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The bottleneck was never the code

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Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#171

Post by abduhl »

roenxi wrote: post #44
abduhl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it is hypocritical. Hypocrisy is an action or statement that is contrary to a stated value or principle. Just because your values or principles changed doesn’t make you a suddenly no longer a hypocrite, it just admits that your former opinions are no longer tenable. I’ve noticed this push to try to clothe hypocrisy in made up virtues like intellectual curiosity and mental plasticity a lot lately. All I can think…

Old value: Producing high value software. How to do it? Focus on writing code. New value: Producing high value software. How to do it? Focus on writing specs for code / identifying needs. I expect there are a lot of hypocrites in the mix, scared for their job. But this isn't a fundamentally hypocritical position - agents are changing the game for how software gets produced and the things that were important as recent…

This is shifting the principle/value discussion up to a level where it's meaningless. Let's use a different example.

Old value: Returning value to shareholders.

How to do it? Treat your employees like family and don't be evil.

New value: Returning value to shareholders.

How to do it? Treat your employees like human resources and get away with what you can get away with.

Is this hypocritical? Most people would say yes, but in your framing it's not because we've backed up to the least specific articulation of an underlying principle. It's a species of the motte and bailey fallacy.

Agents may be changing the game for how software gets produced, but all it's really done is switch software developers from being managed to being managers. And software developers trying to square their historic value/principle that management tasks are useless, easy, and ceremonial (to borrow GP's word) tasks that should take a back seat to ~flow state coding~ with their new view that management is an integral, difficult, and requisite part of writing code reeks of hypocrisy.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#172

Post by bluefirebrand »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #142
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s kind of just strawman with an origin story isn’t it?

On some level, yes, but having words to describe sub-sets can be useful too. A "human" is just a "featherless biped", after all? I think the Goomba Fallacy captures something helpful to me- it's helpful to know the origin of a straw man if you want to un-stuff one.

I know this is off topic but I cannot resist. It's very funny to read a comment about un-stuffing a straw man written by "scarecrowbob"

Gave me a good laugh, thank you. :)

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#173

Post by jmalicki »

Jensson wrote: post #162
wuliwong wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Goomba is distinct. Strawman is disingenuously representing an argument, Goomba is assuming contradictions are coming from the same person, presumably b/c it's coming to the Goomba through the same app.

> Goomba is assuming contradictions are coming from the same person, presumably b/c it's coming to the Goomba through the same app. Its because it comes from the same political faction. In general people are open about A when A seems palatable, and openly B when B seems palatable, but they almost never admit to do that when its obviously wrong to do so. That is the rational part of the fallacy, even if these are diff…

It's almost as if factions are made up of different people with different opinions in a loose alliance.

But nah, clearly they're all goombas.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#174

Post by ozozozd »

dyauspitr wrote: post #89
jugg1es wrote: post #17

I think veteran engineers have always known that the real problems with velocity have always been more organizational than technical. The inability for the business to define a focused, productive roadmap has always been the problem in software engineering. Constantly jumping to the next shiny thing that yields almost no ROI but never allowing systemic tech debt to be addressed has crippled many company's I have work…

It’s part of the problem but AI also can crush this on pure lines of code and functionality alone. It can put out 100,000 lines of somewhat decent code in a day. That usually takes months or years of manual coding for a team.

More lines of code doesn’t help adding more constraints to a system without violating the existing ones.

In fact, it makes it harder.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#175

Post by tempaccount5050 »

jayd16 wrote: post #156
tempaccount5050 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 100% denial/ego. I've been a contractor longer than I'd like and it's the exact same response I see when I join a new team. The team complains they have too much work and can't get anything done, so their manager pulls me in. Suddenly, they don't want to give anything up. I'm actually in the middle of this right now. The team "is swamped" yet somehow, they are able to argue that almost everything I can handle is…

Well who are you? Why should they trust you to actually complete a task and not dump unfinished work on them when your contract is up? The manager didn't do the work to figure out what a contractor should do before hiring one. Why would they expect that org to plan the exit if they didn't plan the entrance? Behavior shouldn't be surprising, no?

I mean, they hire me for a reason, whatever that may be. I want to do a good job and carry out the task because I want to get hired again by them or whatever agency is pimping me out. I've seen a lot of shit and that's my value. Whether or not the team wants to help me succeed is their political thing. And that's not invisible to management either.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#176

Post by theptip »

> They are waiting on the next well-formed spec

Is this actually true? Maybe in a widget factory. I think it’s an anti-pattern for the new world.

When you look at places that are shipping at insane pace (like Anthropic) the secret is not accelerating the writing down of a roadmap and we’ll groomed backlog, it’s empowering smart individuals to run their own end-to-end product improvement loops.

You can slightly reframe the OP by saying “the bottleneck is product ideas”, but “well formed backlog items” IMO frames it as more structured and hierarchical than it should be.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#177

Post by doitLP »

kadhirvelm wrote: post #151

Totally agree, we wrote our own piece similar to this: https://productnow.ai/blogs/teams-that-coordinate I really think as code becomes cheap, misalignment between people, teams, and organizations is going to hurt a lot more, especially when everyone is trying to move at break neck speeds. I also think a big piece of this is human attention and inertia. Aka, why bother doing the hard work to coordinate with others wh…

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Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#178

Post by mothballed »

Jensson wrote: post #162
wuliwong wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Goomba is distinct. Strawman is disingenuously representing an argument, Goomba is assuming contradictions are coming from the same person, presumably b/c it's coming to the Goomba through the same app.

> Goomba is assuming contradictions are coming from the same person, presumably b/c it's coming to the Goomba through the same app. Its because it comes from the same political faction. In general people are open about A when A seems palatable, and openly B when B seems palatable, but they almost never admit to do that when its obviously wrong to do so. That is the rational part of the fallacy, even if these are diff…

This is exactly it. You see it on HN all the time. You will debate someone. Then deep in thread, a second person appears with a gotcha. when you point out that the gotcha doesn't fit in with the prior argument, they point out that was a separate person. They knew damn well what they're doing with their little conniving deflection fuck-fuck game. They're acting for the same surrogate argument. The Goomba is real and the people playing the game are just too cowardly to be two-faced themselves so they act two-faced through a surrogate and deflect to the surrogate when it's pointed out.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#179

Post by jayd16 »

tempaccount5050 wrote: post #175
jayd16 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well who are you? Why should they trust you to actually complete a task and not dump unfinished work on them when your contract is up? The manager didn't do the work to figure out what a contractor should do before hiring one. Why would they expect that org to plan the exit if they didn't plan the entrance? Behavior shouldn't be surprising, no?

I mean, they hire me for a reason, whatever that may be. I want to do a good job and carry out the task because I want to get hired again by them or whatever agency is pimping me out. I've seen a lot of shit and that's my value. Whether or not the team wants to help me succeed is their political thing. And that's not invisible to management either.

You're not looking at it very empathetically. You're disregarding the concerns I floated, you expect the team that feels underwater to now stop everything to reshuffle the work scheduling to fit in a wild card all while you're calling them bad and replaceable.

I mean it really sounds like you're not on their side at all. It's their job to help you succeed, apparently. From what you've said already, you don't care about the project either. You're happy to waste time and money. It sounds like they're right not to trust you.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#180

Post by systemsweird »

nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

Or the person just likes to lock into flow states at the point of maximum leverage. Previously that was coding. Now it’s commanding agents.
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