My Colleague Julius

I&#x27;ve met a breed of career min-maxers adjacent to Julius that I have a hard time describing.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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?<p>You try to explain to management the pickle you find yourself in, but to no avail. They fucking love Pete, and won&#x27;t have anyone criticizing him. He has saved their asses in numerous occasions, and why is it always that <i>others</i> are the ones who can&#x27;t keep up with him?<p>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.<p>I&#x27;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 saw the end coming miles away, but enjoyed reading this essay anyway as it&#x27;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.<p>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.

Fantastic, hilarious, and too relatable.<p>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.<p>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.

I have to say I became a lot happier in this field once I aligned myself more with Julius.<p>I think what happens to developers and engineers is that since we have the ability to attune our toolsets very specifically to our needs, we assume everyone can do the same.<p>This is untrue. Most people live a life of hodge-podge technical solutions that don’t work very well, meaning their expectations for how software should work is supremely low.<p>Once I understood this I became Julius. Management does not care how or why the software does or doesn’t work - they just want 12 rules for life style platitudes and charisma.<p>The part about sending Julius to meetings while everyone else worked to fix things particularly stood out. The meetings are useless, but that’s where everyone glad hands. Gladhanders get raises.<p>The difference is that I like to think I’m still pretty good and doing my job. I’m just acknowledging that pure l33t skills does not a career ladder make. If anything it could even be a hindrance.<p>Perhaps this is a cynical response.

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.

This was pure gold. I&#x27;ve certainly met many Julii trough my career. The universe spawns and churns them abundantly. It must be fond of them.

In the non-tech world they&#x27;re called schmoozers. They were either former athletes, quick witted, good looking, well spoken and&#x2F;or cockie. Everyone knew they were incompetent, but they seemed to always get away with it because they were likable.<p>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.

we hired a Julius. Result after a year: Prolific people were laid off, yappers stayed, sales didn&#x27;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.

That&#x27;s great, I really enjoyed that.<p>I&#x27;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.

If this is going to enter our lexicon as a short-name for this type of person, I&#x27;ll point out that since &quot;Julius&quot; is originally latin derived, the pluralization should follow that of most&#x2F;all latin nouns, and thus be &quot;Julii&quot;.

This is not a comment about the main story in the article, but about a paragraph at the end:<p>&quot;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.&quot;<p>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&#x27;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.<p>But the author and his team seem to be willing victims of scammers and exploiters, so what else is to be expected?

Haha, I genuinely laughed, thanks for this gem.

If this wasn&#x27;t about AI, Julius would have been an excellent PM or mid-level manager.

<i>cough</i> We&#x27;re not all that bad... <i>cough</i>

There are lots of politicians like Julius too.

CEOs should be replaced by AI, charm shouldn’t be a factor in decision making.

There are two games in a career, a game of expertise and a game of status. Most people on this forum play the authority game, its in the name. But typically groups of humans only listen to an expert when the expert&#x27;s ideas are propounded by a high status individual. And by status I don&#x27;t mean class (in this group I assume I don&#x27;t have to explain expertise) I mean presentation, appearance, biography, provenance.. Both things really matter with humans.

I&#x27;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&#x27;t like, but management only pretended to not notice.<p>As for AI being the new version of this, I don&#x27;t think so. The effect of this tech is more likely to remove one layer in the hierarchy. But maybe it&#x27;s your boss, not you, that will get replaced.

&gt; 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<p>Wtf, are places actually making this nonsense mandatory now?!

There is an outdated term that I find perfectly encapsulates this: &quot;goldbrick.&quot;

I&#x27;d worked briefly with a &quot;Julius&quot;.<p>Unpleasant assignment at a decidedly unethical firm, and frankly often-dodgy industry, my own stay was brief.<p>Technical masters from a top-tier university, had all the toys, flashy wheels, etc.<p>But stymied by the most elementary coding tasks.<p>&quot;Julius&quot; turned up in headlines a few years later charged (and subsequently convicted, sentenced, and incarcerated) for insider trading &#x2F; securities fraud.<p>I can find links for the legal case, very little if anything online since.

My 10+ years professional life in software has seen me both thinking I am Julius and thinking I am working with Julii.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t even realize.<p>...more on the topic, I guess, I have stopped using AI tools while coding almost completely

This is a nice parable, but in my experience, people who see their self-image reflected in this story can be just as difficult to work with. They often view themselves as smart and quietly capable, the unsung heroes keeping things running with little compensation and even less credit, while perceiving incompetence and unworthiness in everyone around them.<p>These individuals may think of themselves as “nice guys,” but their unwavering confidence in their own infallibility blinds them to the distinction between doing things wrong and doing things differently. They dismiss documentation, consensus building, and communication with non-technical colleagues as wastes of time—then wonder why their accomplishments go unrecognized or unappreciated.

&gt; 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.<p>I think this part is real. Developers who can use AI tooling to gain a multiple of productivity boost while still having the domain expertise to correct the parts that AI gets wrong will become much more desirable than ones who don’t.<p>But it’s not so much like the article states- AI is not itself the employee that managers love and their peers despise. The developer who can achieve extremely high and accurate velocity due to a combination of domain expertise and AI use will be the one that both managers and their peers love. And that organization will seek to hire more developers like that one.

TIL I&#x27;m Julius lol.

This sounds made up and actually written by an AI. <i>&quot;I now have an artificial intelligence software that helps me code&quot;</i>, can&#x27;t see anyone working in the field writing like that.