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You do realise that a lot of things happening at most companies have absolutely nothing to do with code?

lifeisstillgood 4y ago
But why not? I mean a company is effectively "just" a machine to deliver a service / outcome from inputs. It is a set of processes - which can be codified. why not in software? And if you want to chnage the process, make a release.
- majormajor 4y ago
  This is how you get a "why do I have to ask on HN to get lucky to have someone at Google who knows how System X works see my post to get support on this stupid product?" reality. Inflexible machines that run on rules are not even a unique feature of software, but they are good at slowly making your customers stop liking you. The hard part of the "machine to deliver a service / outcome from inputs" is not "formalizing a process in code." It's designing that process, in all its gross real-world complexities, and then (even harder) changing it as the underlying world changes. If it was easy to actually nail down the requirements in advance, you could ship out the coding to meet a spec to the lowest bidder.
  - andrewflnr 4y ago
    IMO this is truer than you may realize. The future of human work is customer service and empathy, understanding people and what they want in detail. Everything else can be automated.
  - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
    Yes. And it's not like human management does this "design a system" so well at the moment that replacing them with coders focused on explicit expressions of a process is going to be much worse. A number of comments are "it will be awful if the code is bad because the code is inflexible". Yes. That's called bad law. What we want is to write good law. See the Manna story below.
throwaway821909 4y ago
I mean, I'm not convinced by the comment, but I think the article is talking about managers of developers, nearly all of the people here are involved in development, mostly at companies which are predisposed to trying to replace humans with software (because their product does the same) So the interesting question is, in that context is a manager becoming ever less necessary

But why not? I mean a company is effectively "just" a machine to deliver a service / outcome from inputs. It is a set of processes - which can be codified. why not in software? And if you want to chnage the process, make a release.

majormajor 4y ago
This is how you get a "why do I have to ask on HN to get lucky to have someone at Google who knows how System X works see my post to get support on this stupid product?" reality. Inflexible machines that run on rules are not even a unique feature of software, but they are good at slowly making your customers stop liking you. The hard part of the "machine to deliver a service / outcome from inputs" is not "formalizing a process in code." It's designing that process, in all its gross real-world complexities, and then (even harder) changing it as the underlying world changes. If it was easy to actually nail down the requirements in advance, you could ship out the coding to meet a spec to the lowest bidder.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  IMO this is truer than you may realize. The future of human work is customer service and empathy, understanding people and what they want in detail. Everything else can be automated.
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  Yes. And it's not like human management does this "design a system" so well at the moment that replacing them with coders focused on explicit expressions of a process is going to be much worse. A number of comments are "it will be awful if the code is bad because the code is inflexible". Yes. That's called bad law. What we want is to write good law. See the Manna story below.

throwaway821909 4y ago

I mean, I'm not convinced by the comment, but I think the article is talking about managers of developers, nearly all of the people here are involved in development, mostly at companies which are predisposed to trying to replace humans with software (because their product does the same) So the interesting question is, in that context is a manager becoming ever less necessary