> In some ways, tech progress has been pretty disappointing.
AIM had lots of delightful sounds. Can't say the same about Slack or Teams.
779 karma · joined October 23, 2022
AIM had lots of delightful sounds. Can't say the same about Slack or Teams.
What's the vintage of the vehicle? When I was in the 'car enthusiast' phase of my life ECU "reflash/remaps/tunes" were very popular and still happen on more 'modern' cars.
Few things I've seen here.
> If you're working in a field where "good enough" is fine, then I imagine that LLM's can do a lot for you.
There's some specific timesheet software used for Gov Contractors that's hands-down, the worst web "application" I've ever used. Opening devTools on one of these pages is a riot--one of the "APIs" used return HTML documents with js file extensions so the browser fails to parse, every JS file is 1K lines long with blocks of global variables with various naming conventions, using 'back' in the browser just sort of fails and returns you to the sign-in page.
Any modern web programmer would have a stroke looking at this thing. Apparently it's the standard software used for this purpose, relied on all over the industry.
At a previous employer, I had to deal with some internal site for financial transactions and billing. Same story, ancient looking and performing web 'app' that had specific incantations to get it to actually work "don't refresh the page until that loads", piles of JS vomiting bizarre errors in the console, just a remarkable piece of junk.
Anyway, short story long, there's LOADS of software that's terrible by any metric that have crucial purposes floating around that are far worse in terms of 'code quality' than any LLM would spit out.
Also, I have more experience than I like to remember dealing with 'body shop' codebases. There is no way that an LLM is even capable of generating such low quality code. I legitimately think several of the projects I saw were sabotage; there's no way a human would deliberately write such inscrutable junk. Ever seen random python runtime errors cause the type of something would change depending on which branches were hit?
I was college age at the time, but yeah, this is how I recall it feeling.
There's seemingly a universal malaise around that comes up even in casual conversations.
Seemingly everyone is looking for a job with no success, every third story is about some sort of layoffs, and now even the press is starting to discuss the housing bubble.
I've been waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop for some time now. Clearly, something's gotta give and the cracks are getting too large to ignore now.
These organizations are so dysfunctional on this front too, in so many ways.
Even when the technical people communicate "requirements" to HR, it's often a scattershot of everything the department touched even in some ancillary fashion in the last 5 years, and now ends up a game of telephone that, because someone in the department wants to migrate to 'Hive MQ', it's a "hard requirement" with 7-YOE required even tho it was literally just a managers' idea with no implementation path aside from a sprint ticket to "discuss it."
They allegedly need "an expert in IOT" but you'll spend 6 months configuring GitHub runners for some Java CRUD thing. Companies accidentally, by product of pure dysfunction, end up rug pulling people all the time.
From what I've seen it looks far more modern.
I leave with the laptop, return days later, and perform no manual intervention to reconnect. It's absolutely brilliant.
And the 'metrics' for productivity are completely gamed, in any direction, at any time arbitrarily.
Management/those that set these policies can 'turn up the heat' or relax them at any time, without warning. I've been on both sides of this.
Sure, you can hit some metric if some real product is produced, like widgets or something, but even in that hypothetical example, what if someone is top producer but skimps on quality or something resulting in a shorter lifespan of the product?
Before I left a recent employer a very (statistically and materially; i.e he was both very good at 'playing the game' and actually doing, you know, skilled work) high performer was PIPd (for "low performance").
In the previous half-decade+ he was there, he got 'exceeds' and top rankings every single year and was presumably paid more than the managers but was forced out, likely due to pay and internal politics.
I take most measures of 'productivity' to be totally fake, just based on my experience.
Most of the time it's not "don't give a sh!t"--it's they genuinely don't know any better, no actual stakeholders even see the codebase nor are in any position to pass judgement, etc.
Most of the time folks that are "enterprise architects" or some such haven't written code in a decade and spend many hours a day on meetings.
There was a boba tea company that had a free, no-sign-in required LLM that I used to generate a few bash scripts before ChatGPT free-tier started.
"When McKinsey Comes to Town" is an interesting read that covers a lot of this. It's worse than I thought.
This is one of the "here be demons" type signatures of LLM code generation age, along with comments like
// define the payload struct payload {};
Not just subtle bugs, but unused variables (with names that seem to indicate some important use), comments that don't accurately describe the line of code that it precedes and other things that feel very 'uncanny.'
The problem is, the code often looks really good at first glance. Generally LLMs produce well structured code with good naming conventions etc.
There were plenty of people working very hard on things that had no path to profitability/utility (beyond the attempt to get higher-ups promoted for "showing impact" or "ownership") or whatever. This was paired with incentives at this time for managers to have more underlings.
I have no idea of the ratio of this to "day in the life" TikToks, but there were lots of people working on things that had no utility or time horizon to be "valuable" in the business sense.
'process exited with status 1'
This is paired with the lack of stability in employment seemingly across sectors and general economic uncertainty.
I hear concerns like the following, across social groups:
"I'm 'paid well' but live in this dusty old apartment building that's, at most, 700 sq ft."
"If I lose this job, what's the likelihood I make the same amount to even afford this? How long will the job search take?"
Few other things: I pay more for car insurance now than I did when I was in my early 20s, despite driving a far slower, more pedestrian car. Food prices are laughable, even rent far out from major employment centers is much much more than it was even in the late 10's, etc.
I think all of these are major factors that almost noone is immune from.
Almost everyone I know will express some sort of exasperation and lack of security related to the above. These are not the conditions that motivate people to have kids.
I find this surprising. I figured the opposite: that the quality of body shop type places would improve and the productivity increases would decrease as you went "up" the skill ladder.
I've worked on/inherited a few projects from the Big Name body shops and, frankly, I'd take some "vibe coded" LLM mess any day of the week. I really figured there was nowhere to go but "up" for those kinds of projects.
I'm genuinely surprised that Code forks and LLM cli things are seemingly the only use case that's approached viability. Even a year ago, I figured there'd be something else that's emerged by now.
(Only partially joking here)
How is this even a thing? Are there seriously employees at a "tech company" bringing their own hardware? This is madness
Yet people throw around the term "engineers" with reckless abandon for seemingly anyone that wrote Javascript once in their lives. It all strikes me as very silly.
Overwhelming majority of companies have no interest in even approaching the idea of what that would mean.
"we need 7 years experience with Mulesoft and Kubernetes."
sure, yeah, whatever.
Remember that (old?) internet 'meme' (concept, more like it) that was something like "can't unsee this"? Yeah, that.
There's all sorts of "infohazards" (written and visual) that one has to avoid today, largely a product of the social media landscape.
I've heard such practices and attempts at curation as psycho-social security (or something like that); the process of deliberate avoidance of certain "content" and attempts/diligence when interacting with these various platforms and landscapes to avoid such things. It actually does take a concerted effort now to avoid being exposed to "content" like you described, as addiction and "habit" of "scrolling" is in some ways more natural than not, now. Strange time to be alive.
There's a whole world of software stuff that just isn't discussed in public forums/places where you'd usually find information on the internet, unfortunately.