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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like my buddy who's a programmer for our social services. He said they spend about one day per week coding and the rest doing code reviews.

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That sounds better than what my buddy who worked at Microsoft did, where he said he programed probably <10hrs a week and spent more time in meetings.

The luxury of having 10 hours a week to code

You call that luxury! When I was a lad we were put into a cardboard box on the middle of t’motorway, made to code an entire distributed database in our lunch hour, and if we had less than 100% coverage the project manager would cut us into little pieces and dance on our graves.

you had graves?! in my day management would sell our organs on the black market and feed the rest of our corpses to the HQ lobby piranha aquarium, though they'd still charge our estates for the tombstone retainer of course.

You had piranha tanks? Back in my day our managers just threw us in a empty concrete room with no windows and no outlets, tossed a computer at us and said "fix it". If we were lucky they'd say what "it" was. If we were extra lucky, they'd throw us a keyboard. Not that that mattered anyways.

You had keyboards? Luxury, back in my day we had to stamp punch cards with the tips of our fingers. If we made a mistake, the head operator would cut one of our fingers off with a bread knife. We didn't mind though, it made us tough, that and sleeping in the car park wrapped in tape from old backups just t'stay warm.

Did you sleep in cars in the car park or on the car park concrete?

You had concrete car parks? When I were a lad, we had to inherit from car park and implement parking spaces ourselves. And if you had an overflow you had to walk -2147483648 miles to work.

Ahhh, HN … thank you all :-)

It's good that machine learning is taking over the coding part, so we can focus all our engineering efforts on meetings...

Personally, I'd love to use machine learning to automate the meetings instead.

And then all the meetings are about how you make time for resolving all the bugs introduced by copilot. But you can't cancel any meetings, so you need to create a new meeting because it is a new issue. And copilot is cheap so why not just buy more compute time? Surely that's cheaper because humans and machine solve problems in the amount of time and to the same degree of satisfaction, right? We should probably schedule a meeting so we can make a project to find out. We can probably find out if we measure the number of lines of code each can write. It'll be easy.

> Personally, I'd love to use machine learning to automate the meetings instead.

The old ‘could this meeting be an email?’. Rarely wrong, always controversial.

`Could this email be deleted?´

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