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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

#501

Post by notnullorvoid »

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…

It's much more than a management problem, experienced software engineers are actively opting into apathy and atrophy of their craft.

I see many peers getting worse in their abilities. It's especially disheartening to see people I admired for their problem solving devolve into someone who delegates more and more of their reasoning to LLMs. It really negatively affects working with them. If you have a concern or criticism of "their" approach to a problem they either dismiss it off hand as invalid, or they go discuss it with their LLM of choice making themselves a bottleneck to collaboration.

As the article suggests I suspect we're in for a real dark age of software as companies struggle to know who to keep, if they can even trust that those who have vital knowledge and skill today will retain it going forward.

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

#502

Post by 7402 »

Zigurd wrote: post #388
NordStreamYacht wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lucent at the same time went through the same issue: how to monetise Bell Labs. Bell Labs greatest work came out when AT&T was a monopoly. Once they were broken up (1984?) they started feeling the pain. When the Lucent spinoff took place, the new entities had no Monopoly money to fund unconstrained research while management's behaviour never changed. I don't know how BL fared under Alcatel and now Nokia, but haven't…

I've been to the Holmdel office in the decline years. It was very sad. A fraction of the former staff was rattling around in what could've been used for a post apocalyptic sci-fi set. In its heyday it must've been magnificent. Imagine taking an entire great research university and putting it into a single architectural masterpiece. I've also been to Nokia HQ after Elop ruined the place. Also sad.

> could've been used for a post apocalyptic sci-fi set

Of course, it was!

AppleTV show “Severance”

https://www.newsweek.com/lumon-building-severance-real-visit...

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

#503

Post by batshit_beaver »

torginus wrote: post #459
stingraycharles wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to me that - optimistically - this would shift the job of a software engineer into a more formal engineering role, and that the actual implementation is done by AI. In the same way in other areas, engineering and implementation differ and implementation can be (and is) automated. No idea how this should take form, though, and if it’s even realistic. But it seems like due to AI, formal specs and all kinds of “ol…

Personally my experience has been that once I manage to describe a problem in good enough detail that a junior engineer would be able to solve it, it's good enough for an LLM as well. Which creates incentives I'm not wholly comfortable with, but the fact is that I'm more productive now alone, than I used to be in a team.

My experience is that if I manage to describe a problem in enough detail for a junior or LLM to be able to solve it, it would have been faster to do it myself.

Prior to LLMs the idea was to involve juniors in the engineering process to give them an opportunity to learn rather than necessarily to improve the team's immediate productivity. Some companies famously (and consciously) refused to hire juniors to avoid the performance hit even prior to genAI (eg Netflix).

Involving LLMs in our engineering processes has very suspect implications for both productivity and quality of our output, since unlike juniors the LLMs don't even learn.

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

#504

Post by bluefirebrand »

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…

> 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 whole, etc

You're framing this person as a good developer, and sure. Probably some people who behave like this are good. MANY people who are like this leave mountains of problems in their wake. It takes a very special person to be able to build good quality with this kind of approach.

You're basically taking about someone getting the right answer on the fly at full speed

It's much more likely to get a subtly wrong answer, which is then dropped on that second group to manage and maintain going forward, while the fast moving person is hurried along to go drop a subtly wrong solution on another project with another team. This has happened to me many times in my career

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

#505

Post by threepts »

01100011 wrote: post #431

Is this article even worth clicking on? The headline makes it sound like yet another pearl-clutching article extrapolating some trend to the extreme in divergence with reality. AI has been an effective coding tool for, what, 2 years at most? We've collectively forgotten all of our skills in those 2 years? Really?

It's a big strawman.

"Those engineers don’t exist yet because we’re not creating them. The juniors who should be learning right now are either not being hired or developing"

It passes the blame to AI for developers not learning because they are not being hired. You don't need to be hired to learn something. You need to learn something to get hired. It's opposite.

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

#506

Post by jmyeet »

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…

This is all basic economics.

Companies can grow organically or through strategy and adding new verticals to a point. Eventually they're too large for that. They own the whole market, they can't get regulatory approval for acquisitions and so on. At this point they only really grow at the same rate the industry or the economy does.

At this point (or often long before), the only way to increase profits is to raise prices and/or reduce costs. Profits tend to decline over time so there is constant pressure to reduce costs to statisfy the insatiable need for increasing profits.

This is the real product AI is selling: cutting wages. It's a combination of displacing workers (which, thus far, hasn't been all that successful). Where it is successful is to have the threat of layoffs hanging over your workers, getting them to do extra unpaid work for the same wages and making sure they can't ask for raises.

That's what's paying for all this AI investment.

So I agree with you: the real problem isn't AI. It's capitalism.

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

#507

Post by gzread »

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'm not sure if the tweet was a joke, but some companies are apparently hiring junior developers back because it's cheaper than AI.

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

#508

Post by threepts »

"institutional knowledge that exists nowhere in the codebase. Those engineers don’t exist yet because we’re not creating them. The juniors who should be learning right now are either not being hired or developing "

This article passes blame to AI for developers not learning because they are not being actively hired. You do not need to be hired to learn something. You need to learn something in order to be hired.

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

#509

Post by gzread »

GorbachevyChase wrote: post #461
SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also took out all the quality , though in pure business terms one can argue that's a kind of "slack" by itself. The beancounters have cut all the corners on physical products that they could find. Now even design and manufacturing is outsourced to the lowest bidder, a bunch of monkeys paid peanuts to do a job they're woefully unqualified for. And the end result is just a market for lemons. Nobody trusts products…

I think you’re not blaming political leadership enough. NAFTA, and other programs were always going to lead to the state of affairs we have now. This was a choice. Blaming greed is like blaming gravity.

Are you saying we need more tariffs to have quality?

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

#510

Post by nobodyandproud »

Leadership and management problem, exacerbated by the Chicago school.

Good, knowledgable employees are not fungible. The in-house culture that built the engineering takes an entire generation to build.

The winner-take-all MBA class of the 1980s to the 2000s and the congressional leadership developed during this era are squarely at fault and their policies need to be replaced.

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