6 ms·

> Development speed was never the bottleneck; it's all the other processes that take time: infra provisioning, testing, sign-offs, change management, deployment

> Development speed was never the bottleneck; it's all the other processes that take time: infra provisioning, testing, sign-offs, change management, deployment scheduling etc. So much of Management (both mid and executive) still considers Software as if it were an assembly line; "We make software just like how Ford makes cars". Code as a product. Which isn't to say that most software development isn't woefully inefficient, but the important bits aren't even considered. "The Work" is seen as being writing code, not the research that goes into knowing what code has to be written. And for AI marketing, this is almost a videogame-esque weakspot. Microsoft proclaims "50% faster code!" and every management fool thinks "50% faster product; 50% faster money!" > Large enterprises need to learn how to ship software faster if they want to lock in ROI on their token spend. It's going to be a disaster once ROI is demanded. Right now everyone is fine with not measuring it; Investors are drunk on hype and nobody within the company actually wants to admit that properly measuring software development productivity is almost impossible. But the hype won't last forever. Sooner or later investors will see the "$2M spend" and demand "$4M net profit", and that's not going to materialize. Copilot and Claude won't be tackling the real bottlenecks. They're not going to dredge up decade old institutional knowledge, they won't figure out whether code looks bad because it is bad or because it solves a specific undocumented problem, they won't anticipate future uses. Code just isn't the product. Not the real work. Really, if your codebase is in a healthy state, it's often a literally free output of the design and research processes. By the time you've refined "our procurement team finds the search hard to use" into a practical ticket, the React component for the appropriate search filters has basically already been written, writing up the code is just a short formality. Asking Copilot would turn a 10 minute job into a 5 minute job. Real impressive, were it not for the 6 hours of meetings and phone calls that went into it.

