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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 immedia

by jdw64 6mo ago

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. What remains is documentation and automation. But documentation is not the same as field experience. Automation is not the same as judgment. Without people who have actually worked with the system, you end up with a loss of tacit knowledge—and eventually, declining productivity. AI is following the same pattern. What AI is being sold as right now is not really productivity. In many domains, productivity is already sufficient. What’s being sold is workforce reduction. The West has seen this before, especially in the case of General Electric. GE pursued aggressive short-term financial optimization, cutting costs, focusing on quarterly results, and maximizing shareholder returns. In the process, it hollowed out its own long-term capabilities. It effectively traded its future for short-term gains. The same mindset is visible today. The core problem is that decision-makers—often far removed from actual engineering work— believe that tacit knowledge can be replaced with documentation, tools, and processes.ti cannot. Tacit knowledge comes from direct experience with real systems over time. If you remove the people and the learning pipeline, that knowledge does not stay in the organization. It disappears.

deleted 6mo ago
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brrraaah 6mo ago
[flagged]
- stingraycharles 6mo ago
  You can really reduce almost any problem to a “it’s a problem because of people”, so that adds very little to a discussion.
  - brrraaah 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    - stingraycharles 6mo ago
      A claim that fits every possible observation equally well isn’t an explanation. What does it help you predict, when everything falls under that label? How does it help you predict behavior of different institutions?
      - brrraaah 6mo ago
        Given a sufficiently long timeline all predictions breakdown (see prior comment on attenuation and entropy and Nostradamus) And on shorter timescales you aren't really predicting anything of consequence. You're just assuring all that effort trying to predict Apple's next move (for example) keeps Apple itself alive in the public debate whether they do the thing or not; they'll have missteps but our 24/7 fetishizing of what they'll do next, overall, just distracts us from our own lives and boosting the lives of the mega rich You really don't seem to have a grasp of how gamified and propagandized you are
        jrflowers 6mo ago
        > just distracts us from our own lives and boosting the lives of the mega rich So you’re saying we are being distracted from boosting the lives of the mega rich, which we should get back to doing
        stingraycharles 6mo ago
        [dead]
    - teiferer 6mo ago
      If you find discussion forums pointless then why are you participating in one?
palmotea 6mo ago
> 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. I think that's still a symptom. The real problem is ideology: the monomaniacal focus on profit-making business, which infects our political leaders, down to capitalists and business leaders, down to the indoctrinated rank-and-file. Towards the end of the cold war, the last constraint on it were abolished, the the victory over the Soviet Union made it unquestioned. The Chinese don't have that ideological problem. Their government appears to not give a shit about how much profit individual business make, they care about building out supply chains and a capabilities. They will bury the West, so long as the West remains in the thrall of libertarian business ideology.
- AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
  The US is stuck in this weird irony where they recognize that Soviet-style central planning is a disaster but can't recognize that it's what megacorps do when they're insulated from competition. Internal politics, perverse incentives and a system that can sustain massive inefficiencies right up until the point that it doesn't. In general productive economic activity generates a surplus and that surplus allows for slack. Human beings intuitively understand this. Hobbies are frequently de facto training for things that aren't currently happening but might later. Family-owned and operated businesses are much less likely to try to outsource their core competency for the sake of quarterly profits. But regulatory capture and market consolidation causes the surplus to go to the corporate bureaucracies capturing the regulators instead of human beings with self-determination and goals other than number go up, and then the system optimizes for capturing the government rather than satisfying the people. "When you legislate buying and selling the first things to be bought and sold are the legislators." You throw away the competitive market and subject yourselves to the unaccountable bureaucracy, and then try to pretend it's not the same thing because this time the central planners are wearing business suits.
  - NordStreamYacht 6mo ago
    > megacorps do when they're insulated from competition. Internal politics, perverse incentives and a system that can sustain massive inefficiencies right up until the point that it doesn't. You just described Lucent.
stingraycharles 6mo ago
Seems to me that - optimistically - this would shift the job of a software engineer into a more formal engineering role, and that the actual implementation is done by AI. In the same way in other areas, engineering and implementation differ and implementation can be (and is) automated. No idea how this should take form, though, and if it’s even realistic. But it seems like due to AI, formal specs and all kinds of “old school” techniques are having a renaissance while we figure out how to distribute load between people and AI.
- ted_dunning 6mo ago
  That sounds right, but it can be superbly wrong because that presupposes that you can debug what the AI gets very confidently wrong. There are three legs to the stool: specification, implementation, and verification. Implementation and verification both take low-level knowledge and sophisticated knowledge of how things break.
  - adrian_b 6mo ago
    Indeed, even if were possible for someone to create any program most of the time just by directing a team of AI agents, when something does not work one needs the ability to zoom in through the abstraction levels and understand exactly the program that is executed, so only knowing to generate prompts becomes insufficient. This is the same with compilers. Most of the time a programmer needs to know only the high-level language that is used for writing the program. Nevertheless, when there is a subtle bug or just the desired performance cannot be reached, a programmer who also understands the machine language of the processor has a great advantage by being able to solve the bug or the performance problem, which without such knowledge would be solved in much more time or never.
    - SleepyMyroslav 6mo ago
      I don't think compilers are a good example. The economics of software development has won a long time ago. For example in Gamedev with well known soft real-time requirements people (mostly) stopped doing that machine code dance many hardware generations ago. Like it happened with memory optimizations: people measure memory in GB now not in KB =) I am sure programmers cherish every case when they can do micro optimization but in the retrospect the high level cuts is what made the system fit the perf or memory budget.
vishnugupta 6mo ago
> 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 on HN because when I notice a broken system now a days, 90% of it is due to lack of slack in the system to absorb short term shocks.
- acomjean 6mo ago
  I’ll note at the end of the last century I worked at IBM research which had a budget of 6 Billion dollars. Management was trying very hard to get better return on that investment. Even today IBM though often ridiculed in the tech space (sometimes they do deserve it) spends a lot on R&D.
  - NordStreamYacht 6mo ago
    Lucent at the same time went through the same issue: how to monetise Bell Labs. Bell Labs greatest work came out when AT&T was a monopoly. Once they were broken up (1984?) they started feeling the pain. When the Lucent spinoff took place, the new entities had no Monopoly money to fund unconstrained research while management's behaviour never changed. I don't know how BL fared under Alcatel and now Nokia, but haven't heard of anything interesting for years.
    - Zigurd 6mo ago
      I've been to the Holmdel office in the decline years. It was very sad. A fraction of the former staff was rattling around in what could've been used for a post apocalyptic sci-fi set. In its heyday it must've been magnificent. Imagine taking an entire great research university and putting it into a single architectural masterpiece. I've also been to Nokia HQ after Elop ruined the place. Also sad.
      - 6mo ago
netcan 6mo ago
>. In many domains, productivity is already sufficient. What’s being sold is workforce reduction. This is a blindspot to many. People working on entrepreneurial projects need to build a lot. They start with nothing. They need (for example) features. There's a lot to do. Most firms are not that. Visa, Salesforce, LinkedIn or whatnot. They have a product. They have features. They have been at it for a while. They also have resources. They are very often in a position of finding nails for a "write more software" hammer. It's unintuitive because they all have big wishlist and to do lists and and a/b testing system for pouring software into but... If there were known "make more software, make more money" opportunities available, they would have already done them. Actual growth and new demand needs to come from arenas outside of this. Eg companies that suck at software(either making or acquiring) might be able to get the job done. The Problem, bringing this back to the article, is fungibility. A lot of this "human capital" stuff cannot be easily repackaged. It's a "living" thing. Talent and skills pipelines can be cut off, and vanish. A danger in Ai coding (and other fields) is that it leverages preexisting human capital and doesn't generate any for later.
- Terr_ 6mo ago
  > If there were known "make more software, make more money" opportunities available, they would have already done them. Sometimes they're available, but not palatable, when the opportunity could threaten their existing investments or patterns. That might mean "self-cannibalism", or changing the ecology so that the main product niche is threatened. Then those opportunities are ignored, or actively worked-against via lobbying, embrace-extend-extinguish, etc.
  - netcan 6mo ago
    Ok... but this just generalizes into the "known things" type. Whether the reason of strategic (like your example), internal politics, insufficient knowledge.... The point is that there is a local equilibrium, and most mature firms are at this equilibrium. More resources via Ai, at first order, goes after that diminishing returns part of the curve... which is a cliff especially for highly resourced firms topping the S&P500. A lot of Ai-optimist:s " mental model" of the economy do not account for this stuff at all. "Save time/money" outcomes are not similar at all to "make more stuff" outcomes. Firing employees does freeze up labour... but reutilizing this labour is non-trivial... as this article demonstrates quite well.
zelphirkalt 6mo ago
And the next level of this is, that even companies that realize this, mostly go ahead acting like this anyway, because they think someone else can train the juniors. Some other company will appear to do that, but nimby! Over time the lack of good judgement will lead to a decline in their products' quality, which will be difficult to recover from.
samiv 6mo ago
Why would anyone have a sight longer than a quarter? I mean how does long term thinking help the execs get their compensation this quarter? Sheesh..worst case scenario is that the work done now will benefit someone else when they've already left. Also when companies grow big enough "business" becomes the main business of the company. By that I mean everything unrelated to the actual original domain, such as playing in the financial markets, doing stock buybacks, lobbying, cheating etc. When your CEO is an MBA and your real market is Wall Street any actual product RD and support is a real annoying cost that just cuts into the profits and thus into the exec compensation.
