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

techtrenches.dev

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

#491

Post by balamatom »

gyomu wrote: post #231
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…

There are two kinds of developers. There's the kind that, when given a problem, will jump in, learn what they need to learn to solve the parts they don't fully understand yet, deliver meaningful iterative results, talk to people as needed, keep you posted on their progress, loop in other team members and offer/request help to/from them, take initiative on the obvious missing parts that would benefit the project as a…

Thank you for this.

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

#493

Post by [deleted] »

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #186
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,…

[deleted]

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

#494

Post by ianstormtaylor »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #312
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…

> 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…

This is such a weird counter-argument, that only serves to prove OP’s point.

“It’s not that it’s not documentable. It’s just that it would take tens of thousands of pages and no one would be able to write that or read that to effectively take over the project.”

Okay, so surely this is what OP had in mind when they said documentation doesn’t work… Is it no longer safe to assume reasonable expectations when making an argument? Why the need to “well actually” them with this response?

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

#495

Post by ethagnawl »

MattJ100 wrote: post #199
Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 see this in our open-source community. We've had a community channel for over two decades, where community members help newcomers and each other solve problems and answer questions. Increasingly we have people join who tell us they've been struggling with a problem "for days". Per routine, we ask for their configuration, and it turns out they've been asking ChatGPT, Claude or some other LLM for assistance and thei…

This _is_ all true but what's also true is that there's an historical pattern (in many communities) of "n00bs" not being or (at least) _feeling_ welcome. So, I can't say I blame people for spinning in circles with LLMs instead of starting with forums or mailing lists where they may be shamed or have their questions closed immediately as "duplicate" or "off-top" (e.g. SO).

I think if we want newcomers to lead with human interactions, the onus is on us community leaders/elders/whatever need to be a little warmer, understanding and forgiving. (Of course, some communities and venues are already very good about all of this and I'm generalizing to make the larger point.)

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

#496

Post by threepts »

Just like how "The West" offloaded most of its manufacturing to China as people don't have sew their own shoes.

I see this as a sign of increase in productivity, the important software will still have a human centered development team, but we don't need another dev team on say, tinder for dogs.

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

#497

Post by threepts »

trick-or-treat wrote: post #282
latexr wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those examples are nonsensical. None of those are necessary to get working code. The VSCode example is particularly baffling. Firstly, I’m sure you understand there are other editors people use for code; secondly, I know even people who don’t code who have picked up VSCode for text editing and are fine with it.

I think you haven't dealt with a lot of non-coders. 90% of the world will not be able to even open a .py

90 percent of the world doesn't need to be able to open a .py, when their 20 dollar a month agent does it for them.

Just like how we don't need to be able to open our kernels and manually update the OS, the software company does it for us. It helps knowing the kernel, but you can still get the security updates even if you don't know how to.

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

#498

Post by ivan_gammel »

rglover wrote: post #372
brabel wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I've never worked in a corporate environment beyond client projects. Picked up a book on XHTML (no, that isn't a typo) and CSS in 2007, just kept trying to build stuff I wanted to build and backfilling knowledge as I went. Not only is it possible, it's preferred. ~20 years in and I've learned how to build my own full-stack JS framework, deployment infra, a CSS framework, and an embedded database to boot. Not one drop…

All of this is possible on a corporate track. Ability to build frameworks and tools do qualify a person as at least a solid mid-level professional, not having corporate experience and associated skills can be a pretty big gap in their CV.

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

#499

Post by themaninthedark »

flybrand wrote: post #423
numpad0 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time This is a classic Goldratt / Theory of Constraints mistake.

Can you expound on what makes it a mistake?
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