Comment by pdntspa
2 months ago
You are hitting the nail on the head. We are not being hired to write code. We are being hired to solve problems. Code is simply the medium.
2 months ago
You are hitting the nail on the head. We are not being hired to write code. We are being hired to solve problems. Code is simply the medium.
I believe wage work has a significant factor in all this.
Most are not paid for results, they're paid for time at desk and regular responsibilities such as making commits, delivering status updates, code reviews, etc. - the daily activities of work are monitored more closely than the output. Most ESOP grant such little equity that working harder could never observably drive an increase in its value. Getting a project done faster just means another project to begin sooner.
Naturally workers will begin to prefer the motions of the work they find satisfying more than the result it has for the business's bottom line, from which they're alienated.
It gets worse than that: You can possibly get rewarded based on your manager's goals, or maybe your skip level's, but that doesn't necessarily have to line up all that well with more serious business goals. I am sure I am not the only one that had to help initiatives that I thought would be, at best, just wasteful to the business, or that we could get 80% of the value with 20% of the efforts. But it's ultimately about the person who writes the review.
This gets us to the rule number one of being successful at a job: Make sure your manager likes you. Get 8 layers of people whose priority is just to be sure their manager likes them, and what is getting done is very unlikely to have much to do with shareholder value, customer happiness, or anything like that.
> Naturally workers will begin to prefer the motions of the work they find satisfying more than the result it has for the business's bottom line, from which they're alienated.
Wow. I've read a lot of hacker news this past decade, but I've never seen this articulated so well before. You really lifted the veil for me here. I see this everywhere, people thinking the work is the point, but I haven't been able to crystallize my thoughts about it like you did just now.
Marx had a lot of good ideas, though you wouldn't know it by listening to capitalist-controlled institutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
I think it's related. The nature of the wage work likely also self-selects for people who simply enjoy coding and being removed from the bigger picture problems they are solving.
Im on the side of only enjoy coding to solve problems and i skipped software engineering and coding for work explicitly because i did not want to participate in that dynamic of being removed from the problems. instead i went into business analytics, and now that AI is gaining traction I am able to do more of what I love - improving processes and automation - without ever really needing to "pay dues" doing grunt work I never cared to be skilled at in the first place unless it was necessary.
but do you solve the problem if you just slap a prompt and iterate while the LLM gathers diffs ?
Depends what the problem is.
Sometimes you can, sometimes you have to break the problem apart and get the LLM to do each bit separately, sometimes the LLM goes funny and you need to solve it yourself.
Customers don't want you wasting money doing by hand what can be automated, nor do they want you ripping them off by blindly handing over unchecked LLM output when it can't be automated.
there are other ways: being scammed by lazy devs using AI to produce what devs normally do and not saving any money for the customer. i mentioned it in another thread, i heard first hand people say "i will never report how much time savings i get from gemini, at best i'll say 1 day a month"
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If the client is happy, the code is well-formed, and it solves their problem is a cost-effective manner, what is not to like?
cause the 'dev' didn't solve anything
ultimately i wonder how long people will need devs at all if you can all prompt your wishes
some will be kept to fix the occasional hallucination and that's it
Yes?