- baq 6mo ago
  > Why would anyone have a sight longer than a quarter? I mean how does long term thinking help the execs get their compensation this quarter? Vesting schedules, conditional grants, contractual equity ownership requirements
  - cucumber3732842 6mo ago
    >Vesting schedules, conditional grants, contractual equity ownership requirements In those filthy low margin industries that HN loves to regulated across the oceans out of sight out of mind capital investments have service lives measured in decades.
- derf_ 6mo ago
  > ...any actual product RD and support is a real annoying cost that just cuts into the profits... Worse, it might not generate a return. If you have enough profits, you just buy anyone who successfully produced something innovative. Let them take the risks. As Cisco used to say, "Silicon Valley is our R&D lab." It is a very difficult mindset to argue against.
- BoingBoomTschak 6mo ago
  Would be interesting to get a law that says that all positions supposed to take long-term decision should be paid with X% of their salary in (non-redeemable until Y years?) stocks.
cjfd 6mo ago
This sounds all true to me, but I think there is more. It is not just decisions by management, it is also the wider economic context. Low interest rates and, for the US, having the world reserve currency as your own currency both seem to make many of these changes attractive or even inevitable. Low interest rates lead to 'innovation' which I put in scare quotes because besides real innovation it can also mean something that passes as innovation but in the end just turns out to be a bubble of stuff that was not valuable enough. The 'innovation' then crowds out investments in more boring sectors like manufacturing. This is also not good for the population in general because fewer jobs are left for people who are not suited for working in highly 'innovative' sectors.
pelorat 6mo ago
In the case of the military I'd say the real reason is political. After the fall of the Berlin wall, Europe collectively agreed (knowingly or not) that war is now a thing of the past and the goal should be the complete dismantling of militaries worldwide, starting with Europe. Lead by example, etc.
- brabel 6mo ago
  They agreed that war was a thing of the past, but still continued to push for NATO to allow new members anyway, ironically causing Russia (and China and everyone who is NOT in NATO) to suspect that war was NOT a thing of the past and therefore never quite abandoning their military completely. Unpopular opinion: the West should either NEVER have abandoned its military production (so as to maintain NATO actual preparedness for war, given that's the only reason for its existence) OR it should just have dismantled NATO and announced to the world that it strongly believes war is a thing of the past, and that other countries are advised to follow suit. But we actually chose the easy, halfway path: keep NATO, keep our militaries "looking strong" (which gives the signal our rivals should also do the same, obviously), but not actually be ready for any sort of major war and as the article points out, even lose actual capacity to become ready for war within any realistic timeframe. The worst possible outcome :(.
  - LtWorf 6mo ago
    USA had no part in that push?
    - bluGill 6mo ago
      Perhaps but the US was pushing NATO to invest more in war for years suggesting they didn't believe war was in the past
      - LtWorf 6mo ago
        That's because they have more to gain from that.
      - 6mo ago
DrBazza 6mo ago
> 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. It's always seemed to me that the problem is corporate profit and personal profit above all. 'Management' is a subset of this, and so is pretty much everything else, including the current drive for AI. It's the Western, perhaps American, approach to business and emphasived by MBAs and the media. Lowering costs, driving share price, dividends and corporate profit. This race over the few decades has hollowed out most Western companies. Listen to any entrepreneur podcast, or read any website, and it's all about 'how quickly can I get to exit', i.e. personal profit. Capitalism is the worst form of economic system, apart from all the rest.
- 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
  I have worked for companies in different countries. I think the striking thing is how US companies tend to have no idea how to be wealthy. Record profits, so the ceos use all of their tricks to get rich quick? They are already rich! Don't fix what isn't broken. Not every company needs to expand into 10 new markets, or have 5% lay offs or double in revenue. Some of this is investor pressure, but often it's not. Some guy who made it to the top is bored, doesn't feel like he is obviously doing enough, so he keeps making decisions to justify his position. This isn't to insight flames but the European companies I worked for knew how to be wealthy! The market took a down turn from COVID, they ate the cost to keep their people. Some flashy new vertical is trending. They decided it's not for them, they have a brand and customers that they should focus on while everyone else works out the kinks. The company decides, why go public at all, we are successful and don't need anyone else's influence over us. People say "you cannot project beyond 1 quarter". This is true in terms of catastrophe or gambler success. But its not true, if you act in q1 like there will be a q2 or even 5 years from now or heaven forbid a second or third generation you make different moves. You value different things.
yapyap 6mo ago
> The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself in shootings technically the guns are not the issue since they dont fire on their own.. they do enable the ability to shoot though
- 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
  Only in 2026 is AI the answer to everything and when the negative traits of our behaviour are amplified due to AI it clearly has nothing to do with AI even when the article exactly about that.
Aaargh20318 6mo ago
> What AI is being sold as right now is not really productivity. In many domains, productivity is already sufficient. What’s being sold is workforce reduction. And workforce reduction is a nobel goal. In fact, I think it's one of the most important things humanity should focus on. We should strive for a workforce of zero. Humans currently was an enormous amount of their life working instead of more worthwhile pursuits. I despise the rhetoric around this, we didn't "lose jobs" over AI, we saved ourselves a lot of work. What it does do is highlight a problem in our current society: the link between labour and the access to resources (e.g. money). I don't think that AI is the ultimate answer to the problem of work, but it can contribute to it.
- only-one1701 6mo ago
  The time to solve that resource problem is before AI concentrates power, not after. It’s LESS likely to happen when a tiny elite increases their already huge amount of power.
- esseph 6mo ago
  Jobless people normally can't feed themselves in a modern world. And uh, healthcare. Among other things.
  - Aaargh20318 6mo ago
    Exactly, so that problem needs to be solved. Labour and income should not be linked.
    - esseph 6mo ago
      I think you could go at least another 10,000 years and that still wouldn't be "solved".
sgt 6mo ago
You sound convincing, but it also reads very AI generated. A lot of people will stop reading half way.
- christofosho 6mo ago
  ... Yeah, that was my issue as well. I'm pretty sure it _is_ AI generated, and flagged it. Hopefully moderation can follow up.
  - sgt 6mo ago
    The worst part is that several of the replies are probably AI generated too. So AI feeds AI, essentially. Is this going end forums like HN? I hope not.
- xhevahir 6mo ago
  People downvoting the above should consider whether the genetic fallacy is really so much a fallacy when we're talking to a bunch of machines. I'm pretty sure the parent comment is the work of a bot, and I have no interest in talking to an automated sock puppet.
gmerc 6mo ago
See also https://georgzoeller.com/blog/posts/the-tech-job-apocalypse-is-just-outsourcing-with-an-ai-coat-of-paint/ https://georgzoeller.com/blog/posts/the-tech-job-apocalypse-...
Lio 6mo ago
There’s even a management tutorial game which demonstrates the dangers of removing too much slack from systems. It’s called The Beer Game[1]. One of the funny things about it is even people that have played and discussed it before _still_ make the same fundamental mistakes next time. Short-termism is the death of companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game
- dragontamer 6mo ago
  Wut? The point of the beer game is that buffering in the supply chain makes the bullwhip effect worse.
  - wry_durian 6mo ago
    If "winning" the beer game means not overreacting to short-term signals, then you can view that as a form of slack. You're sometimes paying a bit extra to hold onto something that you have no immediate short-term use for.
    - dragontamer 6mo ago
      You are supposed to play the beer game twice. Once where you use the obvious slack and buffering. And a 2nd time where you minimize buffering and use just in time inventory management. People who have played the game knows which one outperforms. By significant margins.
  - avmich 6mo ago
    I'm not sure it's the same kind of buffering. I would assume the "winning" strategy for the case when the known final demand is fixed is to maintain fixed the upstream orders, and buffer outcome, and for non-fixed final demand is to model that demand as good as possible and keep upstream orders accordingly to maintain outcome matching the demand model. Large penalties for buffering may make this approach not working, I guess...
  - marcosdumay 6mo ago
Fr0styMatt88 6mo ago
I feel like it’s something more fundamental and broad than that. We slowly remove excuses to talk to other people. The thought crossed my mind the other day — if I’m asking the AI a question, that’s replacing a human interaction I would have had with a coworker. It’s not just in coding, it’s everything. With ChatGPT always available in your pocket, what social interactions is it replacing? The thing that gets me is, we are meant to fundamentally be social creatures, yet we have come to streamline away socialisation any chance we get. I’m guilty of this too — I much prefer Doordash to having to call up the restaurant like in the old days, for example.
- MattJ100 6mo ago
  We see this in our open-source community. We've had a community channel for over two decades, where community members help newcomers and each other solve problems and answer questions. Increasingly we have people join who tell us they've been struggling with a problem "for days". Per routine, we ask for their configuration, and it turns out they've been asking ChatGPT, Claude or some other LLM for assistance and their configuration is a total mess. Something about this feels really broken, when a channel full of domain experts are willing to lend a hand (within reason) for free. But instead, people increasingly turn to the machines which are well-known to hallucinate. They just don't think it will hallucinate for them. In fact I see this pattern a lot. People use LLMs for stuff within their domain of expertise, or just ask them questions about washing cars, and they laugh at how incompetent and illogical they are. Then, hours later, they will happily query ChatGPT for mortgage advice, or whatever. If they don't have the knowledge to verify it themselves then they seem more willing to believe it is accurate, where in fact they should be even more careful.
  - 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
    Personally this type of behavior played a large part in why I left 2 oss communities. A lot of the passerbys nowadays feel like trolls. They come in copy pasting chatgpt responses spamming they need help instead of chit chatting asking questions. We fix their problems, they don't trust us or understand at all. Or worse we tell them their situation is unreasonably bad and they should start over, they scream at us about how some unimaginably bad code passes tests and compiles just fine and how we are dumb. They tell us we don't need to exist anymore in one way or another. They try to show off terrible code we try to offer real suggestions to improve it, they don't care. Then they leave the community once their vibe/agentic coding leaves that part of their code base. Complete waste of time, they learned nothing, contribute nothing, no fun was had, no ah-hahs, just grimey interactions.
