Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)

brucefwebster.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 55 posts

Re: The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)

#11

Post by iwontberude »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #7

It's thinkpieces like this that make me believe that IT professionals specifically and white collar workers generally would benefit greatly from a mandatory 24 month stint on a construction crew. One of the most important lessons any job foreman can learn is that every crew needs at least one lame duck. A single talented carpenter with an energetic but otherwise totally unskilled helper can accomplish more in a shift…

Fuckin’ A man… fuckin’ A.

I actually have no idea what working construction is like, but I imagine it’s hell. I hear about jackhammering causing permanent damage to people’s nerves and all sorts of random accidents.

Re: The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)

#12

Post by lolinder »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #7

It's thinkpieces like this that make me believe that IT professionals specifically and white collar workers generally would benefit greatly from a mandatory 24 month stint on a construction crew. One of the most important lessons any job foreman can learn is that every crew needs at least one lame duck. A single talented carpenter with an energetic but otherwise totally unskilled helper can accomplish more in a shift…

This hasn't been my experience—the truly talented developers that I've worked with do more of the foundation tasks than the "salt" developers do. They're the ones who upgrade libraries when it's time, fix Jenkins when something goes wrong, and respond to a page and solve it, on top of the rest of their work. Meanwhile they're also automating the repetitive tasks in order to free up their own time and make it possible for them to move on to other things.

Automation is so easy in software development that your analogy to construction becomes pretty weak—we don't need someone moving around ladders because when we realize that's a need we just write a script for it.

Re: The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)

#13

Post by quickthrower2 »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #7

It's thinkpieces like this that make me believe that IT professionals specifically and white collar workers generally would benefit greatly from a mandatory 24 month stint on a construction crew. One of the most important lessons any job foreman can learn is that every crew needs at least one lame duck. A single talented carpenter with an energetic but otherwise totally unskilled helper can accomplish more in a shift…

Hold on! The construction analogy doesn’t apply because in a lot of code bases, probably most there are very few menial tasks. Some code bases need IQ 120 + to do anything non trivial in and maybe even higher.

So there are menial tasks, but menial like “yeah just redraft this architectural drawing for me mate, to take account of the new 2021 fire regs, I got actual brainy stuff to get on with”.

Pairing senior and junior devs works. But not because the junior is an idiot, but because they have stuff to learn and raw talent and can figure stiff out. They probably already know how to code well from their passion or maybe bootcamps or interning. Not from university usually unless there is lot of coursework.

I am not saying construction workers are idiots. But I am saying the OP article is implying the worst employees are left by this dead sea effect. Are you saying you can absorb untalented people on work sites. In dev teams they slow things down it would be better to pay some of them garden leave.

Re: The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)

#16

Post by [deleted] »

cannonpr wrote: post #9
forgetfreeman wrote: post #7

It's thinkpieces like this that make me believe that IT professionals specifically and white collar workers generally would benefit greatly from a mandatory 24 month stint on a construction crew. One of the most important lessons any job foreman can learn is that every crew needs at least one lame duck. A single talented carpenter with an energetic but otherwise totally unskilled helper can accomplish more in a shift…

Yet I’ve worked in two types of places, the ones that had a lot of menial labourers and thus lots of shuffling of stairs and carrying of nail buckets, and in places that had very few to no menial labourers and just automated away the menial tasks or designed the systems to never need menial labour in the first place. If you want to keep the metaphor some plasterers use ladders, others use stilts. In any case plenty o…

[deleted]

Re: The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)

#17

Post by arwhatever »

trashtensor wrote: post #6

I've job hopped a lot over the years and now i make about 30x what i did at my first software job. Now I'm sticking around though despite some of the craziness that i'd prefer not to deal with mostly just to prove to myself i can stick around at a job for more than 2 years.

I’ve done much the same, but I’m curious if you have any other insights to share?

I’ve mostly settled into a place with a good pay rate-to-work expectations ratio, but I’ve also contemplated optimizing for pay alone.

Re: The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)

#18

Post by 082349872349872 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #13
forgetfreeman wrote: post #7

It's thinkpieces like this that make me believe that IT professionals specifically and white collar workers generally would benefit greatly from a mandatory 24 month stint on a construction crew. One of the most important lessons any job foreman can learn is that every crew needs at least one lame duck. A single talented carpenter with an energetic but otherwise totally unskilled helper can accomplish more in a shift…

Hold on! The construction analogy doesn’t apply because in a lot of code bases, probably most there are very few menial tasks. Some code bases need IQ 120 + to do anything non trivial in and maybe even higher. So there are menial tasks, but menial like “yeah just redraft this architectural drawing for me mate, to take account of the new 2021 fire regs, I got actual brainy stuff to get on with”. Pairing senior and jun…

To be specific on the garden leave: "[run to the truck] for some nails" is easy to formulate yet takes effort to do. The majority of the effort for most coding tasks is the formulation, and by the time you've explained to the lame duck how to do what needs to be done, and checked that they actually did it, it would've been easier to have done it yourself.

(were one to have suitable lame duck tasks, how would wetware lame ducks compete in an LLM world?)

Re: The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)

#19

Post by forgetfreeman »

lolinder wrote: post #12
forgetfreeman wrote: post #7

It's thinkpieces like this that make me believe that IT professionals specifically and white collar workers generally would benefit greatly from a mandatory 24 month stint on a construction crew. One of the most important lessons any job foreman can learn is that every crew needs at least one lame duck. A single talented carpenter with an energetic but otherwise totally unskilled helper can accomplish more in a shift…

This hasn't been my experience—the truly talented developers that I've worked with do more of the foundation tasks than the "salt" developers do. They're the ones who upgrade libraries when it's time, fix Jenkins when something goes wrong, and respond to a page and solve it, on top of the rest of their work. Meanwhile they're also automating the repetitive tasks in order to free up their own time and make it possible…

I see y'all over there pretending lifers in your average IT department don't routinely make a career bunker out of legacy support among other odious pursuits despite the author explicitly pointing it out. In any case, if the department manager isn't tasking folks at their level of competence to extract maximum utility that's a failure on their part.

Re: The Wetware Crisis: The Dead Sea Effect (2008)

#20

Post by forgetfreeman »

iwontberude wrote: post #11
forgetfreeman wrote: post #7

It's thinkpieces like this that make me believe that IT professionals specifically and white collar workers generally would benefit greatly from a mandatory 24 month stint on a construction crew. One of the most important lessons any job foreman can learn is that every crew needs at least one lame duck. A single talented carpenter with an energetic but otherwise totally unskilled helper can accomplish more in a shift…

Fuckin’ A man… fuckin’ A. I actually have no idea what working construction is like, but I imagine it’s hell. I hear about jackhammering causing permanent damage to people’s nerves and all sorts of random accidents.

Having worked extensively in construction and IT (including a couple decades spent writing code) I have to say construction is a much more enjoyable and rewarding career. Pay and benefits are horrible though.
Post reply on HN