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The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

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Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#111

Post by KaiserPro »

This is certainly an opinion.

But, I would gently point out that people are actively looking to move away from github because its unreliably

People hate shit when its not working, we are in a bubble where people allow AI products to have shit outcomes, because they either sound human, or do amazing things most of the time (generate that image, sort out that spreadsheet, generate that code or answer that question)

Right now a lot of people are designing https://www.wired.com/2014/07/homer-simpson-car/ thee homer simpson car.

Because, ironically, there is lots of money about to subsidise anything with an AI sheen (how very ZIRP) people are making all sorts of shit with it. Some times it produces value. A lot of the time it doesn't.

If we take a step away from SWE opinion and talked to the product users, I think you'll find they just want that one feature they use your thing to work, they want those bugs to be fixed, and they want your product to work when they need it. They don't give a shit about AI, they fucking hate your redesign, and they really really get pissed off when you move stuff about and re-name it.

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#112

Post by KaiserPro »

shermantanktop wrote: post #40
loeg wrote: post #2

> Having half of the company’s engineers enmeshed in an endless loop of proposing changes and being told no was totally fine - they didn’t need to be productive anyway, and this way they weren’t impacting business-critical systems. Well, it's a take. This is pretty cynical.

There are many stories of FAANG hiring during that era for the purpose of denying talent to competitors. But now that you hired them, what will they do? And how will you keep them from creating problems? It sounds cynical in retrospect; at the time the same set of facts were explained differently, in a way that didn’t hurt people feelings.

> It sounds cynical in retrospect;

At the FAANG I was at, we were pushed to interview interview interview, and the company tripled in size in two years.

We constantly questioned the motive for more engineers, when we had plenty already, constantly seeking alignment. The rationale was more engineers meant we could make more products more quickly.

It never worked, and caused huge headaches that never really went away. It didn't help that team size was made a specific goal of a number of VPs. So it because a goal to grow team size, rather than a business need

And because the VPs were doing it, a whole bunch of people down the hill started copying then, using team size as a forcing function for power.

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#113

Post by rsanek »

What else will we blame interest rates for? I believe we're applying it as an explanation for far too many things. It is but one factor of many changing the mechanics of tech since ~2020: AI coding; big tech capex spending on AI; pandemic over-hiring hangover (mostly done); slowing growth of digital ad spending; TCJA section 174 (partly repealled, but still a thing).

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#114

Post by KaiserPro »

breckenedge wrote: post #10

I agree with this take for experienced and capable engineering teams. Three times over the last three years, I have told my senior engineers to skip code review, and nothing catastrophic happened, and recovery from bugs was rapid. Three times I have been told by engineering management to reimplement code review. Now that management is either gone or about to be gone.

New CEO walks into the office for the first day. Looks at the budget to see what they can do to "Make a mark"

[Budget proposal officer]: "Here is the new cleaning budget"

[CEO]: "looks around the office, the office is clean, why do we need cleaners? much less expensive cleaners"

[Budget proposal officer]: "The cleaners keep the office clean though"

[CEO]: "Nonsense! I read a substack about this, lets get rid of the cleaners"

//Six months later in an ALL hands//

[CEO]: "Look I know that we have had issues, The washing facilities were sub standard, and in some cases people were poisoned by poor hygene. We have insistuted a new mandatory training called `keeping the office clean, you're the first link in the chain` to help keep everyone happy and healthy"

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#115

Post by Adiqq »

bijowo1676 wrote: post #38

Just-say-no is a Quality Control mechanism. You need someone to say: this shit is not going to prod, unless its value is obvious to everyone

I believe quality control is a customer-facing concept and customers aren't who employers optimize for.

This is what the original article and most comments are missing here in my opinion. Theories of value matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_(economics)#Theories . To some degree I might agree with subjective value theory, so in essence everyone values things differently.

However as a framework it describes outcomes without being able to critique them, so whatever happens in a market gets called efficient by definition, including monopoly rents, regulatory capture and the steady drift of returns from labor to capital.

In my opinion labor theory of value describes the underlying relation correctly. The fundamental relation is between employer and employee and the structural goal of that relation becomes extraction of surplus. Customers and product quality enter only as the means through which surplus gets realized.

Once you see it this way, the just-say-no engineer situation makes sense without bringing ZIRP into it. They were doing customer-facing work, defending product quality, inside a structure that doesn't actually want it. They were tolerated, not central. When tolerance shrank, so did they. Good products are incidental to extraction, sometimes useful for it, sometimes in the way.

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#116

Post by nilirl »

rib3ye wrote: post #64

> Worse still, the AI tooling mostly works. It’s not (yet) causing any kind of catastrophe. The code isn’t quite as clean, and it’s a bit less well-understood, but it’s good enough And there it is.

That line stuck out to me too.

Engineers have known that bad engineering cultures cause tiny errors and imprecise code to compound into systemic problems.

Why is this suddenly not a problem? If your AI agent is wrong 5% of the time, what do you think happens when you run it a 1000 times?

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#117

Post by imtringued »

praptak wrote: post #13

The problem with this kind of armchair economy is that you can argue both ways. "End of ZIRP and the raise of just-say-no engineers": with capital being more expensive companies need to invest it wisely, therefore the need the judgement of the just-say-no engineer to avoid blowing it on unnecessary stuff.

Higher interest rates indicate higher urgency, meaning short term investments with fast payoffs. Throw in LLMs that play into that urgency and you get a mass production of AI slop. It doesn't matter if the AI project is a failure, since it failed fast enough to go and do something else. Doing the right thing from the get go is something that only matters for long term projects with significant initial investment.

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#118

Post by imtringued »

lmm wrote: post #12

There's no reason for engineers to be under more pressure to accept technical debt (which is what we're really talking about with the yes-or-no framing) after the end of ZIRP. Quite the opposite: right now debt is expensive and programmers are cheap, it's a good time to have high quality standards and build robust infrastructure that will position you to catch the next growth wave. It really is AI (or rather AI hype)…

>Quite the opposite: right now debt is expensive and programmers are cheap, it's a good time to have high quality standards and build robust infrastructure that will position you to catch the next growth wave.

Uhm, no? You got it exactly backwards. Tech debt isn't the same as interest payments, tech debt is a future productivity decline, whereas interest payments require you to pay more than the initial money you borrowed.

If debt is expensive, then your goal is to pay it off quickly, since debt scales with the remaining principal and grows with interest. This means that you want to cut corners everywhere and incur tech debt. You do not want a long term investment in high quality standards and build robust infrastructure. Doing that will delay the payoff day. Each early payments reduce the principal, which reduces future interest payments.

In other words, it's a terrible time to have high quality standards and build robust infrastructure. There also won't be a "next growth wave", because the growth wave is now. You're about to miss it if you invest in the long term.

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#120

Post by yfw »

praptak wrote: post #13

The problem with this kind of armchair economy is that you can argue both ways. "End of ZIRP and the raise of just-say-no engineers": with capital being more expensive companies need to invest it wisely, therefore the need the judgement of the just-say-no engineer to avoid blowing it on unnecessary stuff.

Sean might be a good engineer but economy seems out of his arena of expertise
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