throwaw12 6mo ago
> The problem is a management pattern .... Short-term cost cutting Absolutely agree with this. Most MBAs are taught to optimize and reduce the slack. It works fine with machinery and materials, but not with humans. When machinery is optimized and run thin, when one of them breaks, you can get exact same in couple days (you usually prepare for it earlier), but with humans, they train their brain and next person is different from the first person. Humans also break in different ways: * They stop caring - you wouldn't notice it immediately, they will close tickets, but give bare minimum thought * Communal brain will not be trained when there is not enough room for experiments and learning - which reduces the innovation eventually This is exactly the reason it is difficult for US companies to compete with Chinese companies in manufacturing, because their communal brain have already trained and produced very good talent. Next is the knowledge, more you outsource, more you lose it
- gnz11 6mo ago
  Perhaps US companies should invest more in their employees then? Advancement, promotions beyond %1-3% COLAs, career paths, etc would go along way to keep employees interested in seeing their employers succeed instead of jumping ship every couple of years. The would require some effort from the C-suite however and since they jump ship every few years as well, I don't see that changing anytime soon.
  - throwaw12 6mo ago
    Invest in employees is very broad statement. Before investing to employees I think it should revisit management practices and strategies, which starts in MBA and university. Instead of teaching how to increase shareholder value in the short term, it should also teach how to increase value to the society in the long term as well (and focus on it highly) - not just say: if you win society wins kind of generic fluff. Without changing management strategies everything becomes short term after a while
    - ranger_danger 6mo ago
      > teaching how to increase shareholder value in the short term Problem is this is quite often a requirement for a public company, to maximize company value/profits above all else. Also execs who are more right-wing are typically not interested in helping the larger society in general.
surgical_fire 6mo ago
> But documentation is not the same as field experience. Automation is not the same as judgment. Without people who have actually worked with the system, you end up with a loss of tacit knowledge—and eventually, declining productivity. This tracks the experience throughout my carreer, in all sorts of companies. From established body-shop consulting, to minor early-stage startup, to FAANG, and everything in between. Essentially everywhere I worked, you would benefit to switch jobs. Companies would at times do quite an effort to hire you, but wouldn't try anything to keep you around. This always sounded bonkers to me, but as I directly benefited with a rapidly increasing salary when I job-hopped, my response was a vague shrug. "Those who care don't know and those who know don't care". The thing is, in every place, you typically is at your least useful when you just joined. It takes months, sometimes years, to learn the intricacies of the business, the knowledge that informs your skills so you can make better decisions, better designs, better implementation, better initiatives. This is, of course, just one facet of a larger trend of how things are typically mismanaged. The article brushes on it when it talks about how governments in the US and Europe had to scramble to get 50-year old manufacturing going anywhere. This is why I laugh whenever I hear someone talking about "governments should be administered like a business". Bitch, businesses are typically mismanaged due to terrible incentive loops, institutional blindness and corporate rot. That anything seemingly works is more a result of inertia and conformity than a sign that things are well managed.
throwaw12 6mo ago
This shows Western government system is broken. In ideal world (where we don't live): * Corporation - optimizes for mid-to-short term profits (remove slack, run everything thin) * Government - optimizes for long term profits (introduce regulations to keep the slack time, keep and attract the talent so state gets better) * Individual - optimizes for their life time (career, family and tries to leverage market conditions to learn skills and get more opportunities from existing pool) In the west, government is optimizing for "loads and loads of moooney", because of lobby groups and MBAs controlling the corporations which are pushing these ideas through lobbies
- sph 6mo ago
  > In the west, government is optimizing for "loads and loads of moooney" More appropriately, government is optimizing for 4 year electoral terms. No one cares about longer timescales necessary to tackle hard problems. This is where autocracies like China, or monarchies for example, win over democracies.
  - techpression 6mo ago
    I think of the four year cycle as one year to whine about the previous (if different) government you took over from, two years of governing and the last as a ”get ready for election”. So in the most optimal scenario you get three ”peaceful” years. It’s very few things that can be done well in three years at ”ruling a country”-scale.
  - throwaw12 6mo ago
    Western democracy is very interesting. Corporations promote people to Principal or distinguished engineer only when they prove their worth by running long running large scale projects. But when it comes to governing the whole country: lobby, marketing and boom, you are a president for next 4 years, which is anyway not enough to deliver anything big and see the impact. (Except the destruction, destruction is easy to cause)
  - fullshark 6mo ago
    It's also where autocracies fail spectacularly and lead to decades of misery for their citizens.
vrganj 6mo ago
The problem, in other words, is quarterly earnings in specific and shareholder capitalism in general.
HeavyStorm 6mo ago
You're absolutely right. And the root cause is simple: the stock market / shareholders. The incentive is for quarterly returns, not long term. That's why CEOs look for that - that's the job they are assigned by shareholders and the board. For a shareholder what matter is the stock going up. Heck, you can make money even if it goes down, but you can't if it stands still.
- lnsru 6mo ago
  No. It’s pure greed dominating the world. My employer is owned by bigger private company and the shitshow is the same as in big megacorporation. There are hordes of colleagues to stab one for 100€ more salary a month. Disgusting. The company is manufacturing special computers. The initial owner/founder ordered CPU modules and memory cards always looking at the price break. His question was always „how many to buy to get best price?“. So he ordered sometimes 200-300 parts more than needed immediately. Then the follow up order came and he emptied the storage. Now new manager always orders EXACT amount memory cards as ordered computers. Price is secondary thing, most important thing to work without warehouse and get things delivered just in time. What doesn’t work at all for the while already. The high prices buying small quantities is eating up the profit, so people are getting fired to save costs. It is pure greed dominating western world. Everything is done to look accounting nicely at every cost, get whole bonus despite ruining the company long term. I see this pattern recently very often.
aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
> The core problem is that decision-makers—often far removed from actual engineering work — believe that tacit knowledge can be replaced with documentation, tools, and processes. [It] cannot. I am not so certain: For example, I think that a lot of my knowledge about the system that I work on could be documented, and based on this documentation someone new could take over the system. The problem rather is: the volume of documentation that I would have to write would be insane; I'd consider ten thousands of dense DIN A4 pages to be realistic - and this is a rather small system. So, a new person who could take over this system would have to cram and understand basically all the details of this documentation insanely well. This insane effort (write the documentation; new workers on the project then have to cram and understand every detail of this incredibly bulky documentation) is something that no employer wants to spend money on: this is in my experience the real reason why it isn't done.
- paganel 6mo ago
  It’s way easier (for this type of scenarios) and far more effective to learn by doing than to learn by reading (even tens of thousands of pages of) documentation, that is the crust of it.
  - chrisweekly 6mo ago
    crust (edge/border) -> crux (heart/essence)
    - paganel 6mo ago
      Thanks , am on phone with a tiny input. I was most probably also a little hungry.
  - aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
    > It’s way easier (for this type of scenarios) and far more effective to learn by doing than to learn by reading I don't think so: the problem is that there exist lots of parts in the system that are quite complicated but which one very rarely has to touch - except in the rare (but happening) case that something deep in such a part goes wrong a for requirement for this part pops up. If you "learned by doing" instead of reading, you are suddenly confronted with a very subtle and complicated subsystem. In other words: there mostly exist two kinds of tasks: - easy, regular adjustments - deep changes that require a really good understanding of the system
bsenftner 6mo ago
That 'real issue' is the lack of formal effective communications training across the board in the United States, and probably all of Western Culture. The Problem is wider than management, it is understanding the extended ramifications of action, understanding the larger systems one is a member and then identifying with them, protecting them, because you and all your peers understand their extended foundational need. That type of critical analysis and secondary considerations tacit knowledge is developed through effective communications training, which is an entire perspective, a way of seeing the world. This can be gained by reading a wide diversity of literature, of the Nobel Literature quality; the reason being such literature is first person accounts of institutions crushing individuals, and individuals finding the power within themselves to defeat the institutions. That personal transformation is practically a Nobel Trope, but it teaches the reader how to have such insight and perseverance. Read a half dozen or more such novels, and you are materially a different person. A better, deeper considering person with a longer perspective horizon. We need this civilization wide.
adam_patarino 6mo ago
Most workforce reductions are using AI as a cover up for greedy short term bonuses. Any exec using AI to pay fewer people lacks imagination.
lolive 6mo ago
I came to comment EXACTLY about this issue. Management lives in a world where they have absolutely no expertise on what they are supposed to manage. So they try to objectify their decisions, with generic KPIs based on efficiency or cost or whatever. And miss MANY additional decision axis very focused on WHAT they are supposed to build. That is a MASSIVE issue, in my opinion.
layer8 6mo ago
> But documentation is not the same as field experience. Even if it were, creating good documentation or assessing its quality requires experience in using good and bad documentation. And how would juniors build up that experience if they are using AI for everything.
fsloth 6mo ago
"McKinsey comes to town". Basically same shaped taylorism-derived industrial management has imposed itself as the "default dogma" in private and public administration.
dominotw 6mo ago
> The core problem is that decision-makers—often far removed from actual engineering work— believe that tacit knowledge can be replaced with documentation, tools, and processes.ti cannot. my promotion packet at work always included how great of a document-er i am
Zigurd 6mo ago
