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The bottleneck was never the code

thetypicalset.com

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Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#31

Post by kenforthewin »

nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

Looks like this comment is touching a nerve. This community is progressing from "AI can't write code", to "Well, AI can write code but it's not really about the code". I wonder where the goalposts will be moved next?

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#32

Post by kj4211cash »

nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

I feel attacked. I still dislike most team meetings, agile ceremonies, etc. Slack and emails give me anxiety. A 30 min meeting will disrupt me for 90 minutes. But, yea, the code was never the bottleneck. Except maybe when I worked at a startup. All of the above are true.

Personally I find it hilarious that the same people at my company who can't be bothered to write down detailed requirements and are constantly fighting any effort to do research or technical documentation or pay down tech debt are now trying vibe coding and struggling to produce anything useful. Oh you don't understand why you aren't getting the results you expected? Maybe you should try thinking deeper about what you expect before your rush your engineers or, now, your agents.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#33

Post by Antibabelic »

What kind of projects are people working on, where understanding what features the management wants is the only difficult part and the rest can just be "typed out" (or, today, offloaded to an LLM)? If that's what you do, then I'm not surprised so many people on HN think LLMs can replace them.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#34

Post by abduhl »

forgotaccount3 wrote: post #23
nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

> nakedly hypocritical How is it hypocritical? If in the old world, the very important process that used up a lot of time and benefited greatly from no distractions was the actual writing of code then interruptions for various ceremonies with limited value other than generating progress reports for some higher ups would feel like a waste of time. That same person in the 'new' world where writing code is very fast but…

Well it is hypocritical. Hypocrisy is an action or statement that is contrary to a stated value or principle. Just because your values or principles changed doesn’t make you a suddenly no longer a hypocrite, it just admits that your former opinions are no longer tenable.

I’ve noticed this push to try to clothe hypocrisy in made up virtues like intellectual curiosity and mental plasticity a lot lately. All I can think is that it’s some kind of ego satisfaction play people make when their place in the world is threatened.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#35

Post by dwoldrich »

nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

They sound like very important people no matter what the circumstances are, haha.

Having "house rules" on a team that new members must agree to follow tends to flush such people out and they usually exit on their own when their shenanigans get repeatedly called out as violative. Gotta introduce the rules in the interview process and get agreement after they join. Catching them out early is the key.

We had an intervention on one hard case and he rage quit the next day. I don't know why people do that, it's a small world and people talk.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#36

Post by AussieWog93 »

nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

Comments like these are why I still come to HN. Absolute kino.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#37

Post by Antibabelic »

kj4211cash wrote: post #32
nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

I feel attacked. I still dislike most team meetings, agile ceremonies, etc. Slack and emails give me anxiety. A 30 min meeting will disrupt me for 90 minutes. But, yea, the code was never the bottleneck. Except maybe when I worked at a startup. All of the above are true. Personally I find it hilarious that the same people at my company who can't be bothered to write down detailed requirements and are constantly fight…

Isn't solving problems, instead of blindly implementing a high-level description of the solution, your job as a developer?

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#38

Post by odie5533 »

Antibabelic wrote: post #33

What kind of projects are people working on, where understanding what features the management wants is the only difficult part and the rest can just be "typed out" (or, today, offloaded to an LLM)? If that's what you do, then I'm not surprised so many people on HN think LLMs can replace them.

I've found the more senior you get, the code seems more fungible, and the process seems more important and difficult.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#39

Post by jmull »

nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

Generally, groups of people aren't homogenous.

The contradictions you see could mostly be variations across individuals rather than hypocrisy within individuals.

(Doubly so for vaguely defined groups, like "kind of engineer".)

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#40

Post by ElatedOwl »

nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

no, these meetings are still hot garbage.

half the time you’re going to discover the right decision / path while you’re coding.

focus time went from hammering code to figuring out how to solve the problem. PRs are now how we exchange ideas. meetings are still productivity theater.

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