3 ms·

I think I understand what the author is trying to say. We miss thinking "hard" about the small details. Maybe "hard" isn't the right adjective, but we all know

by hnfong 9mo ago

I think I understand what the author is trying to say. We miss thinking "hard" about the small details. Maybe "hard" isn't the right adjective, but we all know the process of coding isn't just typing stuff while the mind wanders. We keep thinking about the code we're typing and the interactions between the new code and the existing stuff, and keep thinking about potential bugs and issues. (This may or may not be "hard".) And this kind of thinking is totally different from what Linus Torvalds has to think about when reviewing a huge patch from a fellow maintainer. Linus' work is probably "harder", but it's a different kind of thinking. You're totally right it's just tools improving. When compilers improved most people were happy, but some people who loved hand crafting asm kept doing it as a hobby. But in 99+% cases hand crafting asm is a detriment to the project even if it's fun, so if you love writing asm yourself you're either out of work, or you grudgingly accept that you might have to write Java to get paid. I think there's a place for lamenting this kind of situation.

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Helmut10001 9mo ago
I agree. I think some of us would rather deal with small, incremental problems than address the big, high-level roadmap. High-level things are much more uncertain than isolated things that can be unit-tested. This can create feelings of inconvenience and unease.
jtrn 9mo ago
Spot on. It’s the lumberjack mourning the axe while holding a chainsaw. The work is still hard. it’s just different. The friction comes from developers who prioritize the 'craft' of syntax over delivering value. It results in massive motivated reasoning. We see people suddenly becoming activists about energy usage or copyright solely to justify not using a tool they dislike. They will hunt for a single AI syntax error while ignoring the history of bugs caused by human fatigue. It's not about the tech. it's about the loss of the old way of working. And it's also somewhat egotistical it seems to me. I sense a pattern that many developers care more about doing what they want instead of providing value to others.
- alkonaut 9mo ago
  I disagree. It's like the lumberjack working from home watching an enormous robotic forestry machine cut trees on a set of tv-screens. If he enjoyed producing lumber, then what he sees on those screens will fill him with joy. He's producing lots of lumber. He's much more efficient than with both axe and chainsaw. But if he enjoyed being in the forest, and _doesn't really care about lumber at all_ (Because it turns out, he never used or liked lumber, he merely produced it for his employer) then these screens won't give him any joy at all. That's how I feel. I don't care about code, but I also don't really care about products. I mostly care about the craft. It's like solving sudokus. I don't collect solved sudokus. Once solved I don't care about them. Having a robot solve sudokus for me would be completely pointless. > I sense a pattern that many developers care more about doing what they want instead of providing value to others. And you'd be 100% right. I do this work because my employer provides me with enough sudokus. And I provide value back which is more than I'm compensated with. That is: I'm compensated with two things: intellectual challenge, and money. That's the relationship I have with my employer. If I could produce 10x more but I don't get the intellectual challenge? The employer isn't giving me what I want - and I'd stop doing the work. I think "You do what the employer wants, produce what needs to be produced, and in return you get money" is a simplification that misses the literal forest for all the forestry.
  - mlvljr 9mo ago
    [dead]
  - jstummbillig 9mo ago
    But now you are conflating solving problems with a personal preference of how the problem should be solved. This never bodes well (unless you always prefer picking the method best suited to solve the problem.)
    - alkonaut 9mo ago
      Well as I said, I consider myself compensated with intellectual challenge/stimulus as part of my compensation. It's _why_ I do the work to begin with. Or to put it another way: it's either done in a way I like, or it's probably not done at all. I'm replaceable after all. If there is someone who is better and more effective at solving problems in some objectively good way - they should have my job. The only reason I still have it is because it seems this is hard to find. Employers are stuck with people who solve problems in the way they like for varying personal reasons and not the objectively best way of solving problems. The hard part in keeping employees happy is that you can't just throw more money at them to make them effective. Keeping them stimulated is the difficult part. Some times you must accept that you must perhaps solve a problem that isn't the most critical one to address, or perhaps a bad call business wise, to keep employees happy, or keep them at all. I think a lot of the "Big rewrites" are in this category, for example. Not really a good idea compared to maintenance/improvement, but if the alternative is maintaining the old one _and_ lose the staff who could do that?
washadjeffmad 9mo ago
I work with a lot of artists, and selling them on (not totally rejecting) AI has largely been unsuccessful until they both understand the analogies and the specifics of what different tools do. AI makes you the manager. The models are like GRAs or contract workers, maybe new to their fields but with tireless energy, and you need to be able to instruct them correctly and evaluate their outputs. None of them can do everything, and you'll need to carefully hire the ones you want based on the work you need, which means breaking workflows into batchable parts. If you've managed projects before, you've done this. Right now, my focus is improving pipelines in composition and arrangement based on an artist's corpus. A lot of them just want to be more productive, and it's a slog to write, then break into parts, etc using modern notation software.

