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

The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

techtrenches.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 896 posts

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#181

Post by sampullman »

t43562 wrote: post #163
cbg0 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should have the same flow as reviewing PRs from humans.

Who really truly enjoys that and doesn't see it as a chore? I find the real way to review other people's code is to program with it and then I start seeing where the problems are much more clearly. I would do a review and spot nothing important then start working on my own follow-on change and immediately run into issues.

I usually don't mind, but tend to split reviews into two types. Either I understand the context and can quickly do an in depth review, or I have to take some time to actually learn about the code by reviewing the surrounding systems, experimenting with it, etc. But in both cases I would at least run the code and verify correctness.

I think it becomes a chore when there are too many trivial mistakes, and you feel like your time would have been better spent writing it yourself. As models and agent frameworks improve I see this happening less and less.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#182

Post by user2722 »

If the system treats you as a number, you should become a mercenary.

I love this articles who all the coders read but none of the management.

If possible, be a mercenary and put a high number on your expertise, so we can solve this management blind spot faster.

If you can't, let your life/work's passion be "not starving to death", and try to change it politics-side.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#183

Post by eolgun »

The Fogbank example is the most chilling part. It's not just that they lost the people — they lost the ability to know what they didn't know. Nobody could even write down what was missing because the knowledge was never formalized in the first place.

The junior hiring collapse compounds this. Senior engineers develop judgment partly by watching juniors make mistakes and correcting them. Remove that loop and you don't just lose future seniors — you quietly degrade the current ones.

The 0.18% recruiting conversion rate mentioned here tracks with what I see in compliance and security engineering too. "Can you tell when the AI is confidently wrong?" is now the most important interview question, and almost nobody can answer it well.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#184

Post by Lio »

jdw64 wrote: post #17

The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself. The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring, and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach. As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred. W…

There’s even a management tutorial game which demonstrates the dangers of removing too much slack from systems.

It’s called The Beer Game[1].

One of the funny things about it is even people that have played and discussed it before _still_ make the same fundamental mistakes next time.

Short-termism is the death of companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#185

Post by muragekibicho »

Odd anecdote. I completed high school in 2017 and my home country demanded us use mathematical tables, not calculators, to find logs and sines for our version of SAT math.

I got my highest-paying numerical programming contract (in the US) just because I knew (from high school math table experience) how to use LUTs to calculate a lot of useful stuff i.e quarter squares.

Modernization is great and all. However, it's disappointing to know lots of new programmers are oblivious of the fundamentals.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#186

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

jdw64 wrote: post #17

The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself. The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring, and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach. As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred. W…

I feel like it’s something more fundamental and broad than that. We slowly remove excuses to talk to other people.

The thought crossed my mind the other day — if I’m asking the AI a question, that’s replacing a human interaction I would have had with a coworker.

It’s not just in coding, it’s everything. With ChatGPT always available in your pocket, what social interactions is it replacing?

The thing that gets me is, we are meant to fundamentally be social creatures, yet we have come to streamline away socialisation any chance we get.

I’m guilty of this too — I much prefer Doordash to having to call up the restaurant like in the old days, for example.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#187

Post by cbg0 »

t43562 wrote: post #163
cbg0 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should have the same flow as reviewing PRs from humans.

Who really truly enjoys that and doesn't see it as a chore? I find the real way to review other people's code is to program with it and then I start seeing where the problems are much more clearly. I would do a review and spot nothing important then start working on my own follow-on change and immediately run into issues.

> Who really truly enjoys that and doesn't see it as a chore?

This is a whole different discussion, but I just see it as part of the job that I'm getting paid for, I don't need to enjoy it to do it.

Functional testing is a must now that writing tests is also automated away by LLMs as you can get a better understanding if it does what it says on the box, but there will still be a lot of hidden gotchas if you're not even looking at the code.

Plenty of LLM-written code runs excellent until it doesn't, though we see this with human written code too, so it's more about investing more time in the hopes of spotting problems before they become problems.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#188

Post by lelanthran »

brabel wrote: post #164
mawadev wrote: post #156

I highly question the ability of companies to gauge the level of experience of any dev. The distinction between junior, mid, senior, lead is a facade. It is a soft gradient that spans multiple areas, but is tainted and skewed by the technology du jour. Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. It boils down to your personal willingness to learn and invest time building. What…

> Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. That's incredibly unlikely. Do you need to be an employed surgeon to become a senior (or whatever they call it) surgeon?? I very much doubt you can be senior without having actually spent years doing it professionally. The experience is everything, no book will give you the sort of understanding you need. That's unfortunately human…

> That's unfortunately human nature, we are not capable to learn and internalize things simply from reading or watching others do it, we absolutely need to do it ourselves to truly learn.

That is, and has always been, true. Currently, however, the narrative that is sold (and unfortunately accepted by so many of the senior developers who post here) is that the experience of telling someone else to do something is just as valuable.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#189

Post by mschuster91 »

swiftcoder wrote: post #171
rvba wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did anything come out from those billions?

> Did anything come out from those billions? Per wikipedia: IBM employees have garnered six Nobel Prizes, seven Turing Awards, 20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame, 19 National Medals of Technology, five National Medals of Science and three Kavli Prizes. As of 2018, the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years.

The thing is, Nobel Prizes and other awards don't pay the bills.

Patents do, but in most cases it's trivial patents or patents for a "mutually assured destruction" portfolio (aka, you keep them in hand should someone ever decide to sue you).

That's a fundamental problem with how the Western sphere prioritizes and funds R&D. Either it has direct and massive ROI promises (that's how most pharma R&D works), some sort of government backing (that's how we got mRNA - pharma corps weren't interested, or how we got the Internet, lasers, radar and microwaves) or some uber wealthy billionaire (that's how we got Tesla and SpaceX, although government aids certainly helped).

All while we are cutting back government R&D funding in the pursuit of "austerity", China just floods the system with money. And they are winning the war.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#190

Post by roenxi »

rotis wrote: post #100
roenxi wrote: post #30

> Leadership qualities. Our last hiring round tells you how rare that is: 2,253 candidates, 2,069 disqualified, 4 hired. A 0.18% conversion rate. It's minor but this is just wrong. If you're going to hire 4 candidates, there could be 2,253 perfectly qualified candidates even if only 0.18% get hired. The conversion rate is meaningless; it just tells us how many jobs were on offer. There is no way that the skills this…

He writes 2,253 candidates and 2,069 were disqualified. 184 were qualified, so 1 in 12 was considered competent.

Then he quotes 0.18% to show how rare a quality is, which is a wrong interpretation of the numbers. If he'd said 8% that would be realistic.
Post reply on HN