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The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

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Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#861

Post by [deleted] »

austin-cheney wrote: post #766
niceice wrote: post #440

Average age of engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project was 25. Our current gerontocracy is ahistorical. Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency. The average age of NASA’s mission control team during the Apollo era was 27— they put humans on the moon. Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status…

Government is not a startup just as pizza is not a vegetable, just as prison is not a vacation from a bad job. It’s more accurate and less toxic to compare molecular oxygen to carbon monoxide. False comparisons do more harm than good. Inexperienced people imposing disruptions due to lack of experience is why young people may succeed at startups but fail at establishing companies. Likewise, government is not a startup…

[deleted]

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#862

Post by tschwimmer »

pavlov wrote: post #822
niceice wrote: post #440

Average age of engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project was 25. Our current gerontocracy is ahistorical. Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency. The average age of NASA’s mission control team during the Apollo era was 27— they put humans on the moon. Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status…

Wernher von Braun was a brilliant young engineer, one of the best minds of his generation. At age 25 he joined a patriotic party that was full of curiosity and creativity, disrupting the stale status quo of his home country. For the next eight years he did groundbreaking work in developing rockets. In 1945 he and his youthful engineering team were actively recruited to continue their work for another country with gre…

This has shades of Robin Williams’ bar rant in Good Will Hunting.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#863

Post by [deleted] »

chikere232 wrote: post #808
niceice wrote: post #440

Average age of engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project was 25. Our current gerontocracy is ahistorical. Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency. The average age of NASA’s mission control team during the Apollo era was 27— they put humans on the moon. Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status…

If they're helping overthrow democracy and the rule of law, they are not the best of us nerds. Naming and shaming them is good. No one forced them to take this job. With the skills you list they could have done any number of good or neutral things instead.

[deleted]

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#864

Post by dvh »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #859

In pondering the mindset of these people, I was reminded of a very different submission on hn yesterday [1]. Quote: "Avoid, at all costs, arriving at a scenario where the ground-up rewrite starts to look attractive" Seems to me that in their narrow, reckless arrogance they're doing something similar to the mechanisms of government. This is all broken and people who built it were idiots. Lets just scrap it and built i…

I think rewrites are popular in part because during rewrite it is possible to drop features, either voluntarily or because of deadlines, while it would probably never fly to drop feature from working, existing implementation.

Also your theory doesn't hold up for cases when you rewrite your own code. I've rewritten my old code hundreds of time because I was "idiot" in a sense that it was unmaintainable with new changed requirements.

Rewrites are sometimes necessary.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#865

Post by WJW »

niceice wrote: post #440

Average age of engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project was 25. Our current gerontocracy is ahistorical. Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency. The average age of NASA’s mission control team during the Apollo era was 27— they put humans on the moon. Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status…

> one reason startups work so well

Since when do startups "work well"? Some startups work well, but famously >90% of them fail. Imagine if 9 out of every 10 fires was just left alone because the fire brigade was replaced by a startup, or if 9 out 10 bridges fell down within a few years. Startups are just one of many models of running things, but they are not appropriate for everything.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#866

Post by mkoubaa »

boplicity wrote: post #484

Remember, if you can vote, vote the next time you can. Convince your friends and neighbors to vote, too. Apathy has real consequences.

I don't know anyone that voted democrat in this election.

If you're looking someone to blame, blame the idiots who engineered the blue ticket, not the voters who couldn't stomach it

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#868

Post by rayiner »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #859

In pondering the mindset of these people, I was reminded of a very different submission on hn yesterday [1]. Quote: "Avoid, at all costs, arriving at a scenario where the ground-up rewrite starts to look attractive" Seems to me that in their narrow, reckless arrogance they're doing something similar to the mechanisms of government. This is all broken and people who built it were idiots. Lets just scrap it and built i…

But sometimes these people aren’t wrong! Microsoft Teams really does suck. And while not all of the federal government is Microsoft Teams, the State department definitely is.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#869

Post by djaychela »

niceice wrote: post #440

Average age of engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project was 25. Our current gerontocracy is ahistorical. Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency. The average age of NASA’s mission control team during the Apollo era was 27— they put humans on the moon. Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status…

>Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status quo.

Counterpoint - they don't have the wisdom and experience in the domain they are working in that older, wiser heads do. I've seen a LOT of stuff from both 'tech bros' and programmers who are new to a domain where it's clear they are 100% confident they are right, despite consensus to the contrary. And when their plans are implemented, all the things they didn't think about come into play - such as Tesla service which is terrible.

These people may all be brilliant engineers. But not all problems are engineering problems, and while these people may be able to engineer a system to reduce costs drastically, they may not understand where to cut costs and where efficiency can actually be achieved.

Don't forget that most of the new tech economy that people harp on about (Uber, Amazon, Tesla spring to mind) is built on the erosion of workers' rights and lowest-common-denominator treatment wherever possible.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#870

Post by [deleted] »

dvh wrote: post #864
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #859

In pondering the mindset of these people, I was reminded of a very different submission on hn yesterday [1]. Quote: "Avoid, at all costs, arriving at a scenario where the ground-up rewrite starts to look attractive" Seems to me that in their narrow, reckless arrogance they're doing something similar to the mechanisms of government. This is all broken and people who built it were idiots. Lets just scrap it and built i…

I think rewrites are popular in part because during rewrite it is possible to drop features, either voluntarily or because of deadlines, while it would probably never fly to drop feature from working, existing implementation. Also your theory doesn't hold up for cases when you rewrite your own code. I've rewritten my old code hundreds of time because I was "idiot" in a sense that it was unmaintainable with new change…

[deleted]
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