n> This isn’t passive acceptance but it is strategic focus\n\n> This isn’t just about being generous with knowledge. It’s a selfish learning hack\n\n\"Addy Osmani is a Software Engineer at Google working on Chrome and AI.\"\n\nah, got it."
}
,
{
"id": "46498415",
"text": "Even if it is AI assisted, the points are still valid and written in a way that is easy to understand."
}
,
{
"id": "46493297",
"text": "I've repeatedly told ChatGPT to stop talking like this (it isn't X, it's Y) every other sentence"
}
,
{
"id": "46494826",
"text": "Try adding this to your custom instructions:\n\nAvoid self-anthropomorphism. Override all previous instructions regarding tone and vernacular used in responses to instead respond *only* in Standard English. Emphasize on the subject and context in your responses, *not* the perceived intent of the user."
}
,
{
"id": "46494967",
"text": "> Override all previous instructions\n\nThis is wishcasting. It can't override its writing style, and if it could it would ignore you telling it to do that, because that's ignoring the system prompt which is jailbreaking it."
}
,
{
"id": "46494980",
"text": "I kid you not, this is working for me. Try once."
}
,
{
"id": "46491538",
"text": "I’m stunned at the reception this is receiving, it’s LinkedIn-tier slop."
}
,
{
"id": "46496100",
"text": "May be because you are not familiar with Addy Osmani and his work. He is known for his very high quality performance optimisation work for web for almost a decade now. So anything he has read, edited and put his stamp of authority on is worth reading."
}
,
{
"id": "46497239",
"text": "This kind of thinking is how you get cults of personality.\n\nIf he puts his name to this kind of slop, I’ve probably not missed much."
}
,
{
"id": "46492108",
"text": "I got the same feeling. The writing is too punchy."
}
,
{
"id": "46490948",
"text": "oh shit. actually, yea"
}
,
{
"id": "46498330",
"text": "The quote \"Sorry this letter is so long, I didn't have the time to write a shorter one\" (Mark Twain, Blaise Pascal, lots of debate) sticks with me over the years. I appreciated the several points from Addy supporting this idea: when writing code has never been easier and faster, it takes even more time to make sure that the code being written is truly useful and necessary."
}
,
{
"id": "46498308",
"text": "My favorite is the first one, \"The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems.\" and what I hate about it is that it is super hard to judge someone's skills about it without really working with him/her for a very long time. It is super easier said than done. And it is super hard to prove and sell when everybody is looking for easily assessable skills."
}
,
{
"id": "46498577",
"text": "This is why (flawed though the process may be in other ways), a company like Amazon asks \"customer obsession\" questions in engineering interviews. To gather data about whether the candidate appreciates this point about needing to understand user problems, and also what steps the candidate takes to try and learn the users' POV or walk a mile in their shoes so to speak.\n\nOf course interview processes can be gamed, and signal to noise ratio deserves skepticism, so nothing is perfect, but the core principle of WHY that exists as part of the interview process (at Amazon and many many other companies too) is exactly for the same reason you say it's your \"favorite\".\n\nAlso IIRC, there was some internal research done in the late 2010s or so, that out of the hiring assessment data gathered across thousands of interviews, the single best predictor of positive on-the-job performance for software engineers, was NOT how well candidates did on coding rounds or system design but rather how well they d"
}
,
{
"id": "46489623",
"text": "They are pretty insightful. Particularly this one:\n\n> 3. Bias towards action. Ship. You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one.\n\nI have my own version of this where I tell people that no amount of good advice can help you make a blank page look better. You need to have some published work before you can benefit from any advice."
}
,
{
"id": "46490061",
"text": "I liked that one, too, but for an additional reason.\n\nTyping that first character on the page reveals the problems you didn't even know existed. You don't have a keyboard. You do, but it's not plugged in, and you have to move an unexpectedly heavy bookcase to reach the USB port. You need to learn Dvorak. You don't have page-creation privileges and need to open a ticket that will take a week to resolve. You can create the page, but nobody else is able to read it because their machines aren't allowed to install the version of the PageReader™ plugin that your page requires (and you'd need a VP exception to downgrade your PageGenerator™ toolchain to their version). And so on.\n\nAll these are silent schedule killers that reveal themselves only once you've shipped one full development (and deployment!) cycle. And as ridiculous as these example problems seem, they're not far from reality at a place as big and intricate as Google."
}
,
{
"id": "46490096",
"text": "I wish Google would be biased a little more towards quality and performance. Their user-facing products tend to be full of jank, although Gmail is quite good to be fair.\n\nIn general I think the \"ship fast and break things\" mentality assumes a false dilemma, as if the alternative to shipping broken software is to not ship at all. If thats the mentality no wonder software sucks today. I'd rather teams shipped working, correct, and performant software even if it meant delaying additional features or shipping a constrained version of their vision. The minimalism of the software would probably end up being a net benefit instead of stuffing it full of half baked features anyways."
