Code is a liability. Saying no is because the engineer wants to reduce complexity, not because she/ he is so subjectively “obsessed” with code quality. The term “quality” is nowadays misunderstood by management. It means the right amount of effort to build the product as fast and for as low as cost possible, taking into account a team of engineers that can easily add and modify code.

This description is the better one: https://www.nair.sh/guides-and-opinions/communicating-your-e...

The problem with this kind of armchair economy is that you can argue both ways.

"End of ZIRP and the raise of just-say-no engineers": with capital being more expensive companies need to invest it wisely, therefore the need the judgement of the just-say-no engineer to avoid blowing it on unnecessary stuff.

> Having half of the company’s engineers enmeshed in an endless loop of proposing changes and being told no was totally fine - they didn’t need to be productive anyway, and this way they weren’t impacting business-critical systems.

Well, it's a take. This is pretty cynical.

Super interesting to link these two concepts.

Another great post on this blog. I need to go back and read some other posts I've missed / that didn't make the front page of HN.

Don’t be an engineer who says “no” with zero alternative solutions. That’s not being a good engineer, it’s being lazy and trying to look good. Often times an engineer will put forth a solution that’s non-ideal due to legacy reasons, but required nonetheless. And no they can’t rewrite the entire system to “do it the right way”. You're not being some super high IQ genius by saying “no” or pointing out the solution is non-ideal.

> think of this as the just-say-no engineer, as opposed to the just-say-yes engineer. The just-say-yes engineer is obsessed with moving fast, approves code changes by default, values MTTR over MTBF, and tends to ship a lot of code. The just-say-no engineer is obsessed with quality, is happy to move slowly, and blocks code changes by default.

Love the concept of the 'just-say-yes' engineer vs 'just-say-no' engineer (and corresponding prioritisation of MTTR over MTBF).

I'm definitely a 'just-say-yes' with the caveat that bad architectural choices can be super painful to fix later, and features become a lot harder to fix when they have users as opposed to before launch (so I'm a little bit 'just-say-no', or at least 'just-think-for-a-bit-first').

I also think the balance between 'just-say-yes' and 'just-say-no' really depends a lot on the project. If it's finance or healthcare, perhaps 'no' by default is best. But if it's a silly startup idea, YOLO.

What a wild take. The straightforward takeaway from the end of ZIRP and the resulting increase in focus would be that you need to say no to more things, not fewer? You have to really contort yourself to argue that actually ZIRP gave rise to an entire class of make-work which then gave rise to a class of folks to keep said make-work under control.

> having more engineers around was beneficial to the stock price ... When banks hiked interest rates ... It was just no longer profitable to keep a bloated engineering staff around to boost the stock price.

Erm, what's known of the mechanism coupling software engineer head count and stock price? Or is it just an empirically observed phenomena?

> … why not keep your engineers and deliver 20x the value?

Probably because there isn’t actually an increase in demand for the capabilities of software, and engineers, product managers, and UI/UX designers are justifying the existence of their jobs by complicating software more than necessary.

Anyway, the essence of the article is that a “just say no” engineer is a person who knows how to use and enforce constraints so that complex systems remain manageable in the long-term; and that companies perceive such engineers to be irrelevant as AI coding tools become more mainstream.

I think that that has definitely happened, even with my own employer, but I think that companies of the same mindset just don’t have strong engineering cultures to begin with, and will be natural selected into oblivion during this wave of disruption, which already coincides with a prolonged period of economic uncertainty to begin with.

AI tools are great, but they are only as good as your people’s discernment. If you’re making AI adoption a KPI in your company, you’ve already lost sight of what your business is really about, and you’ll be bankrupt by your token spending before you can beat your competition.

Doesnt seem very testable of a hypothesis. As a company thats trying to get things done, doesnt it make sense to have someone help you prioritize by telling you when some decisions have long term costs?

There’s this trend that tries to sell the idea that, if LLMs and agents have any shortcomings, instead of them getting better we should lower the standards. Focus on the “MTTR”. Is the code bad? Don’t read it. Don’t review it. Remove the bottleneck (the human in the loop). This narrative is all over the place.

