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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

#831

Post by wg0 »

whatever1 wrote: post #716
wg0 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting take. We are not going to talk about Office, Windows, Adobe or Autodesk products here. Neither Linux kernel. Just classified ads or e-commerce platforms such as gumroad and shopify are complex enough that a single person cannot master them end to end. The domain is huge to master and takes a lots of time to master.

Have you ever seen a tech company calling a 65y.o. retired wizard to debug a system failure? I doubt it. In manufacturing it so regular, that typically senior technical people retire as soon as possible to form their consulting firms and charge much higher rates, just by selling their multi-decade expertise back to their company. In oil & gas, there are consulting firms that their role is to just store and provide do…

Software is code and code is documentation. Do you know MAME that is documenting the arcade consoles as code? And that they work is just a side effect and is not an intended goal?

That doesn't mean that MAME is a trivial project. Far from it. It'll take you several years to get proficient with the whole codebase.

Just that unlike manufacturing, the software is much more self contained and everything is in those files including how to build them.

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

#832

Post by sminchev »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #752
sminchev wrote: post #717

This is like saying: nobody can do woodworking with with manual tools anymore these days, because there are machines since 30 years that do woodworking. There will be always a room for good developers.

Yes, but it's very hard to find quality handmade furniture these days, or even capable carpenters for that matter. I visited a few older relatives recently and realised most of them have really well made 50+ yr old pieces of furniture with detailed, intricate design - which you can't get these days. And unfortunately the same trend is already being seen in code - just look at the vast amount of utterly rubbish apps g…

I fully agree with the garbage. It is extremely difficult to release a product these days. Everybody are trying to vibecode something, without any knowledge of basic software development, validation, reviews, specifications. Even if there is something good, and written with focus on the details, it just can't popup and be seen, because the overproduction of software.

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

#833

Post by danmaz74 »

WalterBright wrote: post #658
danmaz74 wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, productivity increase is hugely important, but if you only pursue profit maximization, then all the productivity increase goes into profits, which means that the general population doesn't increase their well being much if at all. The 40hr work week didn't come by as a consequence of the profit maximization mentality, but as a consequence of hard fought battles by the workers/employees against that mentality. A…

The Law of Supply and Demand is in play, and it means a company cannot dictate prices, wages, or working conditions in a free market economy. Rising productivity would have reduced the average work week regardless. If you still aren't convinced, consider that the benefits package routinely offered to employees is worth around 40% of their pay.

Human societies aren't governed by simple, divine Laws. "Free market economy", based on rational actors, is an abstraction, an idealized model which is useful to understand some mechanisms, but it's far - VERY far - from being a complete model of any real society. At some point, trying to explain everything with the simple rules of that abstraction becomes an ideology just like Communism, which tries to do the same with different abstractions/simplifications.

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

#834

Post by h14h »

A lack of tool & die isn't the West "forgetting how to make things" so much as it is the West choosing not to make the things that make things.

To the extent that AI is analogous to automation in manufacturing, and "writing code" to working on an assembly line, it's hard to argue the West is any thing other than a global leader in "software tool & die", so to speak.

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

#835

Post by mikem170 »

WalterBright wrote: post #607
mikem170 wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I didn't say that the economy would be cratered. GDP doesn't capture everything.

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

#836

Post by don_esteban »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #662
don_esteban wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And change in laws regarding the legalized corruption (Citizens United, ...). And fight for real freedom of speech. This is very complex problem that needs to be tackled from all sides simultaneously, the entrenched interests are already well setup to defend themselves.

Citizens United was a pretty pro-speech decision and is unfairly maligned, and "money is speech" predates it by quite a few years. The real problem is when huge corporations control the flow of information. Which is a bigger problem, that corporations can pay for political ads, or that one corporation has 90% search market share? That there are political ads on Facebook or Twitter, or that those corporations control…

Sorry, no. Both are problem. And it is not pro-speech at all, it is pro-$$$. It is a standard practice to drown the unwanted speech in the noise of the paid-for 'speech'. Nothing about pro-speech for ordinary people there.

Furthermore, Citizen's United makes it harder to make any necessary legislative changes. Including the anti-trust. Focusing only on one issue while leaving the other heads of the hydra intact just plays into its strengths.

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

#837

Post by Yoric »

WalterBright wrote: post #806
Yoric wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Outsourcing happens when it is cheaper to build something somewhere else. Tariffs can compensate for that. Is that free market? > Where are the starving people in capitalist countries? The first example from the top of my head is Argentina. > A large part of profit maximization (i.e. optimizing) usually means reducing the amount of material needed. Isn't that a good thing? This very much depends on the industry. In…

Is what a free market? outsourcing - yes. Tariffs - no. Argentina is hardly a free market country - https://borgenproject.org/hunger-in-argentina/ > In software, for instance, it's exactly the opposite. ?? > No idea what you're talking about. Watch "Alone". I think it's on Netflix. Compare it with the kit of Lewis and Clark.

> > In software, for instance, it's exactly the opposite.

>

> ??

During the last 30+ years, the trend has always been to increase hardware use to save on development/thinking time. AI is the latest and most extreme version of it.

> Argentina is hardly a free market country - https://borgenproject.org/hunger-in-argentina/

Are you by any chance moving the goalposts?

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

#838

Post by flashdesk »

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 think this is an important distinction. Documentation and automation can preserve artifacts, but not the actual capability.

A runbook can tell you what usually works, but it cannot tell you when the situation is no longer “usual.” That kind of judgment mostly comes from seeing real systems fail in messy ways over time.

Tools are still valuable, of course. But they work best when they help experienced people transfer knowledge, not when they are used as a reason to remove the people who understand the system.

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

#839

Post by mawadev »

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…

I highly agree. Let us stop talking about software dev and look behind the curtain a bit...

I want to point at the discouraging framing of developers who learn to be helpless whenever they are stuck in an organization for long enough where they start to believe they cannot do better and there is something that cannot be changed.

The majority of people I met started out in the former group but have been reshaped by the environment they are in.

If you are in the former group and find yourself turning into someone from the latter group, becoming unrecognizable to your past self, ask yourself if you have been reshaped by the organizational experience you were having and where that spark went.

The chance is very high the organization figured out how to keep you in your position or you have internalized things about your professional self at face value that do not depict reality outside the org and that start to affect deeper layers like your confidence and outlook.

You start to identify with the made up labels or arbitrary hurdles of reaching some next level that will change everything. Essentially you are in a box and you developed tunnel vision, could be dept, org, branch or industry wide.

Just bash your head against a project away from work for 3 months on the side and gauge for yourself how capable you are with no economic intention disregarding time and value investments and so on. Repeat this long enough to fill any gaps in knowledge you encounter and at some threshold the coin flips again.

You will do DevOps but you are no DevOps guy, you do Frontend but you are no Frontend guy. Just a free flowing human walking through the layers that create something real.

There is an art in unplugging yourself from economics and thinking in organizational hierarchies and patterns and I think if most of us see it for what it is, software would turn into a calmer place, grounded closer in reality.

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

#840

Post by jbn »

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…

Tom DeMarco wrote a book "Slack" about precisely this.
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