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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

#231

Post by gyomu »

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…

There are two kinds of developers.

There's the kind that, when given a problem, will jump in, learn what they need to learn to solve the parts they don't fully understand yet, deliver meaningful iterative results, talk to people as needed, keep you posted on their progress, loop in other team members and offer/request help to/from them, take initiative on the obvious missing parts that would benefit the project as a whole, etc.

And then there's the rest.

Within the first few years of someone's career, you can quickly tell which kind they are. It's almost impossible to turn someone from the latter group into the former.

Yes, everything else is a façade. You can be a "senior" developer with 30 years of experience and still be in the latter group. And you can be fresh out of college and be in the former.

Now some people are extremely good at other skills (politics, interpersonal communication, bullshit, whatever you want to call it) and will be able to seem to be in the first group to the people who matter (managers, execs, etc) while actually being in the second group. But then we're not talking about actual software-making skills anymore.

You can also totally be in the first group and be underpaid, never promoted, etc. There's little correlation with actually career success.

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

#232

Post by mewpmewp2 »

liendolucas wrote: post #152

I still code daily without any coding assistance mostly because I believe this is the way to not forget how things are done, even trivial things. My main point against using AI is that I do not want to depend basically on anything when I'm in front of the screen (obviously not including, documentation, books, SO and alike). I closely see people that are 100% dependent on AI for literally everything, even the most tri…

I hear this a lot, but also I'm curious. How can you really forget coding?

It doesn't seem to me a thing that I could suddenly forget?

Without AI I will feel frustrated that I'm now much slower, but ultimately it's just describing logic. So I'm a bit skeptical of the claim.

My brain effort is also on other things now, such as how to orchestrate guardrails, how to build pipelines to enable multiple agents work on the same thing at the same time, how to understand their weaknesses and strengths, how to automate all of that. So there's definitely a lot of mental effort going into those things.

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

#233

Post by 2ndorderthought »

DrBazza wrote: post #135
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. It's always seemed to me that the problem is corporate profit and personal profit above all. 'Management' is a subset of this, and so is pretty much everything else, including the current drive for AI. It's the Western, perha…

I have worked for companies in different countries.

I think the striking thing is how US companies tend to have no idea how to be wealthy. Record profits, so the ceos use all of their tricks to get rich quick? They are already rich! Don't fix what isn't broken. Not every company needs to expand into 10 new markets, or have 5% lay offs or double in revenue. Some of this is investor pressure, but often it's not. Some guy who made it to the top is bored, doesn't feel like he is obviously doing enough, so he keeps making decisions to justify his position.

This isn't to insight flames but the European companies I worked for knew how to be wealthy! The market took a down turn from COVID, they ate the cost to keep their people. Some flashy new vertical is trending. They decided it's not for them, they have a brand and customers that they should focus on while everyone else works out the kinks. The company decides, why go public at all, we are successful and don't need anyone else's influence over us.

People say "you cannot project beyond 1 quarter". This is true in terms of catastrophe or gambler success. But its not true, if you act in q1 like there will be a q2 or even 5 years from now or heaven forbid a second or third generation you make different moves. You value different things.

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

#234

Post by xienze »

fao_ wrote: post #206
xienze wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I…

Why do you need to generate transistor-level breakthroughs multiple times a year? Those breakthroughs are hard to generate, but they're important and industry-spanning. The problem is we've mostly stopped generating them.

I wasn't saying anything about that, I was just pointing out that yes, IBM produces a ton of patents, but they're mostly trivial junk that regular employees generate en masse in order to earn accomplishments and make up for the insultingly low bonuses.

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

#235

Post by ianberdin »

I don’t know. Partly true. I came to web development, when low level things solved: frameworks, ORMs, OSs, databases. I don’t know sql nor c++ well. But I can create a system, a value based on the abstractions. Everyone told me: Ruslan, you don’t know SQL, what a shame! Well I do not have problems and did not have about it.

Probably we are going to be fine with AI abstraction too. People will use it, stuck with problems, dig deeper, learn, improve, same as we had with frameworks and its source code.

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

#236

Post by mewpmewp2 »

LtWorf wrote: post #227
ReptileMan wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I closely see people that are 100% dependent on AI for literally everything, even the most trivial daily tasks and I find that truly scarly because it means that brain effort drops drammatically to a minimum level. To be stolen mental effort is not a minor thing. I find myself thinking more and my thinking is of higher quality. Now I have 30 years of fucked up projects experience, so I know all the rakes I could ste…

You probably overestimate yourself.

I relate to the idea of having a different level of thinking now with AI. How would you evaluate that someone is overestimating themselves?

As in every little thing that used to be too much effort before, I can just easily get the info, the data now with prompt. The data analysis of something, which otherwise might have taken hours to figure out, I can just have AI write scripts for everything, which allows me to see more data about everything that previously was out of touch. Now you will probably ask of course "how do I know the data is accurate?" -- I can still cross reference things and it is still far faster because even if I spent hours before trying to access that data there wouldn't have been similarly guarantees that it was accurate.

I am thinking so much more about the things now that I couldn't have possibly time to think about before because they were so far out of reach, or even unimaginable to do in my lifetime. Now I'm thinking about automating everything, having perfect visualizations, data about everything, being able to study/learn everything quickly etc.

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

#237

Post by lxgr »

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #186
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…

I feel like it’s something more fundamental and broad than that. We slowly remove excuses to talk to other people. The thought crossed my mind the other day — if I’m asking the AI a question, that’s replacing a human interaction I would have had with a coworker. It’s not just in coding, it’s everything. With ChatGPT always available in your pocket, what social interactions is it replacing? The thing that gets me is,…

> if I’m asking the AI a question, that’s replacing a human interaction I would have had with a coworker.

Importantly, you're removing a signal: If I'm not asked things anymore, I don't know which aspects of our domain are causing the most confusion/misunderstandings and would as such benefit most from simplifying the boundaries of.

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

#238

Post by swiftcoder »

xienze wrote: post #234
fao_ wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need to generate transistor-level breakthroughs multiple times a year? Those breakthroughs are hard to generate, but they're important and industry-spanning. The problem is we've mostly stopped generating them.

I wasn't saying anything about that, I was just pointing out that yes, IBM produces a ton of patents, but they're mostly trivial junk that regular employees generate en masse in order to earn accomplishments and make up for the insultingly low bonuses.

> they're mostly trivial junk that regular employees generate en masse in order to earn accomplishments and make up for the insultingly low bonuses

We did that at Meta and Amazon too (for polycarbonate puzzle pieces, with no monetary award at all!). Every now and then something meaningful came out of it

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

#240

Post by only-one1701 »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #161
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…

> What AI is being sold as right now is not really productivity. In many domains, productivity is already sufficient. What’s being sold is workforce reduction. And workforce reduction is a nobel goal. In fact, I think it's one of the most important things humanity should focus on. We should strive for a workforce of zero. Humans currently was an enormous amount of their life working instead of more worthwhile pursuit…

The time to solve that resource problem is before AI concentrates power, not after. It’s LESS likely to happen when a tiny elite increases their already huge amount of power.
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