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The bottleneck was never the code

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Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#101

Post by xquce »

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…

Not a false dichotomy. I agree with OP and I can say for certain that if you are one of the few developers that is "fond of meetings with customers" you are not the the type of person OP is talking about, and you are more rare than you think.

I am a former Dev turned PO/PM and now CEO, I can tell you many a developers are not fond of those meetings you are fond of and people like myself don't insert our selves where we don't belong, we simply join the meeting and have the vital conversation with the customers/stakeholders whos payments make payroll possible, while the developers refused to.

My team have always commented and liked that I "shielded" them from the none technical meetings and distilled customer needs in our kanban, without them having to go to the meeting. While I agree this isn't the "best way" to do things, I simply have never seen a Dev Team work as the way HN tries to make the role sound "Dev/Eng and the customer is the only thing needed". Would love for this to be the case!

Also for those who think I'm down talking the abilities of my team, we made a company together when we left a huge company we worked for, as Co owners and even now we use same setup is used :)

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#102

Post by pu_pe »

Sometimes code is definitely the bottleneck. For example some organizations have a very bureaucratic process guarding which projects get access to a development team and when. That's not needed if implementation is now faster/cheaper.

I'm also skeptical that development velocity is so separate from all those other things (context, stakeholder alignment,etc). It's much easier to get actionable feedback when you have a prototype.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#104

Post by Antibabelic »

kusokurae wrote: post #64
kenforthewin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The community portion that unironically think AI is good enough now, are mostly managers and non/semi-technical people, and engineers who do not engage in critical or complex problems. HN has always been too much of the velocity-alignment-synergy class of professional talkers; it's just so much more obvious now that they feel emboldened in false confidence.

No hackers on Hacker News? Oh my oh my

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#105

Post by aleph_minus_one »

tempaccount5050 wrote: post #99
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…

It's 100% denial/ego. I've been a contractor longer than I'd like and it's the exact same response I see when I join a new team. The team complains they have too much work and can't get anything done, so their manager pulls me in. Suddenly, they don't want to give anything up. I'm actually in the middle of this right now. The team "is swamped" yet somehow, they are able to argue that almost everything I can handle is…

> A - they are replaceable and their work isn't that unique and B - they are the bottleneck, not the process or workload.

The problem rather is: often good programmers have quite good ideas how these problems could be solved, but for "organizational politics" reasons they are not allowed to apply these solutions.

Thus:

Concerning (B): Because they are not allowed to apply their improvement ideas, they are the bottleneck. But being the bottleneck is not the root problem, but rather a consequence of not being allowed to improve things.

Concerning (A): It is indeed often the case that if you simply let someone else do the work, the code quality decreases a lot and in subtle ways. Good programmers are very sensitive (and sometimes vocal) with respect to that - in opposite to managers.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#107

Post by TheLudd »

paldepind2 wrote: post #100

From the article: > Jevons Paradox: when something gets cheaper, you tend to use more of it, not less. That's a butchering of Jevons paradox. What's stated is not a paradox, but a very natural effect. Obviously usage of something goes up when it gets cheaper. What Jevons paradox actually describes is the situation where usage of a resource becomes more efficient (which means less of it is needed for a given task), bu…

Should the paradox not be that we PAY more for it? Or, if some process is made more effective, i.e. takes shorter time, we spend more time in that process.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#108

Post by mayhemducks »

tlkan wrote: post #60

One of the bottlenecks has always been the code. That code has been stolen and is being laundered while companies rely on mediocre engineers who have never written anything of value to promote the burglary tools and call the process "writing software". It is the same as putting an Einstein paper on a photocopier and call the process "writing a paper". I agree with the point of the article though: code generation does…

My status after reading your comment: https://imgflip.com/i/7yki7x

Agentic tools are "burglary tools" -> Younger folks should not study CS?

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#109

Post by SkyBelow »

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

Sometimes there are two groups of people who have different opinions that don't interact, but given the extent they take up the same platform and don't seem to see each other, I'm not sure it is really a fallacy even then.

First, it becomes possible for people who have a double standard to hide behind this. One can try to track an individual's stance, but a lot of internet etiquette seems to be based on the idea of not looking up a person's history to see if they are being contradictory. (And while being hypocritical doesn't necessarily invalidate an argument, it can help to indicate when someone is arguing it bad faith and it is a waste of time as someone will simply use different axioms to reach otherwise contradictory conclusions when they favor each.)

Second, I think there is the ability to call out a group as being hypocritical, even when there are two sub groups. That one group supports A generally and another group supports B generally (and assuming that A + B is hypocritical), but they stop supporting it when it would bring them into conflict indicates a level of acceptance by the change in behavior. Each individual is too hard to measure this (maybe they are tired today, or distracted, or didn't even see it), but as a group, we can still measure the overall direction.

So if a website ends up being very vocally in support of two contradictory positions, I think there is still a valid argument to be made about contradicting opinions, and the goomba fallacy is itself a fallacy.

Edit: Removed example, might be too distracting to bring up an otherwise off topic issue as an example.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#110

Post by hiohio »

jorisw wrote: post #14

> Agents that consume context need agents that produce it. Once that loop is running, the organization has a written substrate it would never have produced on its own. I'm not sure a business is helped by documentation that distilled from (hopefully present) PR descriptions and comments in JIRA, by agents. Or wherever this context is supposed to be reverse-engineered from.

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