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The bottleneck was never the code

thetypicalset.com

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Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#141

Post by Supermancho »

raincole wrote: post #46
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…

> 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!

https://hn.algolia.com/ - search for "actual work" This has long been a topic on HN.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#142

Post by scarecrowbob »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #103
sermah wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That’s kind of just strawman with an origin story isn’t it?

On some level, yes, but having words to describe sub-sets can be useful too.

A "human" is just a "featherless biped", after all?

I think the Goomba Fallacy captures something helpful to me- it's helpful to know the origin of a straw man if you want to un-stuff one.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#143

Post by appplication »

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 think there’s some kernel of validity in this comment, but the unnecessarily aggressive tone loses it. This just comes off as bitter.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#144

Post by aaron695 »

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

[dead]

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#145

Post by IanCal »

hnthrow0287345 wrote: post #56
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.

This is like 80% of CRUD apps. Sometimes they have a few interesting problems but not like the upper 20%. Most of them are hot garbage in terms of code quality because of the offshoring and layoff cycles.

Also even the more complex things will have a lot of simpler code in them.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#146

Post by albedoa »

peab wrote: post #134
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…

The amount of cognitive dissonance I'm seeing on HN right now is concerning. I'm seeing both these beliefs right now: • Belief A: "I am a skilled professional whose value lies in my unique ability to solve complex problems." • Belief B: "An LLM can now solve many of these problems in seconds for pennies." This thread is great at showing how people are rationalizing by moving the goal posts, so to say

"both these beliefs" and you label one a Belief and the other a Fact.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#147

Post by bonesss »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #105
tempaccount5050 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bottlen…

Additionally on A: the people who will be stuck maintaining this contribution for years and years have a different view of the pain.

Pushing a 90% solution through is a ‘win’ for the coder who is leaving, and hurts everyone on a continuing basis. It’s bad accounting, and lets the consultant look good for making the team perform worse (and look bad later).

And, IME, if that 90% solution needs a 100% rewrite after 40-80% burn in bugs and error chasing? What once was a bit behind is now way behind with staffing issues. Sunk costs don’t create extra budget.

Do It Right The First Time doesn’t always apply, only mostly always. Some people are insecure and territorial, yeah, but some know what their job is.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#148

Post by jayd16 »

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 because concurrent design, QA, research etc push out the Gantt chart doesn't mean your meeting isn't useless.

In fact, deep pipelines don't even need to have bottlenecks to take time. Even still any given meeting could still be a waste of time depending on the meeting.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#150

Post by loeg »

nottorp wrote: post #132
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…

> 2. It's annoying and disruptive to be interrupted when doing work that requires deep focus. Steering a LLM also requires deep focus. Unless you want to end up on accidentally quadratic or have a CVE named after your project.

How can it? You prompt it, then wait minutes+ for it to come back. It's the opposite of flow state.
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