I don't hold much empathy for higher-ups, for other reasons. But its clear to me man was not meant for this. Large orgs are almost destined to be dysfunctional, as they move beyond "you have to study hard and make a real effort to remember everyone" to "no matter how much you try it is literally impossible to remember everyone, more people are being hired and fired each day than you can keep up with"

That's ridiculous. You wouldn't respond to "I went to visit my doctor yesterday" with "but slavery has been illegal since forever!" Similarly it would be foolish to respond to "where should we meet? my place or yours" with "but we both rent!"

Similarly, counter strike was famous for having a thriving community of private servers before they released cs:go

for existing services built in stupid ways, this may be impractical. After such a law is passed, services won't be built in stupid ways in the first place.

We can argue about imagined future progress, but I don't see that getting much better, given that the literature doesn't often do that, and how often experts in one scenario end up being poorly suited given another set of facts.

it's oft debated, but I do fall on the side of "you should still know maths even in the age of the calculator/matlab/llms". I have found productive employment, and indeed tickets to speak to the big boys in their gilded palaces many times because graphs and charts are their favorite toys and knowing maths got me there. They have always been able to make things with excel, with matlab etc. Often they actually can make charts themselves, but they don't care to become experts in what data is important and what isn't.

The LLM isn't yet good enough to tell you what data matters. People act like LLMs are magical gods that do everything, but it is but another tool. It has limitations, just as it has strengths. It is not ultimately convincing, it is not infallible, and experts will keep finding edge cases all the damn time. Anyone working with them every day knows this, and you need to know it too.

If your argument is that the customer themselves could use an AI or whatever to learn plumbing, that was always an option (libraries, google, youtube). They pay you so they don't have to worry about flooding their house (or at least have someone else to blame).

They might be able to "one shot" simple fixes that you might previously have assigned to an apprentice, but believe me, AIs are not about to start doing complex things for the layman that actually required seniors previously in either programming or plumbing, because very few of those things were just "type better into a computer". (build trust, speak confidently, know what doesn't work, take responsibility, test without breaking systems, communicate and work together with other professionals, have opinions)

I think perhaps the problem is instead "I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart, forever, without me having to learn anything else"

We don't know how to measure worker productivity -> its hard to even say what a good hire is.

We don't have good standardisation around whatever measurements we do take -> hard to say anything about hiring at all.

People are more interested in their own prestige than hiring the best option for the company -> too many candidates get hired in the wrong places.

many of these problems do seem solvable given risk taking and statistics. However, culturally hiring managers aren't inclined to do either.

I think the problem some people fall into, and especially LLM authored ones (which is where they see the documents not helping here) is instead describing the code, or the structure of the code. Which I don't think helps much - the agent can already see you have 4 modules called a b c and d, and can read the readmes inside of them just fine if it has questions.

One more marginal thing I find helpful but im less sure has positive impact is describing the right terminology for the agent so it can be smarter at communicating with the developer. Things like different names for the product, products it interfaces with, resource names in infra, terms from the customer and product team. I don't think it helps the agent code (much) but it does help communication if it knows what we mean when we speak (and naming things is, as we know, one of the hard problems in CS)

Overall, most of my agents.md now are a list of useful bash commands for working and testing with the project & tests. (heres how to spin up docker services, heres how to update the libraries, heres how to run a command against the local db, heres how to insert a document to be run etc)

and then at the end a terminology blob, which I find myself referencing too.

Do these hypothetical laid off software engineers with no empathy for buggy drivers exist outside the imagination of people who hate software engineers? I know in my education we had a bunch of mandatory courses about automation and the effects on workers, how to consult with workers on how to lift them up rather than be antagonistic, and consider different stakeholders (where "the business" or "product" was but one of many) etc.

Learning to play well heavily depends on exposure to an appropriate level of play that challenges and stretches young athletes. If they get to a level thats too challenging, they aren't picked for match day, don't play, and wash out. If they stay at a level that isn't challenging enough, they learn bad habits that won't work against much stronger players. Thus, even those few americans that do play a lot at home struggle to make the jump to play against teams from outside, because the level of competition overseas is so much stronger. This is why for many many years, everyone on the mens football team played and lived in europe (and usually grew up there in these academies, too). The only way to develop players at home is if you can convince enough of these highly skilled players and coaches to move to the US long enough to play against the developing players, so they can hone their craft in a way that actually works against the best in the business.

This also explains why the women's game doesnt see the same problem, becuase that massive infrastructure in europe and the rest of the americas doesnt (or rather, didnt) exist to the same degree for young girls.