This behavior is strongly incentivized by the fact that recruitment and on boarding and training costs don't show up in the quarter, or maybe even the fiscal year, where layoffs are made. You can also hide a bit of age and wage discrimination in layoffs and intentionally dumb down your organization to goose up the quarter a bit more. Quarterly financial reporting is an obvious target for a rethink. Managers get instantaneous readings from dashboards, but they also like the room for shenanigans that quarterly reporting to shareholders enables. It's going to be hard to get management to give up information asymmetry.
cultofmetatron 6mo ago
china is run by engineers, America is run by bankers. the consequences are significant
- dboreham 6mo ago
  Surely run by lawyers?
  - cultofmetatron 6mo ago
    > Surely run by lawyers? they do the dirty work
giantg2 6mo ago
The real issue isn't the management pattern. The real issue is outsourcing. Offshore The manufacturing and coding and you wont have the facilities and personnel to do that type of labor anymore. Management has a and in that, but the people and the officials they elect have an even bigger impact (regulation vs invisible hand and all that).
api 6mo ago
Most of what you describe here is overfitting: https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart.html https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....
reaperducer 6mo ago
Modern managers: You have to be in the office for synergy and the serendipitous exchanges with coworkers that lead to innovation. Also modern managers: You were in the bathroom for six minutes. I'm docking your pay.
thegrim33 6mo ago
The way the system is supposed to work is that companies that make bad decisions fail, and provide room for companies that do not make bad decisions to appear or grow bigger. Which works as long as you have an environment with fair competition where people are free to start and grow companies without running into entrenched interests or undue hardship.
- RataNova 6mo ago
  That's true in theory, but I think the hard part is timing
notnullorvoid 6mo ago
It's much more than a management problem, experienced software engineers are actively opting into apathy and atrophy of their craft. I see many peers getting worse in their abilities. It's especially disheartening to see people I admired for their problem solving devolve into someone who delegates more and more of their reasoning to LLMs. It really negatively affects working with them. If you have a concern or criticism of "their" approach to a problem they either dismiss it off hand as invalid, or they go discuss it with their LLM of choice making themselves a bottleneck to collaboration. As the article suggests I suspect we're in for a real dark age of software as companies struggle to know who to keep, if they can even trust that those who have vital knowledge and skill today will retain it going forward.
jmyeet 6mo ago
This is all basic economics. Companies can grow organically or through strategy and adding new verticals to a point. Eventually they're too large for that. They own the whole market, they can't get regulatory approval for acquisitions and so on. At this point they only really grow at the same rate the industry or the economy does. At this point (or often long before), the only way to increase profits is to raise prices and/or reduce costs. Profits tend to decline over time so there is constant pressure to reduce costs to statisfy the insatiable need for increasing profits. This is the real product AI is selling: cutting wages. It's a combination of displacing workers (which, thus far, hasn't been all that successful). Where it is successful is to have the threat of layoffs hanging over your workers, getting them to do extra unpaid work for the same wages and making sure they can't ask for raises. That's what's paying for all this AI investment. So I agree with you: the real problem isn't AI. It's capitalism.
gzread 6mo ago
I'm not sure if the tweet was a joke, but some companies are apparently hiring junior developers back because it's cheaper than AI.
Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
There's economic / capitalist pressure to reduce cost / increase revenue and optimize for short-term profits; that's on the corporate side, anyway. But applying the military hardware stuff to software is IMO a bit of a leap; I get the similarities, but where demand for software hasn't slowed down at all, demand for military hardware and ammunition just wasn't there. The alternative would have been to keep all the factories alive, maintained, staff employed (or training staff ready to onboard rapidly hired staff when capacity had to go up), supplied stockpiled (and rotated), etc. And who would be willing to pay for that? In times of peace the voter wouldn't want the government to spend billions on the military if it wasn't necessary... except for the US which still spends billions a year on the military even in peacetime. But not on their production facilities it seems.
aleqs 6mo ago
I think the problem is even more general than that, and has existed since before LLMs. All of the decision makers are incentivized to chase short term gains and ignore everything else. Many tech companies already had huge gaps in knowledge around their own codebases simply because such knowledge and expertise is basically treated as a liability/expense rather than an asset. I'm actually very optimistic about LLMs/AI for basically the opposite reason tech leadership/MBAs are - I think it will allow us to overcome organizational/business/marketing ing hurdles that tech companies rely on short-sighted MBA-style 'leadership' for in the first place. And not because I believe in OpenAI and Anthropic - I think the future is self-hosted or community -hosted open models, and open collaboration among willing peers, building open software to solve real problems in honest ways, rather than hierarchical top-down corporate hellholes pumping out pre-enshitified crapware full of ads, tracking and dark patterns.
WalterBright 6mo ago
On the other hand, we have government operations that spend staggering amounts of money, and accomplish nothing at all. This one even has lost $8 million and nobody knows what happened to the money: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/does-nothing-work-unfortunately-seattle-has-another-case-study/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/does-noth...
RataNova 6mo ago
AI is almost a distraction from the older pattern: management discovers a way to make the spreadsheet look better this quarter and the hidden cost only shows up years later
deleted 6mo ago
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qwertywert_ 6mo ago
It's interesting because i find when I'm less busy/stressed at work is when I spend more time motivated, doing better work, and fixing issues that otherwise would get left behind.
osigurdson 6mo ago
Agree. There is so much focus on "let's do the same thing we are doing now with fewer people". It is very boring and uninspired. How about "let's do something that we couldn't do before", instead?
Aurornis 6mo ago
> The core problem is that decision-makers—often far removed from actual engineering work— believe that tacit knowledge can be replaced with documentation, tools, and processes.ti cannot. You need some experienced people around, but companies that rely on institutional knowledge to get everything done have always been doomed to fail. Even before AI, turnover was a real thing. People churn jobs a lot in tech even when the pay is good. They get bored and jump companies, leave to join their friends' startup, or move to another city. Every company I've worked for that operated on a belief that institutional knowledge was king and documentation and processes couldn't replace it eventually had to face the music when key employees left. Ironically this problem was at its worst at a company that compensated very well, because those key employees would often realize they had enough money to retire early or go take some risky startup job instead of sticking around to be the insitutional knowledge base.
- samrus 6mo ago
  Companies that have too much tribal knowledge obviously do fail. But for a company to run well, some institutional knowledge will be there. And this will be the most subtle and implicit stuff that really isnt feasible to put down on paper. Or even if it is documented, its hard to understand without building alot of context. Even if that context is present in the docs, its not really possible to internalize it without actually seeing things at work. All that is what takes time to learn and it cant really be eliminated either because thats what is critical for you company to run on
dismalaf 6mo ago
The real problem is that the west is fractured and sees itself only as individuals, corporations and nations. China sees itself as a civilization. Russia does too, ish (look up Dugin's Eurasian Empire). The West has a hard time believing anyone wants to destroy it, so doesn't take the threat seriously. Meanwhile other civilizations are working to both destroy the west and ensure their own place in the future. So we were OK outsourcing our production and knowledge for a quick buck and it's coming back to haunt us. Even now, we still don't see ourselves as a civilization, actively work to undermine ourselves and help our enemies who openly want to destroy us, and are barely doing anything to defend ourselves. We seem to have also given up on the idea of a "democratic world", which was in vogue when I was growing up (Bush 2 years). As for the thesis of this article, the positive is that code and knowledge, because of the fact preserving it is basically free, is still there. AI hasn't been good enough to displace it. And our technological advantage is still pretty wide and our military industrial complex is, for better or worse, coming back.
ezoe 6mo ago
What you describe had been happened already when programming task became using search engines, passing data between libraries, and delegating coding to off-shore workers.
aidenn0 6mo ago
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AdamN 6mo ago
I'm seeing that in Big Tech now - there's no room anymore and it's super short term thinking (couched in the language of long term thinking). It's a really dangerous game for an incumbent to fritter away the ability to innovate because there is only enough capacity to focus on the here and now.
adamddev1 6mo ago
> 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. Exactly. In direct contrast to this would be how Xerox and Bell funded laboratories just to pursue knowledge, without demands of profit. They ended up creating incredibly profitable things when driven my knowledge, and not profit. I also read a book about math where the author argued that while the Greeks were driven to pursue truth for truth's sake, they ended up being far more productive and innovative. The Romans who were more driven to work for solutions to immediate practical needs, ended up being not so productive and innovative. He used this as a defense for efforts in pure math that seems to have no immediate application but ends up being massively, surprisingly powerful and productive for practical applications down the road. I think the same could be said for software development focussed on truth and correctness, rather than immediate productivity.
d3Xt3r 6mo ago
> The problem is a management pattern No, the problem is much more far-reaching than being limited to just corporations - it's a societal problem. The article says the west is forgetting how to code, but actually the west is forgetting how to do math, how to draw and edit images, how to make music, how to write, how to read and even how to think. And have you interacted with any kids recently? They're doing ALL their homework using ChatGPT. Forget kids, adults are even worse. At least kids can be supervised, but who's supervising the adults? How many of us have enough self-control to not reach out to the convenient AI app in our phones for every little thing? This has massive repurcarions for our society as a whole. The bleak future depicted in Idocracy is becoming more and more of a surefire reality.
flashdesk 6mo ago
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.
zombot 6mo ago
> What remains is documentation and automation. In my experience, documentation is unwanted because it creates work and no revenue. Which makes the tacit knowledge all the more valuable.

