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Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

horn.gg

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Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#31

Post by Fordec »

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…

Out of curiosity, what was the path that the engineers have been taking? The limiting communication between agents to my mind is obvious to anyone who hasn't swallowed orthodoxy Agile development completely whole. And in my experience the people who have, are rarely the devs. Context switching, between agents, people or whoever, require ramp up time to relearn context. It's always slower and more expensive, other potential upsides about long term training or developers being more replaceable notwithstanding. But no agent gets long term training, not in a 1M context window.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#32

Post by indoorfish »

JauntyHatAngle wrote: post #25
ares623 wrote: post #13

[flagged]

What? The joke saying about that is "those who can't teach, teach gym". Never heard anyone say that about software engineering.

The joke at my school was when the engineering students failed (mech, EE, civ) out, they went into business, when they failed out of business they went into software engineering.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#34

Post by random3 »

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.

Yet this is part correct, part wrong. Indeed every industry has some unique challenges that are not directly solvable. However, while a cast is absurdly expensive, the problem is being solved in large part by software in the FDM (3D printing) space and it's changing how things are built.

edit: this doesn't invalidate the OP thesis, which I strongly agree with. Except that it's not just engineers, this is a more general thing across many fields.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#36

Post by skydhash »

As someone that has studied engineering, designing a solution is very different than managing the resources around the design and implementation of that solution. Books like The Mythical Man Month and Making Things Happen deals with the management side, (from a team level) and The Pragmatic Programmer is from a personal level.

But TFA is ignoring the actual engineering side where you have to grapple with some primitives and assemble them in a way that do something valuable. And so in a way that is cost effective. That part is always answered by hand waves.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#37

Post by II2II »

JauntyHatAngle wrote: post #25
ares623 wrote: post #13

[flagged]

What? The joke saying about that is "those who can't teach, teach gym". Never heard anyone say that about software engineering.

Among many teachers it is, "those who can't teach become education consultants/researchers."

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#38

Post by sublinear »

indoorfish wrote: post #32
JauntyHatAngle wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? The joke saying about that is "those who can't teach, teach gym". Never heard anyone say that about software engineering.

The joke at my school was when the engineering students failed (mech, EE, civ) out, they went into business, when they failed out of business they went into software engineering.

And what happened when they failed out of "software engineering"?

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#39

Post by ares623 »

JauntyHatAngle wrote: post #25
ares623 wrote: post #13

[flagged]

What? The joke saying about that is "those who can't teach, teach gym". Never heard anyone say that about software engineering.

That's the joke. That software engineering is the new "teach gym"

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#40

Post by to11mtm »

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.

IDK, I think it's been a bit of a (reverse?) bell curve of sorts.

30+ years ago, You had to be a -lot- more careful about how you handled releasing software. Your stuff was in boxes on shelves, most people didn't have internet access to 'download an update' so fixing anything had a long tail support cost (i.e. paying for the media containing the fix and shipping).

But there's a fine line. As an example, If your shop is having a vendor do brand new stuff, -compartmentalized from your other stuff-, using technologies that are actually out of support vs an in-support version is a free/zero effort update versus using the outdated stuff... Something went wrong on the management side.

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