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Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Avicebron 2mo ago> You can make lots of money by making something appear novel and undiscovered, and consequently make yourself sound smart and cutting edge. This is pretty much the crux of it. It's very similar to the strategy of undercutting a market with VC subsidies until it dies and can be replaced.
- amelius 2mo agoSounds like Apple.
- sscaryterry 2mo agoVC subsidies are no longer enough, now we need IPOs to keep it going...
- singpolyma3 2mo agoAn IPO and subsequent offers is hardly a temporary subsidy. That can keep going until the economy dies.
- sscaryterry 2mo agoMate, its so fucked, people are going to cry way worse than 2008.
- cyanydeez 2mo agopeople in these fields we pre-crying, building the torment nexus, because if they dont, they'll be in the "permanent underclass". FOMO is going to kill more americans than COVID.
- an0malous 2mo agoAs an MCP engineer, how dare you
- r_lee 2mo ago> MCP Engineer LOL gotta put that on my resume
- sscaryterry 2mo agoTake my money. This is better than "The Pragmatic Engineer".
- FrankWilhoit 2mo agoHe cites Brooks as proving that communication friction is quadratic in headcount. The exponent does not need to be exactly, or even nearly, 2; 1 + epsilon is already fatal. This is very closely related to Coase's ceiling.
- arionhardison 2mo ago[dead]
- patja 2mo agoSeems like this could be categorized as yet another reason why software developers are not engineers.
- EA-3167 2mo agoAbsolutely. Engineering is defined by it learning from history, it's an art build up from thousands of years of human attempts to alter the world around them. In a modern sense engineers inevitably require a certain amount of schooling, certification, and most critically of all professional and ethical standards.
- grebc 2mo agoI never understood why actual engineers(eg. Civil) have not complained more that programmers/coders stole that title.
- indoorfish 2mo agothey have, loudly and repeatedly, it doesn't really make it very far on HN for obvious reasons.
- satvikpendem 2mo agoWhy would they care? And a lot of them turned to coding anyway.
- wat10000 2mo agoThere’s a good list of reasons why we do this, but it leaves out the biggest one, at least for me: building stuff is fun. Reinventing stuff is fun. It’s the most natural hammer to reach for whenever I encounter a nail. Not necessarily the best, but such is life.
- fragmede 2mo agoFinding a thing, using it, finding out it sucks, and then making your own version that's better and doesn't suck, is an entirely natural instinct.
- wat10000 2mo agoIt is, but we often skip over those first three parts and go straight to making our own version.
- DangitBobby 2mo agoI try to explain this on every post that complains about software reinventors. Why should people from the 60s and 70s get to have all the fun? So far my efforts have been in vain.
- ares623 2mo ago[flagged]
- JauntyHatAngle 2mo agoWhat? The joke saying about that is "those who can't teach, teach gym". Never heard anyone say that about software engineering.
- indoorfish 2mo agoThe joke at my school was when the engineering students failed (mech, EE, civ) out, they went into business, when they failed out of business they went into software engineering.
- II2II 2mo agoAmong many teachers it is, "those who can't teach become education consultants/researchers."
- ares623 2mo agoThat's the joke. That software engineering is the new "teach gym"
- mpyne 2mo agoMan I love and agree with nearly everything about this post except that I wouldn't take the advice to follow waterfall or PMBOK literally. The post laments that it's hard to find Dr. Royce's original waterfall paper. That's probably true, I have my copy from a compilation book “Ideas that Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science” edited by Lewis [1]. I do agree that it's important to do things like scope out your demands of your AI agent, check-in on progress, give as clear a requirement and test cases as you can. But you've always been able to do that with agile methods, and LLMs are fast enough that you don't need to go full waterfall (and if anything it would be counter productive). Dr. Royce's paper talks about literally thousands of pages of documentation being needed for any reasonably useful system. Good luck fitting that into even a 1M context window :P. But the main point to thesis, that you can't just let your coders loose to do whatever and expect the right results even pre-dates Fred Brooks. I'd argue it goes all the way back to the beginning, to the comments about Baggage's computing machine where British politicians asked if it would generate the correct answers even with incorrect inputs. The answer then is the same answer today: of course not, and expecting anything different is foolishness. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262045303 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262045303
- collinmcnulty 2mo agoRelatedly, I fully expect the software business to fail to learn from (nearly) literally every other industry how to operate when your marginal costs are no longer zero. It drives me nuts the number of people in software who think that people in other industries are slow because they’re just not as smart as us, rather than because when it takes months to get a cast part made, it better be right the first time.
