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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

#591

Post by osigurdson »

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…

Agree. There is so much focus on "let's do the same thing we are doing now with fewer people". It is very boring and uninspired. How about "let's do something that we couldn't do before", instead?

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

#592

Post by linhns »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #581

At least here in America, we've been offshoring coding since at least the late 90s. Often, that code isn't so great (this is not an indictment of foreign workers in general but these off-shore operations are not always on the up-and-up). And just like offshoring dev work, we may see the rebound effect when there's all kinds of poorly written LLM outputs in production and companies are running around trying to re-hire…

And when foreigners reach some levels of decent expertise, their jobs are offshored to cheaper nations again.

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

#593

Post by danmaz74 »

WalterBright wrote: post #557
aleqs wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

Profit maximization is a continuous process that has generated our high standard of living. P.S. I welcome all attempts to prove me wrong!

"Profit maximization" on its own would have left most people working 12+ hours a day 6 days a week, like it was very common in the 19th century. Luckily, it's never been the only force shaping our societies.

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

#594

Post by Aurornis »

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.ti cannot.

You need some experienced people around, but companies that rely on institutional knowledge to get everything done have always been doomed to fail.

Even before AI, turnover was a real thing. People churn jobs a lot in tech even when the pay is good. They get bored and jump companies, leave to join their friends' startup, or move to another city.

Every company I've worked for that operated on a belief that institutional knowledge was king and documentation and processes couldn't replace it eventually had to face the music when key employees left. Ironically this problem was at its worst at a company that compensated very well, because those key employees would often realize they had enough money to retire early or go take some risky startup job instead of sticking around to be the insitutional knowledge base.

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

#595

Post by danmaz74 »

t-3 wrote: post #305
vishnugupta wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think the bean counters get a bad rap for this a bit unfairly. The past century has seen more progress in knowledge and technology than the rest of human history combined. The world and business environment are changing too rapidly to make longtermist thinking practical. Few care if you have a lifetime warranty and excellent service or replacement parts if the majority will upgrade in a few years! Mature technologi…

"The world and business environment are changing too rapidly to make longtermist thinking practical." Tell that to the Chinese...

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

#596

Post by ahussain »

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…

Engineers seem to think business people don’t know what they are doing, but if your post were true, then companies would add slack to outperform their competitors.

The broken system likely doesn’t have enough business impact to justify the investment to maintain it.

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

#597

Post by jdw64 »

pembrook wrote: post #570
vishnugupta wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Without people who have actually worked with the system, you end up with a loss of tacit knowledge—and eventually, declining productivity. > You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. Huh? What happened to the concept of "debate" on HN. It's just a bunch of people agreeing with each other. Yet the data doesn't support any of OP's thesis. Here's a chart of the rise in productivity per hour worked in the Unit…

US aggregate productivity metrics fail to address this nuance. There is a fundamental difference in abstraction layers between a macro-system becoming more efficient and an individual enterprise experiencing operational failure. As a software engineer, distinguishing between these layers is critical. Your argument is akin to claiming that because the Google Play Store sees a higher volume of app releases (increased productivity), the intrinsic quality of individual apps has naturally improved.

In this analogy, the individual app represents a company, and the Play Store represents the broader US market. Silicon Valley’s highly liquid labor market allows talent to flow freely, which opens up and elevates the baseline of the overall market. However, that is entirely distinct from the fact that individual companies are suffering severe drops in internal quality and productivity.

Furthermore, in software architecture, 'productivity' and 'quality' are rarely directly proportional. With AI coding tools, we can ship an app orders of magnitude faster. Historically, it took me three months to write 60,000 lines of code; recently, I am generating that same volume in just two weeks. My productivity has undeniably spiked, but can I confidently claim the code quality is better than when I manually scrutinized every single line?

The real issue is not whether the broader economy has grown more productive since 1947. The core issue is whether a specific organization bleeds capability when the exact people who understand its real-world constraints, failure modes, and operational history walk out the door.

Both realities can co-exist: National productivity can trend upwards, while individual companies simultaneously suffer operational regressions due to botched migrations, failed refactors, or the loss of tacit knowledge.

