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“Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

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Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#191

Post by dnautics »

suttontom wrote: post #64
dnautics wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nah. my company (not a tech company)'s stack is ai generated and it has created credible value.

It seems so obvious that a non-tech company can benefit hugely from AI for their bespoke use case, especially if no one in the company knew how to write code pre-AI. But it's also easy to put some planks down across a stream and call it a bridge, that doesn't mean it's built well, going to last, or that there's no longer a need for structural engineers and architects.

good news, the ceo of this non tech company has years of experience as a competent sofware dev

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#192

Post by hintymad »

prinny_ wrote: post #72

I believe there are some programming jobs in which the code is absolutely the easier part. Not all of us work in signal processing, integrated systems or have to push upstream to Linux kernel because the company we work for really needs a memory allocation optimization for its data centers. Navigating customer requirements and building something that satisfies both market's needs and company strategy can be an incred…

> Navigating customer requirements and building something that satisfies both market's needs and company strategy can be an incredibly difficult and frustrating problem to solve

True. And there is another angle: ownership. The author also said “having clarity on the priorities” boils down to “just tell me what to do and don't switch it up every two days”. This is like saying that a programming language designer does not own the spec of the language itself but just wants to write hte compiler. I find such altitude counterproductive. Case in point, many companies hire PMs for their internal infra org. I mean, shouldn't the engineers in the infra org know exactly what they design to build? If you don't want to own what to build, you end up letting someone else tell you what to do, except that the person is neither an expert nor even your user.

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#193

Post by ryan_n »

tikhonj wrote: post #62

Everybody saying "coding was never the hard part" is really telling on themselves. Coding was never "hard" because most organizations were absolutely unwilling to take on any technical work that was hard. That tells us about business strategy and culture rather than anything about the fundamentals of programming or technical work. The real conclusion is that programming is such a high-leverage activity that even tech…

> But also, there still is a ton of programming that is fundamentally difficult. That's not going anywhere either. And LLMs are useful there too, but they're currently nowhere near replacing the expertise needed to do novel and non-trivial technical work.

Genuine question and not trying to be snarky here, I am actually curious: what fields or types of programming does this apply too? I think I've read anecdotes online about people in fields I previously (a few years ago lol) thought "oh yea an llm will never be able to help with that" and now see articles about how llm's are doing just that.

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#194

Post by austin-cheney »

Code was never the hard part

I roll my eyes at this when thinking about the poor JavaScript developer that cannot write code without things like jquery or React.

If code were so easy there wouldn’t be so much bloat and slow garbage in the world.

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#195

Post by wbl »

hintymad wrote: post #192
prinny_ wrote: post #72

I believe there are some programming jobs in which the code is absolutely the easier part. Not all of us work in signal processing, integrated systems or have to push upstream to Linux kernel because the company we work for really needs a memory allocation optimization for its data centers. Navigating customer requirements and building something that satisfies both market's needs and company strategy can be an incred…

> Navigating customer requirements and building something that satisfies both market's needs and company strategy can be an incredibly difficult and frustrating problem to solve True. And there is another angle: ownership. The author also said “having clarity on the priorities” boils down to “just tell me what to do and don't switch it up every two days”. This is like saying that a programming language designer does…

The infra org has to also understand their internal customer!

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#196

Post by robertlagrant »

This is a bit of a false dichotomy. The thing that isn't code (at least in some people's minds) isn't "requirements analysis". It's architecture, data modeling, deployment, inter/intra-team communication, triaging, prioritising, code reviewing, testing. It's all of software development, and not simply writing lines of code (which in itself can be hard of course.)

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#197

Post by hintymad »

wbl wrote: post #195
hintymad wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Navigating customer requirements and building something that satisfies both market's needs and company strategy can be an incredibly difficult and frustrating problem to solve True. And there is another angle: ownership. The author also said “having clarity on the priorities” boils down to “just tell me what to do and don't switch it up every two days”. This is like saying that a programming language designer does…

The infra org has to also understand their internal customer!

And that should be the engineers' job instead of outsourcing it to PMs who do not even use any of the infra services -- I'm not insulting the PMs, of course, but to state a fact. Infra is used to serve the internal engineering teams, and the PMs don't code, so they don't have a need to use the infra.

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#198

Post by seemaze »

woodruffw wrote: post #88
pdhborges wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Touch billing, touch medical data, be at a B2B company that needs to catch all the ISOs to have a chance to land bigger contracts. I don't think it's uncommon.

It might be an unpopular option, but I think the regulatory regimes that control medical and financial privacy as they interact with software are significantly lighter touch than e.g. the regimes that control material quality for bridges and tunnels, much less airplanes.

Not in tech, so does the authority granting license to proceed do code reviews?

Because when I submit building plans, they are manually reviewed and approved (or denied) by registered architects, engineers, and planners employed by the authority for just this purpose.

Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

#200

Post by snickerbockers »

>If coding is easy, was Carmack just at the right place at the right time?

Yes, it's fairly axiomic that he was "just at the right place at the right time" because there are dozens of modern "boomer shooters" on steam that are not nearly as successful as DOOM or Quake. You might counterargue that its always harder to do something thats never been done before but that would only be a tacit admission that coding actually was the easy part in that case.

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