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The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

techtrenches.dev

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Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#121

Post by AnthonyMouse »

palmotea wrote: post #53
jdw64 wrote: post #17

The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself. The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring, and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach. As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred. W…

> The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. I think that's still a symptom. The real problem is ideology: the monomaniacal focus on profit-making business, which infects our political leaders, down to capitalists and business leaders, down to the indoctrinated rank-and…

The US is stuck in this weird irony where they recognize that Soviet-style central planning is a disaster but can't recognize that it's what megacorps do when they're insulated from competition. Internal politics, perverse incentives and a system that can sustain massive inefficiencies right up until the point that it doesn't.

In general productive economic activity generates a surplus and that surplus allows for slack. Human beings intuitively understand this. Hobbies are frequently de facto training for things that aren't currently happening but might later. Family-owned and operated businesses are much less likely to try to outsource their core competency for the sake of quarterly profits.

But regulatory capture and market consolidation causes the surplus to go to the corporate bureaucracies capturing the regulators instead of human beings with self-determination and goals other than number go up, and then the system optimizes for capturing the government rather than satisfying the people. "When you legislate buying and selling the first things to be bought and sold are the legislators." You throw away the competitive market and subject yourselves to the unaccountable bureaucracy, and then try to pretend it's not the same thing because this time the central planners are wearing business suits.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#122

Post by neuderrek »

I remember same complaints about junior engineers copy pasting snippets of code from StackOverflow without understanding. And without curiosity to understand, without code review and mentorship from senior engineers they never grew to the senior level. But that is only some of them, others used StackOverflow to learn, did not use the snippets without understanding them first and properly adapting to their context, and they got good coaching in their teams and now have reached senior level from there. I see the same dynamic with LLMs, just more opportunities for both juniors to learn more by following up, and for seniors to to create tooling to enforce better architectur, test coverage and fault resiliency.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#124

Post by pelorat »

jdw64 wrote: post #17

The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself. The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring, and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach. As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred. W…

In the case of the military I'd say the real reason is political. After the fall of the Berlin wall, Europe collectively agreed (knowingly or not) that war is now a thing of the past and the goal should be the complete dismantling of militaries worldwide, starting with Europe. Lead by example, etc.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#125

Post by NordStreamYacht »

acomjean wrote: post #82
vishnugupta wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> removing people and organizational slack You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. When bean-counters took over the ecosystem they optimised immediate profitability over everything else. Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time. There's no room for experimentation, repair, or anything else. I've commented about lack of slack on several times here…

I’ll note at the end of the last century I worked at IBM research which had a budget of 6 Billion dollars. Management was trying very hard to get better return on that investment. Even today IBM though often ridiculed in the tech space (sometimes they do deserve it) spends a lot on R&D.

Lucent at the same time went through the same issue: how to monetise Bell Labs.

Bell Labs greatest work came out when AT&T was a monopoly. Once they were broken up (1984?) they started feeling the pain.

When the Lucent spinoff took place, the new entities had no Monopoly money to fund unconstrained research while management's behaviour never changed.

I don't know how BL fared under Alcatel and now Nokia, but haven't heard of anything interesting for years.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#126

Post by [deleted] »

the-smug-one wrote: post #83
cladopa wrote: post #52

People are not perfect. I went to Ukraine just days before the invasion. Travel and Hotels in Kiev had become extremely cheap. You asked the Ukrainians about the possible invasion. "Not going to happen" everybody said."Russia talks always aggressively, but never does anything". They did not properly prepare and as a result lost 20% of its territory in days. Days after that I was back is Austria and could not stop thi…

I'd say that Ukraine were very prepared for the invasion, though? They managed to survive for the first 2 weeks, leading to a long-term war. The Donbas war had already been going on for 8 years, and I don't think Ukrainians were under some illusion that those weren't Russians.

[deleted]

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#127

Post by Tade0 »

> The combination of technical skill and the judgment to know when the AI is wrong barely exists in the market anymore.

Well then train them, instead of selecting 0.18% of applicants and calling it a day.

It's not some innate, immutable property - people can be taught even in adulthood.

Also it's not like they'll work for a year and switch jobs - not in the current market.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#128

Post by zelphirkalt »

bit1993 wrote: post #48

Yes. Just like globalization created companies like TSMC, AI will do the same. Software engineers who don't rely on LLM code generators will have a moat because they can do it cheaply and sustainably. Another reason is that LLMs train on the existing code we already know, don't expect new programming languages or frameworks this means that the software engineering skills that exist today will be relevant for a long t…

I am not so much convinced by your last point, that point of new languages and frameworks. I think the cutoff date is closing in on our current now. If models cannot easily become bigger, they will likely advertise using "up-to-date-ness". Maybe they will be merely a few days behind. Or bigger models will make use of smaller but more up-to-date models.

I think engineering skills will still remain relevant due to taste and proper judgement. A model trained on everything and the kitchen sink has probably not the fitting bias for given specific problems in my project. Accepting too much AI generated code without steering the ship will result in some drift of taste and ultimately make some mediocre project like done by people without good domain knowledge and without good taste. It might even be short term a business, but it lacks the long term excellence, that sets projects with good judgement apart from the common rabble.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#129

Post by fifilura »

blitzar wrote: post #102
cladopa wrote: post #52

People are not perfect. I went to Ukraine just days before the invasion. Travel and Hotels in Kiev had become extremely cheap. You asked the Ukrainians about the possible invasion. "Not going to happen" everybody said."Russia talks always aggressively, but never does anything". They did not properly prepare and as a result lost 20% of its territory in days. Days after that I was back is Austria and could not stop thi…

On the flip side, all around the world you have "leaders" talking about imaginary conflicts with foreign countries that we must spend billions (they have a friend who really should get the contract) to prepare for and if the other side (tm) gets in your whole family will be killed instantly.

Killing of families is what happened in Ukraine in the Russia controlled territories.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#130

Post by NordStreamYacht »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #121
palmotea wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. I think that's still a symptom. The real problem is ideology: the monomaniacal focus on profit-making business, which infects our political leaders, down to capitalists and business leaders, down to the indoctrinated rank-and…

The US is stuck in this weird irony where they recognize that Soviet-style central planning is a disaster but can't recognize that it's what megacorps do when they're insulated from competition. Internal politics, perverse incentives and a system that can sustain massive inefficiencies right up until the point that it doesn't. In general productive economic activity generates a surplus and that surplus allows for sla…

> megacorps do when they're insulated from competition. Internal politics, perverse incentives and a system that can sustain massive inefficiencies right up until the point that it doesn't.

You just described Lucent.

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