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I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

jamesdrandall.com

631–640 of 697 posts

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#631
post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you also have bozo managers like my recent one measuring metrics like PR time open, review count while the team hasn't shipped anything useful in 6 months.

Honest question — why don't managers like this get fired? My team wants us to ship fast. If I don't ship for a month I'm probably gonna lose my job, and rightly so. If a whole team is spinning its wheels at the behest of its manager I feel like the manager should get axed.

typical management layer in big tech

manager why are so many layers needed ?

it incentivizes busy work and shit metrics like I outlined above. if they fire the manager it also means their managers have to get fired too

it's like communist party bureaucracy just veiled with tech

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#632
post #508

I'm 61 (retired when I was 57). I too began with BASIC (but closer to 1980). Although I wrote and published games for the Macintosh for a number of years as I finished up college, my professional career (in the traditional sense) began when I was hired by Apple in 1995 and relocated to the Bay Area. Yeah, what started out as a great just got worse and worse as time went on. I suspect though that to a large degree thi…

you also have bozo managers like my recent one measuring metrics like PR time open, review count while the team hasn't shipped anything useful in 6 months.

Hey, I'm now measuring PR open time ... Only because there's been open PRs for months. It is of course possible that broad directional metrics are useful.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#633

I'm 61 (retired when I was 57). I too began with BASIC (but closer to 1980). Although I wrote and published games for the Macintosh for a number of years as I finished up college, my professional career (in the traditional sense) began when I was hired by Apple in 1995 and relocated to the Bay Area. Yeah, what started out as a great just got worse and worse as time went on. I suspect though that to a large degree thi…

Thanks for sharing! I definitely agree. I've seen web software go downhill somewhere after 2013. It's been sad and now we have far more buggy apps and security issues on the Internet than ever before.

I used to love the 90s because it was "for nerds." The space wasn't crowded and you could actually do good work and research. So much research went into things and I feel like that died somewhere. Or is dying. You get a few good things coming out here and there, but it's masked by this "I want to be a celebrity" stuff that's going on. It started with conferences and such and has now progressed to YouTube and live streaming. That's kinda sickening to me honestly. What we have is pull in directions from the loudest voices in the room despite the fact this pull could be directly into flames.

As people try to sift through the confusion and overcrowding they tend to grab on to anything they can for refuge. Ironically they are often unaware of the dangerous situation they put themselves in.

I think cowboy coding may see a definition change.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#634
post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you also have bozo managers like my recent one measuring metrics like PR time open, review count while the team hasn't shipped anything useful in 6 months.

Honest question — why don't managers like this get fired? My team wants us to ship fast. If I don't ship for a month I'm probably gonna lose my job, and rightly so. If a whole team is spinning its wheels at the behest of its manager I feel like the manager should get axed.

Because if that's what they were told to do. The organization is likely very dysfunctional, or has messed up priorities, which is probably about 80%+ of the startups out there and companies in tech in general.

Seriously. There's not many healthy engineering organizations out there. So if you fire one manager you end up with either another bad one or one who performs poorly due to the organization.

Paramount here is culture. It's important to remove toxicity. I remove toxic managers (and team members) because even if they were smart or productive, they ultimately drag down the entire org and the net of it is negative productivity. I don't care if they were the most skilled programmer on the team. Doesn't matter. They could be unproductive or could be making others unproductive and unhappy. They're out. They're out before they burn or push someone else out.

So you may also find that is the reason. If the manager is generally a positive influence on morale or culture, but is perhaps just a little too reckless, they may still have value. Remember that the reckless pressure may even being coming from top down. A lot of people still subscribe to (and misunderstood) the whole "move fast and break things" mantra.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great question, I've never tried to draw a concrete line before. Code is inherently creative. But it's not art, it doesn't map 1:1 like that. But I wouldn't consider attempting to duplicate a painting, plagiarism if you painted it yourself with your hand (assuming you mention or reference the original author, or it's well know e.g. starry night) . I would consider it plagiarism if you duplicated it via photo…

> But if you didn't make the decision about where to place the function, about which order you want to call them, if you're gonna do error handling deep down as close to the error as possible, I still make all those decisions. I decide what my error handling structure is, and I have it finally exactly the way I like it in python. I usually discover the "right" way for a piece of software while writing it, then it is…

> Yes I dont decide anymore exactly which line number the function is in, but that never mattered did it? What matters is how your objects compose and how you handle edge cases. I still do that.

I would say it does matter, and always did.

Obviously, not every single line order matters with performance results that you can measure. That's not what I'm saying. But every decision does add up to who deserves the credit for the thing. Especially with how you describe your role. And then you assure me for each of those critical decisions, it's you who makes that decision.

In another thread you accuse me of constructing a strawman and then ignoring any counter evidence. But not a single person has ever provided anything above a token "I'm just built different", contained within a response as if the fictional person, sorry, "strawman" I've created is a personal attack. If it doesn't accurate represent you, why does it bother you? I'm getting strong, thou doth protest too much vibes.

Again, I'm not directly accusing you. I try very hard to believe someone when they tell me something. So I am actively trying to believe the things you've said. But you offer nothing above "nah man, I'm different, promise". Meanwhile I have dozens of examples of people vibe coding, and responding to the answer of, 'why' with: "I don't know, the LLM did that". Your example I've never seen, not once. My example is terrifyingly common.

