If this were true then software engineering jobs would have all already been offshored. Software is much closer to a competitive race where small improvements in ability give completely outsized returns.
> I live a 5-minute bike ride away from the Delft Technopolis, and 20 minutes by train to Leiden's Bio Science Park. Where you live is comparable to somewhere like Raleigh and not comparable at all to NYC/SF. There is a…
> Maybe they think politicizing the whole executive branch is a little distasteful They believe it has already been politicized by people who hate them.
> Is that just how CRM systems are? Is everybody just doing it wrong? What's the deal? These kinds of tools cover 80% of what you want to do out-of-the-box. For the remaining 20% to build it correctly you need to either…
> in order to catch up in other parts of the business or figure out what markets to put your new productivity toward. Product can come up with and design features an order of magnitude faster than developers can…
> I don't think anyone can get numbers, but partial ordering is much easier. Agreed. > If Steve and Susan are in different part of organization, the answer is "cannot compare". If they are doing different job, the…
> This is moving goalposts. Then I shall move the goalposts. Can you address my shifted goalpost? I personally did not interpret the author as literally meaning there is no such thing as software productivity but I…
So how do you stop this from happening? The OP pointed out a highly informative and important point and the majority of the negative responses to it have been from people who want to bash the American education system.…
That is not true either. There is very little innovation happening in European countries where college is low/no-cost. They have less innovation than the US does despite our terrible college debt. It takes a certain…
Can current techniques be scaled/improved/optimized to do this or do we need new techniques? It took 30 years in the generative art world to move from cave paintings to the level that we have today because we needed new…
> Give it time. Progress is fast. Why pick 2020 as your starting point? That is simply around the time the current set of techniques came about. We had generative art back in the late 90's - my screensaver has been…
You misunderstand. I'm saying intuition in a complex space we don't understand is less reliable than intuition in a simple well understood space. Recognising that someone is angry is simpler than discovering how gravity…
> Entire science is basically testimony of how our intuition lead us astray and why we need to be disciplined about looking at data, evidence and crafting experiments. This is not really the case. If you look into how a…
> Your gut feelings want you to slam down McDonalds cheeseburgers one after another, day after day. Are we talking about the same thing here? When the article is talking about gut feelings it is referring to intuition.…
> My gut tells me to do stupid shit all the time Does it? Can you provide some examples? My intuition rarely lets me down. Perhaps you don't have enough experience in the areas where you are trying to listen to your…
I suspect it will go a different direction. Codebases are exploding in size. Feature development has slowed down. What might have been a carefully designed 100kloc codebase in 2018 is now a 500kloc ball of mud in 2024.…
> In online communities, honest curiosity is often punished Because "honest curiosity" is so often used as a DDoS vector. This is not the case in real life when people know you and there is real investment in the…
> This stuff may happen, I can't say it is untrue, but I've never seen a manager terminate a decent to good programmer because they didn't understand their workload. This happens all the time. It just doesn't look so…
High school has been dumbed down and is mostly a waste of time.
> but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million. I don't quite understand your point. Pretty good still puts you far ahead of the average. I could…
> Your job is to do what the company pays you for. The problem with this mindset is the most companies are short-sighted and when the problems inevitably start coming in it is the developers who are placed under…
The first adopters seem to be the same group / personality type that is always first to adopt new technologies. Very few of these are the superstars. But plenty are good solid senior developers.
Yes, other bottlenecks might be preventing us from seeing overall productivity improvements. We might require large organisational changes across the industry in order to take advantage of the improvements. I guess we…
There are other potential explanations. Perhaps developers are now slacking off. Perhaps we have added more meetings because developers have more free time. Or perhaps developers were never the bottleneck. We can see…
> You can't measure productivity for shit We can't measure small changes and we aren't great at comparing across orgs. However, at the director level we can certainly see a 50% or 100% productivity improvement in our…
If this were true then software engineering jobs would have all already been offshored. Software is much closer to a competitive race where small improvements in ability give completely outsized returns.
> I live a 5-minute bike ride away from the Delft Technopolis, and 20 minutes by train to Leiden's Bio Science Park. Where you live is comparable to somewhere like Raleigh and not comparable at all to NYC/SF. There is a…
> Maybe they think politicizing the whole executive branch is a little distasteful They believe it has already been politicized by people who hate them.
> Is that just how CRM systems are? Is everybody just doing it wrong? What's the deal? These kinds of tools cover 80% of what you want to do out-of-the-box. For the remaining 20% to build it correctly you need to either…
> in order to catch up in other parts of the business or figure out what markets to put your new productivity toward. Product can come up with and design features an order of magnitude faster than developers can…
> I don't think anyone can get numbers, but partial ordering is much easier. Agreed. > If Steve and Susan are in different part of organization, the answer is "cannot compare". If they are doing different job, the…
> This is moving goalposts. Then I shall move the goalposts. Can you address my shifted goalpost? I personally did not interpret the author as literally meaning there is no such thing as software productivity but I…
So how do you stop this from happening? The OP pointed out a highly informative and important point and the majority of the negative responses to it have been from people who want to bash the American education system.…
That is not true either. There is very little innovation happening in European countries where college is low/no-cost. They have less innovation than the US does despite our terrible college debt. It takes a certain…
Can current techniques be scaled/improved/optimized to do this or do we need new techniques? It took 30 years in the generative art world to move from cave paintings to the level that we have today because we needed new…
> Give it time. Progress is fast. Why pick 2020 as your starting point? That is simply around the time the current set of techniques came about. We had generative art back in the late 90's - my screensaver has been…
You misunderstand. I'm saying intuition in a complex space we don't understand is less reliable than intuition in a simple well understood space. Recognising that someone is angry is simpler than discovering how gravity…
> Entire science is basically testimony of how our intuition lead us astray and why we need to be disciplined about looking at data, evidence and crafting experiments. This is not really the case. If you look into how a…
> Your gut feelings want you to slam down McDonalds cheeseburgers one after another, day after day. Are we talking about the same thing here? When the article is talking about gut feelings it is referring to intuition.…
> My gut tells me to do stupid shit all the time Does it? Can you provide some examples? My intuition rarely lets me down. Perhaps you don't have enough experience in the areas where you are trying to listen to your…
I suspect it will go a different direction. Codebases are exploding in size. Feature development has slowed down. What might have been a carefully designed 100kloc codebase in 2018 is now a 500kloc ball of mud in 2024.…
> In online communities, honest curiosity is often punished Because "honest curiosity" is so often used as a DDoS vector. This is not the case in real life when people know you and there is real investment in the…
> This stuff may happen, I can't say it is untrue, but I've never seen a manager terminate a decent to good programmer because they didn't understand their workload. This happens all the time. It just doesn't look so…
High school has been dumbed down and is mostly a waste of time.
> but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million. I don't quite understand your point. Pretty good still puts you far ahead of the average. I could…
> Your job is to do what the company pays you for. The problem with this mindset is the most companies are short-sighted and when the problems inevitably start coming in it is the developers who are placed under…
The first adopters seem to be the same group / personality type that is always first to adopt new technologies. Very few of these are the superstars. But plenty are good solid senior developers.
Yes, other bottlenecks might be preventing us from seeing overall productivity improvements. We might require large organisational changes across the industry in order to take advantage of the improvements. I guess we…
There are other potential explanations. Perhaps developers are now slacking off. Perhaps we have added more meetings because developers have more free time. Or perhaps developers were never the bottleneck. We can see…
> You can't measure productivity for shit We can't measure small changes and we aren't great at comparing across orgs. However, at the director level we can certainly see a 50% or 100% productivity improvement in our…