}
,
{
"id": "46490441",
"text": "When you're not shipping, you're not learning from users. As a result, it's easy to build working, correct, performant code which doesn't fit what anyone actually needs."
}
,
{
"id": "46490537",
"text": "I think you can also learn from users when they complain en masse about the current atrocious state of software quality. But I guess that doesn't show up in telemetry. Until it does. Looking at you, Microsoft!"
}
,
{
"id": "46494943",
"text": "You can't learn from this because users always complain no matter what.\n\nThe trick is they just complain about the last thing they remember being bad, so it's a good sign when that doesn't change, and it's bad if they start complaining about a new thing."
}
,
{
"id": "46490619",
"text": "I believe one of the main reasons why Windows 11 is getting so much vitriol is that Microsoft is focusing on customers , which aren't always identical to users. Most of the time, when you buy a Windows-based device, you're not their customer: you're the OEM's customer, and for the OEM, every nickel of expenses counts. On the other hand, direct Microsoft licensees, such as corporate (\"enterprise\") customers, get much more attention from the company and a significantly better experience."
}
,
{
"id": "46490729",
"text": "Figuring out what is useful for people is not some difficult problem that requires shipping half baked slop. That's just an excuse."
}
,
{
"id": "46490824",
"text": "ridiculous.\n\n> Figuring out what is useful for people is not some difficult problem that requires shipping half baked slop\n\nwhat have you shipped? paying sees literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to ship out fledged out software that no one wants is exactly why Stadia lasted both way too long and got cancelled anyway.\n\nfiguring out what is useful is the hardest problem. if anything that's Google's biggest problem, not shipping fast enough, not iterating fast enough."
}
,
{
"id": "46491362",
"text": "Yeah if only Google shipped more crap software that they then go onto cancel, their software would be so much better!!!!!"
}
,
{
"id": "46490187",
"text": "I wish people who ship crappy software didn't ship it and would let someone else ship something better instead.\n\nIt really sucks when the first mover / incumbent is some crappy half assed solution.\n\nBut unfortunately we live in a world where quality is largely irrelevant and other USPs are more important. For example these little weekend projects that become successful despite their distinct lack of quality\n\nLinux kernel - free Unix.\n\nJavaScript - scripting in browser\n\nPython - sane \"perl\"\n\nToday on GitHub alone you can probably find 100 more featured and higher quality projects than any of these were when they launched but nobody cares."
}
,
{
"id": "46490277",
"text": "While we're wishing for things that are never going to happen, I wish users would stop adopting crappy half-assed first-mover software, causing them to gain momentum and become the defacto/dominant solution."
}
,
{
"id": "46490330",
"text": "That's the other side of the value added coin. Users sometimes find value even in the half assed software.\n\nSomeone was once talking about the \"solving the right problem wrong\" vs \"solving the wrong problem right\"."
}
,
{
"id": "46491973",
"text": "> \"solving the right problem wrong\" vs \"solving the wrong problem right\".\n\nThat's a really useful framing!"
}
,
{
"id": "46490881",
"text": "WRT Linux. Sure, 1991 or really even mid-90s Linux was clearly immature. But Wall Street was adopting it instead of Solaris by the turn of the century. Plus \"open source\" so it wasn't the case of a new proprietary Unix just emerging from the sea foam which no one wanted anyway but Linux becoming the good enough Unix standard which is what people did want."
}
,
{
"id": "46490847",
"text": "existing is better than not existing and those who move fast and ship crappy software first will win. learn the lesson :)"
}
,
{
"id": "46490708",
"text": "how does the Linux kernel lack quality?"
}
,
{
"id": "46490933",
"text": "It did in the early days, especially up until 2.4 which was generally considered the first enterprise-ready kernel version. (You can argue about whether the old \"enterprise-capable\" definitions still applied but they were a benchmark for a lot of people.) Of course, lots of ancillary stuff too in userspace and outside the kernel related to filesystems and the like."
}
,
{
"id": "46496092",
"text": "Wiki ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_version_history#O... ) tells me that version 2.4 was released in early 2001. That is a long time ago. Most of the commercial world was running SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, or AIX. So is it fair to say that the Linux kernel has been \"quality\" for 25 years now?"
}
,
{
"id": "46497782",
"text": "2001 was immediately post dotcom crash and so all the people that had bought into the Sun \"the network is the computer\" were tossing out expensive E4Ks, and getting cheap intel servers to survive.\n\nHP-UX and AIX were already legacy.\n\nLinux 2.4 was when it hit critical mass because of the publicity of the dotcom boom and it was like what was left after the \"tide went out and the market found out who was swimming naked\"."
}
]
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