Tim ChaffeeMar 15
Human Brain Enthusiast

During the outsourcing and offshoring craze a decade or two ago everyone hired cheap developers in India and eventually companies realized that that doesn’t work.

Now they’re trying the same with outsourcing to LLMs.

The bottleneck in software development isn’t coding.

It’s management and design.

Mar 14 at 2:29pmWeb
Show threadHuman Brain EnthusiastMar 14

The main difference is that this time around companies are also preventing junior developers from actually being able to learn how to code.

Truly epic galaxy-brain fail.

Show threadSteve Karsch 🤘🏻Mar 14
@thomasfuchs Software problems are driven by being forced to mimic business processes that were designed by idiots who, when asked, can’t even describe what their process it, therefore leading to massive gaps in requirements causing endless cycles of rework. I mean, that’s just ONE problem! ;)
Show threadErik VorhesMar 14
@thomasfuchs — it really blows my mind how much of an emphasis there has been on turning the writing of software into a kind of gnostic cult where you can’t learn the secret knowledge until you’re in so deep that you no longer care when the big reveal is that nobody has a clue about what’s going on & it’s just about amassing power.
Show threadVickie Gray 🍁Mar 14
@erikvorhes @thomasfuchs Right. When I started coding in ‘83 there was a woman who became famous for debugging her son’s compsci homework. She knew nothing about coding. She was a poet. She just looked at the structure. Like…an LLM. But now the cult of “being technical” is so thick theres no way to join unless you have already joined.
Show threadErik VorhesMar 14
@graymattergrcltd @thomasfuchs — I wonder how much of that was her having an understanding not just of intentional language but of symbolic logic? (For what it’s worth, my own background is in literary and textual studies, and I think it maps well, if not inuitively, to the world of software.)
Show threadVickie Gray 🍁Mar 15
@erikvorhes @thomasfuchs Agree. Philosophers also have an advantage because of expertise in argument, symbolic logic, etc.
Show threadSimon newslttrs.comMar 14
@thomasfuchs ironic how often AI stands for An Indian as well
Show threadPaul McAleerMar 14
@thomasfuchs Not... all companies realized that didn't work, unfortunately. Plenty are still working on it.
Show threadNazoMar 14

@thomasfuchs

The bottleneck in software development isn’t coding.

It’s management and design.

This is an objectively provable fact.

But you know what's funny? If you actually think about it, there is one set of positions in a company that could be replaced with a LLM and it would take ages for anyone to even notice the difference. A set of positions that already make too much, so would save enormous amounts of money to replace.

I'll give you one guess who it is. Here's a hint: it's not the workers doing the actual work.

Show threadSerf de WebMar 14
@thomasfuchs
At the now-defunct software company where I used to work, we rank-and-filers used to say "too many managers, not enough management".
Show threadJyrgen NMar 14
@thomasfuchs Also testing, bug fixing, refactoring...
Show threadPointlessOne Mar 15

@thomasfuchs Depending on how you define “outsourcing and offshoring” it kinda sorta worked. It still does. You can totally find an agency-type of company to build you a mobile app of a website and the quality is not even bad, sometimes even good.

We collectively dank on Indians but among them there are a plenty of competent and even brilliant developers. Likewise among local devs there are a lot people producing substandard output, for any definition of “local”.

I myself arguably “an Indian”, not actually Indian but I live in and work from a country most people wouldn’t find on a map until 4 years ago (and probably to this day). I'm the guy on the other side of email/slack/zoom. Throughout my career most of my colleagues seen me in person for only a couple of weeks total, a good fraction—never. I’m proud that most of my work was valuable for my clients and that most of the time our partnership was a net positive (mostly by a large margin) for them.

There absolutely were botched “outsourcing and offshoring” but the scale of the damage and rectification potential are incomparable to what's going of with LLMs.

Show threadHuman Brain EnthusiastMar 15

@pointlessone My point is that it overwhelmingly didn’t work for _software companies_ to off-shore _prpgramming_ and they later started to bring back those jobs.

Also, I’m not making a comment on how competent Indian developers are; quite the opposite—I’m making an observation how inept and incompetent management is in western software companies, who now repeat the same mistake with LLMs.

The bottleneck in software developement isn’t coding, but management. Yet, management always tries to “fix” programming.

Show threadTss'Renia & CritternetMar 15
@thomasfuchs Exactly. Most of the meetings I am in involve someone who did not do prior reading, refuses to adhere to the meeting agenda, wants to argue against design decisions taken 6 months prior, or otherwise insist in being unpleasant because they disagree with the project existing.

If we are having a good day and come to an agreement, then maybe I delete an entire service because an abomination of a workaround was finally agreed to be abolished after being online for three months.