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The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

bayramovanar.substack.com

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Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#191

Post by queenkjuul »

j05ev1f3 wrote: post #52
jasode wrote: post #15

>In traditional industries like manufacturing you don’t hire 500 factory workers unless you have a production line that needs them. You don’t over-hire based on a guess. Traditional factories do make wrong guesses about the future and overhire all the time. Example: https://www.google.com/search?q=Ford+f150+lightning+laid+off...

The whole article rests on this false economic claim, that traditional industries don’t overhire based on expectations. They absolutely do, ALL THE TIME. Manufacturing, automotive, airlines, energy etc. all of them make demand bets and lay people off when those bets fail. Cheap money amplified this cycle, but this isn’t a tech specific "failure", it’s just how forecasting under uncertainty work. It’s incredible how s…

It's incredible how engineers of all stripes assume they know all sorts of things they don't actually understand

Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#192

Post by palmotea »

j05ev1f3 wrote: post #52
jasode wrote: post #15

>In traditional industries like manufacturing you don’t hire 500 factory workers unless you have a production line that needs them. You don’t over-hire based on a guess. Traditional factories do make wrong guesses about the future and overhire all the time. Example: https://www.google.com/search?q=Ford+f150+lightning+laid+off...

The whole article rests on this false economic claim, that traditional industries don’t overhire based on expectations. They absolutely do, ALL THE TIME. Manufacturing, automotive, airlines, energy etc. all of them make demand bets and lay people off when those bets fail. Cheap money amplified this cycle, but this isn’t a tech specific "failure", it’s just how forecasting under uncertainty work. It’s incredible how s…

> It’s incredible how some engineers assume they understand economics, then proceed to fail on some of its most basic premises. This tends to happen when engineering-style certainty is applied to systems that are driven by incentives and uncertainty.

Software engineers are stupid, often because they think they are very smart (which breeds arrogance). And on top of that, they often have many biases that they often fail to account for (e.g. a preference for neat-and tidy-systems, leading them to get seduced by oversimple neat-and-tidy explanations, e.g. Econ 101).

Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#193

Post by bespokedevelopr »

kjs3 wrote: post #176
mexicocitinluez wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also anecdotally, I've had a handful of software development positions throughout the years (never at a position with more than 200-300 person company) and have yet to be laid off due to money. I've yet to be laid off at all, but that's irrelevant. I truly believe that these new tools will actually hurt the bigger companies and conversely help smaller ones. I'm in healthcare. The big players in the EMR space are Epic…

What if, instead of having to reach out to the big players, the economics of having a software developer or 2 on staff make it such that you could build custom-tailored, bespoke software to work "with" your company and not against? Because the hospitals those practices want to associate with say "we're on Epic and expect you to be as well"? Wife in healthcare management...overhear this conversation once or twice a we…

Also the nurses in the floor learn the system and many are not great at adapting to different interfaces. Travel nurses who come in and only worked with GE or Cerner and now having to use Epic causes all kinds of issues.

Also from what I’ve seen is big city hospitals use a mix of all three. Which I believe actually creates an opening as it shows a willingness to use different walled gardens.

However I think there are a lot of opportunities to just build on top of these systems rather than wholesale replace. Because they’re one size fits all and the people who work on them haven’t a single designer bone in their body the interfaces are terribly clunky and slow. Macros exist but seemingly no one is aware of them. It’s rife to build better interfaces tied into macros behind the scenes.

Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#194

Post by Denzel »

_dark_matter_ wrote: post #117
Denzel wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a one-person shop? How do you find clients?

Almost always they start by having connections that hire them (old colleagues, former friends, etc.), building out those connections (conference talks, doing really good work, writing high quality blogs), and then if you're lucky, some word of mouth.

Good points - admittedly, I didn’t put enough effort into building connections through different pipelines back when I was contracting. Upwork and a few personal connections were my sole sources.

It just felt really difficult to do both the engineering work while trying to do customer development at the same time.

The fact that OP has been able to do this for so long, while supporting a family, piqued my interest.

Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#195

Post by austin-cheney »

pjc50 wrote: post #14
austin-cheney wrote: post #4

From around 2010-2020 the stock market was rewarding growth more than profit. That means large tech employers hired like crazy to indicate growth. Then came COVID and the economy contracted. As a result the stock market changed to reward profitability. So, excess developers had to go. We are still feeling this. I do agree that AI is not to blame for this. In fact I will go further and claim that AI is a net negative…

Qualification is a very difficult problem, but I think everyone resents the characterization of "bad devs". Things like the Metaverse failure - apparently $70bn spent for no results - are primarily management failures. Like the Cybertruck, they succeeded 100% at building a product that the CEO wanted. The problem is that the CEO is basically the only person that wants that product. There's also the thought nobody wan…

Yes and no. Excellent developers deliver excellent products, like with the Cybertruck example. I wouldn't buy one either, but it appears to be well crafted.

