Live data from Hacker News

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

techtrenches.dev

361–370 of 896 posts

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

#361
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…

This shows Western government system is broken. In ideal world (where we don't live): * Corporation - optimizes for mid-to-short term profits (remove slack, run everything thin) * Government - optimizes for long term profits (introduce regulations to keep the slack time, keep and attract the talent so state gets better) * Individual - optimizes for their life time (career, family and tries to leverage market conditio…

> In the west, government is optimizing for "loads and loads of moooney"

More appropriately, government is optimizing for 4 year electoral terms. No one cares about longer timescales necessary to tackle hard problems.

This is where autocracies like China, or monarchies for example, win over democracies.

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

#362
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…

> The core problem is that decision-makers—often far removed from actual engineering work — believe that tacit knowledge can be replaced with documentation, tools, and processes. [It] cannot. I am not so certain: For example, I think that a lot of my knowledge about the system that I work on could be documented, and based on this documentation someone new could take over the system. The problem rather is: the volume…

There are certain things that are too obvious to some person at a given time. Hence they would not consider it's worth documenting. Some of those things are important bits and pieces of the theory[1] of the program.

[1] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

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

#364

“Money was never the constraint. Knowledge was.” The irony is how difficult it is to read this obviously AI-generated article due to its unnatural prose and choppy flow full of LLM-isms. The ability to write is also a skill that atrophies. Even when AI is understandably used due to language fluency, I’d prefer to read an AI translation over a generated article. If you don’t care enough to write it, why should I care…

#1 rule of slop: anything that can be written, can be AI-generated now

#2 rule of slop: even posts critical of pervasive AI usage and how it's ruining the world can be AI-generated

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

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It had to be H1B Indians and outsourcing to India. As a European, I have seen some "Eastern European devs" around, sure. But they were not present at every company I worked with. Indians were. Quality-wise, it was always the same story, but I'm not going to elaborate. Everyone who is ready to accept it, knows what I would be saying anyway.

No, you probably need to elaborate on that. Because in my experience, the quality from people in India varies just as much as the quality from any other country, including the USA. What does make a difference is the company they work for. Large hourly "body shops" gives you coders whose quality tends to be lower, regardless if we are talking about an Indian firm or an American firm. Direct hires of independent indivi…

Okay, since you insist.

I'm not racist. I don't care about race. I do care about culture a lot. By culture I mean a set of "default behaviors" and values that people from said culture are more likely to exhibit. That's where my issues with Indians began and continue. Of course you are right that generalizing over 1+ billion people is a futile exercise. Intellectually, I agree. And yet, in my personal experience, certain behaviors and attitudes they have just keep coming up with frequency, that just doesn't match any other group of people I have been interacting with. I live a rather international life. I interact with people from many, many cultures. I currently live in a culture, that is completely alien to my own, and I love it. It's not a problem of closed mind or some kind of supremacy thinking. I am free from that.

Specifically about Indians - I find that great many of them prefer memorizing over thinking. In the IT consulting days of my career, I noticed that they seemed to have 4-5 solutions, that they would apply to all problems. Whether the solution would fit the problem or solve it, was secondary. If it did, great. If it didn't, well that was someone else's problem. Half of my job was fixing stuff that an Indian "fixed" before me. The appearance of having fixed something was much more important than the actual fixing. It was all about appearances with them. While people in general seek recognition, I have never met another group of people who are so eager to lie and cover things up to gain some perception of short-term bump in status. It's not isolated to work environment. You see, I suspected myself of perhaps being racist in the end, so I would challenge myself to befriend Indians if I met any - just to see. Maybe I was being judgmental and wrong? The last time I tried it, the Indian man I met kept kissing my ass so much I had to cut him off. Why did he do that? Based on what he was saying, he saw me as someone from an "upper caste" (he projected his ideals of a successful businessman on me) and desperately wanted me to know how much I have done for him (I haven't done anything other than having a few conversations about life and business in general). Took me a while to understand that all this excessive praise and ass kissing was an attempt to elevate himself by proximity to something great. Needless to say I am nowhere as great as he portrayed me to be. Later I also found that half the stuff he shared with me was made up to impress me.