When I try to merge what you promise yeu do, with what I've actually seen occur out in real life. I end up with, what I'm sure you'll angerly object as, just another strawman, but again I'm asking for something other than hollow reassurances: Because what you describe is close to an artist, teaching an apprentice. The apprentice does the work, perhaps exactly as instructed by the artist. But then when the artists sells the work. They claim that it's their creation. As if the apprentice never existed. It's disgusting behavior when the apprentice is a person, but shameful for an entirely different reason if the apprentice is a large block of token weights.

I don't for a second believe, all you have opencode do for you is refactor based on a specification you wrote (belief != disbelief) but still feel you deserve the assumption of the best possible interpretation. If all your apprentice did was clean the brushes, and take the pottery out of the kiln. Then yes, you created everything. But given my assumption that's not actually what reality looks like, help me understand the delta between these two examples?

They don't say, My team did this. Or Look how good I am teaching, my student created this. Or anything of the nature. They pass off work and effort, and expertise, As if they wrote every line of code. Some people do sheepishly admit the used an LLM when writing some patch. But many MANY more, don't.

If you actually don't feel like you're misrepresenting how much credit you deserve. Then I'm hoping you can explain to me, why so many people who don't try, and just blindly trust the vibe slop, don't feel embarrassed? Because I'm so far from it, that I don't have the context required to understand that lack of integrity. But perhaps someone who does it the correct way can explain it to me?

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends, of course, but in my experience managers like this do get fired after a few years, followed shortly after or before by their manager.

Years! I can see why managerial positions can be so coveted. You can be shitty at your job for years before getting sacked.

It's easy to hide in those positions. Many people don't know how to measure performance there and they get to point fingers.

My advice to anyone in this boat is to talk to the team underneath them every now and then. Get a pulse check. See where they get stuck and then set the managers goals based on that. At least one of their goals. It can be a small thing. It need not derail any roadmap or anything else. Explain why it's important for their team, explain where the team is having trouble.

See if they do it. If they do, they care about their team. If it's a small task/goal, it proves they can also be productive. Often times we have people taking on enormous goals that are vague or difficult to measure or complete in a timely manner. So a little mini goal (or a few, test a few over time) is very important here. Now, if they can't meet this goal or are unwilling to - you know you have a manager that doesn't care about the team they are managing. They can't manage that team or they can't be at the org. You can of course always try a different team or role for them.

In my experience a lot of managers (especially middle managers) kinda like to sit up there in a tower shouting orders at people, but never want to get their hands dirty or never want to support their team. They sometimes don't even realize the orders they are shouting are incorrect or impossible tasks to complete. This is where you get the "you now need 95% test coverage." That very often doesn't come from a C-suite level or customer demand because they don't care what the % is, they just want it to work.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#637
post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question — why don't managers like this get fired? My team wants us to ship fast. If I don't ship for a month I'm probably gonna lose my job, and rightly so. If a whole team is spinning its wheels at the behest of its manager I feel like the manager should get axed.

typical management layer in big tech manager why are so many layers needed ? it incentivizes busy work and shit metrics like I outlined above. if they fire the manager it also means their managers have to get fired too it's like communist party bureaucracy just veiled with tech

Depends on size of org. Many orgs end up too top heavy too quickly and don't have things in place to support that. That's where you get the "busy work." It's because they have too much time on their hands.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#638

Ironically this post comes across to me as written by an LLM. The em-dashes, the prepositions, the "not this, that" lines. As a college instructor, I can usually tell. I put it through GPTZero and it said it's 96% LLM written. GPTZero is not full-proof but I think it's likely right on this one and I find it very ironic.

I feel like I'm being rickrolled over and over again by infomercial-grade slop.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “write me an app” and ships it unread… That is in fact, the behavior I see most often. > What I described was directing, reviewing, and editing. You didn't actually describe any of that though? You asserted that's what you do, but didn't describe any of those steps. If you do, you'd be the first person I see actually do that when using LLM codegen. Most people who advocate for it, do behave that way. You're mistake…

You've made a straw man of how people use codegen and are not willing to change your opinion even though people are telling you this is not how they use code gen.

I've replied much deeper in the other thread. But my concrete problem is that insubstantial arguments can't override the overwhelming evidence I've already acquired. Just trust me bro; I'm different from every other vibe coder you've seen dump slop on somebody, might be true but is not very compelling.

I don't care about how you use codegen, I want to understand why you discard all of the process, while still claiming credit for writing it? Perhaps you don't say I wrote this. Or I made this. Perhaps you do say, I asked an LLM to create this. Or disclose an LLM generated most of the lines. Or perhaps you do modify most of it, but I've never seen the latter in real life. And even then, that doesn't help answer my question about when people who aren't built different like you, why isn't that plagiarism?

Because when I look at something created by the team, I do give the engineering manager credit for their contributions, they helped build the team. But I definitely don't think they helped create the thing.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had claude make a tool that scans a file or folder, finds all symbols, and prints them with line number. It can scan a whole repo and present a compact map. From there the model has no issue knowing where to look at. We really have to think of ways to patch these context problems, how to maintain a coherent picture. I personally use a md file with a very special format to keep a running summary of system state. It…

> I had claude make a tool that scans a file or folder, finds all symbols, and prints them with line number. ctags?

Almost, mine uses less tokens repeating filenames.
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