Stellar developers are one step better. Yes, they too delivery excellent products, but they also produce things of value that nobody asked for. Business examples include Teflon, Postit Notes, antibiotics, linux, git, and much more.

The US Army changed leadership methodologies about 20 years ago to account for this. The current leadership philosophy is called Mission Command. In the fewest possible words a leader provides a stated intent and then steps back to monitor while subordinate leaders exercise their own creative initiative to meet that intent. The philosophy before that was called Military Decision Making Process (MDMP). MDMP required leadership buy in for each step of a process from among a set of discussed courses of action. MDMP is now largely relegated to small personnel teams.

Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#196

Post by roncesvalles »

direwolf20 wrote: post #179
roncesvalles wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Mass hysteria. 2. Central banks rotating into gold to de-risk from USD combined with their usual slow bureaucratic processes. By the time they've decided that gold needs to be bought, the price has already run up by 50% and it's no longer a good idea to buy, but they still need to execute on their decisions anyway. The USD isn't going anywhere for the simple reason that the USA can simply counterfeit any non-USD c…

North Korea is a prolific USD counterfeiter. Where are the missiles? Digital currencies can't be counterfeit. China is cashless, so are some parts of Europe.

>Where are the missiles?

The scale doesn't seem to be large enough to warrant military action. It seems NK had mostly used it as pocket money for its embassy staff and has now stopped.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar#North_Korea:

"The U.S. Secret Service estimates that North Korea has produced $45 million in superdollars since 1989. [...] Since 2004, the United States has frequently called for pressure against North Korea in an attempt to end the alleged distribution of supernotes. It has investigated the Bank of China, Banco Delta Asia, and Seng Heng Bank. The U.S. eventually prohibited Americans from banking with Banco Delta Asia. [...] The United States has threatened North Korea with sanctions over its alleged involvement with the supernotes, though it said those sanctions would be a separate issue from the nuclear sanctions."

>Digital currencies can't be counterfeit.

Yes they can. 51% attack.

Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#197

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #188
gdmka wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd add that companies write off their equipment investment over a 3-5 year depreciation period. After that, when the laptops reach EOL, employees can often buy them through the company's EPP (employee purchase program) usually for just the fair market value, which might be a couple hundred € or sometimes even less. So, eventually they recoup the equipment costs, wouldn't get surprised if they even make a profit out…

Is that common? I've never worked at a corporation that had an EPP for EoL computer equipment. It always all went to a specialist recycling/refurbishing business.

I don't know about "common", but at one place, when they were retiring my machine, I asked if I could buy it, and they agreed. (Of course, for that to work, you have to be there long enough that they replace your machine...)

Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#198

Post by jjmarr »

HWR_14 wrote: post #112
jjmarr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hospitals are huge liability sinks. Doctors are constantly sued for killing, injuring, or traumatizing patients, because it's impossible to consistently save everyone.

Which is why they don't food liability when they can. Is it worth saving $100,000 a year if it allows the lawyer to say "if they had used industry standard software would the medical error have happened?"

The research hospital in my neighborhood has a whole biomedical engineering dept and regularly tries out new medical technology on me.

They consistently try non-standard approaches if they feel like it can improve the standard of care since their commercialization team can make more money. They can also iterate faster and deliver better outcomes.

I'm guessing either EHR software is uncompetitive or nobody has tried it yet. Or it's just because I live in Toronto and we have a really good healthcare system.

Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#199

Post by roncesvalles »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #37

> Most engineers (including me) spent months grinding LeetCode at least twice in their career, studying system design, and passing grueling 6-round interviews to prove they are the “top 1%.” Really grateful that the opportunities I've been given weren't predicated on knowing things completely irrelevant to my job. I have spent exactly zero time solving LeetCode problems in my career (beyond algorithm stuff in college…

It's perfectly possible to have a successful SWE career without touching Leetcode-style questions. It's just that most of those jobs don't pay well.

Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#200

Post by insane_dreamer »

jakubmazanec wrote: post #53

I'm not arguing against the core arguments of the article (I agree with most of the points), but on the other hand, software development is (at least currently) an essentially iterative process - one that differs greatly from other production processes (e.g. buildings, cars). We all know how difficult it is to estimate how much development time something takes. Planning is hard and outcomes have therefore greater var…

The other major factor is that increasing dev work for "side bets" doesn't require large Capex investments which typically other industries do (building a new car as a moonshot project? you have to spin up a whole new factory). all you need is some office space and not even that if you're hiring remote
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