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Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

karimjedda.com

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Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#211

Post by j45 »

glimshe wrote: post #67
j45 wrote: post #3

Software development has always evolved. Sometimes slowly, sometimes quicker. LLMs have brought a different unlock, and for everything we're seeing become easier, it allows people learn to use the tools to take on solving problems that couldn't be approached before.

Your short post speaks of exactly what people should be talking about. Due to the panic related to job replacement, not many are talking about the new frontiers. Vibe coding is boring because it does the same faster/cheaper. I'm more interested in the things we couldn't do before but we now can because there's a crazy savant a few keystrokes away.

Appreciate it.

The focus is placed by those who ask question and have a platform, and most don't have a tech background let alone implementing tech or software in businesses.

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#212

Post by leptons »

thih9 wrote: post #197
leptons wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jQuery is still used by approximately 7.78 million of the top 10 million websites. The people touting "modern frameworks" are in a niche and they don't even realize it.

Cherry picked usage stats are off topic. The fact that 90% of Fortune 500 companies rely on COBOL[1] doesn’t make other languages a niche. [1]: https://www.rocketsoftware.com/en-us/insights/what-is-cobol

>The fact that 90% of Fortune 500 companies rely on COBOL[1] doesn’t make other languages a niche.

Well that's some cherry picking. And really off-topic, because nobody here mentioned COBOL.

If someone were shitting on COBOL here, it would be right to point out that COBOL is still getting the job done at 90% of fortune 500 companies.

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#213

Post by mgaunard »

swat535 wrote: post #170
mgaunard wrote: post #9

The cost of code actually increased; code debt is being accumulated faster than we can clean it up.

Business never cared about code debt, LLM helps building features faster into production and from their POV, that's all that matters. If your engineers are "wasting time" optimizing artisan code whilst the competition has released their next version, they'll be told to use AI. The other reality is that by the time you figure out the right abstraction, business has already pivoted, or your feature will be rewritten ,…

Features aren't that important; what's important is capabilities.

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#214

Post by twister2920 »

lordnacho wrote: post #165
twister2920 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well yeah, and I've automated my workflows completely. I don't have the problems I used to have. If you haven't caught on to the new way of working, well, that's a skill issue... I use LLMs, but they're just a tool in the workflow, and I make sure to review the output. they might remember semicolons but they make much more pernicious mistakes that are harder to detect

But are those pernicious issues more common than what you would write yourself? Keeping in mind that you will get your LLM code back a lot sooner and have more time left over to check for them?

yes

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#215

Post by raffraffraff »

treetalker wrote: post #69
raffraffraff wrote: post #40

My take, as a non-coder (well, not software engineering, I write 'code' but it's infra, and utilities in go/bash/pythong)... I work at a company where the biggest problems are not 'writing code', they are: - Organising teams - Designing the system - Prioritisation of work The fuckups that we make on a daily bases are not 'code errors' they are failures in THOSE three things. I'll go into detail if anyone cares.

Generative language models have helped me most by drawing my attention to the importance of context, communicative compression, prompting, comprehension, coherence, and coordination in the domain of human groups.

Same. Our engineers have failed to convince absolutely clueless executives that service / code ownership is critical, you can't just allocate 100% of your engineering team to "roaming around the dungheap adding features" because they want everybody to focus on features. In an organisation where nobody owns anything, nobody cares about anything, nobody has the autonomy to fix anything. Imagine a huge wobbling Jenga tower with dozens of engineers all trying to pull out a block, put it on top and back the fuck away quickly, hopping it falls over after someone else touches it.

Yes this is real. And it's hell. And now all of those Jenga players are AI powered.

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#216

Post by cindyllm »

raffraffraff wrote: post #215
treetalker wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generative language models have helped me most by drawing my attention to the importance of context, communicative compression, prompting, comprehension, coherence, and coordination in the domain of human groups.

Same. Our engineers have failed to convince absolutely clueless executives that service / code ownership is critical, you can't just allocate 100% of your engineering team to "roaming around the dungheap adding features" because they want everybody to focus on features. In an organisation where nobody owns anything, nobody cares about anything, nobody has the autonomy to fix anything. Imagine a huge wobbling Jenga to…

[dead]

Re: Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

#217

Post by ParityBear »

aivengo_mk wrote: post #201

For you as supervisor not much has changed. Before you had juniors not having full context, hesitating to ask, focused on code. Now lying agents, pretending to have phd grade but taking dumb choices here and there. Trust but verify as Lenin was saying.

Nothing has changed. I worked under this guy at some point in the last year while working at a very questionable cryptocurrency company with a very questionable CEO (doesn't narrow it down too much).

The author of this article was awful. Pure toxicity. He gatekept all information and no one under him had any context until the CEO would complain and he would blame his underlings. He would set teams working against each other on the same problem with neither team knowing. Many people working in his vicinity quit. He would have tirades in open group chats threatening to fire people outside of his department. I saw him trying to get views for this post on LinkedIn so I had to come and check the comments.

Seeing this article is pretty funny though. Seeing "Shield the team from the business." is pretty funny not only because he would gatekeep context, but also because the company he has worked at for the last several years has no business model. It is a pet project for a founder who made too much money for his own good during the cryptocurrency boom. And since the author has been there the value has dropped something like 95% or more.

His department was outputting so much AI slop proofs-of-concept and then handing it off to other departments to maintain, and then passing off blame for future issues while taking the short term wins.

I am so happy I am out now.

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