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I think - and it's only a think - that the author has ignored that a large part of what used to be called technical work is now commodified. I remember when a

• steveBK123 3y ago
  I guess the point may be that after 30-40 years of this, the low hanging fruit of commodification may be gone. Further, the more we commodify, the higher order our problems become and the specialist engineers you hire move further and further up the stack. Also, not sure if it's always been the case.. but the latest vintage of SaaSified startups have a high % of products that don't actually do any of the things you want them to do yet. They want you to pay them for their service, so they can capture your use cases for implementation and then commodify them for other customers. So you end up with long lead times and IP leakage. Neat! I think the example of templating SQL is always this misunderstood target for management. I dunno, the language in particular has survived an incredible length of time in our industry... it actually does a pretty good job. 99% of wrappers/DSLs/etc put on top of it make it far worse and still require you to dip into SQL for anything remotely non-vanilla. Further, instead of hiring SQL experts (there's many) you need to train up SaaSified DSL SQL wrapper X experts (none exist).
• Dardania 3y ago
  to bounce on your point, there's the distinction between creative & non creative work. Sure, tools might help the creativity, but it can't replace it, and their article discusses how it can make it worse. Accurate requirements gathering requires a spark of creativity...
• danwee 3y ago
  What you say is true, but the amount of "grunt work" is not constant over the years. In fact, I think the amount of "grunt work" in teh tech industry is just growing and not shrinking; I think the following look is quite obvious: - amount of current grunt work: X - new tech Z appears that makes X be reduced to 0.1X - at the same time Z enables new ways of doing things. Some things become grunt work because they are a byproduct of Z - amount of current grunt work: Y (where Y ~= X) - ... If the technological progress had stopped in the 2000s, then all the grunt work (originated in the 90s) would be esentially zero today. New tech just brings automation and grunt work. I don't think we will live in a society where there's practically no grunt work. The most recent example is AI: there are AI tools that generate sound, images, video and text... but if you want to create a differentiating product/experience, you need to combine (do the grunt work) all the available tools (chatgpt, stable difussion, etc.)
  • steveBK123 3y ago
    Right!! 10/20/x years ago we didn't have DevOps, CloudOps, CloudFinOps, CloudSecOps, IaC experts, Cloud Architects, Cloud transformation experts, Observability architects, SREs, plus all the permutations of roles around "data" that didn't exist discretely, etc etc etc.
    • esafak 3y ago
      We did not have web scale products, which enabled new possibilities. E-mailing documents and collaborating offline sucked.
  • BurningFrog 3y ago
    > I think the amount of "grunt work" in the tech industry is just growing and not shrinking... Not sure, but isn't this just another way of saying that the tech industry keeps growing?
    • csydas 3y ago
      I'm not sure what the parent post meant exactly, but I do agree there is tons of grunt work -- I've seen big name SV companies where large parts of their work flow include parts like "and then just every hour you need to do something in a slow UI that can't be automated" to keep vital systems working. I would say that's really grunt work, and there are even persons in such companies where their only task is doing such grunt work. Truly I've been told by clients I work with they have entire double-digit sized teams where the members only responsibility is to reboot VMs that breach specific resource thresholds -- easily automated and even built into most hypervisors, but for whatever reason these tech giants opted for a human to do it -- the only semi-reasonable explanation I got from one client was that their infrastructure team got outsourced and they laid off the only people who knew how to use the automation tooling. It's a dumb reason for sure, but at least I can understand why they opted for the manual grunt work. Similarly, keep in mind a lot of this grunt work is just to satisfy some reporting requirement from somewhere -- some person(s) in the company want to see at least X% of uptime or Y LOC every day, so you get people trying to write a lot of yak shaving code that basically does nothing except satisfy the metrics or ensure that uptime % always looks good (i.e., they don't fix the cause of the downtime entirely, they just get the endpoint that is checked to determine update working well enough so it reports to the monitoring system and they leave it at that)
• loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  Nah, WordPerfect and wordstar had mail merge way before word did.
  • suoduandao3 3y ago
    I miss WordPerfect. Maybe it was the novelty but it had such enjoyable fonts.