This tech is quite useful, and I wish we focused on how to work with the tool better and improved our processes around it instead of treating the symptoms.

The "Just Say No" engineer is a person who knows what existing tools can do, while more junior people don't know what their tools can do. So junior people are constantly proposing new types of yak shaving (new architecture, new storage backend, new framework, etc) that must be done before solving the problem at hand. This is all wasted resources and time, even if LLMs let you shave yaks faster. A good JSNE focuses your resources on solving problems straight away, not pouring them all into a bottomless pit of busy work.

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> It used to be that they only had to say no to more junior engineers’ handwritten PRs, but now they have to say no to a barrage of AI-generated code, some of it generated by managers and VPs who are politically difficult to say no to.

Holy cow. I worked at a big tech firm but left the industry prior to the emergence of InstructGPT et al., so I haven't experienced LLM code generation from the inside. Is this really happening -- upper managers and VPs proposing code changes they generated with LLMs? I don't think I'd survive.

Beautiful write-up, thank you.

One aspect that still bothers me is that you claim the just-say-no-engineer "was a critical role during ZIRP." I might be in the minority here, but I don't hold that same stance. I wonder if I am alone in that?

Sorry: is there any evidence for the proposition that staffing was excessive, or that it was ZIRP that led to excessive staffing? The idea is plausible, but was it actual?

Second, is there any evidence for more or less gatekeeping?

Or evidence that there were relatively more "pure-engineering" projects? (Though one would expect that for the new technologies and markets. The green fields migrated from scale to data science and AI.)

Finally, wouldn't more gatekeeping be required when AI reduces the cost of making concrete tech proposals?

This seems not connected to facts or compelling in theory, but it does touch on anecdotal and emotional truths. I believe the writer could do better. (More, I believe HN readers should insist on writers doing better, to raise quality and offer harder challenges to people.)

There's no reason for engineers to be under more pressure to accept technical debt (which is what we're really talking about with the yes-or-no framing) after the end of ZIRP. Quite the opposite: right now debt is expensive and programmers are cheap, it's a good time to have high quality standards and build robust infrastructure that will position you to catch the next growth wave. It really is AI (or rather AI hype) making the difference.

What else will we blame interest rates for? I believe we're applying it as an explanation for far too many things. It is but one factor of many changing the mechanics of tech since ~2020: AI coding; big tech capex spending on AI; pandemic over-hiring hangover (mostly done); slowing growth of digital ad spending; TCJA section 174 (partly repealled, but still a thing).

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> Saying “with this transformative new technology, we’re able to deliver 10x the value with half the engineers” is a much stronger message, even though it doesn’t make much sense (if this is true, why not keep your engineers and deliver 20x the value?)

in some orgs it was a good excuse to cut the underperformers. these folks wouldnt deliver 10x value with AI, they would either deliver 0x or -10x (with contributions that the just say no engineer would have normally said no to)

> Saying “with this transformative new technology, we’re able to deliver 10x the value with half the engineers” is a much stronger message, even though it doesn’t make much sense (if this is true, why not keep your engineers and deliver 20x the value?)

I guess not every service or product needs 20x the value. That depends on the market segment, market maturity, and actual demand.

I've seen the "just say no" thing institutionalized through SRE, where they can use the "banhammer" to stop the deployment of new features or whatever hasn't passed their various "reliability checklists" and such (if they're responsible for on-call)

I'm sure this won't be popular but a lot of "SRE" teams were definitely ZIRP phenomenon, heh.

Who is their right minds would be wedded to an identity of saying "No"? Code quality puritans are annoying but if they do their job right they actually speed-up the development process because they don't let technical debt accumulate. Ultimately saying "No" is protecting your codebase. In the era of LLMs, saying "No" is much easier because you don't have to worry about the author feeling bad.

The whole zero-interest rate narrative I see used in a variety of context is a bit silly. Real interest rates were seldom close to zero. During much of that time they were negative, for example. And during many other times, when we had rather high positive nominal rates, real rates were closer to zero (because of inflation), and the author doesn't say anything weird happened then.

Earlier submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48245331

Making up a guy to get mad at.

