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by raffraffraff 3 days ago
My take, as a non-coder (well, not software engineering, I write 'code' but it's infra, and utilities in go/bash/pythong)...

I work at a company where the biggest problems are not 'writing code', they are:

- Organising teams

- Designing the system

- Prioritisation of work

The fuckups that we make on a daily bases are not 'code errors' they are failures in THOSE three things. I'll go into detail if anyone cares.

3 comments

Generative language models have helped me most by drawing my attention to the importance of context, communicative compression, prompting, comprehension, coherence, and coordination in the domain of human groups.
Same. Our engineers have failed to convince absolutely clueless executives that service / code ownership is critical, you can't just allocate 100% of your engineering team to "roaming around the dungheap adding features" because they want everybody to focus on features. In an organisation where nobody owns anything, nobody cares about anything, nobody has the autonomy to fix anything. Imagine a huge wobbling Jenga tower with dozens of engineers all trying to pull out a block, put it on top and back the fuck away quickly, hopping it falls over after someone else touches it.

Yes this is real. And it's hell. And now all of those Jenga players are AI powered.

don't forget 'actually making decisions'
Same as it ever was.