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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

#531

Post by netcan »

lazystar wrote: post #408
netcan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>. In many domains, productivity is already sufficient. What’s being sold is workforce reduction. This is a blindspot to many. People working on entrepreneurial projects need to build a lot. They start with nothing. They need (for example) features. There's a lot to do. Most firms are not that. Visa, Salesforce, LinkedIn or whatnot. They have a product. They have features. They have been at it for a while. They also…

> doesn't generate any for later. "any" is quite an assumption.

I didn't mean this as an absolute statement. Relatively, and in the short term.

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

#532

Post by Joeri »

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…

The deeper I wade through Microsoft’s Azure documentation the more I feel the reality of this. There’s so much of it that it basically is unreadable in real terms, most employees will never get the time allocated, and when you do try to exhaustively read up on a specific area you find that the documentation is incomplete and wrong in subtle but important ways. I’m sure Microsoft spends a lot of resources on that documentation, but it seems somewhat of a hopeless mission.

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

#533

Post by outloudvi »

The article speaks well but the situation for coding is more severe.

Shells are not needed once they are not in needed. Code does not: customer need is always there.

Before forgotting how to code, The West will first get round up by their own Monsanto, voluntarily.

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

#534

Post by Madmallard »

dmix wrote: post #375
Madmallard wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure cheap foreign labor is more prevalent now than ever at every major tech company. They really, really do not want to spend money. Especially not on Americans and their health insurance. It's really strange how we're just letting them get away with this. They're on a fast trajectory toward putting Americans completely out of work and without aid, even though they're American companies first and foremost.

America could just reduce their cost of living, optimize their healthcare, make domestic business more attractive etc instead of trying to ban everything to duct tape over deeper problems

What's your evidence that they could do that?

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

#535

Post by crusty »

I feel sad that evening I read now has to pass through my "is this LLM slop?" filter, and if it gets caught, the content loses focus and the worthless puzzle of truth takes over.

So there was this: "I run engineering teams in Ukraine. My people lived the other side of this equation. Not the factory floor. The receiving end. While Raytheon was struggling to restart production from forty-year-old blueprints, the US was shipping thousands of Stingers to Ukraine. RTX CEO Greg Hayes: ten months of war burned through thirteen years’ worth of Stinger production. I’ve seen this pattern before. It’s happening in my industry right now."

The filter flashed the warning on the telltale signs and I stopped reading. Now I've got the puzzle I don't want to do. Did someone trying to argue against "AI assisted" coding use an LLM to author that argument?

But this is HN, I can also just move on to the next story.

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

#536

Post by Madmallard »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #248
Madmallard wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure cheap foreign labor is more prevalent now than ever at every major tech company. They really, really do not want to spend money. Especially not on Americans and their health insurance. It's really strange how we're just letting them get away with this. They're on a fast trajectory toward putting Americans completely out of work and without aid, even though they're American companies first and foremost.

> It's really strange how we're just letting them get away with this. Choosing to pay less is what almost all people do, and it is consistent with almost all of human history. > They're on a fast trajectory toward putting Americans completely out of work and without aid, even though they're American companies first and foremost. When push comes to shove, i.e. paying lower prices to consume more goods and services or…

Yeah that's true.

I think it's all bad and counter-productive toward a stable society though. I think economic sacrifices likely have to be made to ensure long-term viability. What we're doing now is accelerating the demise of everything. The entire planet even.

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

#537

Post by NateEag »

flymasterv wrote: post #357
swiftcoder wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're mostly trivial junk that regular employees generate en masse in order to earn accomplishments and make up for the insultingly low bonuses We did that at Meta and Amazon too (for polycarbonate puzzle pieces, with no monetary award at all!). Every now and then something meaningful came out of it

I still have my “Get fucked, employee! Love, Jeff” puzzle pieces.

What are these? I'm extremely curious.

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

#538

Post by aleqs »

vishnugupta wrote: post #60
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…

> 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…

The problem is, in the minds of these people 'firing at 100% all the time' generally means doing busywork and/or thinking of ways to cheat/manipulate their customers and the market for maximum gain whole delivering minimum value. I would have loved to be 100% engaged working on solving real problems in honest ways at some of my past jobs, but alas MBA/marketing leadership, which has taken over much of tech has very little interest in actually building good things and solving real problems in honest ways.

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

#539

Post by applied_heat »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #405
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…

> And in the background of this something ominous: Companies can't just pivot back to higher quality after they've destroyed all their inhouse knowledge. (...) They can't move back upmarket after that's done. The knowledge isn't the problem. It can be quickly regained, and progress of science and technology often offer new paths to even better quality, which limits the need for recovering details of old process. The…

10 year warranty on appliances instead of 1 would show the manufacturer was serious about quality !
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