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The bottleneck was never the code

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Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#231

Post by Perz1val »

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…

What? Coding was escape from what that hypothetical engineer of yours disliked the most. Now there is less of it and ai hypers keep yapping about the job being no longer needed. Meanwhile it's just the fun part that was optimised out. Working hours stay the same, so it's more of the unfun activities. The job is worse, but we're told it's "solved". Bitching more makes sense, no?

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#232

Post by msteffen »

msteffen wrote: post #73
ftmootnomoat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

For that matter, here's a thread from a few days ago recommending the practice of scheduling status meetings for the purpose of pressuring the attendees to work on your project in addition to their other work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47906942

What hermit wouldn't love meetings that simultaneously insist that you do more while taking away time to do it, all to avoid adjusting a pollyanna quarterly plan and budget!

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#233

Post by Serhii-Set »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #49
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…

But the flow state wasn't just about typing code. The flow state was about understanding the problem , about loading it into your head so that you could "walk around in it" mentally, so that you could figure out that what really needed to happen was that module X needed to add a getter to value foo, that module Y needed to get foo and make a change based on the value, and that the key to making this all work was to a…

[dead]

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#234

Post by CodeMage »

ryandrake wrote: post #160
xquce wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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! I think a lot of HN truly believes that Software Developer is the only important role at their company. Software goes straight from the developer's brain, through his fingertips into the computer, and then on to the online store (run by nobody)…

> I think a lot of HN truly believes that Software Developer is the only important role at their company.

I doubt that. A lot of HN might have believed that some 10 years ago, perhaps, but most of those people have either matured or been driven away by the shift in the discourse.

I was one of the people who used to believe that, but the years of experience have taught me several important lessons that changed my mind. That change in attitude came both from my own failures and from having the rare privilege to work with people who were actually good at those other roles you listed.

> This is an exaggeration, but you see these themes all over the comment section.

And you'll keep seeing those comments, just like you'll keep seeing the comments about how developers are hypocritical divas. Those comments come from people's bad experiences.

Workplace political games are a thing. Unnecessary meetings and documents are a thing. Problematic, unprofessional developers are a thing.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#235

Post by lucasacosta_ »

doitLP wrote: post #177
kadhirvelm wrote: post #151

Totally agree, we wrote our own piece similar to this: https://productnow.ai/blogs/teams-that-coordinate I really think as code becomes cheap, misalignment between people, teams, and organizations is going to hurt a lot more, especially when everyone is trying to move at break neck speeds. I also think a big piece of this is human attention and inertia. Aka, why bother doing the hard work to coordinate with others wh…

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Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#236

Post by fmbb »

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…

> Obviously usage of something goes up when it gets cheaper.

Sure.

But is it not also obvious that when usage of a resource becomes more efficient, the price of that ”usage” becomes cheaper?

So usage goes up obviously because efficiency increases.

It is called a paradox because some people naively think that increasing efficiency is a good way to decrease consumption.

Almost everything that is called a ”paradox” is this obvious.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#237

Post by paldepind2 »

TheLudd wrote: post #107
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.

Jevons paradox starts with some resource being used more efficiently.

A classic example could be coal. The first steam engines used a ton of coal, but over time more efficient steam engines where created that used way less coal.

One might think that this caused the global coal usage to go down. But the opposite happened, as the overall cost of doing something with a steam engine went down.

Note, that the price of coal itself can remain fixed in this example. So Jevons principle is not (directly) about a resource changing in value.

If LLMs make codes cheaper to produce, then obviously more code will be produced. That's not an instance of Jevons paradox even though the article claims so.

You could say that LLMs means that we can create software with less of the resource that is human software engineers. So one might think that we'll need less software engineers in the future. If, on the other hand, we end up needing more software engineers, then that'll be an instance of Jevons paradox. But the article is not making that claim.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#238

Post by marcosdumay »

TheLudd wrote: post #107
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.

Yes. Jevon's paradox is that if we need less X to do a single Y, we end up using more X doing Y.

Anyway, it's an specific observation about a single X, Y pair. It some times happens with other things, but anybody claiming it's a universal rule don't know what they are talking about.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#239

Post by empath75 »

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 probably both things can be true. That all of those things can be actively harmful when they distract the most productive coders from coding, and become more useful when time at a keyboard isn't really the constraint for producing code any more and coordination becomes a more serious problem.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#240

Post by JohnMakin »

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 have seen this play out too IRL and I am really enjoying the schadenfreude.
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