I agree that 'institutional knowledge' is sometimes weaponized to defend unnecessary complexity. However, the opposite fallacy is treating all localized, domain-specific knowledge as worthless. While some of it is merely job-security folklore, the rest is literally the only surviving documentation of why the system functions in the first place

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

#598

Post by hnthrow0287345 »

luckylion wrote: post #483
hnthrow0287345 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's almost impossible to turn someone from the latter group into the former. Only if you're constrained by the same short-term thinking as US businesses. The way to do that is more of an apprenticeship model when someone observes/works closely with someone from the first group over years. Even then, the businesses don't want to pay for that, and why should the workers give that away for free? They want people to ch…

My experience is that that plainly does not work. I work with developers of both types, and the junior ones who are part of the first group are limited in their ability by experience, but they have an inquisitive mind and don't give up quickly when they encounter something they don't understand. Much more experienced developers of the second type just throw their hands up and give up (or now: turn to AI). I've worked…

>My experience is that that plainly does not work.

The apprenticeship model isn't in practice at any scale in software, I don't see how you could believe that. Practically every career start is self-taught or university to junior positions which is not the high-attention, one-on-one focus you'd get.

>Why invest a lot of money and high-talent attention into someone who might quit?

What happens if you don't and they stick around? You might say 'well, I'd just fire them' but then you are going to have a culture of people always having one foot out the door. And a high amount of position switching in the industry has led us to what we have today where people don't really stay and build for the long-term, and shoddy code bases also drive people to quit.

An apprenticeship model also helps if you can do 3-5 year agreements for training where you see the most benefit from the person in the last 1-2 years.

As good as it has been for my career, switching often probably needs to slow down (while raises go up) and apprenticeships go into effect for better quality training.

All this assuming there isn't another major leap in AI competency though.

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

#599

Post by AnthonyMouse »

anon7725 wrote: post #309
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone wants to tag the evil with their opposition's name. The evil is concentration of power. But no one wants to call it that because then they can't pretend that it's something different when they're doing it themselves. Witness the people who keep proposing to solve market consolidation with higher taxes. Higher taxes go to the government, and therefore the interests that have captured the government. Are we go…

> Higher taxes go to the government, and therefore the interests that have captured the government. There is at least a chance for it to be redistributed, unlike private wealth.

Let's have a quick look at the federal budget. The big ticket items are social security, medicare, net interest and military/VA. Together those are more than half the budget.

Social security is the biggest of them. Older people have more wealth than younger people on net and social security is structured to make higher payments to people who made more money when they were younger, which is significantly correlated with having more wealth right now. So it's a massive transfer payment system that transfers money from the poor to the rich. Meanwhile it uses its own special tax which is significantly more regressive than the ordinary income tax and doesn't tax corporate income at all. Notice in particular that we could instead be solving "grandma doesn't starve" with a UBI that makes uniform payments to everyone and not disproportionate payments to the rich, and comes from a tax which is also paid by corporations.

Net interest is a naked transfer to people with enough capital to invest in government bonds.

Most of the military and VA budgets go to government contractors who work hard to sustain an uncompetitive bidding process with thick margins.

Medicare uses the same bad tax as social security and those dollars go to the healthcare industry which has thoroughly captured the government. The AMA lobbies to limit the number of medical residency slots and sustain a doctor shortage and healthcare corporations have established a thicket of laws to limit competition, impair price transparency and promote over-consumption.

That's where the majority of the government budget goes, and the remaining minority of the money is also going in significant part to government contractors and regulatory capture industries. The government takes tax money from the middle class and gives it to the rich and huge corporations.

We don't need any more "redistribution" like that. If you think you can get the government to stop doing that and instead give the money the poor and middle class then first prove you can do it with the existing money before even thinking about collecting more. You have a nutrient deficiency because you're infested with tapeworms, not because you don't have enough food.

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

#600

Post by WalterBright »

spiorf wrote: post #579
WalterBright wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profit maximization is a continuous process that has generated our high standard of living. P.S. I welcome all attempts to prove me wrong!

No, the process has impeded even higher standard of living, because it misallocates resources from value generation to value appropriation. It's the extreme short term profit maximization that makes the economy a zero sum game. Otherwise it is not.

Do you really think the economy is zero sum?

For example, who was Elon Musk's wealth transferred from?

What do you think about all that money being invested into AI? Is that "extreme short term profit maximization"?

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