Comment by azornathogron
1 day ago
Pilots can do that because they go through a ton of training and they deliberately do things to maintain their manual flying skills, including regularly taking manual control outside emergencies when the autopilot could fly perfectly well. And when a pilot takes control "for practice" there's no reduction in productivity for the airline compared to if the pilot is sitting in the seat with the autopilot engaged.
How can software engineers maintain a healthy "manual programming" skill set? What employer would be willing to pay for so much wasted time for their software engineers to do deliberate training courses, or willing to accept the productivity loss from their engineers occasionally working manually for practice, when working manually is so much slower?
> What employer would be willing to pay for so much wasted time for their software engineers to do deliberate training courses, or willing to accept the productivity loss from their engineers occasionally working manually for practice, when working manually is so much slower?
Lots of regulation or some landmark lawsuits should do it. If airlines operated the way tech companies did, we'd have daily plane crashes.
Pilots have to know all the ins and outs of every single system and subsystem of the machine they operate. If software engineers were required to understand their systems to the same degree in order to ship something, the only way you could do it is by coding yourself.
I honestly don't really see that big of a difference between a pilot and a software developer steering an agent. Both let a machine do 99% of the work.
It's not like the pilot instructs every single control surface individually. Nor does he physically carry every single passenger on his back.
Just because you're using a machine to do your job now doesn't really change anything substantial about the job other than the fact that you now need capital to pay the machine.