/* due to customer repeatedly deleting code and backups because they where “unnecessary” we refuse to work with said customer from now on. Whoever is in charge after us, be warned.*/
Yeah I kind of agree but I also think when it gets to that point we’ll have much bigger problems than programmers losing their jobs. Like, most of society losing their jobs.
Kind of will. There are already templates on demand for things like generating unit tests as you code. They’re pretty robust already, and have aside from a few things (or edge cases), I don’t have to do much code refactoring or fixing them.
They already save me several hours a week from manually setting up full ones. Haven’t delved into other stuff they can do, but I’m sure it would only be more useful with time.
I can very easily see companies looking at the time save and thinking “we can downsize”.
For openly available programs that might be true, but a programmer isn’t just writing code, “ai” is very bad at identifying and solving problems for example and Chatgpt is even getting worse at math. And internal programming languages, or, programs not meant for public eyes won’t be put in a AI in general.
They are a tool, and will stay a tool hopefully forever, they are supposed to make shit easier.
And those mentioned companies have already done that and fallen face first into shit. And rehired those that didn’t get a better job… In general its a shit idea to replace people with AI, cause its bad.
Also “ais” are currently in a feedback loop and basically make themselves brain dead over time. Wich is for example one of the reasons why GPT and others get worse at math. Image generators are more obvious regarding that, when you feed the ai ai images, the fingers get worse.
It's called Brook's Law. It takes a lot of time and effort getting people up to speed, and that takes experienced devs away from coding. You also have to get them credentialed, teach them the tools, need extra code reviews/testing/bugfixes while they learn the quirks and pitfalls of the code base, etc. In the long term you'll be able to get more done, but it comes at the cost of short term agility.
Maybe "credentialed" wasn't the right word. I was thinking of software licenses and access to third party tools and systems. Probably not as big a mess in game dev as it is in government.
You mean you didn’t enjoy sitting there when your thumb up your ass while you wait 6 months for a background check and another 6 months to get your GFE? Crazy!
Yeah, it happens everywhere, all the time. And the main cause of it is, surprise surprise, people who have no technical understanding of the subject matter.
If you have a troubled project, and you add more people, you have a bigger troubled project.
It’s a common trap for project managers … and in fact some pretty high brow projects blew up because of this.
When you are called in front of the board, and they say:
“Hey, your project is late, we get it, it’s not your fault, but we have to deliver on the 1st of the month. - and so we’re giving you our 10 best men to get it done”
I can tell you, it takes a certain amount of testicular fortitude to say “That won’t work”. More than I had at the time , in fact.
My anecdote isn’t quite the same since it deals with something a lot simpler, and lower stakes than stuff like this.
used to assemble bicycles for a sporting goods chain, and had to travel to a nearby city to build theirs because nobody there knew how. I had two days to get 300 done.
I got there and start, and about two hours in the store manager comes over and tells me he’s pulling 2 of their operations employees to help and learn how to build. “they’re the strongest guys we have so they should have no problem tossing these bikes around”
I straight up told him I have no time at all to train them on how to build and do the safety inspections correctly, not to mention the fact that I will still have to personally inspect every single one they put together anyway, so if they want to give me help I’ll take it but they’re on trash duty. Remove all the packaging, put the bike next to my work area, toss the trash. I will build. If there’s extra time at the end I will be happy to instruct everyone in the store how it’s done. Or even put me on the schedule for next week to do it.
Dude got pissy and wanted me to train people first, so I just called the district manager while he was talking and had him tell the guy to do what I said because I’m here at corporates request and if I don’t get the bikes finished in time then “it will look bad on your store’s next visit if the bikes are still boxed up”
In the end I got all of them done with about 3 hours to spare, so I spent the rest of the time teaching a couple people how to do it.
More like 12-14 hours, and with the experience I had I was able to build most in about 6-7 minutes.
There’s downsides to speed building like that, because whoever has to inspect it when it gets sold has to spend a lot longer fixing minor problems.
If I were building at my own store, each bike took about 20 minutes because I made sure everything was as close to “ready to ride” as possible.
Nowadays I bulk build for many companies. They don’t give a shit about quality but I spent years making sure my bikes were perfect, so I still like to make them good to ride out the door.
my quickest bike was one particularly well put together model. 3 minutes per bike and it was good enough that I’d ride one without tools to the nearest store a few miles away.
Big teams are faster on straightaways. Small teams go through the corners better. Upgrading from a go-kart to a dragster may just send your project 200mph into a wall. Sometimes a go-kart is really what you need.
Currently in a project, where for strategic and unrelated reasons, we ended up with 4 new juniors and had to hand off one senior. In a team that consisted of merely 3 people before.
So, it’s just me and another guy having to constantly juggle these juniors to push them back into the right direction and review whatever code they ended up with.
It’s so frustrating, because while I’ll gladly pass on my knowledge, the project has basically ground to a halt.
There’s so many tasks me and the other senior would like to just quickly tackle. Which should just take a few days, no big deal. Oh no, I rarely get a day’s worth of work done in two weeks. The rest is just looking after the juniors, who cannot tackle many of the actual crucial tasks.
And it’s not even like the juniors are doing a bad job. Frankly, they’re doing amazingly for how little support we can give them. But that doesn’t stop the project from falling apart.
This is rarely ever the developer and more a business stakeholder forcing you to push the Friday deploy button.
I’ve had somebody in the business escalating to my team lead, head of development and CIO because i flat out refused to deploy something on Friday at 16h.
So no. This is not the developer making a hard choice. There should be somebody coercing or forcing him to push the deploy button.
I’ll go along with a Friday deploy. But I ly after I have it in writing that the first time I’m opening the laptop is Monday at 8:00a. If Business is okay with that risk, tell me to mash the button.
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