Forwarded from HN Best Comments
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
What you are describing as performative I would describe as bureaucratic.
The Iron Law or Bureaucracy:
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. (Quoted from Wikipedia)
cjbgkagh, 8 hours ago
What you are describing as performative I would describe as bureaucratic.
The Iron Law or Bureaucracy:
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. (Quoted from Wikipedia)
cjbgkagh, 8 hours ago
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1. AI writing directly to assembly is useless, compilers exist for a reason. No idea who thought this is a good idea
2. productivity in LoC is a meme and can only be used by someone who don't know the history of CompSci and how "paying engineers for lines of code" story ended up. from my current experience main bottleneck isn't writing a code, it is communication, time to build containers, etc. iteration of development is reduced, but not as drastic as AI bros want you to think
3. i don't think it is useless, it increases the speed of development, but it is definitely reduces code quality without additional guardrails. i don't think it is better, it is just good for different set of tasks and feels like completely different approach to development not starting from logic and creating solution from first principles, but more like making rules by which city of people will evolve.
4. research suggests that the rate of hallucinations is decreasing rapidly over last 5 years, so let's see what we will get
5. due to jagged frontier phenomenon we can't just assume llms have the same skills as humans. they are good at some tasks, that would be a miracle 5 years ago, but are absolutely idiotic at other. currently best place for LLM agents is to make demos/MVP for presale or for throwaway code that is too simple to fail to produce
6. nah, only LLMs without RLHF are "only predicting next tokens". LLMs with RLHF are more morphed to be task solvers (this is why we see AI proving new previously unproved theorems, you can't argue that it was in the training data). this is an important technical distinction that is often overlooked by AI critics. And if we want to unravel "AI cannot create" argument - I can say that only God can create and humans stole most of the ideas for technologies. Imagine the economy in which nature patented most of it's creations and humans would need to pay for using nature's inventions
2. productivity in LoC is a meme and can only be used by someone who don't know the history of CompSci and how "paying engineers for lines of code" story ended up. from my current experience main bottleneck isn't writing a code, it is communication, time to build containers, etc. iteration of development is reduced, but not as drastic as AI bros want you to think
3. i don't think it is useless, it increases the speed of development, but it is definitely reduces code quality without additional guardrails. i don't think it is better, it is just good for different set of tasks and feels like completely different approach to development not starting from logic and creating solution from first principles, but more like making rules by which city of people will evolve.
4. research suggests that the rate of hallucinations is decreasing rapidly over last 5 years, so let's see what we will get
5. due to jagged frontier phenomenon we can't just assume llms have the same skills as humans. they are good at some tasks, that would be a miracle 5 years ago, but are absolutely idiotic at other. currently best place for LLM agents is to make demos/MVP for presale or for throwaway code that is too simple to fail to produce
6. nah, only LLMs without RLHF are "only predicting next tokens". LLMs with RLHF are more morphed to be task solvers (this is why we see AI proving new previously unproved theorems, you can't argue that it was in the training data). this is an important technical distinction that is often overlooked by AI critics. And if we want to unravel "AI cannot create" argument - I can say that only God can create and humans stole most of the ideas for technologies. Imagine the economy in which nature patented most of it's creations and humans would need to pay for using nature's inventions
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