- austin-cheney 2mo agoYes, the future of software as an institution, if there is any, is driven by the loudest voices. Those loudest voices are thus driven by selected personalities as opposed to any accomplishment or title. The people who are the highest achievers are rarely the loudest voices as they tend to be the people spending time solving real problems as opposed to the people who just talk about themselves, the forest for the trees.
- kristianc 2mo agoAs a buddy in construction used to say, concrete erasers are expensive.
- gopher_space 2mo agoSpeaking of which, are you done with my cat5-stretcher?
- random3 2mo agoYet this is part correct, part wrong. Indeed every industry has some unique challenges that are not directly solvable. However, while a cast is absurdly expensive, the problem is being solved in large part by software in the FDM (3D printing) space and it's changing how things are built. edit: this doesn't invalidate the OP thesis, which I strongly agree with. Except that it's not just engineers, this is a more general thing across many fields.
- collinmcnulty 2mo ago
- elktown 2mo agoAnother obnoxious behaviour I’ve observed lately, is trying to attach whatever pre-existing pet methodologies one had to the AI-hype bandwagon like some sort of personal vindication orgy.
- mosura 2mo agoWe don’t have long before it is all made irrelevant so need to make one final dash for glory before it’s too late.
- bluehatbrit 2mo agoI'm a hands on engineering leader for a team of about 20 engineers and I've been spending the past 6 months trying to get my team to understand just this. On Friday we had a coffee hour to share how we've been working recently and they all seemed perplexed at the workflows I've been adopting. It seems natural to me as someone who's been a manager for some time now, but very alien to all those who've never gone down that path. That's not to say my workflows are superior, but they're extremely different to some of my teams now. In reality it's just leaning heavily on things like prds, limiting communication between agents, etc.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Fordec 2mo agoOut of curiosity, what was the path that the engineers have been taking? The limiting communication between agents to my mind is obvious to anyone who hasn't swallowed orthodoxy Agile development completely whole. And in my experience the people who have, are rarely the devs. Context switching, between agents, people or whoever, require ramp up time to relearn context. It's always slower and more expensive, other potential upsides about long term training or developers being more replaceable notwithstanding. But no agent gets long term training, not in a 1M context window.
- psunavy03 2mo ago> obvious to anyone who hasn't swallowed orthodoxy Agile development completely whole. What? One of the first principles in doing Lean and Agile correctly is limiting Work in Progress and avoiding context switching whenever possible.
- bluefirebrand 2mo agoMost organizations are not doing Agile correctly. Everywhere I've worked claims to be doing Agile, but none of them have ever done anything to avoid context switching or limiting work in progress
- saltysalt 2mo agoSee also: people.
- slopinthebag 2mo agoI don’t quite understand the management analogy. Agents aren’t people, they’re code generation machines. Part of managing is delegating and trusting the output of your employees without having to verify everything yourself. But if you’re “managing” an agent, how does that work? You can’t exactly hold an LLM responsible if it fucks something up. Or are people really just yoloing and not even verifying that the code generation is correct? I know it’s a bit of a meme, but are people actually doing the meme in irl where there are actual consequences??
- ThrowawayTestr 2mo agoHe says "engineers" but he means code monkeys. Actual engineering is all about learning from past failures
- hirvi74 2mo agoAll while creating new ones. :)
- ThrowawayTestr 2mo agoNobody's perfect ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- hirvi74 2mo agoTrue. Which is why I love this quote from the most beautiful works of art I have ever enjoyed, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: > You speak to me of perfection, but is there really any such thing? Or is it a siren, leading us astray. I happily predict that neither of us will ever summit that elusive peak, but I care little, as long as we walk together. Art gives us the perception of control. For a moment, as I paint, I find order among the chaos. That is, for me, a moment of pure contentment. And that is truly better than perfection.
- sscaryterry 2mo agoThis is why we do not have any real engineers at the helm of any nation, state, multi-national enterprise or anything really. The current world conceptions of engineers are that they're the negative ones, the naysayers.
- ThrowawayTestr 2mo agoAren't there a lot of engineers/scientists near the top of the CCP?
- sscaryterry 2mo ago
- LorenPechtel 2mo agoNobody gets rewarded for rejecting the newfangled thing. Even when the newfangled thing should be rejected. Same as scientific papers are very biased against reporting nulls.
- skydhash 2mo agoAs someone that has studied engineering, designing a solution is very different than managing the resources around the design and implementation of that solution. Books like The Mythical Man Month and Making Things Happen deals with the management side, (from a team level) and The Pragmatic Programmer is from a personal level. But TFA is ignoring the actual engineering side where you have to grapple with some primitives and assemble them in a way that do something valuable. And so in a way that is cost effective. That part is always answered by hand waves.
