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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

#601

Post by wredcoll »

ahussain wrote: post #596
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…

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.

This would be true if everyone was optimizing for the same thing.

It's not terribly difficult to imagine someone optimizing for, say, a bonus at the end of the year.

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

#602

Post by black3r »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #310
skydhash wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding is a thinking avtivity. What you’ll be missing is the nimbleness in doing that activity, not the knowledge. So you may remember all your high school math, but not doing it every day, means you are slower than some of the students. So your knowledge of programming will be there, bit you will be slower because you no longer have the reflex that comes with doing things over and over.

I feel like I have to disagree here. I don't practice e.g. multiplication or doing math in my head everyday or for years really, but I feel like I'm just as fast at it as I ever was. In fact whenever I have tried things like Lumosity or brain benching games, that I used to do when I was younger, I'm actually faster than when I was younger, despite not having practiced it at all. I feel like all the real world side pr…

Multiplication is elementary school math which doesn't require any thinking and the learned approach is simple. You can't really compare the simple stuff that's taught to kids, like basic multiplication or riding a bike with stuff that requires domain-specific knowledge and experience.

Think more stuff like "find the angle of lines defined by (x-4y-1=0) and (x-y-2=0)", "write the number 2026 in base 7", "solve an equation sin^2(x) - sin(x) = 0".

I plucked these from our country's high school final exam from this year. Back when I was in high school, I did mine in 60 minutes without an error when the time limit is 150 minutes and I intuitively immediately knew how to approach each task since the moment I saw it. Also all needed formulas are supplied, you don't need to remember any of them.

I plucked these because for these I don't have the immediate "know how" now, I still understand the topics, and could solve them with enough time, but it would require some thinking and thus I would be slower at solving them than when I was in high school, even though I'm pretty sure I could still ace it in the 150 minute time limit.

But reality goes beyond high schoool... College-level math, like derivations/integrations, sums, algebraic proofs, is even harder and solving some of them could take me hours when I could do them in minutes when I was in college.

With code it's the same. I could solve simple Python/Pascal/C++ high school level tasks as fast or faster than when I was in high school, even if I didn't write any code for a couple of years. But we also had assembly class in college, and I would struggle at assembly if I had to code it now, 10+ years later, even though I didn't struggle with it back then.

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

#603

Post by pocksuppet »

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…

Wrong on the first point, right on the second. Institutional knowledge can't be easily regained. To build up the knowledge to, say, make a transistor, you need a bunch of people experimenting with a bunch of things. Published scientific papers and patents will get you part of the way there, but the final stretch is still up to you, including things like which equipment to buy, purity of supplies (and where to get them!), how long the chip needs to be bombarded by each kind of particles, how much air the cleanroom needs to move. All the tiny details. You have to discover them by trial and error. Actual chip manufacturing companies have found themselves unable to get good yield until they copied the floor plan of another working fabrication plant, and they still have no idea why that mattered, but that's an extreme case. Maybe nobody expected miniscule air contamination from one process step was affecting another nearby process step, and in the original plan they were farther apart.

Yes if you want to wire a neighborhood for internet you can skip DSL and go straight to fiber. That's not the problem. The problem is that nobody in your company knows how deep to put the fiber to minimize problems, how much redundancy is needed, how strong the mechanical armor around the fiber needs to be, how many fibers per cable to meet future capacity needs without excessive costs, which landlords are friendly to you, nobody has the right connections to city hall to get digging permits approved expediently, and so on.

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

#604

Post by ozim »

ahussain wrote: post #596
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…

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.

Adding slack works over years.

Cutting slack gets you quarterly bonuses.

When you plan working 3-5 years in a single company you don’t care if it crashes and burns month after you leave just to burn down next one.

Conversely we see the same dynamic with engineers, they build stuff to prop up their CV and don't care if company still supports crap they did after they leave.

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

#605

Post by cramsession »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #484
WhatsTheBigIdea wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "fair" have to do with anything? This is exactly the issue the author is writing about. Take the easy way, reap the profits, then someone suffer the obviously predictable consequences at some point in the unforeseeable future... likely not you! "Fair" is not relevant. The original author points to the consolidation of military suppliers as a major issue, but the truth is that the economies of the western wo…

> What does "fair" have to do with anything? Not wasting other people’s time when they expect your work to at least pass a cursory check. It’s selfish and disrespectful. It reflects poorly on you. I don’t know about all that other stuff you wrote but it’s not really what I’m talking about so I’ll clarify. I don’t know what your high school/college was like, but we used to trade papers for editing. It was universally…

Are the people paying your paycheck being fair to you? Are the executives of your company paid orders of magnitude more than you are? Fairness starts from there. Your job is to be as unexploited as possible. I hope my coworkers also have this goal.

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

#606

Post by fluoridation »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #236
LtWorf wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably overestimate yourself.

I relate to the idea of having a different level of thinking now with AI. How would you evaluate that someone is overestimating themselves? As in every little thing that used to be too much effort before, I can just easily get the info, the data now with prompt. The data analysis of something, which otherwise might have taken hours to figure out, I can just have AI write scripts for everything, which allows me to see…

It sounds like you're optimizing for a system of self-deception. If you never check how the data is collated, but rather whether the collation appears consistent, you will eventually be left only with data that has the appearance of consistency, regardless of how correct it is.

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

#607

Post by WalterBright »

mikem170 wrote: post #571
WalterBright wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> optimised immediate profitability over everything else Which is the usual complaint that businesses are focused on short term results, sacrificing long term results. If that would be generally true, the stock market would be going down steeply, not up, as stock prices are based on expectations of future profits.

Are stock market profit expectations mostly long term? Stock markets have been wrong before. Besides that, the U.S. stock market went up over several decades while manufacturing capabilities were transferred overseas. That has had, and will continue to have, domestic ramifications that might not be captured by investor profits.

The stock market has been going up for a couple hundred years. When do you expect the pervasive short term thinking will crater the economy?

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

#608

Post by wredcoll »

WalterBright wrote: post #555
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…

> optimised immediate profitability over everything else Which is the usual complaint that businesses are focused on short term results, sacrificing long term results. If that would be generally true, the stock market would be going down steeply, not up, as stock prices are based on expectations of future profits.

> as stock prices are based on expectations of future profits.

I thought stock prices were based one what I thought I could sell it for next week.

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

#609

Post by WalterBright »

danmaz74 wrote: post #593
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!

"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.

Working long hours was necessary in those days because productivity was much lower.

Productivity has gone up so much people can work a lot less, and vast part of the population doesn't work at all.

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