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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

#171

Post by swiftcoder »

rvba wrote: post #136
acomjean wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did anything come out from those billions?

> Did anything come out from those billions?

Per wikipedia:

  IBM employees have garnered six Nobel Prizes, seven Turing Awards,
  20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame, 19 National Medals of Technology,
  five National Medals of Science and three Kavli Prizes. As of 2018,
  the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years.

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

#172

Post by kaashif »

brabel wrote: post #164
mawadev wrote: post #156

I highly question the ability of companies to gauge the level of experience of any dev. The distinction between junior, mid, senior, lead is a facade. It is a soft gradient that spans multiple areas, but is tainted and skewed by the technology du jour. Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. It boils down to your personal willingness to learn and invest time building. What…

> Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. That's incredibly unlikely. Do you need to be an employed surgeon to become a senior (or whatever they call it) surgeon?? I very much doubt you can be senior without having actually spent years doing it professionally. The experience is everything, no book will give you the sort of understanding you need. That's unfortunately human…

Maybe they mean you can be not employed and build products yourself? Technically true, but that's like running your own surgeries or something, you're still doing surgery.

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

#173

Post by sgt »

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…

You sound convincing, but it also reads very AI generated. A lot of people will stop reading half way.

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

#174

Post by bradleyjg »

lelanthran wrote: post #168
simondotau wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg to differ, insofar as my own experience has been the exact opposite. I enjoy fixing other people's mistakes. And I especially enjoy outsmarting the LLMs. I find that I can obsessively breathe down the neck of an LLM for far longer than I could ever stay in the traditional flow state.

> I find that I can obsessively breathe down the neck of an LLM for far longer than I could ever stay in the traditional flow state. I can do that too. Most programmers can. That's because it requires less skill! Critiquing something is always easier than doing it. I can literally keep an LLM fixing things forever by just saying things like "This is not scalable", or "this is not maintainable", or "this is not flexib…

That's because it requires less skill! Critiquing something is always easier than doing it.

No, it was always the other way around. Mediocre programmers always wanted to rewrite everything because reading and understanding an existing codebase was always harder than writing some greenfield thing with a “modern language” or “modern libraries” or “modern idioms.” So they’d go and do that and end up with 100x the bugs.

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

#175

Post by andrewstuart »

brabel wrote: post #164
mawadev wrote: post #156

I highly question the ability of companies to gauge the level of experience of any dev. The distinction between junior, mid, senior, lead is a facade. It is a soft gradient that spans multiple areas, but is tainted and skewed by the technology du jour. Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. It boils down to your personal willingness to learn and invest time building. What…

> Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. That's incredibly unlikely. Do you need to be an employed surgeon to become a senior (or whatever they call it) surgeon?? I very much doubt you can be senior without having actually spent years doing it professionally. The experience is everything, no book will give you the sort of understanding you need. That's unfortunately human…

Analogies to other professions give your argument an air of legitimacy, with none.

There’s plenty of people in this world who are expert programmers without following any traditional path.

“Oh yeah, like who”, you say.

Con Kolivas, anaesthetist, work on kernel schedulers including the Staircase Deadline (RSDL) scheduler which was a precursor to the Completely Fair Scheduler in Linux and the Brain Fuck Scheduler and the ck Patchset.

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

#177

Post by gmerc »

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…

See also https://georgzoeller.com/blog/posts/the-tech-job-apocalypse-...

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

#178

Post by crabbone »

The West started to forget how to code a long time before AI. At first, it was the work visas to bring programmers in, then it was outsourcing. At this point, I'm not even sure if AI is doing more harm than good in this department as it might be able to bring some jobs back to the "West", if it turns out that it's cheaper than outsourcing.

The outsourcing was shedding more of the trivial jobs, while trying to keep key positions at home, but increasingly, it also started to lose the key positions too. It's possible that AI can make it so that the key positions will be harder to justify to outsource... but, who knows... maybe not.

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

#179

Post by xienze »

swiftcoder wrote: post #171
rvba wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did anything come out from those billions?

> Did anything come out from those billions? Per wikipedia: IBM employees have garnered six Nobel Prizes, seven Turing Awards, 20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame, 19 National Medals of Technology, five National Medals of Science and three Kavli Prizes. As of 2018, the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years.

> the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years.

A couple things about those patents, from a former IBMer who has quite a few in his time there.

First, not all patents are created equal. Most of those IBM patents are software-related, and for pretty trivial stuff.

Second, most of those patents are generated by the rank and file employees, not research scientists. The IBM patent process is a well-oiled machine but they ain't exactly patenting transistor-level breakthroughs thousands of times a year.

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

#180

Post by mahrain »

I don't agree with "the west forgot how to make things", it moved supply chains for cheap consumer goods to asia, but in the B2B space a lot of things are manufactured in Europe: companies like Bosch, Volkswagen, ASML, Alstom and Airbus are cranking out extremely complicated machines that last many years in demanding environments. It's just a different level of value-add vs. low cost electronics (for instance).
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