I’m a contractor at a rocket launch service provider. The final build of the ground control software is compiled and deployed to the launch pad with debug flags enabled because of a “fly like you test” mandate.
Millions of dollars and tons of time invested by brilliant people are riding on rockets that are launched using software with debug flags because of an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality and archaic test strategies.
I’ve worked on ground systems and it’s actually come in handy two times in five years, usually where we had a hard-to-reproduce bug. Getting the info when the problem happens can occasionally be all the difference.
Addendum: And usually we didn’t care about performance. Basically never.
Salesforce advertised “No more developers” for awhile in the mid 2010s. It was great fun trying to clean up the mess all the “not programmers” made of those systems. I really hate Salesforce. They must have some of the best sales people on the planet.
sometimes, it feels like managers hate engineers, and are constantly plotting their replacement. maybe its because it hurts their ego to know that the engineers they manage worked harder to get there and deserve a higher salary.
or else, it could be office politics. anyone who can claim to have removed an entire department from payroll is due a huge raise.
I don’t think it’s just managers saying hey we could automate such and such a thing away. It’s human nature to think “how could I improve this” which almost immediately leads to “if I get this right it could mean no work at all”
Every business’s biggest expense is labor. Skilled labor costs more. The people in charge like it when you save money.
I think it’s wrong. But only because the interests of the people who own the machines and businesses diverge from the worker’s interests. I’d like to see more worker cooperatives. If the workers own the machines, then it’s good when things are automated.
I also don’t believe anything will ever be truly automated, or that it’s a good idea to try.
All that to say we don’t have to resort to an explanation of “managers must hate engineers” to understand why they would want to eliminate positions.
They hate engineers because the engineers ask difficult questions that somebody needs to answer in order to really automate a process, and they take the time necessary to do so.
When I write APIs I like to set endpoints to return all status codes this way no matter what you’re doing you can always be confident you’re getting the expected status code.
Was thinking that may be why it's taking so long. It's akin to knowing you have to train your human replacement before you're fired. You can't possibly teach a program or human everything you know in a limited time; and a great many don't want to do.
Rational Rose etc. could generate code from UML diagrams, then you “only” needed architects.
In reality it only gave a little help during the design phase, as soon as someone touches the generated code, you have to manually merge changes to UML.
It’s really weird, though, that nobody really created a language/tool to bridge these two world. It’s always just generating one representation from the other, mostly in a bad way.
I’d argue, that for many problems, a graphical view of the system can help reasoning. But there simply is nothing in that regard.
For OOP languages, you can definitely get IDE plugins, which create UML from code.
Personally, I’ve never found them useful, though, partially because our code was never OOP enough, e.g. we were using the actor pattern, or had important modules with functions, or had lots of small classes for handing data around etc…
But also because it just makes for bad architecture diagrams.
It has no sense of what’s important and what should be abstracted away. Or how to structure the diagram to make it readable, e.g. REST API at the top, database at the bottom.
What I also really don’t like about generated architecture diagrams in general (even when the contents are specified via e.g. PlantUML), is that things jump around every time you make a structural change. This means people looking at the diagram have no chance of learning what it looks like, so they can spot changes or know where to look for what they’re interested in.
Sound like a critical race condition or bad memory access (this latter only in languages with pointers).
Since it’s HTTP(S) and judging by the average developer experience in the domain of multi-threading I’ve seen even for people doing stuff that naturally tends to involve multiple threads (such as networked access by multiple simultaneous clients), my bet is the former.
PS: Yeah, I know it’s a joke, but I made the serious point anyways because it might be useful for somebody.
So far my experience with ai is it cannot evaluate the quality of the data it uses to any significant degree. As such it can summarize which is convenient for searching and give examples but ultimately you have to correct its mistakes and know enough to do so. There is some savings for a programmer in the sense you might be able to get some rough scaffolding and its a bit eaiser to identify relevant search links but I don't see it replacing developers. It definitely allows one to do more though or even increase the quality. One really great thing it can do is auto commenting of the code which does not need as much improvement as actual code and makes it more likely for you to do the task (both because it does it and because it causes you to go. no don't explain it like that). Is similarly helps with documentation. I doubt it could more than double productivity though. At least as how it stands now. Im not sure it can do much better without becoming general ai.
One really great thing it can do is auto commenting of the code
But then it only comments the ‘what’, it cannot possibly know the ‘why’. I know, some devs disagree on that, but personally, I would rather not have what-comments in my code.
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