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The hypothesis that companies today need to really focus so they can make money ignores the fact that, in fact, most or the major AI companies are not making money relative to their costs.

This is certainly an opinion.

But, I would gently point out that people are actively looking to move away from github because its unreliably

People hate shit when its not working, we are in a bubble where people allow AI products to have shit outcomes, because they either sound human, or do amazing things most of the time (generate that image, sort out that spreadsheet, generate that code or answer that question)

Right now a lot of people are designing https://www.wired.com/2014/07/homer-simpson-car/ thee homer simpson car.

Because, ironically, there is lots of money about to subsidise anything with an AI sheen (how very ZIRP) people are making all sorts of shit with it. Some times it produces value. A lot of the time it doesn't.

If we take a step away from SWE opinion and talked to the product users, I think you'll find they just want that one feature they use your thing to work, they want those bugs to be fixed, and they want your product to work when they need it. They don't give a shit about AI, they fucking hate your redesign, and they really really get pissed off when you move stuff about and re-name it.

This is perhaps a very American-centric article? I realise that ZIRP was near-global, but "When banks hiked interest rates, almost every tech company immediately laid off 5-20% of their engineers." does not track with my or my friends' experiences.

And, fundamentally, in countries with employee rights, as an employee I do not give two shits about interest rates the company I work at borrows on. My philosophy on software design does not change. You can argue that the company might pick and choose who it makes redundant, and they might value people who produce "more product", but companies have always valued that visibility. It's your responsibility, if you care, to sell your actions in a commercial context. I don't think ZIRP changes that, and I have not personally noticed a change there.

I disagree with the analysis, although I liked the opening paragraph. Why separate the economics of interest rates from the economics of AI productivity?

this is a terribly written article that oversimplifies what happened during zirp to the point of absurdity. We have always had just say no engineers-ask anyone with a platform role. They’re still saying no a lot.

I feel like the article is pretty contradictory.

Apparently ZIRP was the era of abundance and of codebases growing rapidly and:

> with so many engineers running wild, how would they keep their systems from becoming completely unmanageable? Enter the just-say-no engineer.

So before "AI", the just-say-no engineer was a vital part of the system who was preventing it from getting overrun by (human-generated) slop. Good.

If ZIRP had not ended (but with AI):

> this would be a glorious moment for the just-say-no engineers. LLMs would have thrown fuel on the “engineers running wild” problem that the just-say-no engineers were empowered to solve. Tech companies, unable to publicly or privately cast doubt on AI-assisted coding, would have relied heavily on these engineers to prevent the tsunami of AI code from swamping the entire company.

Again, the just-say-no engineered would have been a vital part of the system shielding it from the influx of slop. And apparently this scenario isn't what's happening, because ZIRP had ended. Okay, what next?

> LLMs are adding insult to injury for the just-say-no engineer. They’re forced to watch while other engineers merge AI-generated PRs that would previously have been blocked, and are told to use the tools themselves

So even though ZIRP had ended and we've avoided the slopocalypse, the teams (now reduced by layoffs but augmented with AI) are still adding slop, even the traditional gatekeepers (just-say-nos) are now being actively forced to add slop and suddenly, none of that is a problem?

I'm simply not following.

I agree with this take for experienced and capable engineering teams. Three times over the last three years, I have told my senior engineers to skip code review, and nothing catastrophic happened, and recovery from bugs was rapid. Three times I have been told by engineering management to reimplement code review. Now that management is either gone or about to be gone.

I low key disagree with the majority of this.

First, i dont think the low interest rates did that much for “tech companies” who were already cash cows which is usually the bench most people speak about. Small companies already operated in a no free money era as they never had the capital access to begin with.

Covid had a big hiring spike in tech and then it sloft off once rates went up. More of an excuse than real market conditions although startup, for sure impacted. Lets not even start with the political “org building” that still drives the “no” mindset today.

Second, ai has now been in the mix for at least a year now where it is objectively useful. I have not seen a single project complete faster than it would have pre ai. Stability is a wash trending to worse than pre AI.

The rigor is what is see draining slowly. You can be fast, say yes, and use ai all while maintaining some kind of quality bar.