by hnfong 9mo ago

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Helmut10001 9mo ago

I agree. I think some of us would rather deal with small, incremental problems than address the big, high-level roadmap. High-level things are much more uncertain than isolated things that can be unit-tested. This can create feelings of inconvenience and unease.

jtrn 9mo ago

Spot on. It’s the lumberjack mourning the axe while holding a chainsaw. The work is still hard. it’s just different. The friction comes from developers who prioritize the 'craft' of syntax over delivering value. It results in massive motivated reasoning. We see people suddenly becoming activists about energy usage or copyright solely to justify not using a tool they dislike. They will hunt for a single AI syntax error while ignoring the history of bugs caused by human fatigue. It's not about the tech. it's about the loss of the old way of working. And it's also somewhat egotistical it seems to me. I sense a pattern that many developers care more about doing what they want instead of providing value to others.

alkonaut 9mo ago
I disagree. It's like the lumberjack working from home watching an enormous robotic forestry machine cut trees on a set of tv-screens. If he enjoyed producing lumber, then what he sees on those screens will fill him with joy. He's producing lots of lumber. He's much more efficient than with both axe and chainsaw. But if he enjoyed being in the forest, and _doesn't really care about lumber at all_ (Because it turns out, he never used or liked lumber, he merely produced it for his employer) then these screens won't give him any joy at all. That's how I feel. I don't care about code, but I also don't really care about products. I mostly care about the craft. It's like solving sudokus. I don't collect solved sudokus. Once solved I don't care about them. Having a robot solve sudokus for me would be completely pointless. > I sense a pattern that many developers care more about doing what they want instead of providing value to others. And you'd be 100% right. I do this work because my employer provides me with enough sudokus. And I provide value back which is more than I'm compensated with. That is: I'm compensated with two things: intellectual challenge, and money. That's the relationship I have with my employer. If I could produce 10x more but I don't get the intellectual challenge? The employer isn't giving me what I want - and I'd stop doing the work. I think "You do what the employer wants, produce what needs to be produced, and in return you get money" is a simplification that misses the literal forest for all the forestry.
- mlvljr 9mo ago
  [dead]
- jstummbillig 9mo ago
  But now you are conflating solving problems with a personal preference of how the problem should be solved. This never bodes well (unless you always prefer picking the method best suited to solve the problem.)
  - alkonaut 9mo ago
    Well as I said, I consider myself compensated with intellectual challenge/stimulus as part of my compensation. It's _why_ I do the work to begin with. Or to put it another way: it's either done in a way I like, or it's probably not done at all. I'm replaceable after all. If there is someone who is better and more effective at solving problems in some objectively good way - they should have my job. The only reason I still have it is because it seems this is hard to find. Employers are stuck with people who solve problems in the way they like for varying personal reasons and not the objectively best way of solving problems. The hard part in keeping employees happy is that you can't just throw more money at them to make them effective. Keeping them stimulated is the difficult part. Some times you must accept that you must perhaps solve a problem that isn't the most critical one to address, or perhaps a bad call business wise, to keep employees happy, or keep them at all. I think a lot of the "Big rewrites" are in this category, for example. Not really a good idea compared to maintenance/improvement, but if the alternative is maintaining the old one _and_ lose the staff who could do that?

washadjeffmad 9mo ago

I work with a lot of artists, and selling them on (not totally rejecting) AI has largely been unsuccessful until they both understand the analogies and the specifics of what different tools do. AI makes you the manager. The models are like GRAs or contract workers, maybe new to their fields but with tireless energy, and you need to be able to instruct them correctly and evaluate their outputs. None of them can do everything, and you'll need to carefully hire the ones you want based on the work you need, which means breaking workflows into batchable parts. If you've managed projects before, you've done this. Right now, my focus is improving pipelines in composition and arrangement based on an artist's corpus. A lot of them just want to be more productive, and it's a slog to write, then break into parts, etc using modern notation software.