Then work on hard problems in your free time. I've found myself clinging onto some fun ones after work lately, and I'm having fun building things in the weekends/evenings lately!
I miss thinking hard
651–660 of 764 posts
Re: I miss thinking hard
#652Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't have to be soul crushing. Just like people more, and have better meetings. Life is what you make it. Enjoy yourself while you can.
Just have better meetings If we could I think we would be doing that...
It's going to come across very naive and dumb, but I believe we can and people just aren't aware of or they simply aren't implementing the basics.
Harvard Business Review and probably hundreds of other online content providers provide some simple rules for meetings yet people don't even do these.
1. Have a purpose / objective for the meeting. I consider meetings to fall into one of three broad categories information distribution, problem solving, decision making. Knowing this will allow the meeting to go a lot smoother or even be moved to something like an email and be done with it.
2. Have an agenda for the meeting. Put the agenda in the meeting invite.
3. If there are any pieces of pre-reading or related material to be reviewed, attach it and call it out in the invite. (But it's very difficult to get people to spend the time preparing for a meeting.)
4. Take notes during the meeting and identify any action items and who will do them (preferably with an initial estimate). Review these action items and people responsible in the last couple of minutes of the meeting.
5. Send out the notes and action items.
Why aren't we doing these things? I don't know, but I think if everyone followed these for meetings of 3+ people, we'd probably see better meetings.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#653Sometimes I miss thinking hard, but I also don't miss thinking really hard on a problem that seems difficult only to find out it was actually trivial and I was just looking at it the wrong way or overthinking it. We've all spent hours tracking down bugs that turned out to be silly syntax errors or spelling mistakes. It seems like that might be the trade off now.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#654I've loved programming my whole life. Something happens inside my brain when I'm solving a problem. I think it's a release of endorphins or something that has a calming effect. When I was younger, it came easier. I used to be able to get "into the zone" and stay there for hours. Almost a constant stream of endorphins, almost a euphoria. Other things give me a similar feeling. Anything with numbers. I used to really love playing blackjack. Something about figuring out how to get to 21 just really did it for me. Or playing dominoes or other games that require me to solve something. I'm almost 65 now and it's just much more difficult to get there. I think I've been slow to adopt AI partly because I'm afraid it's going to take me further away from what I've loved. Friends tell me it's just a new tool to add to my toolbox. I'm giving it a try but I'm still skeptical.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#655Earlier quoted context omitted.
But we become watchers instead of makers. There is a difference between cooking and putting a ready meal into the microwave. Both satisfy your hunger but only one can give some kind of pride.
The same thing happens if you are the head cook in a restaurant. If you are a cook wanting to open a restaurant, you will be delegating, the same thing with AI. If you are fine only doing what your hands can possibly do in the time allotted, go ahead and cook in your kitchen. But I need to make money to be able to trade for the food I eat.
You will make money but the others are the artists.
That’s the whole point. You become a customer of an AI service, you get what you want but it wasn’t done by you. You get money but not the feeling of accomplishment from cracking a problem. Like playing a video game following a solution or solving a crossword puzzle with google.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#656I think harder because of AI. I have to think more rigorously. I have to find ways to tie up loose ends, to verify the result efficiently, to create efficient feedback loops and define categorical success criteria. I've thought harder about problems this last year than I have in a long time.
> I have to find ways to tie up loose ends, to verify the result efficiently, to create efficient feedback loops and define categorical success criteria. So... you didn't have to do that prior to using agents?
Not as much upfront. I had plenty of opportunities to adjust and correct along the way. With AI, the cost of not thinking upfront is high and the cost of being wrong in upfront decisions is low, so we bias towards that.
But beyond that, I have been thinking deeply about AI itself, which has all sorts of new problems. Permissions, verification, etc.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#657Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same thing happens if you are the head cook in a restaurant. If you are a cook wanting to open a restaurant, you will be delegating, the same thing with AI. If you are fine only doing what your hands can possibly do in the time allotted, go ahead and cook in your kitchen. But I need to make money to be able to trade for the food I eat.
You will make money but the others are the artists. That’s the whole point. You become a customer of an AI service, you get what you want but it wasn’t done by you. You get money but not the feeling of accomplishment from cracking a problem. Like playing a video game following a solution or solving a crossword puzzle with google.
What good is a “feeling of accomplishment” as I am on the street homeless, hungry and naked?
Re: I miss thinking hard
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have to find ways to tie up loose ends, to verify the result efficiently, to create efficient feedback loops and define categorical success criteria. So... you didn't have to do that prior to using agents?
Not as much upfront. I had plenty of opportunities to adjust and correct along the way. With AI, the cost of not thinking upfront is high and the cost of being wrong in upfront decisions is low, so we bias towards that. But beyond that, I have been thinking deeply about AI itself, which has all sorts of new problems. Permissions, verification, etc.
> With AI, the cost of not thinking upfront is high and the cost of being wrong in upfront decisions is low, so we bias towards that.
I don't really understand what that means:
1. If the cost of not thinking upfront is high, that means you need to think upfront.
2. If the cost of being wrong upfront is low, that means you don't need to think upfront.
To me, it looks like those assertions contradict each other.
Re: I miss thinking hard
#659> It (Software Engineering) satisfied The Builder (feeling productive and pragmatic by creating useful things) and The Thinker (solving really hard problems).
I think this is the issue, who associates really hard problems with Software Engineering? You should've stuck with Physics, or pivoted to Math (albeit you don't get so much of the physical building with pure math). You did Software Engineering because you like money, with a little bit of thinking. ;)
Re: I miss thinking hard
#660Earlier quoted context omitted.
Though it is not like management roles have ever appreciated the creative aspects of the job, including problem solving. Management has always wished to just describe the desired outcome and get magic back. They don't like acknowledging that problems and complications exist in the first place. Management likes to think that they are the true creatives for company vision and don't like software developers finding solu…
Agreed. I hate to say it, but if anyone thought this train of thought in management was bad now, it's going to get much worse, and unfortunately burnout is going to sweep the industry as tech workers feel evermore underappreciated and invisible to their leaders. And worse: with few opportunities to grow their skills from rigorous thinking as this blog post describes. Tech workers will be relegated to cleaning up afte…
I greatly agree with that deep cynicism and I too am a cynic. I've spent a lot of my career in the legacy code mines. I've spent a lot of my career trying to climb my way out of them or at least find nicer, more lucrative mines. LLMs are the "gift" of legacy-code-as-a-service. They only magnify and amplify the worst parts of my career. The way the "activist shareholder" class like to over-hype and believe in Generative AI magic today only implies things have more room to keep getting worse before they get better (if they ever get better again).
I'm trying my best to adapt to being a "centaur" in this world. (In Chess it has become statistically evident that Human and Bot players of Chess are generally "worse" than the hybrid "Centaur" players.) But even "centaurs" are going to be increasingly taken for granted by companies, and at least for me the sense is growing that as WOPR declared about tic-tac-toe (and thermo-nuclear warfare) "a curious game, the only way to win is not to play". I don't know how I'd bootstrap an entirely new career at this point in my life, but I keep feeling like I need to try to figure that out. I don't want to just be a janitor of other people's messes for the rest of my life.