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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

#91

Post by gopher_space »

kristianc wrote: post #29
austin-cheney wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Speaking of which, are you done with my cat5-stretcher?

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#92

Post by Fordec »

psunavy03 wrote: post #50
Fordec wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pot…

> obvious to anyone who hasn't swallowed orthodoxy Agile development completely whole. What? One of the first principles in doing Lean and Agile correctly is limiting Work in Progress and avoiding context switching whenever possible.

And our in house "Agile Practitioners" (their job title) pushed this to a state where the next four tickets in a task get broken down to four hour long pieces of work go to four different people, regardless of their context or skill set rather than what two years ago was what one person just owned and did in a day. Work in progress is minimized by the metrics, but it doubled the overall man hours. And the Ops Director gets promoted on that WIP metric while half the team quit citing the changes due to the added communication burden and lack of ownership.

I'm thinking some people are approaching agentic development in the same manner, splitting work up across agents too aggressively, giving each agent new context/upfront plans, when the one session could have done the whole problem in the one context window.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#93

Post by wat10000 »

fragmede wrote: post #88
wat10000 wrote: post #11

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.

Finding a thing, using it, finding out it sucks, and then making your own version that's better and doesn't suck, is an entirely natural instinct.

It is, but we often skip over those first three parts and go straight to making our own version.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#95

Post by DangitBobby »

wat10000 wrote: post #11

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.

I try to explain this on every post that complains about software reinventors. Why should people from the 60s and 70s get to have all the fun? So far my efforts have been in vain.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#96

Post by robocat »

cush wrote: post #47

That’s because most Software Engineers aren’t Engineers, they’re computer science majors. It’s a completely different discipline.

That's a strawman argument, because most engineers aren't engineers. The vast majority of engineers have no consequences for their shite. Neither is certification a panacea against bad engineers.

Watch mechanical engineers design plastic rubbish.

Watch some electronic engineers design circuits that don't work.

Watch some geotech engineers make up overspecified bullshit: because they're paid per hour and their work is often just a glorified tickbox (where they have no real consequences for most of their failure risk).

Even with egregious design failures by engineers, they often get away with it for a variety of reasons. A building collapsed due to the Christchurch earthquakes - failures by different engineers with little harm to them.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#97

Post by satvikpendem »

cush wrote: post #49
satvikpendem wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they care? And a lot of them turned to coding anyway.

Because Engineering is an incredibly rigorous discipline and title that requires so much work to obtain. It’s like a massage therapist calling themself a doctor. Computer Science isn’t Engineering.

Sure but out of my engineer friends I've never heard of them sneering a programmer calling themselves and engineer, they literally don't care and just worry about their own job. It seems only programmers seem to care about their lack of a proper engineer title.

Re: Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history

#100

Post by defrost »

brazukadev wrote: post #99
yahway wrote: post #83

Software developers aren't real engineers; such an ironic title.

food engineers are considered real engineers. There is no way food engineering is more engineering than software engineering.

The majority of modern software engineering doesn't have human illness and or death as a consequence of failure.

That's front and centre as a concern in Food, Chemical, Civil, Electrical, Mechanical etc. engineering disciplines.

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