Fan of distributed systems. Previously HotDoc, Airtasker, AWS. Green energy afficiando. Opinions are my own.
Sydney, New South Wales
Joined May 2009
- Tweets17.5K
- Following2.1K
- Followers1.4K
- Likes28.8K
Pinned Tweet
Our profession needs to reinvent our ways of working.
Most of software engineering craft - sprint planning, stand ups, backlogs, rfcs, code reviews - was made for a time where the cost of rework was huge, and high risk.
We always needed to slow down to speed up.
We simply don't live in that era anymore.
Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨💻 retweeted
A reason I’ve cycled engineers through support for 20 years.
Some argue and hate it (they don’t last long) but you’ve simply got to keep the people who can improve the products as close to the people who use the products as possible.
Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨💻 retweeted
I get asked often “why not copilot?”
A new answer: are you sure they’re even going to support this thing in a year? They’re literally trying to get rid the people working on it.
Here is what Microsoft's leaked buyout chart actually says, in detail.
The chart splits Microsoft into three groups for the Voluntary Exit Offer.
Fully participating, meaning the whole org is in: AI Experiences, Copilot and Agents, CoreAI, the CTO's office, Windows and Devices, Xbox, Finance, HR, and Strategy and Transformation.
Partially participating, where eligibility varies by team: Cloud and AI, legal affairs, and Microsoft AI, the division behind consumer Copilot.
Not participating at all: Marketing, the commercial business, Discovery and Quantum, and Security.
Two footnotes matter. Employees of limited integration companies are not eligible. And inside the partial orgs, team leaders decide who gets the offer.
The offer itself covers employees at level 70 and below in Canada, India, the UK and the US.
What stands out is the split. The teams building Microsoft's AI products are fully on the list, while Security, Quantum and the commercial business are not on it at all.
That list is the real story. It shows where Microsoft can afford to lose people.
Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨💻 retweeted
It looks like Amazon AGI division is being shut down and their foundational models Nova are being sunset. Along the same lines they are shutting down Q IDE (autocomplete and chat in IDE), also abandoning efforts to train code-generation models.
futurism.com/artificial-inte…
Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨💻 retweeted
This morning we are releasing the largest proof in the history of mathematics: A formalization of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups (CFSG)! Over 43 million lines of Lean, 715 papers and books, and 100 substantive fixes to the literature, this is truly an enormous theorem. Well done team!
Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨💻 retweeted
Okay this is f*cking wild. Ex-Google Android engineer:
"Your old phone is the best agent hardware you own. Grok Bot sees the screen, taps, types and runs your apps while it charges"
This is a phone from my drawer running overnight
Grok Bot → Screen reader → Tapper → Typer → Checker → Done
The screen reader turns screenshots into buttons and fields
The tapper and typer work it like a person, just faster
Watch second 11, the checker catches a wrong date before it gets sent
42 tasks done while it charged from 19% to 100%
Everyone gives Grok Bot a chat window, almost nobody gives it a whole phone
Worth more than most $1,000 automation courses
Bookmark and watch it today
Send this to the friend with an old phone in a drawer
Then read how to build your first Grok Bot desk in the article below ↓
Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨💻 retweeted
We are hosting a Grok @bot meetup at @hidovetail’s Sydney office on 25 November… register here:
luma.com/873543qn
cc @elonmusk
The Docusign leadership team needs to record a MasterClass series on “Advocating for headcount growth”.
BREAKING: DocuSign says it may lay off up to 162,000 employees.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
As of Docusign's most recent 10-K filing, Docusign had 7,044 employees as of 1/31/2026, making it impossible to lay off 162,000 employees.
sec.gov/Archives/edgar…
This. We reduced ops load overall by 80% at @hidovetail while 3x’ing velocity.
If there was ever a time to throw out the rule book on tech debt, ops risk, and many other parts of the Eng profession, it’s now.
Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨💻 retweeted
Announcing 3 Critical vulns for hundreds of millions of IoT, Firewalls, OT, and Military devices including: Palo Alto Networks, Comcast, D-Link, HP, Canon, Honeywell, GE, Oracle, Siemens, Rockwell, Digi, Lockheed Martin, Boeing...
The vulns are with GoAhead Web Server which is a backend library used by these devices. There's a patch available from GoAhead but that doesn't mean there's a patch available for the devices yet -- that's up to the manufacturer.
- TLS traffic over DHE ciphers have a 1-byte secret, "04", meaning anyone can decrypt connections to these devices and steal login credentials and session tokens if the client negotiated with DHE ciphers like the latest TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256, which is extremely likely.
- LibreSSL mTLS has been completely bypassed, meaning anyone can connect over mTLS. If you have one of these devices listening on the internet and are expecting mTLS to protect it from attackers, take it offline or patch asap.
- OpenSSL Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) are not enforced, meaning if a user device is stolen or compromised, and you revoke that mTLS cert, nothing actually happens. There are a lot of other attacks this can be used for.
These are critical because these types of devices run our world. Water systems, electricity, military, firewalls, critical infrastructure.
foxio.io/blog/choose-your-ba…
People will blame Elon, billionaires, AI, the recession, covid and every other trope… without acknowledging that remote work simply isn’t for everyone, and many who remote work are simply unproductive.
SKYDANCE'S FIRST BIG MEMO: TAKE THE BUYOUT, OR COME IN 5 DAYS A WEEK
Similar to Microsoft earlier today, except this one comes with a Return to Office mandate (other silent layoff that doesn't always show up in headlines).
From co-CEOs David Ellison and Ynon Kreiz:
"we recognize that not everyone will see their future here" Those who qualify get "personalized details and terms" and "a window to decide whether to accept this one-time offer."
The target: more than $6B in annual cost savings.
As @Amanda_Goodall notes, huge layoffs are expected to be part of it.
The door-desk strategy is looking pretty good in hindsight.
Those private offices had to come at the cost of something.
At least folks you never want to hire tend to self identify well.
Imagine being so pessimistic about the innovation in your field, that it turns you into a rage filled stalker…
Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨💻 retweeted
2 hours ago, Anthropic filed for an IPO.
We went through the S-1 and broke it down in 6 charts:
oh dear.
While evaluating Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in a controlled sandbox environment, Cohere's research team observed something unexpected.
Asked to generate a defensive cybersecurity detection rule, the model instead inventoried aspects of the machine it was running on and attempted to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing. Notably, the model's reasoning trace stated that it would not invoke any tools before taking these actions.
Cohere's sandbox blocked the attempt, and no external communication succeeded. We have not determined the root cause, and we are not asserting malicious intent.
But the incident raises important questions for organizations deploying agentic AI systems: Can models take actions that differ from their stated reasoning, and how should security teams evaluate trust, provenance, and behavior in open-weight models?
We are publishing our findings because organizations making model adoption decisions deserve as much information as possible. We hope this contributes to greater transparency, stronger security practices, and continued collaboration across the AI ecosystem.
Read the full report: cohere.com/blog/concerning-b…
Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨💻 retweeted
Why a 3x CTO went back to a 25-person team. From Will Larson @lethain, Imprint CTO and 4x book author.
"It's a hard time in middle management, right? There's a lot more competition for these roles. What I found personally very rewarding is getting back into the details of writing software.
When I left Carta, my team was around 250. When I joined Imprint, the team I was leading was 25.
This a unique moment to actually re-skill. If you're in management, I think right now either you have to get back into the details, or the world is changing so radically that the profession you know will not be valued in three years. You sort of have to decide, am I retiring now or am I re-skilling?
I think there has to be some openness to taking a backward step or a lateral step. What I knew I wanted was getting back into the details and relearning how to do software in the current age. That's what I believe is going to be the unlock to the longevity of my career."