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Comment by brianobush | Hacker News Reader

If software was so regular like construction, we could automate most of it.

We automate tons of software. That's what compilers and interpreters are. And now we're even entering the era of plausibly-deniably-stealing-other-people's-code-from-Github-as-a-service.

We do. 80% of the tasks that I did as an engineer in 1999 are fully automated today.

Interesting. Almost nothing I've done as a programmer since 1985 seems automated today.

What do you mean by "fully automated" ?

No? You had valgrind to find memory bugs in 1985?

I would not consider that "full automated", but YMMV.

Same. It's fair to say our tooling today is far superior, but "fully automated" implies virtually zero input from humans beyond the initial configuration.

Being a bunch of engineers on HN, I get it, but that’s needlessly pedantic. My first real job was a systems and tools programmer working on scaled database systems.

Literally every aspect of that job is fully automated.

Where I work today 20+ years later, we have 1/3 of the people doing like 100x the amount of work by several measures. Little teams of developers can just crank out work.

You call it pedantry, I call it "field of work". I've managed to avoid working on apps built around databases for my entire career, instead focusing initially on operating systems, device drivers and OS-level tools; then later on software for pro-audio/music creation workflows. Literally no aspect of this work is "fully automated".

Yes, the productivity of modern day "stored-in-the-DB/presented-in-the-browser" project teams can be astounding. But that's only one type of software.

Debug heap libraries existed in 1895.

ORMs didn't go mainstream until Hibernate in 2001 or so? Before that, everyone was writing custom SQL and DB access by hand.

I implemented "an ORM" at amazon in 1994. None of the code outside of the library used SQL, everything pushed and pulled C++ objects.

I worked at a place a long time ago upgrading legacy software from the 80s. I helped them update their build process from file shares, copy/pasting and manual building to Git, Jenkins and automated builds/tests/packaging. I know it's not automated code, but it certainly saved us a lot of time with about 50 assemblies. I'm sure some companies were ahead of the curve when it comes to stuff like that, but this was a really small company. Modern CI/CD software is great and saved us lots of time.

then why isn't construction automated? i think if your company's processes are so specialized and nuance, you should really take a step back and ask if they should be.

Construction in the US is highly mechanized, the vast majority of laborers have been replaced by machinery.

Are you saying the fortune 500 are bad at business?

A. Bank caused the financial crisis of 2008

B. Are you saying top banks are bad at banking?

That's the convenient myth to think banks caused crisis. Money printing and credit rates lowering by government caused this. Free money? Sure, why not. Please watch princes of yen documentary where they speak about "credit window guidance" conducted by Japanese national bank for more than decades

oh so typical

literal fraud by banks and security rating agencies was directly responsible for the crisis. They defrauded their customers and each other.

Thats why they were called subprime loans.

I don't deny frauds in credit agencies. However, somebody was buying banks' CDOs? Who, ancient aliens? No, they weren't called surprime because credit agencies cheated on their rating, they were called so because they were inherently risky more than a normal mortgage ( so called ninja loans, no income, no job ). That's the people were buying this shit with the all time low rate loans. Human greed huh? That's less convenient than blaming banks for all the evil in this world

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