> Worse still, the AI tooling mostly works. It’s not (yet) causing any kind of catastrophe. The code isn’t quite as clean, and it’s a bit less well-understood, but it’s good enough

And there it is.

ZIRP was 2008 to 2022? The 2010s were calm and collected, zirp-mania gripped us through the pandemic. You cannot compare 2011 and 2021. Totally different environments.

what's this glorious "do whatever you want" era???

This is trivially incorrect outside of SV.

There are plenty of slow moving projects that focus on the stability of the codebase if you work for a business that isn't a "tech company" and work on services instead of products.

The article's logic doesn't hold up. The OP argues that "no-engineers" were valuable during ZIRP because companies were over-hiring and adding too much code but that's exactly the situation we're in now with AI. If anything, the analogy strengthens the case for them.

The OP even acknowledges this:

> Ironically, if ZIRP had not ended, this would be a glorious moment for the just-say-no engineers.

But then never explains what ZIRP actually has to do with it. Why does the end of ZIRP change anything?

The article vastly underestimates how often no was said before ZIRP. Getting to yes was very, very, very hard. Zirp moved the default to build it snd they will come.

2022 coincided with a lot of things, such as the time period where R&D tax credits for US tech salaries were allowed to expire (reinstated in 2025)

it also coincided with rate hikes

it coincided with ChatGPT launch, which was incapable of replacing engineers at the time

it coincided with a tech bear market

it coincided with a crypto implosion and web3 bear market as well, which a variety of engineers were involved with or had asset exposure to

the R&D tax credit lapse I think was the biggest one, while the smallest headline. and therefore I think making a whole blog post about the rate hikes exclusively is grasping at straws

I stopped saying No. If management wants to push stupid decisions, so be it. They are getting payed for strategic decisions. If their strategy is bullshit, so be it. If they tank the company, so be it. I am not getting payed for that kind of work. And the more bullshit I hear from upper levels, the less I identify with my company.

This is a nice narrative, but without real world test cases, reads like yet another fanfiction on the internet.

Good article.

People don’t realize the breadth of the impact of the low rates and quantitative easing policies.

This stuff clearly helped navigate the 2008 crisis. But the cost is huge: bubbles everywhere, inequalities through the roof, spiralling government debt.

And while the interest rates have gone up, bank reserves are still nowhere near their pre-2008 levels.

Unfortunately, the way the monetary system works is quite difficult to understand, and is unlikely to ever enter the political debate.

Just-say-no is a Quality Control mechanism.

You need someone to say: this shit is not going to prod, unless its value is obvious to everyone

> Tech companies are now more focused than at any time in the past two decades

Citation needed. In fact, I find the utter opposite - the pivots are happening hard and fast, planning is taking a major back seat, and it’s a ship with speed and look good and be visible at all costs mentality.

The truth is the guardrails are being ignored in the frenzy. Style is winning over substance. I think if you revisit this hot take in a year it’ll have aged so poorly it will seem like a parody.

Maybe this article cites a real phenomenon. I don't know. What I find odd though, is that it doesn't even include the question of whether there is merit to the Yes or No of the engineer. Maybe the cynical take is that within many corporations it does in fact not matter, but in the real world if you want to fly to the moon, you will need engineers who say No to ideas that are stupid within the framework of engineering, given the projects budget, time and personal constraints and the goal it tries to reach. You don't need a Yes/No-engineer you need someone who can decide how a reliable well-engineered contraption within those limitations would look like. Sometimes that can be a sophisticated rocket, sometimes it can be a makeshift raft or a band aid slapped on a crumbling structure. A good engineer would be one who understands those constraints, while preventing you from killing people in the process.

Many goals companies want to reach are taking place in the real world. But some are not — and I wonder whether the latter may not sometimes be the actual issue. Money boys playing virtual money games while stopping to care about the real physical world just need someone to go along, so their latest Potemkin village can be painted in the color of the season quickly before Paris fashion week.

> desperately chasing new capabilities and features that can make money

Ah yes. And.. where are those?

I don't agree with this argument.