- satvikpendem 2mo agoA comments section about an HN comment about a post. We can recurse even deeper.
- brazukadev 2mo agoThat's a conversation in multiple threads happening in blogs. Much better than social media.
- andai 2mo ago>You can make lots of money by making something appear novel and undiscovered, and consequently make yourself sound smart and cutting edge. Nobody raises a round to apply a well understood discipline correctly. I'm curious about this. I thought investors preferred safe bets? On the other hand, I know that if you're too early, it can be impossible to make a business work (or even to pitch the idea in the first place). Related: You can't tell people anything (2004) https://web.archive.org/web/20091025030730/https://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/ https://web.archive.org/web/20091025030730/https://habitatch...
- Folcon 2mo agoIt's really funny, I've read this essay before a long time ago and it's really interesting playing back the many times both in realising it in retrospect and having seen it playing out before my eyes, that the last part really comes to the fore > One final point: I expect none of you to really get what I’m talking about here, because this principle also applies to itself. But I fully expect I’ll get the occasional email saying “Oh! so that’s what you meant.” or “Why didn’t you tell me that?” I did, but you can’t tell people anything. In my youthful naivety I thought I understood this, but now years later I can more deeply appreciate the message that you really can't tell people anything
- danielmarkbruce 2mo agoThis is mostly wrong as far as motivation is concerned. Some people just by default figure stuff out with what they know. Others accumulate knowledge. If you go too far in either direction you are probably going to struggle, but it's just different people having different nature.
- cush 2mo agoThat’s because most Software Engineers aren’t Engineers, they’re computer science majors. It’s a completely different discipline.
- sscaryterry 2mo agoYep, you actually do get Electronic & Software Engineers, which has CS subjects, with an Engineering discipline.
- robocat 2mo agoThat's a strawman argument, because most engineers aren't engineers. The vast majority of engineers have no consequences for their shite. Neither is certification a panacea against bad engineers. Watch mechanical engineers design plastic rubbish. Watch some electronic engineers design circuits that don't work. Watch some geotech engineers make up overspecified bullshit: because they're paid per hour and their work is often just a glorified tickbox (where they have no real consequences for most of their failure risk). Even with egregious design failures by engineers, they often get away with it for a variety of reasons. A building collapsed due to the Christchurch earthquakes - failures by different engineers with little harm to them.
- random3 2mo agoYes. This. Also I don't think most software engineers are CS majors, either :)
- ThrowawayTestr 2mo ago>The vast majority of engineers have no consequences for their shite. What do you base this on? In my country, engineers are legally responsible for their designs.
- robocat 2mo agoLook up some post-mortems on engineering failures in your country that caused deaths. Pick something big like a dam failure or a large building. Did the engineers have their certification revoked? Did the engineers go to jail for criminal negligence? I found a couple of examples and counter-examples in European countries. I'm no wonk, but too often major failures have seemingly small consequences.
- TZubiri 2mo agoSolo programming is like managing a team of developers that can only communicate and contribute in one temporal direction. Sometimes two or more developers may appear to coexist, but it's actually a simulated concurrency achieved by rapid context switching Every time you close a file to open another, you are setting up a different context, therefore you are different agents.
- eadwu 2mo agoThis isn't an issue for engineers only, it is basically ingrained in the current system in the world. The problem is in simple terms; the fact that being a polymath is absurdly hard in today's world. You can't not reinvent something if you don't know it exists in the first place. The thing about software is that it slots nicely into every other field, making it a _very_ good base to work off of to get concepts (aka the modern bootleg polymath) that have likely been invented in other fields (with different names).
- joshdavham 2mo ago[dead]
- dwheeler 2mo agoMost HUMANS will do anything to avoid learning from history. Engineers are merely an example. Sigh.
- nbcu1985 2mo agoMore then just engineers, we all need to study history
- nojokepoke 2mo agoThe author missed one key motivation: giant fucking ego. I don’t know why every damn software engineer thinks they are gods gift and can derive anything from first principles. The OP hinted at it with the physicist XKCD but I think it is far more dominant in software because the payouts for mediocrity are just astronomical.
- Areading314 2mo agoThe central point, that working with agents is some tried and true variation of existing processes, is incorrect. Managing agents has some similarities with EM and program management but a whole lot of other dimensions like token use, avoiding drift, successful concurrency at scale, variations in prompting, testing, evaluation, etc., not to mention that the agents are hyperintelligent coders with zero common sense and a penchant for extremely literal interpretation and ultra-verbosity.