    • loloquwowndueo 3y ago
      Well I remember when it had no fonts :)
    • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      It's still there if you want to buy it. At least in name.
• fulafel 3y ago
  I wonder if there's a term for Amdahl's law but applied to human processes. Like the other side of "law of diminishing returns".
  • davidgerard 3y ago
    "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." - Fred Brooks, 1975
  • random3 3y ago
    Amdahl's Law applies cleanly to human processes. Perhaps the most revealing example is the origin of "computer" as a human occupation and how scaling the compute process happened at Los Alamos https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/human-computers-los-alamos/ https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/human-computers-lo... The more general aspect of Amdahl's law is captured by certain scaling laws and limits generally related to communication (see full bisection bandwidth) and certain architectures (e.g. Cray) meant to optimize for this
    • fulafel 3y ago
      It semantically works but it has not been adopted by people outside computing, I'd guess think the definition isn't relatable or understandable enough for people coming from humanities/biz backgrounds, so it might well be possible that there's a parallel concept there.
• martingalex2 3y ago
  the people you're supposed to be eliciting requirements from are just regurgitating what ChatGPT told them are the requirements hehehe
  • dexwiz 3y ago
    This is becoming so true. I have read so many documents in the last year that are obviously from a GPT, especially when it’s about something new to a group. But in the end, I would rather get a half baked GPT doc than a quarter baked junior analyst doc. I just worry that GPTs are going to kick the rungs out of the bottom of any knowledge work later. Being bad but junior used to be a learning environment without too many repercussions. But how do you compete with peers using AI? You use it also. But now you have robbed yourself of a learning opportunity. Yeah you can learn someway by doing it, but it’s like doing homework by looking at the answers. Sure it can help you double check, but if you don’t put the effort into constructing your own answer, then you have only cheated yourself. I think the AI alignment issues are probably over blown in the short term, but what about the long term when the average person has regressed so far as to be unable to live without AI. They will just do whatever is told to them.
• ludicity 3y ago
  This is a fair critique, and I'm giving it some thought now. I'll need to stew on it a little bit. Maybe the fundamental issue is that many of these products are designed to, as one of the other commenters noted, appear to purchasers that don't work in the field as simply appliances one purchases and then the problem is solved. The issue is that a lot of the stuff out there doesn't actually solve the problem - it just appears to because other people buy it, and then lie about the implementation being successful to get promoted. Things like mail merge -are- like kettles, they're solved problems, and the only way to solve them is to try things. The broader issue is that my employer purchased Workday because they believed it's like a kettle, but it can't actually fix the fact that our org structure is so horrendous that it can't be modeled. (Incidentally, this year is the first year that I've realized that a sufficiently bad org structure, in a large company, tech debt of a sort. You end up doing all sorts of crazy things just to work out who works for who, and what can this user see in this database, etc.)
• atmosx 3y ago
  Some aspects have indeed been commodified. But what about the bigger picture? How simple is it to run a business, a website, organise a travel around or pay a bill nowadays, compared to 1994 or 2004? At times, I can't help but feel that the previous generation had a more leisurely pace of life, which led to a more fulfilling lifestyle. Nowadays, time seems to pass at a rapid pace, with high levels of stress. Allow me to share two experiences: a) The other day, while at the bank, I witnessed at least three individuals over the age of 60 struggling to complete simple tasks, aimlessly wandering around and pleading with the staff for assistance. These tasks are supposed to be easily accessible through online banking, but due to certain exceptions, the system did not support their specific needs. As a result, they were forced to make appointments, with the earliest available slot being three to four months away. One of them needed to withdraw money from a blocked account to purchase wood and heat her home, but the bank's staff refused to budge, insisting that she wait three months to solve the problem. b) Just two years ago, my father was in Sicily and could not find a way to make a simple phone call back home. Yet, in the 1970s, all he had to do was walk into the bar in the area with a few coins. Not to mention that while once upon a time your average person could fix the lights, the car, the heating, the non-automatic door, etc. by themselves now they need to call the professionals.