Tech on A Blog for the Uninitialized

PIPs in Tech

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:23:54 -0700

If you’re a high performer, chances are you know about what a “PIP” is, but may have never been placed on one.

Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t.

But in the current era of AI + layoffs that we’re in, I have a feeling more people have recently become familiar with what a PIP includes.

What is a PIP?

A PIP is also known as a “Performance Improvement Plan.” In the event that you aren’t performing to the duties that your position requires, your manager can place you on one of these.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should

Mon, 18 May 2026 19:36:33 -0700

Everyone today is, and I say this begrudgingly, rightfully concerned about the new Mythos model announced by Anthropic this past week.

Basically this model is quite advanced to the point where it is discovering bugs and “zero day” (aka unknown) issues on 30 year old tooling that no one has touched for years.

Which is alarming.

I suppose.

At least I know my company is currently freaking out about it. As is nearly every other company inundated with massive amounts of tech debt who have willfully turned a blind eye to it for literal years. Suddenly we all have only six weeks to get ourselves prepared for this (dystopian?) future.

There's a (real) problem with AI compute

Wed, 06 May 2026 16:13:14 -0700

I’ll make no apologies for being an AI skeptic. I maintain that position today, despite being an active subscriber of Google’s Gemini AI. I really like it for guided learning.

Regardless, the primary problem coming for AI is very similar to what caused some issues during the early days of the internet. Back then, the internet was new and companies were scrambling to build a bunch of high throughput fiber optic cable across the US.

A word about company loyalty

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:47:15 -0700

Early in my career, I was given a great piece of advice. Advice that I’ve recently lost track of following, unfortunately.

You can be as loyal as you want to a company, they will never be loyal back.

I think it goes without saying in today’s environment, but I think it’s important to reiterate again.

Today, Oracle laid off 30,000 employees, many of whom have been there 30 or more years!

Enshittification

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 15:37:07 -0800

Cory Doctorow coined this term a while back and even wrote a book about it.

“Enshittification” is the gradual degradation of online platforms, where services initially provide high-quality, free, or cheap value to attract users, then pivot to prioritize advertisers, and finally extract all value for themselves, ultimately harming both users and business customers.

I love this term.

It describes so much of what I’ve seen in tech over my lifetime. Seriously great products and processes enabled by the “world wide web” of the mid to late 90’s, eventually to succumb to ads, paywalls, popups, and “nickel and dime” schemes in both physical and online products.