by jdw64 6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

brrraaah 6mo ago

[flagged]

stingraycharles 6mo ago
You can really reduce almost any problem to a “it’s a problem because of people”, so that adds very little to a discussion.
- brrraaah 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - stingraycharles 6mo ago
    A claim that fits every possible observation equally well isn’t an explanation. What does it help you predict, when everything falls under that label? How does it help you predict behavior of different institutions?
    - brrraaah 6mo ago
      Given a sufficiently long timeline all predictions breakdown (see prior comment on attenuation and entropy and Nostradamus) And on shorter timescales you aren't really predicting anything of consequence. You're just assuring all that effort trying to predict Apple's next move (for example) keeps Apple itself alive in the public debate whether they do the thing or not; they'll have missteps but our 24/7 fetishizing of what they'll do next, overall, just distracts us from our own lives and boosting the lives of the mega rich You really don't seem to have a grasp of how gamified and propagandized you are
      - jrflowers 6mo ago
        > just distracts us from our own lives and boosting the lives of the mega rich So you’re saying we are being distracted from boosting the lives of the mega rich, which we should get back to doing
      - stingraycharles 6mo ago
        [dead]
  - teiferer 6mo ago
    If you find discussion forums pointless then why are you participating in one?

palmotea 6mo ago

> 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. I think that's still a symptom. The real problem is ideology: the monomaniacal focus on profit-making business, which infects our political leaders, down to capitalists and business leaders, down to the indoctrinated rank-and-file. Towards the end of the cold war, the last constraint on it were abolished, the the victory over the Soviet Union made it unquestioned. The Chinese don't have that ideological problem. Their government appears to not give a shit about how much profit individual business make, they care about building out supply chains and a capabilities. They will bury the West, so long as the West remains in the thrall of libertarian business ideology.

AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
The US is stuck in this weird irony where they recognize that Soviet-style central planning is a disaster but can't recognize that it's what megacorps do when they're insulated from competition. Internal politics, perverse incentives and a system that can sustain massive inefficiencies right up until the point that it doesn't. In general productive economic activity generates a surplus and that surplus allows for slack. Human beings intuitively understand this. Hobbies are frequently de facto training for things that aren't currently happening but might later. Family-owned and operated businesses are much less likely to try to outsource their core competency for the sake of quarterly profits. But regulatory capture and market consolidation causes the surplus to go to the corporate bureaucracies capturing the regulators instead of human beings with self-determination and goals other than number go up, and then the system optimizes for capturing the government rather than satisfying the people. "When you legislate buying and selling the first things to be bought and sold are the legislators." You throw away the competitive market and subject yourselves to the unaccountable bureaucracy, and then try to pretend it's not the same thing because this time the central planners are wearing business suits.
- NordStreamYacht 6mo ago
  > megacorps do when they're insulated from competition. Internal politics, perverse incentives and a system that can sustain massive inefficiencies right up until the point that it doesn't. You just described Lucent.

stingraycharles 6mo ago

Seems to me that - optimistically - this would shift the job of a software engineer into a more formal engineering role, and that the actual implementation is done by AI. In the same way in other areas, engineering and implementation differ and implementation can be (and is) automated. No idea how this should take form, though, and if it’s even realistic. But it seems like due to AI, formal specs and all kinds of “old school” techniques are having a renaissance while we figure out how to distribute load between people and AI.

ted_dunning 6mo ago
That sounds right, but it can be superbly wrong because that presupposes that you can debug what the AI gets very confidently wrong. There are three legs to the stool: specification, implementation, and verification. Implementation and verification both take low-level knowledge and sophisticated knowledge of how things break.
- adrian_b 6mo ago
  Indeed, even if were possible for someone to create any program most of the time just by directing a team of AI agents, when something does not work one needs the ability to zoom in through the abstraction levels and understand exactly the program that is executed, so only knowing to generate prompts becomes insufficient. This is the same with compilers. Most of the time a programmer needs to know only the high-level language that is used for writing the program. Nevertheless, when there is a subtle bug or just the desired performance cannot be reached, a programmer who also understands the machine language of the processor has a great advantage by being able to solve the bug or the performance problem, which without such knowledge would be solved in much more time or never.
  - SleepyMyroslav 6mo ago
    I don't think compilers are a good example. The economics of software development has won a long time ago. For example in Gamedev with well known soft real-time requirements people (mostly) stopped doing that machine code dance many hardware generations ago. Like it happened with memory optimizations: people measure memory in GB now not in KB =) I am sure programmers cherish every case when they can do micro optimization but in the retrospect the high level cuts is what made the system fit the perf or memory budget.

vishnugupta 6mo ago

> 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 on HN because when I notice a broken system now a days, 90% of it is due to lack of slack in the system to absorb short term shocks.

acomjean 6mo ago
I’ll note at the end of the last century I worked at IBM research which had a budget of 6 Billion dollars. Management was trying very hard to get better return on that investment. Even today IBM though often ridiculed in the tech space (sometimes they do deserve it) spends a lot on R&D.
- NordStreamYacht 6mo ago
  Lucent at the same time went through the same issue: how to monetise Bell Labs. Bell Labs greatest work came out when AT&T was a monopoly. Once they were broken up (1984?) they started feeling the pain. When the Lucent spinoff took place, the new entities had no Monopoly money to fund unconstrained research while management's behaviour never changed. I don't know how BL fared under Alcatel and now Nokia, but haven't heard of anything interesting for years.
  - Zigurd 6mo ago
    I've been to the Holmdel office in the decline years. It was very sad. A fraction of the former staff was rattling around in what could've been used for a post apocalyptic sci-fi set. In its heyday it must've been magnificent. Imagine taking an entire great research university and putting it into a single architectural masterpiece. I've also been to Nokia HQ after Elop ruined the place. Also sad.
    - 6mo ago

netcan 6mo ago

>. In many domains, productivity is already sufficient. What’s being sold is workforce reduction. This is a blindspot to many. People working on entrepreneurial projects need to build a lot. They start with nothing. They need (for example) features. There's a lot to do. Most firms are not that. Visa, Salesforce, LinkedIn or whatnot. They have a product. They have features. They have been at it for a while. They also have resources. They are very often in a position of finding nails for a "write more software" hammer. It's unintuitive because they all have big wishlist and to do lists and and a/b testing system for pouring software into but... If there were known "make more software, make more money" opportunities available, they would have already done them. Actual growth and new demand needs to come from arenas outside of this. Eg companies that suck at software(either making or acquiring) might be able to get the job done. The Problem, bringing this back to the article, is fungibility. A lot of this "human capital" stuff cannot be easily repackaged. It's a "living" thing. Talent and skills pipelines can be cut off, and vanish. A danger in Ai coding (and other fields) is that it leverages preexisting human capital and doesn't generate any for later.

Terr_ 6mo ago
> If there were known "make more software, make more money" opportunities available, they would have already done them. Sometimes they're available, but not palatable, when the opportunity could threaten their existing investments or patterns. That might mean "self-cannibalism", or changing the ecology so that the main product niche is threatened. Then those opportunities are ignored, or actively worked-against via lobbying, embrace-extend-extinguish, etc.
- netcan 6mo ago
  Ok... but this just generalizes into the "known things" type. Whether the reason of strategic (like your example), internal politics, insufficient knowledge.... The point is that there is a local equilibrium, and most mature firms are at this equilibrium. More resources via Ai, at first order, goes after that diminishing returns part of the curve... which is a cliff especially for highly resourced firms topping the S&P500. A lot of Ai-optimist:s " mental model" of the economy do not account for this stuff at all. "Save time/money" outcomes are not similar at all to "make more stuff" outcomes. Firing employees does freeze up labour... but reutilizing this labour is non-trivial... as this article demonstrates quite well.

zelphirkalt 6mo ago

And the next level of this is, that even companies that realize this, mostly go ahead acting like this anyway, because they think someone else can train the juniors. Some other company will appear to do that, but nimby! Over time the lack of good judgement will lead to a decline in their products' quality, which will be difficult to recover from.

samiv 6mo ago

Why would anyone have a sight longer than a quarter? I mean how does long term thinking help the execs get their compensation this quarter? Sheesh..worst case scenario is that the work done now will benefit someone else when they've already left. Also when companies grow big enough "business" becomes the main business of the company. By that I mean everything unrelated to the actual original domain, such as playing in the financial markets, doing stock buybacks, lobbying, cheating etc. When your CEO is an MBA and your real market is Wall Street any actual product RD and support is a real annoying cost that just cuts into the profits and thus into the exec compensation.