Another feature of their culture is extreme pride. They will never stop talking about India, Indian culture, Indian food, etc. They expect you to praise it, be in awe. If you aren't, they will pressure you to change your mind. Since working with them was a universally appalling experience, I wasn't impressed, so that came up a lot. You see this pride and attention seeking everywhere online. A normal person will say "Hello", "Good morning". An Indian will say "Good morning FROM INDIA". It must be mentioned, because it must be noticed and praised. It's just tiring. There is a reason why so many are waiting for country-based filters on Twitter. You wouldn't have guessed which countries are most upset about this.

I am certain that there are reasons and explanations for all of this and that there are many exceptions. As you have mentioned, there are so many of them, they can't all be like that. And fair enough. I just find all of this so tiring, that I don't want to deal with them at all. If 1 out of a 100 is a smart and pleasant person, they are still surrounded by 99 that I don't want to deal with. It might be sad, but it is what it is.

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

#366
post #120

There's a certain irony in that the article itself is quite clearly assisted by AI. Not a criticism per se as I don't have a problem with AI assistance, but food for thought given the material being commented on.

I don't have a problem with AI assistance either, but this undermines the point the article is making. For me it is like a priest preaching gay sex is wrong and then being caught in bed with a male prostitute (snorting cocaine optional). Leaves bad taste in the mouth.

Many such cases. Both the priest anecdote, and AI-critical posts being AI-generated.

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

#367
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…

> removing people and organizational slack You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. When bean-counters took over the ecosystem they optimised immediate profitability over everything else. Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time. There's no room for experimentation, repair, or anything else. I've commented about lack of slack on several times here…

> Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time

Not just that, you have to be always doing less for more gains. Real work is bad work. Shrinkflation good. I don't know what it is if it wasn't a pure scammer mindset.

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

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You started well, but then the train got derailed... Russia has no need for Eastern Europe (they have enough land and resources, why saddle yourself with hostile population?), as long as the said Easter Europe is not threatening them with NATO bases/missiles (US has repeatedly shown that they do not hesitate to use their muscle if they think they can get away with it, so Russia's paranoia is not entirely unfounded).…

If China cannot get oil from the middle east what happens to China and China-Russia relations? I didn't say there would be hostilities just Russia would become potentially the more dominant partner. If NATO expansion is the reason for the war in Ukraine (not imperialism) then why has the war not stopped now we know Ukraine will never join NATO?

1) Russia will happily supply China with oil and other resources, and China will pay by industrial good and all other stuff they produce. China is working really hard on getting rid of dependence on foreign energy sources, any leverage Russia might get if it became the sole supplier of oil/gas to China is very temporary and Russia knows it. Furthermore, unlike USA, it has no delusion of ever dominating China - China already has them by the balls.

2) mostly face saving, but also: Ukraine will remain openly hostile, NATO or not, planning to have hostile (EU) forces on its territory as 'security guarantor'. Russians still believe Ukraine will collapse (those men will eventually run out/economy will collapse/EU will not send its children to die on the eastern front) and they will be able to have a friendly (or at least truly neutral) government there. Russia's paranoia about the west is really strong, well founded and well documented.

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

#369
I don’t see it as so dire.

Software developers have been learning what they needed to know to do the job the whole time. That’s pretty much the job description.

What you need to know has changed a lot recently. Like always.

> The combination of technical skill and the judgment to know when the AI is wrong barely exists in the market anymore.

That’s certainly not true. I’d take a hard look at my hiring process if it was performing this inefficiently.

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

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction: The US was pushing NATO to invest more in US gear.

That was the hope but nothing stopped the EU from making their own stuff.

Nothing, only the gentle hand of US influence over their internal affairs, and the typical nationalistic bickering among themselves.
Post reply on HN