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Is this sustainable?

jamiehurst.co.uk

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Re: Is this sustainable?

#51

Post by lstodd »

1dom wrote: post #47

> When I returned from five months of paternity leave in early 2024, the org needed someone at my level to lead GenAI work in developer experience and I was the available person. It wasn't a bet so much as an opportunity I recognised when it showed up. I took enough time to satisfy myself that this wave was different from previous hype cycles before I committed, but once I did, I had to drop most of the rest of my wo…

> The only thing standing in the way of greedy hype chasing CEOs and a post apocolyptic wasteland is ...

Nothing.

Either you quit outright, or ride the flames to the bottom, depending on personal ethics to cash-out potential ratio.

It's not an engineer's job to fix upper management delusions, and engineering is poorly equipped for that in any case.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#52

Post by customguy »

customguy wrote: post #25
andyferris wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a funny observation, apologies in advance: I am rewatching Stargate SG-1 with my children right now and cannot read this comment except in the voice of Teal’c. In the previous episode the team was in 1969 on a hippy bus. My advice is to chill out a little…

I'm just gobsmacked at how self-absorbed this is. I was listening to some obscure band you wouldn't know with a few chicks I met roller blading last week, and I can't help but read your comment while imagining the first few notes of the second song playing. After that we watched The Simpsons and my advice is to not eat a cow, man.

But on second consideration, I also want to apologize to you. It's not that your comment in a vacuum is so terribly, incredibly self-absorbed. It's the cumulative effect of many little such comments over time, which I pay way too much attention to, and you could say your comment "triggered" me and I let all that frustration out in one solid chunk of snark. "Gobsmacked" is really the wrong word for that. I sometimes am, but your comment isn't the one.

The truth is, I still don't know how to put it more nicely, but please have the generosity to take my lampooning of your comment as the time honored tradition of whatever you call it when you point out the flaw in something by driving it to an absurd extreme. It does have a place, but my eye-rolling "being gobsmacked" was a bit too much indignation. tbh when I wrote that I thought I ought to get flak for that, but fuck it, I'm annoyed, I'll say it anyway. But I didn't get flak so now I feel the need to calibrate it myself a little.

In short, I think you're wrong, that comment was bleh, but so was mine. Have a great weekend and much fun showing your kid stuff you both enjoy.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#53

Post by 1dom »

lstodd wrote: post #51
1dom wrote: post #47

> When I returned from five months of paternity leave in early 2024, the org needed someone at my level to lead GenAI work in developer experience and I was the available person. It wasn't a bet so much as an opportunity I recognised when it showed up. I took enough time to satisfy myself that this wave was different from previous hype cycles before I committed, but once I did, I had to drop most of the rest of my wo…

> The only thing standing in the way of greedy hype chasing CEOs and a post apocolyptic wasteland is ... Nothing. Either you quit outright, or ride the flames to the bottom, depending on personal ethics to cash-out potential ratio. It's not an engineer's job to fix upper management delusions, and engineering is poorly equipped for that in any case.

> It's not an engineer's job to fix upper management delusions, and engineering is poorly equipped for that in any case.

What is the job of engineering leadership in your mind then, if not to take requirements from the business and convert them into technical solutions which improve things for the business? The requirement here was "AI to improve DX" the outcome was developers lives are worse in many creative and future impacting ways.

I sincerely would love to know if the author or their employer consider what they've done as successful or not.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#54

Post by daxfohl »

simonw wrote: post #41

This piece is really good: > The cost of building has collapsed, but the cost of aligning organisationally has not. If anything, it's gone up. When three different teams can each produce a working solution to the same problem in the time it used to take to write a proposal, the bottleneck moves from engineering to coordination. We're still figuring out how to productively use coding agents as individuals, the next ch…

One mitigating factor is the increased productivity leads to consolidation, aka layoffs, meaning fewer people to align with. (Leading to further increased productivity, more consolidation, and so on ... Whether this is a virtuous cycle or a vicious cycle depends on perspective).

Re: Is this sustainable?

