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Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

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Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#21

Post by bluehatbrit »

I'm a hands on engineering leader for a team of about 20 engineers and I've been spending the past 6 months trying to get my team to understand just this.

On Friday we had a coffee hour to share how we've been working recently and they all seemed perplexed at the workflows I've been adopting. It seems natural to me as someone who's been a manager for some time now, but very alien to all those who've never gone down that path.

That's not to say my workflows are superior, but they're extremely different to some of my teams now. In reality it's just leaning heavily on things like prds, limiting communication between agents, etc.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#23

Post by mosura »

elktown wrote: post #17

Another 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.

We don’t have long before it is all made irrelevant so need to make one final dash for glory before it’s too late.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#24

Post by grebc »

indoorfish wrote: post #19
grebc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure it’s obvious reasons, but understandable, sure. When someone questions your credentials the default is to tell them to jump, whether that’s a good idea or not.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#26

Post by austin-cheney »

collinmcnulty wrote: post #15

Relatedly, 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.

Yes, the future of software as an institution, if there is any, is driven by the loudest voices. Those loudest voices are thus driven by selected personalities as opposed to any accomplishment or title. The people who are the highest achievers are rarely the loudest voices as they tend to be the people spending time solving real problems as opposed to the people who just talk about themselves, the forest for the trees.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#27

Post by arionhardison »

FrankWilhoit wrote: post #5

He cites Brooks as proving that communication friction is quadratic in headcount. The exponent does not need to be exactly, or even nearly, 2; 1 + epsilon is already fatal. This is very closely related to Coase's ceiling.

[dead]

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#28

Post by slopinthebag »

I don’t quite understand the management analogy. Agents aren’t people, they’re code generation machines. Part of managing is delegating and trusting the output of your employees without having to verify everything yourself. But if you’re “managing” an agent, how does that work? You can’t exactly hold an LLM responsible if it fucks something up.

Or are people really just yoloing and not even verifying that the code generation is correct? I know it’s a bit of a meme, but are people actually doing the meme in irl where there are actual consequences??

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#29

Post by kristianc »

austin-cheney wrote: post #26
collinmcnulty wrote: post #15

Relatedly, 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.

Yes, the future of software as an institution, if there is any, is driven by the loudest voices. Those loudest voices are thus driven by selected personalities as opposed to any accomplishment or title. The people who are the highest achievers are rarely the loudest voices as they tend to be the people spending time solving real problems as opposed to the people who just talk about themselves, the forest for the tree…

As a buddy in construction used to say, concrete erasers are expensive.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#30

Post by [deleted] »

bluehatbrit wrote: post #21

I'm a hands on engineering leader for a team of about 20 engineers and I've been spending the past 6 months trying to get my team to understand just this. On Friday we had a coffee hour to share how we've been working recently and they all seemed perplexed at the workflows I've been adopting. It seems natural to me as someone who's been a manager for some time now, but very alien to all those who've never gone down t…

[deleted]
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