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I do not appreciate when authors use the royal "we" to speak for all software engineers when admitting to low quality-control standards. I suspect that it is a

• Xirdus 2mo ago
  I just want to point out this is not a royal "we". It's a regular "we". Royal "we" is when you say "we" but mean a singular person, yourself. Here, the author does actually mean multiple people beyond themselves - like you pointed out, they claim to speak for all software engineers.
  • gfody 2mo ago
    the wicked we
  • lmm 2mo ago
    No, that is exactly GP's complaint. Their whole point is that OP has written things like "we throw everything at a model and hope it gives us what we imagined, without ever having to understand how any of it actually works" when the honest statement would be "I throw everything at a model and hope it gives me what I imagined, without ever having to understand how any of it actually works".
    • Xirdus 2mo ago
      Yes I understand the complaint. It's just that "royal we" means something else.
      • lmm 2mo ago
        Talking about the "royal we" is a correct, established (if somewhat sarcastic) way to complain about this kind of usage. It highlights the presumptiveness of the author in their use of "we".
        • brianmcc 2mo ago
          No it doesn't. It comes from the Queen saying "We are not amused" to mean "I specifically am not amused".
          • lmm 2mo ago
            It has other uses. But the point is that saying "we" when one is not, in fact, a sovereign, is extremely pretentious.
    • BeetleB 2mo ago
      I'm pretty sure the author intended it as a regular "we".
      • litoE 2mo ago
        There's also the wifely we, meaning "you", as in "we need to take out the trash."
        • PyWoody 2mo ago
          My dad's reply to that was always, "We? What, do you have a mouse in your pocket?"
          • latexr 2mo ago
            > "We? What, do you have a mouse in your pocket?" Suggested response: “I do, but the poor thing is not strong enough. No no, I meant one of us needs to do it. Please do go ahead, if you don’t mind, as I’m a bit busy feeding the mouse.”
  • ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosism
  • latexr 2mo ago
    > they claim to speak for all software engineers. I have reread the post and see no such claim. They are using “we” to refer to the significant subset of humanity which fits the description, not “all software engineers”. If someone says “we are addicted to fast food” (or social media, or what have you), we can understand they don’t mean literally everyone. Some people never even eat it, so they couldn’t be addicted, but there’s enough people who do to make the claim. It’s a generalisation.
• theF00l 2mo ago
  At least in my experience, the 'software' people are VPs/management who push and push with short term thinking.
• CBLT 2mo ago
  Article aside, I generally always use the "we" pronoun at work when writing prose. Saying "I" feels too adversarial when talking about negative effects, or too self-aggrandizing when talking about positive effects. For example: "We discovered a bug shipped at the end of the merge window, so we will restart validation with the rollback applied." I think in school they say the business-safe way to write is instead with the passive voice but I just can't do it.
  • devsda 2mo ago
    "We had a bug in our code, I fixed it" I've seen this so many times where the same individual introduced and fixed the bug, it is now funny. This is corporate team level equivalent of "Socializing losses and privatizing profits".
  • 0cf8612b2e1e 2mo ago
    I am reminded of the speech analysis of the Bush administration talks before the Iraq war. Colin Powell and others knew the intelligence was bad, so predominately shifted to passive voice so as to diffuse blame. “I” am not starting Iraq has WMDs, but there is credible intelligence on which we must act.
• m3047 2mo ago
  "We all could have done more.": said by every politician. Which is easier: writing good code, or winning a political battle over crappy code? I mean, if you're not capable of coding, and creating an appropriate architecture for the the domain: which course of action gives you the most control over risk management? So yeah most fights about software are about politics and crappy code. Saying this to set expectations based on having a business license since 1984.
• fastball 2mo ago
  The author didn't say "we (all software engineers)", so the only person including you in his class is you.
• asdfman123 2mo ago
  > To build good software with AI, you still have to understand software. > You need to know what you’re actually asking for, how to judge what comes back, and when the machine is just confidently serving you charcoal. It's surprising to me this even needs to be written down. Like, obviously still use your brain and think about what the computer is doing. Did you guys think that LLMs were magic?
  • Timwi 2mo ago
    I mean you're not wrong, but consider that a lot of high-level developers treat low-level details such as CPU architecture, memory virtualization, and even garbage collection as essentially magic. That's not the same thing as LLMs because those things I listed are carefully crafted to be reliable abstractions, but I can understand the impetus to want to think of LLMs in a similar way.
• fooker 2mo ago
  We are not getting that reckoning. It’s great to yearn for bug free software, but that necessarily brings an insane amount of red tape to get anything done. Like 5 years worth of review to start building your code with the next version of your compiler. Or six months to ship a hundred lines of code. I'd rather have bugs. I’d happily quit having anything to do with software than suffer months of doing nothing in the name of security.
• mulmen 2mo ago
  > [...] but we need [...] You did the same thing you criticize the author for doing.
• denkmoon 2mo ago
  Most of us aren't making software with fatal consequences. Most. I'd say the typical aviation job offers a few more chances for fatal consequences.