baq 6mo ago
> Why would anyone have a sight longer than a quarter? I mean how does long term thinking help the execs get their compensation this quarter? Vesting schedules, conditional grants, contractual equity ownership requirements
- cucumber3732842 6mo ago
  >Vesting schedules, conditional grants, contractual equity ownership requirements In those filthy low margin industries that HN loves to regulated across the oceans out of sight out of mind capital investments have service lives measured in decades.
derf_ 6mo ago
> ...any actual product RD and support is a real annoying cost that just cuts into the profits... Worse, it might not generate a return. If you have enough profits, you just buy anyone who successfully produced something innovative. Let them take the risks. As Cisco used to say, "Silicon Valley is our R&D lab." It is a very difficult mindset to argue against.
BoingBoomTschak 6mo ago
Would be interesting to get a law that says that all positions supposed to take long-term decision should be paid with X% of their salary in (non-redeemable until Y years?) stocks.

cjfd 6mo ago

This sounds all true to me, but I think there is more. It is not just decisions by management, it is also the wider economic context. Low interest rates and, for the US, having the world reserve currency as your own currency both seem to make many of these changes attractive or even inevitable. Low interest rates lead to 'innovation' which I put in scare quotes because besides real innovation it can also mean something that passes as innovation but in the end just turns out to be a bubble of stuff that was not valuable enough. The 'innovation' then crowds out investments in more boring sectors like manufacturing. This is also not good for the population in general because fewer jobs are left for people who are not suited for working in highly 'innovative' sectors.

pelorat 6mo ago

In the case of the military I'd say the real reason is political. After the fall of the Berlin wall, Europe collectively agreed (knowingly or not) that war is now a thing of the past and the goal should be the complete dismantling of militaries worldwide, starting with Europe. Lead by example, etc.

brabel 6mo ago
They agreed that war was a thing of the past, but still continued to push for NATO to allow new members anyway, ironically causing Russia (and China and everyone who is NOT in NATO) to suspect that war was NOT a thing of the past and therefore never quite abandoning their military completely. Unpopular opinion: the West should either NEVER have abandoned its military production (so as to maintain NATO actual preparedness for war, given that's the only reason for its existence) OR it should just have dismantled NATO and announced to the world that it strongly believes war is a thing of the past, and that other countries are advised to follow suit. But we actually chose the easy, halfway path: keep NATO, keep our militaries "looking strong" (which gives the signal our rivals should also do the same, obviously), but not actually be ready for any sort of major war and as the article points out, even lose actual capacity to become ready for war within any realistic timeframe. The worst possible outcome :(.
- LtWorf 6mo ago
  USA had no part in that push?
  - bluGill 6mo ago
    Perhaps but the US was pushing NATO to invest more in war for years suggesting they didn't believe war was in the past
    - LtWorf 6mo ago
      That's because they have more to gain from that.
    - 6mo ago

DrBazza 6mo ago

> 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. It's always seemed to me that the problem is corporate profit and personal profit above all. 'Management' is a subset of this, and so is pretty much everything else, including the current drive for AI. It's the Western, perhaps American, approach to business and emphasived by MBAs and the media. Lowering costs, driving share price, dividends and corporate profit. This race over the few decades has hollowed out most Western companies. Listen to any entrepreneur podcast, or read any website, and it's all about 'how quickly can I get to exit', i.e. personal profit. Capitalism is the worst form of economic system, apart from all the rest.

2ndorderthought 6mo ago
I have worked for companies in different countries. I think the striking thing is how US companies tend to have no idea how to be wealthy. Record profits, so the ceos use all of their tricks to get rich quick? They are already rich! Don't fix what isn't broken. Not every company needs to expand into 10 new markets, or have 5% lay offs or double in revenue. Some of this is investor pressure, but often it's not. Some guy who made it to the top is bored, doesn't feel like he is obviously doing enough, so he keeps making decisions to justify his position. This isn't to insight flames but the European companies I worked for knew how to be wealthy! The market took a down turn from COVID, they ate the cost to keep their people. Some flashy new vertical is trending. They decided it's not for them, they have a brand and customers that they should focus on while everyone else works out the kinks. The company decides, why go public at all, we are successful and don't need anyone else's influence over us. People say "you cannot project beyond 1 quarter". This is true in terms of catastrophe or gambler success. But its not true, if you act in q1 like there will be a q2 or even 5 years from now or heaven forbid a second or third generation you make different moves. You value different things.

yapyap 6mo ago

> The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself in shootings technically the guns are not the issue since they dont fire on their own.. they do enable the ability to shoot though

2ndorderthought 6mo ago
Only in 2026 is AI the answer to everything and when the negative traits of our behaviour are amplified due to AI it clearly has nothing to do with AI even when the article exactly about that.

Aaargh20318 6mo ago

> What AI is being sold as right now is not really productivity. In many domains, productivity is already sufficient. What’s being sold is workforce reduction. And workforce reduction is a nobel goal. In fact, I think it's one of the most important things humanity should focus on. We should strive for a workforce of zero. Humans currently was an enormous amount of their life working instead of more worthwhile pursuits. I despise the rhetoric around this, we didn't "lose jobs" over AI, we saved ourselves a lot of work. What it does do is highlight a problem in our current society: the link between labour and the access to resources (e.g. money). I don't think that AI is the ultimate answer to the problem of work, but it can contribute to it.

only-one1701 6mo ago
The time to solve that resource problem is before AI concentrates power, not after. It’s LESS likely to happen when a tiny elite increases their already huge amount of power.
esseph 6mo ago
Jobless people normally can't feed themselves in a modern world. And uh, healthcare. Among other things.
- Aaargh20318 6mo ago
  Exactly, so that problem needs to be solved. Labour and income should not be linked.
  - esseph 6mo ago
    I think you could go at least another 10,000 years and that still wouldn't be "solved".

sgt 6mo ago

You sound convincing, but it also reads very AI generated. A lot of people will stop reading half way.

christofosho 6mo ago
... Yeah, that was my issue as well. I'm pretty sure it _is_ AI generated, and flagged it. Hopefully moderation can follow up.
- sgt 6mo ago
  The worst part is that several of the replies are probably AI generated too. So AI feeds AI, essentially. Is this going end forums like HN? I hope not.
xhevahir 6mo ago
People downvoting the above should consider whether the genetic fallacy is really so much a fallacy when we're talking to a bunch of machines. I'm pretty sure the parent comment is the work of a bot, and I have no interest in talking to an automated sock puppet.

gmerc 6mo ago

See also https://georgzoeller.com/blog/posts/the-tech-job-apocalypse-is-just-outsourcing-with-an-ai-coat-of-paint/ https://georgzoeller.com/blog/posts/the-tech-job-apocalypse-...

Lio 6mo ago

There’s even a management tutorial game which demonstrates the dangers of removing too much slack from systems. It’s called The Beer Game[1]. One of the funny things about it is even people that have played and discussed it before _still_ make the same fundamental mistakes next time. Short-termism is the death of companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game

dragontamer 6mo ago
Wut? The point of the beer game is that buffering in the supply chain makes the bullwhip effect worse.
- wry_durian 6mo ago
  If "winning" the beer game means not overreacting to short-term signals, then you can view that as a form of slack. You're sometimes paying a bit extra to hold onto something that you have no immediate short-term use for.
  - dragontamer 6mo ago
    You are supposed to play the beer game twice. Once where you use the obvious slack and buffering. And a 2nd time where you minimize buffering and use just in time inventory management. People who have played the game knows which one outperforms. By significant margins.
- avmich 6mo ago
  I'm not sure it's the same kind of buffering. I would assume the "winning" strategy for the case when the known final demand is fixed is to maintain fixed the upstream orders, and buffer outcome, and for non-fixed final demand is to model that demand as good as possible and keep upstream orders accordingly to maintain outcome matching the demand model. Large penalties for buffering may make this approach not working, I guess...
- marcosdumay 6mo ago

Fr0styMatt88 6mo ago

I feel like it’s something more fundamental and broad than that. We slowly remove excuses to talk to other people. The thought crossed my mind the other day — if I’m asking the AI a question, that’s replacing a human interaction I would have had with a coworker. It’s not just in coding, it’s everything. With ChatGPT always available in your pocket, what social interactions is it replacing? The thing that gets me is, we are meant to fundamentally be social creatures, yet we have come to streamline away socialisation any chance we get. I’m guilty of this too — I much prefer Doordash to having to call up the restaurant like in the old days, for example.