In the 1990s (and earlier) and 2000s startups were "rebels", almost countercultural (to Corporate America at least). Think about the famous 1984 Macintosh ad that evoked George Orwell. There's a famous story about Steve Jobs remembering a magazine called the Whole Earth Catalog from the 1970s with a picture captioned "Stay hungry, stay foolish". If you listen to Steve Jobs talk about Corporate America, he talks about John Scully or Xerox where conformity ruled. NOthing really challenged the status quo. Nobody really cared about products. Everything was run by accountants, finance people and sales people.

This attitude persisted into the 2010s. Google was quite famous up until that time for shipping when ready, basically. Decisions were engineering-driven rather than being driven by launch dates, product goals, marketing, finance, sales or quarterly earnings. They famously studied what made teams successful with Project Aristotle [1] and concluded that the number one factor was psychological safety.

In the 2020s we have a vastly different picture of neurodivergence than existed in the 2000s and even the 2010s. A lot of the people who found success at Google. Famous examples include the likes of Urs Holzle who famously wrote a user manual [2] for interacting with him. Many of these people did not or would not survive let alone flourish in Corporate America. Why? Because it's a social/political game almost entirely divorced from output. Google's technical infrastructure remains top-notch to this day. They're still coasting on that inertia and what Urs built, both technically and culturally.

But Google slowly dismantled all that. Careers got formalized into job ladders. Getting promoted got harder (eg compare getting promoted to Staff Engineer in 2010 vs 2025). They added stack ranking, which is just a popularity contest and reeks of the Corporate America social/political capital (and I'll die on that hill).

But worst of all (IMHO) was the change in the 2020s that moved from job security (and thus psychological safety) to Corporate America's "up or out" approach. I'm talking of course of about permanent mass layoffs. I cannot begin to describe to you how toxic of an environment that is by comparison. Nitpickers might point out that engineers always had an "up or out" to Senior SWE but it's not the same.

There were other initiatives too like the new CFO Ruth Porat changing the promotion percentages (because nobody had any visibility into that), reducing discretionary equity, etc.

Did Google need to do any of this? At differen ttimes during all this the annual profit per employee was hovering around $1 million. So the answer is "no".

But the fate of any company is that it gets sufficiently large where the only way to keep growing profits is to raise prices or cut costs and for a tech company, labor costs are a major part of the cost structure.

This isn't a Google-specific issue. Google is just a bellwether for the entire industry. The mass layoffs all started about the same time when interest rates were still zero I might add. It's not the first time the industry has engaged in collusion eg [3].

Google to me feels like the new Boeing. Boeing coasted for many years on the 747 and 737 also became a major defense contractor. That inertia took them a long way but there are cracks. The 737MAX was a debacle. The 787 was an outsourcing shitshow.

And hey look where Intel is compared to even 10 years ago. It would be unimaginable given their decades of lithography and engineering dominance. But it's like the move to 10nm just completely broke them and they never recovered.

So I reject that this was a ZIRP issue of being engineering-driven (which is really what we're talking about here). After all, that wasn't a thing before 2008 either.

[1]: https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/

[2]: https://codenote.net/en/posts/6191/

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

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Ohhh man wait I have so much to say about the “just say no” engineer.

The "just say no" phenotype of engineers believe these things generally (from my experience)

- thinks cloud is a psyop by the big tech people to fool companies into being locked in

- thinks everything companies do is to fool the stock market and prop up stocks

- thinks tech ecosystem was at its peak during their time and ever since then it has become overly complicated mess

- thinks that AI is hyped and will just becoming a passing thing in a few months

- simultaneously believes both that no new features are required in their product because it complicates things but also thinks layoffs shouldn’t be done (what would employees do?)

- believes in conspiracy theories like “bullshit jobs” but doesn’t realise the irony

- believes in things like “enshittification” and is generally pessimistic about the state of tech

There are lots of good things about these engineers as well to be fair

- generally smarter in a narrow sense and can spot out unneeded complexity

- they are the people to go to for hard technical issues

- they do, to be fair, care about their code base which I see less in others

- though dogmatic at times with dev principles, they bring a father like pseudo wise vibe to the team that makes it feel like a family