There’s a good list of reasons why we do this, but it leaves out the biggest one, at least for me: building stuff is fun. Reinventing stuff is fun. It’s the most natural hammer to reach for whenever I encounter a nail. Not necessarily the best, but such is life.
Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history
11–20 of 124 posts
Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history
#12Seems like this could be categorized as yet another reason why software developers are not engineers.
Absolutely. Engineering is defined by it learning from history, it's an art build up from thousands of years of human attempts to alter the world around them. In a modern sense engineers inevitably require a certain amount of schooling, certification, and most critically of all professional and ethical standards.
Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history
#13[flagged]
Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history
#14Man I love and agree with nearly everything about this post except that I wouldn't take the advice to follow waterfall or PMBOK literally.
The post laments that it's hard to find Dr. Royce's original waterfall paper. That's probably true, I have my copy from a compilation book “Ideas that Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science” edited by Lewis [1].
I do agree that it's important to do things like scope out your demands of your AI agent, check-in on progress, give as clear a requirement and test cases as you can. But you've always been able to do that with agile methods, and LLMs are fast enough that you don't need to go full waterfall (and if anything it would be counter productive).
Dr. Royce's paper talks about literally thousands of pages of documentation being needed for any reasonably useful system. Good luck fitting that into even a 1M context window :P.
But the main point to thesis, that you can't just let your coders loose to do whatever and expect the right results even pre-dates Fred Brooks. I'd argue it goes all the way back to the beginning, to the comments about Baggage's computing machine where British politicians asked if it would generate the correct answers even with incorrect inputs.
The answer then is the same answer today: of course not, and expecting anything different is foolishness.
Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history
#15Relatedly, I fully expect the software business to fail to learn from (nearly) literally every other industry how to operate when your marginal costs are no longer zero. It drives me nuts the number of people in software who think that people in other industries are slow because they’re just not as smart as us, rather than because when it takes months to get a cast part made, it better be right the first time.
Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history
#16Seems like this could be categorized as yet another reason why software developers are not engineers.
I never understood why actual engineers(eg. Civil) have not complained more that programmers/coders stole that title.
Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history
#17Another obnoxious behaviour I’ve observed lately, is trying to attach whatever pre-existing pet methodologies one had to the AI-hype bandwagon like some sort of personal vindication orgy.
Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history
#18[deleted]
Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history
#19Seems like this could be categorized as yet another reason why software developers are not engineers.
I never understood why actual engineers(eg. Civil) have not complained more that programmers/coders stole that title.
they have, loudly and repeatedly, it doesn't really make it very far on HN for obvious reasons.
Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history
#20> You can make lots of money by making something appear novel and undiscovered, and consequently make yourself sound smart and cutting edge. This is pretty much the crux of it. It's very similar to the strategy of undercutting a market with VC subsidies until it dies and can be replaced.
Sounds like Apple.