- demibabs 2mo agoYeah. Just because you can list a lot of ways that two things are similar, it doesn’t make them actually that similar in practice. That’s why predicting the future is really really hard.
- xnx 2mo agoHow many of these complications will anyone even remember in 12 months?
- preg_match 2mo agoThis just reads like engineers. Token use is time, labor cost. Drift happens with humans too when they’re over-extended on a task with not enough check in. That’s why we have standup, to avoid drift. Prompting is management. Zero common sense and a penchant for extremely literal interpretation? That sounds like an average engineer who may or may not be on the spectrum. Ultra-verbosity, okay you got me, humans don’t do that. They do over complexity though, when it makes them feel smart.
- m3at 2mo agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309451 > Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding
- bthornbury 2mo ago"Suddenly, waterfall is the thing to do." Matches my experience. Like 90% of the work is the spec. Except instead of weeks researching its like a few hours talking with an agent.
- IshKebab 2mo agoSlightly off topic but... > We even reinvented bus stops. Unless I am mistaken, buses do not descend in a lift and travel underground. It's pure fantasy of course, but no we didn't somehow forget buses exist and reinvent bus stops.
- yahway 2mo agoSoftware developers aren't real engineers; such an ironic title.
- brazukadev 2mo agofood engineers are considered real engineers. There is no way food engineering is more engineering than software engineering.
- defrost 2mo agoThe majority of modern software engineering doesn't have human illness and or death as a consequence of failure. That's front and centre as a concern in Food, Chemical, Civil, Electrical, Mechanical etc. engineering disciplines.
- sscaryterry 2mo agoSay that to the victims of social media.
- Qasaur 2mo agoThe modern software engineer throws away the requirements specification because the computers he commands are fast and the people he negotiates with are slow. He ignores archival science because his business records are digital and the musings of a geriatric archivist are not compatible with PostgreSQL 18. He adopts the posture of an industry thought leader on X but has never read a standards document in his life. He believes he has little in common with the Roman aqueduct engineer but finds himself in management meetings pleading for more byte-sized stones for the stone god. Lawyers are informed by ancient case law and bankers leverage trade instruments with roots in medieval Italy. Why is the software profession so exceptional that replacing hundreds of years of engineering wisdom with blog posts on agentic workflows is considered best practice?
- felineflock 2mo agoThis I can agree with: - People can "rediscover" knowledge that was already established because they don't investigate other disciplines first. - Agent engineering can benefit from decades of studies in management, requirements engineering, operations and process research. But the article has a big irony: the article accuses engineers of oversimplifying other disciplines and then does exactly that itself. > "Data science was statistics with a cooler name" The author mentions David Donoho's "50 Years of Data Science" but that work presents a much more complicated concept of data science: one with data exploration, transformation, computing, visualization, modeling, etc. Even the study of data-analysis practice itself. Look at that XKCD he posted with it. Horn took a nuance argument and converted it into the "human slop" formula mocked in the XKCD: complicated subject = simple thing I already understand <new complicated thing> is really just <old familiar thing> The cartoon is criticizing the same operation the article is doing. Maybe that is the joke?
- hintymad 2mo ago[dead]
- tpoacher 2mo agoReminds me of a quote by my old prof at Oxford: "We used to just call this stuff chemistry; but citations and funding didn't really take off until we started calling it nanotechnology."
- mikewarot 2mo agoCan we please stop with this endless, seemingly deliberate, misunderstanding of what Engineering actually involves? You go to a 4 year Engineering school, get an actual Engineering degree. Then you apprentice with an Engineering company, and study for the state's license examination, one of the hardest tests you'll ever take. If you pass, then and only then are you an Engineer. Real engineering is nothing like the slop portrayed in this article. Engineering schools showcase failures of the past as a teaching tool. I still remember learning about the bridge that shook itself apart during my freshman year. Engineers value safety margins and failure analysis. Engineers DO learn from history.
- culebron21 2mo agoI remember in 1999 reading some tech executive (with tech education, I guess) complain, like "I'd like to make executive financial reporting, but not like this horrendous and too complicated accounting". Then he proceeded with ideas. Well, the thing is that all our terms we use are lines from summarized accounting balance sheet, from either assets side, or liabilities. And if you detach them from the rest, the list of figures won't make any sense. I learned that studying accounting in the uni. Also what I learned back then was that accounting was invented for the same purpose the blockchain: to make fraud in the workplace very hard. I remember engineers reinvent geospatial technologies, avoiding such thing as map projections, and in the end still came to them.