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The bottleneck was never the code

thetypicalset.com

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Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#71

Post by rkozik1989 »

jugg1es wrote: post #17

I think veteran engineers have always known that the real problems with velocity have always been more organizational than technical. The inability for the business to define a focused, productive roadmap has always been the problem in software engineering. Constantly jumping to the next shiny thing that yields almost no ROI but never allowing systemic tech debt to be addressed has crippled many company's I have work…

Any competent engineer should understand that engineering is just the assembly line side of product development. Deciding when to release which feature, bug fixes, etc. and the development/management of the product in general has always been the real challenge, and a lot of the strategy involved in doing this relies on feedback loops that AI cannot speed up. Though at the same time I do feel like leaders on the business side often scapegoat engineer's speed as an excuse instead of taking responsibility for poor decisions on their end.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#72

Post by keybored »

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…

Just look at what they write. There is a correlation between the Agentic Multitasker and the type of person who wanted results and didn’t care about the coding in itself. That’s what they themselves keep writing.

They are not the same people.

> It's hilarious ... their most essential and sacred activity ... suddenly, and with no hint of shame ... the nakedly hypocritical attitude ... still extraordinary

Calm down the hyperventilating for two seconds, look around, and you’ll immediately see examples of the same group of people who now biTch aNd mOaN about how agentic coding is killing what they love about programming.

It’s interesting to see people either gloat or get incensed at the nerds who like computers in the context of these developments.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#73

Post by msteffen »

ftmootnomoat wrote: post #26
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…

This is a false dichotomy. Software development has always been about keeping people in agreement, from the customer to the coder, and all the people in between (the fewer the better). Meetings that increases sync between customer and coder are few and precious. In large organisations ceremonial meetings proliferate for the wrong reasons. People like to insert themselves in the process between customer and coder to a…

Yes! So much of professional software development is about assisting the nominal job of management—planning and budgeting—rather than users or even business fundamentals.

Why am I awake at 1:00am, ruining my brain and body, trying to get this feature finished before the end of the week instead of three days later? Ah yes, so that we meet our quarterly OKR, and the next quarter's plan that the EM and PM negotiated without me or our customers isn't disrupted and doesn't need adjustment. That would invite reprimand from the director, and the extra work would be terrible for them, I understand.

I'm reminded of this recent thread in which Heroku left the devs in charge and suddenly features that the author had requested for years got implemented: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47669749

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#74

Post by frollogaston »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #30

For me it was. Solo entrepreneurs are the ones who profit the most from AI assisted development.

Or startups where coding was always a bottleneck because it was very expensive to hire swes, unlike big corps which would often throw swes at a problem.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#75

Post by esafak »

abduhl wrote: post #34
forgotaccount3 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Abduhl, the nature of the job has changed; before it was coding, now it is managing the AI coding. What was and remains valuable is delivering value. This principle has not changed.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#76

Post by robertlagrant »

kenforthewin wrote: post #31
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?

Both your error and the OP's error is in imagining that the same people are saying both things. The "community" fallacy, which has been around for about 10 years now, that pretends that people with something in common (e.g. "uses HN") are somehow a community that thinks identically is completely wrong.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#77

Post by sermah »

knollimar wrote: post #54
dmm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you referring to the author specifically? Or a specific hypocritical person you know? If you're making a general statement about groups of online people you might be falling for the group attribution error[1], where the characteristics of an individual are assumed to be reflective of the whole group. In any case, two things can be simultaneously true: 1. Writing code is not the bottleneck, as in we can develop fe…

Or just goomba fallacy

til https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#78

Post by deepsquirrelnet »

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.

Any discussion related to this topic always seems to assume everyone uses code the same way and for the same function, and then forces the rest of the world through that lens.

So here we walk around the circle one more time again, voicing our anxieties, talking past each other, waiting for the next opportunity for commentary to come in half an hour.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#79

Post by frollogaston »

Doesn't add up. I used to spend more than half my time coding, as did others. Besides the obvious cost, that coding took wall-time which meant talks had to wait. Sure a poor collaborator will jam things up a ton, but a team of at least ok collaborators used to be bottlenecked on code.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#80

Post by robertlagrant »

moralestapia wrote: post #70
raincole wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the same kind of engineer Who? There are millions of software engineers around the world. It's quite likely that they have a few different opinions and point of views!

But it is written there, and GP was quite specific: >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 Seems pretty clear to me.

I doubt the GP has gone back through their career and checked on each person who thought there were too many meetings have now all made the switched they're being accused of, though.
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