thfuran 6mo ago
>Sooner or later investors will see the "$2M spend" and demand "$4M net profit", and that's not going to materialize. I think this is probably going to happen at the same time that the providers start really jacking up token prices to extract all the value they can.
- SlinkyOnStairs 6mo ago
  Almost certainly. Software firms are pretty bad at self-evaluation and they're profitable enough that Capitalism won't force them to do it either. Right now the subscriptions are still in the range of reasonable business expenses, but pretty soon they'll have to jump and $200/month/seat subscriptions turning into $2000/month/seat subscriptions is going to get even very badly ran companies to re-evaluate.
  - busterarm 6mo ago
    It's worse than that. Developers themselves are drunk. They'll be cut off from tools right when they no longer understand the underlying code they're responsible for. We're already here even. I know of a company that was doubling their Codex spend and hitting the cap week over week and finally they had enough and stopped increasing. Then they maxed out on credits and had a week of no Codex. A large percentage of the engineers loudly refused to work for the rest of the week. They were managing the Codex managing the codebase and were totally incapable of dealing with its output without it.
    - jimmypk 6mo ago
      [flagged]
  - cdud3 6mo ago
    Amen. We are still running highly unoptimized workflows in AWS and nobody reviews why we spend so much $ on that now while it was peanuts when we did it all ourself.
- daheza 6mo ago
  I'm a manager and the VPs are starting to ask - how many story points are we getting with AI now. Now we do story points = number of days to implement. (I know this is not real agile but just assume you are in the same position) I can't answer that question but plenty of other managers are fully ready to just give bogus numbers. For my team, use of AI has indeed lowered the story point cost. The coding part of the story takes less work so we have started to lower the story point cost for stories that would previously cost more. Think of a 5SP to 3SP reduction. We have increased the number of features being delivered but our number of story points delivered has remained static.
palmotea 6mo ago
> So much of Management (both mid and executive) still considers Software as if it were an assembly line; "We make software just like how Ford makes cars". Code as a product. Which, it should be noted, is the dumbest idea ever. The Ford assembly line makes more-or-less identical copies of the same design. How do you do that with software? The cp command. If someone thinks like that, they probably read some business book and either didn't understand the book, don't understand their own business, or is following some guru who has one of those problems.
- Henchman21 6mo ago
  > If someone thinks like that So like 95% of business school graduates?
- DoctorOetker 6mo ago
  Precisely, cars are more-or-less identical copies, at each position along the assembly line its just one of a handful of variants of the step that needs to be executed. Software is less like an assembly line and more like plumbing: Some people design which type of pipe needs to be routed from here to there. The implementor actually pipes the outputs of one function, in a variable, and then taps it off as an argument to another function. Software development is like plumbing really, so a good manager of a pipeworks and plumbing company might actually make a good manager for software companies as well. This is also why its actually not so surprising that LLM's are mastering programming skills, it's essentially just being a plumber, and a lot of people are happy they no longer need to be a plumber. Physicists, engineers, scientists, ... they have much more complicated tasks compared to plumbers, programmers and code monkeys.
  - palmotea 6mo ago
    > Software development is like plumbing really, so a good manager of a pipeworks and plumbing company might actually make a good manager for software companies as well. No, wrong again. Some software development tasks are like plumbing, but that misses a lot. Your claim in sort of like saying since the Wendelstein_7-X has wiring, the manager an electrical contractor would be good to lead that project. Plumbers and electricians more or less solve the same problems over and over with slightly different parameters, and because of the repetitiveness, they can do a good job by following (a hefty number) of rules of thumb (the building code). A software developer isn't going to go far just throwing design patterns at a problem (though many bad ones try).
danaris 6mo ago
> They're not going to dredge up decade old institutional knowledge Worse—they'll get the people who hold that knowledge laid off, and at least 50% of the institutional knowledge won't be documented anywhere that even could be fed to the LLM.
SoftTalker 6mo ago
"We make software just like how Ford makes cars". People who say this kind of thing probably have no idea how Ford makes cars either. The assembly line is the last step. All the research, design, engineering, and testing happens before any sheet metal is stamped out. So the comparison might be more true than not, but unknowingly.
- Brian_K_White 6mo ago
  It's not true at all. In software, the factory line is nothing but cp or httpd and neither costs nor produces any value. In cars, the factory line both costs and produces all the value.
  - jldugger 6mo ago
    > the factory line both costs and produces all the value. I think the point OP is trying to make is that manufacturing and design are seperate steps with different workflows and expectations. And that the design step does have value, as without it your factory line has nothing particular to make or sell. Nobody is sitting around Ford trying to make the clay modeling step faster or more error free, it's a design function. But there are hundreds of software execs out there trying to do exactly that. In part because cp and git and make and your other build tools that make up the factory line function are pretty much rock solid and cost optimized to nearly free.
  - ambicapter 6mo ago
    Really? So all the designers and engineers at Ford who don't have an iota of a car built by the time they're done with their work aren't producing any value?
    - Brian_K_White 6mo ago
      The design is like the electricity to the factory. You need it or else you get no cars at all, but it's a small percentage of the total resources consumed and produces no value at all directly.
    - 6mo ago

thfuran 6mo ago

>Sooner or later investors will see the "$2M spend" and demand "$4M net profit", and that's not going to materialize. I think this is probably going to happen at the same time that the providers start really jacking up token prices to extract all the value they can.

SlinkyOnStairs 6mo ago
Almost certainly. Software firms are pretty bad at self-evaluation and they're profitable enough that Capitalism won't force them to do it either. Right now the subscriptions are still in the range of reasonable business expenses, but pretty soon they'll have to jump and $200/month/seat subscriptions turning into $2000/month/seat subscriptions is going to get even very badly ran companies to re-evaluate.
- busterarm 6mo ago
  It's worse than that. Developers themselves are drunk. They'll be cut off from tools right when they no longer understand the underlying code they're responsible for. We're already here even. I know of a company that was doubling their Codex spend and hitting the cap week over week and finally they had enough and stopped increasing. Then they maxed out on credits and had a week of no Codex. A large percentage of the engineers loudly refused to work for the rest of the week. They were managing the Codex managing the codebase and were totally incapable of dealing with its output without it.
  - jimmypk 6mo ago
    [flagged]
- cdud3 6mo ago
  Amen. We are still running highly unoptimized workflows in AWS and nobody reviews why we spend so much $ on that now while it was peanuts when we did it all ourself.
daheza 6mo ago
I'm a manager and the VPs are starting to ask - how many story points are we getting with AI now. Now we do story points = number of days to implement. (I know this is not real agile but just assume you are in the same position) I can't answer that question but plenty of other managers are fully ready to just give bogus numbers. For my team, use of AI has indeed lowered the story point cost. The coding part of the story takes less work so we have started to lower the story point cost for stories that would previously cost more. Think of a 5SP to 3SP reduction. We have increased the number of features being delivered but our number of story points delivered has remained static.