MattJ100 6mo ago
We see this in our open-source community. We've had a community channel for over two decades, where community members help newcomers and each other solve problems and answer questions. Increasingly we have people join who tell us they've been struggling with a problem "for days". Per routine, we ask for their configuration, and it turns out they've been asking ChatGPT, Claude or some other LLM for assistance and their configuration is a total mess. Something about this feels really broken, when a channel full of domain experts are willing to lend a hand (within reason) for free. But instead, people increasingly turn to the machines which are well-known to hallucinate. They just don't think it will hallucinate for them. In fact I see this pattern a lot. People use LLMs for stuff within their domain of expertise, or just ask them questions about washing cars, and they laugh at how incompetent and illogical they are. Then, hours later, they will happily query ChatGPT for mortgage advice, or whatever. If they don't have the knowledge to verify it themselves then they seem more willing to believe it is accurate, where in fact they should be even more careful.
- 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
  Personally this type of behavior played a large part in why I left 2 oss communities. A lot of the passerbys nowadays feel like trolls. They come in copy pasting chatgpt responses spamming they need help instead of chit chatting asking questions. We fix their problems, they don't trust us or understand at all. Or worse we tell them their situation is unreasonably bad and they should start over, they scream at us about how some unimaginably bad code passes tests and compiles just fine and how we are dumb. They tell us we don't need to exist anymore in one way or another. They try to show off terrible code we try to offer real suggestions to improve it, they don't care. Then they leave the community once their vibe/agentic coding leaves that part of their code base. Complete waste of time, they learned nothing, contribute nothing, no fun was had, no ah-hahs, just grimey interactions.

throwaw12 6mo ago

> The problem is a management pattern .... Short-term cost cutting Absolutely agree with this. Most MBAs are taught to optimize and reduce the slack. It works fine with machinery and materials, but not with humans. When machinery is optimized and run thin, when one of them breaks, you can get exact same in couple days (you usually prepare for it earlier), but with humans, they train their brain and next person is different from the first person. Humans also break in different ways: * They stop caring - you wouldn't notice it immediately, they will close tickets, but give bare minimum thought * Communal brain will not be trained when there is not enough room for experiments and learning - which reduces the innovation eventually This is exactly the reason it is difficult for US companies to compete with Chinese companies in manufacturing, because their communal brain have already trained and produced very good talent. Next is the knowledge, more you outsource, more you lose it

gnz11 6mo ago
Perhaps US companies should invest more in their employees then? Advancement, promotions beyond %1-3% COLAs, career paths, etc would go along way to keep employees interested in seeing their employers succeed instead of jumping ship every couple of years. The would require some effort from the C-suite however and since they jump ship every few years as well, I don't see that changing anytime soon.
- throwaw12 6mo ago
  Invest in employees is very broad statement. Before investing to employees I think it should revisit management practices and strategies, which starts in MBA and university. Instead of teaching how to increase shareholder value in the short term, it should also teach how to increase value to the society in the long term as well (and focus on it highly) - not just say: if you win society wins kind of generic fluff. Without changing management strategies everything becomes short term after a while
  - ranger_danger 6mo ago
    > teaching how to increase shareholder value in the short term Problem is this is quite often a requirement for a public company, to maximize company value/profits above all else. Also execs who are more right-wing are typically not interested in helping the larger society in general.

surgical_fire 6mo ago

> But documentation is not the same as field experience. Automation is not the same as judgment. Without people who have actually worked with the system, you end up with a loss of tacit knowledge—and eventually, declining productivity. This tracks the experience throughout my carreer, in all sorts of companies. From established body-shop consulting, to minor early-stage startup, to FAANG, and everything in between. Essentially everywhere I worked, you would benefit to switch jobs. Companies would at times do quite an effort to hire you, but wouldn't try anything to keep you around. This always sounded bonkers to me, but as I directly benefited with a rapidly increasing salary when I job-hopped, my response was a vague shrug. "Those who care don't know and those who know don't care". The thing is, in every place, you typically is at your least useful when you just joined. It takes months, sometimes years, to learn the intricacies of the business, the knowledge that informs your skills so you can make better decisions, better designs, better implementation, better initiatives. This is, of course, just one facet of a larger trend of how things are typically mismanaged. The article brushes on it when it talks about how governments in the US and Europe had to scramble to get 50-year old manufacturing going anywhere. This is why I laugh whenever I hear someone talking about "governments should be administered like a business". Bitch, businesses are typically mismanaged due to terrible incentive loops, institutional blindness and corporate rot. That anything seemingly works is more a result of inertia and conformity than a sign that things are well managed.

throwaw12 6mo ago

This shows Western government system is broken. In ideal world (where we don't live): * Corporation - optimizes for mid-to-short term profits (remove slack, run everything thin) * Government - optimizes for long term profits (introduce regulations to keep the slack time, keep and attract the talent so state gets better) * Individual - optimizes for their life time (career, family and tries to leverage market conditions to learn skills and get more opportunities from existing pool) In the west, government is optimizing for "loads and loads of moooney", because of lobby groups and MBAs controlling the corporations which are pushing these ideas through lobbies

sph 6mo ago
> In the west, government is optimizing for "loads and loads of moooney" More appropriately, government is optimizing for 4 year electoral terms. No one cares about longer timescales necessary to tackle hard problems. This is where autocracies like China, or monarchies for example, win over democracies.
- techpression 6mo ago
  I think of the four year cycle as one year to whine about the previous (if different) government you took over from, two years of governing and the last as a ”get ready for election”. So in the most optimal scenario you get three ”peaceful” years. It’s very few things that can be done well in three years at ”ruling a country”-scale.
- throwaw12 6mo ago
  Western democracy is very interesting. Corporations promote people to Principal or distinguished engineer only when they prove their worth by running long running large scale projects. But when it comes to governing the whole country: lobby, marketing and boom, you are a president for next 4 years, which is anyway not enough to deliver anything big and see the impact. (Except the destruction, destruction is easy to cause)
- fullshark 6mo ago
  It's also where autocracies fail spectacularly and lead to decades of misery for their citizens.

vrganj 6mo ago

The problem, in other words, is quarterly earnings in specific and shareholder capitalism in general.

HeavyStorm 6mo ago

You're absolutely right. And the root cause is simple: the stock market / shareholders. The incentive is for quarterly returns, not long term. That's why CEOs look for that - that's the job they are assigned by shareholders and the board. For a shareholder what matter is the stock going up. Heck, you can make money even if it goes down, but you can't if it stands still.

lnsru 6mo ago
No. It’s pure greed dominating the world. My employer is owned by bigger private company and the shitshow is the same as in big megacorporation. There are hordes of colleagues to stab one for 100€ more salary a month. Disgusting. The company is manufacturing special computers. The initial owner/founder ordered CPU modules and memory cards always looking at the price break. His question was always „how many to buy to get best price?“. So he ordered sometimes 200-300 parts more than needed immediately. Then the follow up order came and he emptied the storage. Now new manager always orders EXACT amount memory cards as ordered computers. Price is secondary thing, most important thing to work without warehouse and get things delivered just in time. What doesn’t work at all for the while already. The high prices buying small quantities is eating up the profit, so people are getting fired to save costs. It is pure greed dominating western world. Everything is done to look accounting nicely at every cost, get whole bonus despite ruining the company long term. I see this pattern recently very often.

aleph_minus_one 6mo ago

> The core problem is that decision-makers—often far removed from actual engineering work — believe that tacit knowledge can be replaced with documentation, tools, and processes. [It] cannot. I am not so certain: For example, I think that a lot of my knowledge about the system that I work on could be documented, and based on this documentation someone new could take over the system. The problem rather is: the volume of documentation that I would have to write would be insane; I'd consider ten thousands of dense DIN A4 pages to be realistic - and this is a rather small system. So, a new person who could take over this system would have to cram and understand basically all the details of this documentation insanely well. This insane effort (write the documentation; new workers on the project then have to cram and understand every detail of this incredibly bulky documentation) is something that no employer wants to spend money on: this is in my experience the real reason why it isn't done.

paganel 6mo ago
It’s way easier (for this type of scenarios) and far more effective to learn by doing than to learn by reading (even tens of thousands of pages of) documentation, that is the crust of it.
- chrisweekly 6mo ago
  crust (edge/border) -> crux (heart/essence)
  - paganel 6mo ago
    Thanks , am on phone with a tiny input. I was most probably also a little hungry.
- aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
  > It’s way easier (for this type of scenarios) and far more effective to learn by doing than to learn by reading I don't think so: the problem is that there exist lots of parts in the system that are quite complicated but which one very rarely has to touch - except in the rare (but happening) case that something deep in such a part goes wrong a for requirement for this part pops up. If you "learned by doing" instead of reading, you are suddenly confronted with a very subtle and complicated subsystem. In other words: there mostly exist two kinds of tasks: - easy, regular adjustments - deep changes that require a really good understanding of the system

bsenftner 6mo ago

That 'real issue' is the lack of formal effective communications training across the board in the United States, and probably all of Western Culture. The Problem is wider than management, it is understanding the extended ramifications of action, understanding the larger systems one is a member and then identifying with them, protecting them, because you and all your peers understand their extended foundational need. That type of critical analysis and secondary considerations tacit knowledge is developed through effective communications training, which is an entire perspective, a way of seeing the world. This can be gained by reading a wide diversity of literature, of the Nobel Literature quality; the reason being such literature is first person accounts of institutions crushing individuals, and individuals finding the power within themselves to defeat the institutions. That personal transformation is practically a Nobel Trope, but it teaches the reader how to have such insight and perseverance. Read a half dozen or more such novels, and you are materially a different person. A better, deeper considering person with a longer perspective horizon. We need this civilization wide.

adam_patarino 6mo ago

Most workforce reductions are using AI as a cover up for greedy short term bonuses. Any exec using AI to pay fewer people lacks imagination.

lolive 6mo ago

I came to comment EXACTLY about this issue. Management lives in a world where they have absolutely no expertise on what they are supposed to manage. So they try to objectify their decisions, with generic KPIs based on efficiency or cost or whatever. And miss MANY additional decision axis very focused on WHAT they are supposed to build. That is a MASSIVE issue, in my opinion.

layer8 6mo ago

> But documentation is not the same as field experience. Even if it were, creating good documentation or assessing its quality requires experience in using good and bad documentation. And how would juniors build up that experience if they are using AI for everything.

fsloth 6mo ago

"McKinsey comes to town". Basically same shaped taylorism-derived industrial management has imposed itself as the "default dogma" in private and public administration.