#55

Post by lstodd »

1dom wrote: post #53
lstodd wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing standing in the way of greedy hype chasing CEOs and a post apocolyptic wasteland is ... Nothing. Either you quit outright, or ride the flames to the bottom, depending on personal ethics to cash-out potential ratio. It's not an engineer's job to fix upper management delusions, and engineering is poorly equipped for that in any case.

> It's not an engineer's job to fix upper management delusions, and engineering is poorly equipped for that in any case. What is the job of engineering leadership in your mind then, if not to take requirements from the business and convert them into technical solutions which improve things for the business? The requirement here was "AI to improve DX" the outcome was developers lives are worse in many creative and fut…

If the requirements are self-contradicting while at the same time being non-negotiable their job is to quit.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#56

Post by faangguyindia »

I know a few guys here who were doing sysadmin, devops, frontend jobs for a few years in India and now they are driving a taxi in India. AI took their job. There have been mass layoffs by foreign companies in India; fewer outsourcing contracts are flowing to India.

As a result, many service companies are moving to product businesses.

will it also happen to developers in other countries? I've no idea.

When I tell this to others, they go in disbelief, but people don't care till their own job is gone.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#57

Post by carlosjobim »

skydhash wrote: post #43
carlosjobim wrote: post #34

Thinking that memorizing insane code rules is being skilled in making software is like thinking that memorizing all the generals' birth days is being skilled in warfare. Before AI, trying to program even a simple thing was an exercise in frustration from rules that had only been put in place by programmers to protect their own jobs and make it as difficult as possible for a normal person to develop. Oh! You mixed tab…

> memorizing insane code rules is being skilled in making software That’s on the level of complaining about having to learn music theory to play the piano, or to learn grammar to write a report. Or having to learn the road rules to drive a car on the street.

Have you ever seen a police report? They are the people who write most reports of any profession, and usually they are full of grammar and spelling mistakes.

But I understand that the majority of hackers here think that spelling mistakes in a report means that somebody is bad at their job as a police officer. And I know that a good portion of hackers here think that a suspect should have all charges dismissed if a police officer has mixed tabs and spaces when typing his final report, or forgot a semicolon. Or used ' where he should have used ".

Re: Is this sustainable?

#58

Post by tomjakubowski »

neuroblaster wrote: post #19
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

black swan is not a reference to the badness of blackness but the unlikelihood of something contradicting volumes of previous data. Thus it can change industry in a good way or a bad way, because the black swan is unprecedented and unpredicted, its consequences and their nature is unsettled.

Traditionally in economics black swan is an unpredictable negative event. The only thing that is unsettled here still is how many more people will lose their jobs and how much cumulative loss prisoner's dilemma will generate. I saw random people on Internet suggesting to piggyback this disaster and dip into the crazy money that it is "generating", but in a zero-sum game somebody has to lose.

As I understand it, it's something unpredictable and high-consequence, not necessarily negative. The origins are in Hume's problem of induction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

Re: Is this sustainable?

#59

Post by jon-wood »

NewLogic wrote: post #37
nathanielks wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead there’ll be a much stronger focus on teams of generalists, or combined teams of specialists from different fields, working on a feature or product end to end. > Coordination has in my experience always been the big bottleneck in getting anything done I work at a large enterprise you've heard of. They're currently re-organizing the product area to remove currently-static two pizza teams into an amorphous blo…

Where does the feature go for long term ownership? That throws you build it you own it out the window. We are going to get more time for documentation and handover right, right? Engineers are famous for generating good documentation.

Some places I've worked in the past had a rotating support team who were tasked with dealing with bugs/small feature requests/incidents for a period. I'm not sure that's the right answer because nobody wants to be on the team that's just doing scutwork even if its just for a month or two but it is an option.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#60

Post by esafak »

simonw wrote: post #41

This piece is really good: > The cost of building has collapsed, but the cost of aligning organisationally has not. If anything, it's gone up. When three different teams can each produce a working solution to the same problem in the time it used to take to write a proposal, the bottleneck moves from engineering to coordination. We're still figuring out how to productively use coding agents as individuals, the next ch…

Different teams could already step on each others' toes before AI. If there is confusion over which team ought to develop something it might indicate an organizational problem. Crucially, if you ship something you must be willing to maintain it.
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