481–490 of 534 posts
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Because selling shovels is more profitable than digging holes themselves.
Really? Where do you live because in my country the opposite is true
Naturally we can't use figures of speech.
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I also have a suspicion that people’s microdistributions of talents is underappreciated. Some people are good architects and average at algorithms. Some people are unusually good at debugging or QA. Some can spin out whole systems at an impressive speed that may not be a great long term fit for the larger system. And most businesses aren’t managed in a way that’s interested in adapting to the microshapes of personnel…
I think this is one of the beauties of AI -- filling in the gaps to help people make their microtalents shine.
> bad engineers were always a liability This part of the article hits home for me. With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I am still a f…
But sooner or later for AI to reach its true potential we need to have HOTL ie Human Out of the Loop. Meta prompting or using AI to develop the prompt by coaxing it to ask relevant questions , creating specs and going through multiple loops with LLMs - things like this can be a good start towards the final goal. Final means the over abundance of goods and services like the men of the millenium are suggesting us mere…
Yeah, that sure sounds like paperclip maximizing hypercapitalists. Real big on sharing, not so big on minding the cost, but they just can't show their love for us all while employee labor still has some value to them. Once that's out of the way and they've taken or mulched everything of value from others, that's... that's when they'll start giving it all back, yeah.
I know the sarcasm isn't helpful. But goddamn I can't understand this take, I don't know why people believe people-shaped entities like [your favorite wealthy sociopath's name here] will become society's mommy if given the power, and it's incredibly fscking frustrating. Like people who think once their home and everything is burned to the ground, the fire will rebuild everything, but better.
I think it is less about junior/mid engineers, and more just about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development. This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [0] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult…
What's with people using the number "0" for their first reference? I have only ever seen that practice here at Hacker News.
I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the…
Again, this ignores the second order effect of entirely gutting the personnel pipeline that is required to create new senior devs... So without a training pipeline to provide experience to jr. Devs, in 15 years we will be hurting for senior devs to replace all the graybeards. Kind of like the fortran crisis of the last decade or so.... Just across an entire industry that supports every other industry....
The way the industry "solved" it was basically raising degree requirements across the board. I went to a top 5 engineering school and one of my undergrad roommates was a mechanical engineer. I remember having a pretty eye-opening conversation with him about how their undergrad program just teaches them what is already commoditized in CAD application packages and is considered table stakes. Industry hires had MS minimums, and plenty of MechEs ended up getting PhDs so they could work on more cutting edge stuff.
My guess is software will end up similarly. The bottom end of this stuff will become purely commoditized and cutting edge stuff will require more education.
> bad engineers were always a liability This part of the article hits home for me. With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I am still a f…
I kind of think the whole "Learn to Code" push of the 2010s was one of the worst things that happened to our industry. Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. The problem is our industry mostly doesn't have any sort of reasonable mentorship or apprenticeship culture, so we've always left it to the engineers to teach themselves. Sink or swim. The problem is th…
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> The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I wouldn't be so quick to judge the long tenured engineers. They probably realized that moving business forward is more important than writing artisan code. You always have some young hotsh…
I agree. Why is everyone so hard on everyone else? Look at the outages Anthropic and OpenAI have had. They aren't hiring stupid people but they can't seem to go a week without major platform instability. And you can't even argue that it's because of high load because all of these engineers have worked at Facebook, Meta, etc. They are seasoned veterans that should be able to build resilient systems.
All those smart people are probably using genAI to generate their codebases.
So far, that does not seem to have resulted in a robust, stable system.
Certainly no better than the results the hyperscalers got doing things by hand, and arguably worse.
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> The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. i think i fall into this bucket. our "leaders" and executives have told us they dont care about 'shipping good' . we are simply responding to incentives.
They’ll care when nothing works, nobody seems able to fix it, building new features takes forever and every change breaks something somewhere else. This was already happening before. But now, a lot more companies that previously might have taken many years to reach an unmaintainable state can now get there in just a few months.
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It's not a scapegoat, it's basic economics that wages are determined by supply and demand; increasing the supply decreases wages. It's also basic economics that this ultimately reduces costs to consumers, but that doesn't make it any less painful for the workers whose wages face downward pressure due to increased competition from labor force growth.
Never heard the words "basic economics" used outside of strawman political arguments. To think that H-1B developers can meaningfully shift the supply to the point that is felt by other people it's very shortsighted. The job market has been very difficult for years with vastly more supply than demand and its due to plenty economic, financial and political reasons. Interest rates itself affect it way more than any H-1B…
Only someone ignorant of basic economic concepts—such as, in this case, supply and demand—would write the above.
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The whole "learn to code" and software bootcamp craze always baffled me. Like what other profession markets themselves as "Hey, our job is so easy that any schmuck off the street can enter the career with 4 months of training." Practically every other job I can think of at a similar salary level has entrance requirements (e.g. grad school admissions exams), extensive and expensive training, a lengthy apprenticeship p…
I mean, the obvious thing is that the "learn to code quick, code bootcamps!" drive was driven by connected people who were, as they are now, attempting to drive down the cost of software development. Management types really really really loathe software developers for making good money, and have spent decades now jumping at any advertisement that suggests it can undercut the salary of your current crop of engineers.…