dominotw 6mo ago

Zigurd 6mo ago

This behavior is strongly incentivized by the fact that recruitment and on boarding and training costs don't show up in the quarter, or maybe even the fiscal year, where layoffs are made. You can also hide a bit of age and wage discrimination in layoffs and intentionally dumb down your organization to goose up the quarter a bit more. Quarterly financial reporting is an obvious target for a rethink. Managers get instantaneous readings from dashboards, but they also like the room for shenanigans that quarterly reporting to shareholders enables. It's going to be hard to get management to give up information asymmetry.

cultofmetatron 6mo ago

china is run by engineers, America is run by bankers. the consequences are significant

dboreham 6mo ago
Surely run by lawyers?
- cultofmetatron 6mo ago
  > Surely run by lawyers? they do the dirty work

giantg2 6mo ago

The real issue isn't the management pattern. The real issue is outsourcing. Offshore The manufacturing and coding and you wont have the facilities and personnel to do that type of labor anymore. Management has a and in that, but the people and the officials they elect have an even bigger impact (regulation vs invisible hand and all that).

api 6mo ago

Most of what you describe here is overfitting: https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart.html https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....

reaperducer 6mo ago

Modern managers: You have to be in the office for synergy and the serendipitous exchanges with coworkers that lead to innovation. Also modern managers: You were in the bathroom for six minutes. I'm docking your pay.

thegrim33 6mo ago

The way the system is supposed to work is that companies that make bad decisions fail, and provide room for companies that do not make bad decisions to appear or grow bigger. Which works as long as you have an environment with fair competition where people are free to start and grow companies without running into entrenched interests or undue hardship.

RataNova 6mo ago
That's true in theory, but I think the hard part is timing

notnullorvoid 6mo ago

It's much more than a management problem, experienced software engineers are actively opting into apathy and atrophy of their craft. I see many peers getting worse in their abilities. It's especially disheartening to see people I admired for their problem solving devolve into someone who delegates more and more of their reasoning to LLMs. It really negatively affects working with them. If you have a concern or criticism of "their" approach to a problem they either dismiss it off hand as invalid, or they go discuss it with their LLM of choice making themselves a bottleneck to collaboration. As the article suggests I suspect we're in for a real dark age of software as companies struggle to know who to keep, if they can even trust that those who have vital knowledge and skill today will retain it going forward.

jmyeet 6mo ago

This is all basic economics. Companies can grow organically or through strategy and adding new verticals to a point. Eventually they're too large for that. They own the whole market, they can't get regulatory approval for acquisitions and so on. At this point they only really grow at the same rate the industry or the economy does. At this point (or often long before), the only way to increase profits is to raise prices and/or reduce costs. Profits tend to decline over time so there is constant pressure to reduce costs to statisfy the insatiable need for increasing profits. This is the real product AI is selling: cutting wages. It's a combination of displacing workers (which, thus far, hasn't been all that successful). Where it is successful is to have the threat of layoffs hanging over your workers, getting them to do extra unpaid work for the same wages and making sure they can't ask for raises. That's what's paying for all this AI investment. So I agree with you: the real problem isn't AI. It's capitalism.

gzread 6mo ago

I'm not sure if the tweet was a joke, but some companies are apparently hiring junior developers back because it's cheaper than AI.

Cthulhu_ 6mo ago

There's economic / capitalist pressure to reduce cost / increase revenue and optimize for short-term profits; that's on the corporate side, anyway. But applying the military hardware stuff to software is IMO a bit of a leap; I get the similarities, but where demand for software hasn't slowed down at all, demand for military hardware and ammunition just wasn't there. The alternative would have been to keep all the factories alive, maintained, staff employed (or training staff ready to onboard rapidly hired staff when capacity had to go up), supplied stockpiled (and rotated), etc. And who would be willing to pay for that? In times of peace the voter wouldn't want the government to spend billions on the military if it wasn't necessary... except for the US which still spends billions a year on the military even in peacetime. But not on their production facilities it seems.

aleqs 6mo ago

I think the problem is even more general than that, and has existed since before LLMs. All of the decision makers are incentivized to chase short term gains and ignore everything else. Many tech companies already had huge gaps in knowledge around their own codebases simply because such knowledge and expertise is basically treated as a liability/expense rather than an asset. I'm actually very optimistic about LLMs/AI for basically the opposite reason tech leadership/MBAs are - I think it will allow us to overcome organizational/business/marketing ing hurdles that tech companies rely on short-sighted MBA-style 'leadership' for in the first place. And not because I believe in OpenAI and Anthropic - I think the future is self-hosted or community -hosted open models, and open collaboration among willing peers, building open software to solve real problems in honest ways, rather than hierarchical top-down corporate hellholes pumping out pre-enshitified crapware full of ads, tracking and dark patterns.

WalterBright 6mo ago

On the other hand, we have government operations that spend staggering amounts of money, and accomplish nothing at all. This one even has lost $8 million and nobody knows what happened to the money: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/does-nothing-work-unfortunately-seattle-has-another-case-study/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/does-noth...

RataNova 6mo ago

AI is almost a distraction from the older pattern: management discovers a way to make the spreadsheet look better this quarter and the hidden cost only shows up years later

deleted 6mo ago

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qwertywert_ 6mo ago

It's interesting because i find when I'm less busy/stressed at work is when I spend more time motivated, doing better work, and fixing issues that otherwise would get left behind.

osigurdson 6mo ago

Agree. There is so much focus on "let's do the same thing we are doing now with fewer people". It is very boring and uninspired. How about "let's do something that we couldn't do before", instead?

Aurornis 6mo ago

> The core problem is that decision-makers—often far removed from actual engineering work— believe that tacit knowledge can be replaced with documentation, tools, and processes.ti cannot. You need some experienced people around, but companies that rely on institutional knowledge to get everything done have always been doomed to fail. Even before AI, turnover was a real thing. People churn jobs a lot in tech even when the pay is good. They get bored and jump companies, leave to join their friends' startup, or move to another city. Every company I've worked for that operated on a belief that institutional knowledge was king and documentation and processes couldn't replace it eventually had to face the music when key employees left. Ironically this problem was at its worst at a company that compensated very well, because those key employees would often realize they had enough money to retire early or go take some risky startup job instead of sticking around to be the insitutional knowledge base.

samrus 6mo ago
Companies that have too much tribal knowledge obviously do fail. But for a company to run well, some institutional knowledge will be there. And this will be the most subtle and implicit stuff that really isnt feasible to put down on paper. Or even if it is documented, its hard to understand without building alot of context. Even if that context is present in the docs, its not really possible to internalize it without actually seeing things at work. All that is what takes time to learn and it cant really be eliminated either because thats what is critical for you company to run on

dismalaf 6mo ago

The real problem is that the west is fractured and sees itself only as individuals, corporations and nations. China sees itself as a civilization. Russia does too, ish (look up Dugin's Eurasian Empire). The West has a hard time believing anyone wants to destroy it, so doesn't take the threat seriously. Meanwhile other civilizations are working to both destroy the west and ensure their own place in the future. So we were OK outsourcing our production and knowledge for a quick buck and it's coming back to haunt us. Even now, we still don't see ourselves as a civilization, actively work to undermine ourselves and help our enemies who openly want to destroy us, and are barely doing anything to defend ourselves. We seem to have also given up on the idea of a "democratic world", which was in vogue when I was growing up (Bush 2 years). As for the thesis of this article, the positive is that code and knowledge, because of the fact preserving it is basically free, is still there. AI hasn't been good enough to displace it. And our technological advantage is still pretty wide and our military industrial complex is, for better or worse, coming back.

ezoe 6mo ago

What you describe had been happened already when programming task became using search engines, passing data between libraries, and delegating coding to off-shore workers.

aidenn0 6mo ago

[dead]

AdamN 6mo ago

I'm seeing that in Big Tech now - there's no room anymore and it's super short term thinking (couched in the language of long term thinking). It's a really dangerous game for an incumbent to fritter away the ability to innovate because there is only enough capacity to focus on the here and now.

adamddev1 6mo ago

> 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. Exactly. In direct contrast to this would be how Xerox and Bell funded laboratories just to pursue knowledge, without demands of profit. They ended up creating incredibly profitable things when driven my knowledge, and not profit. I also read a book about math where the author argued that while the Greeks were driven to pursue truth for truth's sake, they ended up being far more productive and innovative. The Romans who were more driven to work for solutions to immediate practical needs, ended up being not so productive and innovative. He used this as a defense for efforts in pure math that seems to have no immediate application but ends up being massively, surprisingly powerful and productive for practical applications down the road. I think the same could be said for software development focussed on truth and correctness, rather than immediate productivity.

d3Xt3r 6mo ago

> The problem is a management pattern No, the problem is much more far-reaching than being limited to just corporations - it's a societal problem. The article says the west is forgetting how to code, but actually the west is forgetting how to do math, how to draw and edit images, how to make music, how to write, how to read and even how to think. And have you interacted with any kids recently? They're doing ALL their homework using ChatGPT. Forget kids, adults are even worse. At least kids can be supervised, but who's supervising the adults? How many of us have enough self-control to not reach out to the convenient AI app in our phones for every little thing? This has massive repurcarions for our society as a whole. The bleak future depicted in Idocracy is becoming more and more of a surefire reality.

flashdesk 6mo ago

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.

zombot 6mo ago

> What remains is documentation and automation. In my experience, documentation is unwanted because it creates work and no revenue. Which makes the tacit knowledge all the more valuable.