palmotea 6mo ago

> So much of Management (both mid and executive) still considers Software as if it were an assembly line; "We make software just like how Ford makes cars". Code as a product. Which, it should be noted, is the dumbest idea ever. The Ford assembly line makes more-or-less identical copies of the same design. How do you do that with software? The cp command. If someone thinks like that, they probably read some business book and either didn't understand the book, don't understand their own business, or is following some guru who has one of those problems.

Henchman21 6mo ago
> If someone thinks like that So like 95% of business school graduates?
DoctorOetker 6mo ago
Precisely, cars are more-or-less identical copies, at each position along the assembly line its just one of a handful of variants of the step that needs to be executed. Software is less like an assembly line and more like plumbing: Some people design which type of pipe needs to be routed from here to there. The implementor actually pipes the outputs of one function, in a variable, and then taps it off as an argument to another function. Software development is like plumbing really, so a good manager of a pipeworks and plumbing company might actually make a good manager for software companies as well. This is also why its actually not so surprising that LLM's are mastering programming skills, it's essentially just being a plumber, and a lot of people are happy they no longer need to be a plumber. Physicists, engineers, scientists, ... they have much more complicated tasks compared to plumbers, programmers and code monkeys.
- palmotea 6mo ago
  > Software development is like plumbing really, so a good manager of a pipeworks and plumbing company might actually make a good manager for software companies as well. No, wrong again. Some software development tasks are like plumbing, but that misses a lot. Your claim in sort of like saying since the Wendelstein_7-X has wiring, the manager an electrical contractor would be good to lead that project. Plumbers and electricians more or less solve the same problems over and over with slightly different parameters, and because of the repetitiveness, they can do a good job by following (a hefty number) of rules of thumb (the building code). A software developer isn't going to go far just throwing design patterns at a problem (though many bad ones try).

danaris 6mo ago

> They're not going to dredge up decade old institutional knowledge Worse—they'll get the people who hold that knowledge laid off, and at least 50% of the institutional knowledge won't be documented anywhere that even could be fed to the LLM.

SoftTalker 6mo ago

"We make software just like how Ford makes cars". People who say this kind of thing probably have no idea how Ford makes cars either. The assembly line is the last step. All the research, design, engineering, and testing happens before any sheet metal is stamped out. So the comparison might be more true than not, but unknowingly.

Brian_K_White 6mo ago
It's not true at all. In software, the factory line is nothing but cp or httpd and neither costs nor produces any value. In cars, the factory line both costs and produces all the value.
- jldugger 6mo ago
  > the factory line both costs and produces all the value. I think the point OP is trying to make is that manufacturing and design are seperate steps with different workflows and expectations. And that the design step does have value, as without it your factory line has nothing particular to make or sell. Nobody is sitting around Ford trying to make the clay modeling step faster or more error free, it's a design function. But there are hundreds of software execs out there trying to do exactly that. In part because cp and git and make and your other build tools that make up the factory line function are pretty much rock solid and cost optimized to nearly free.
- ambicapter 6mo ago
  Really? So all the designers and engineers at Ford who don't have an iota of a car built by the time they're done with their work aren't producing any value?
  - Brian_K_White 6mo ago
    The design is like the electricity to the factory. You need it or else you get no cars at all, but it's a small percentage of the total resources consumed and produces no value at all directly.
  - 6mo ago