2. You get credit for "shipping" and "moving fast".
3. It is later learned by management that the rubbish is rubbish. But crucially, they do not view bugs as arising from how the work was done. Rather, it is treated as if it is an uncontrollable natural process.
4. Fixing high-profile rubbish is prioritized.
5. The rubbish is smothered with still more rubbish that moves the observable rubbishness to elsewhere in the codebase.
6. You get credit for "better engineering" and "moving fast".
Nobody is properly incentivized to prevent rubbish. Only to produce it and then to produce more of it.
Focusing on your first point: Memorization isn't everything. But it's not nothing either.
Sometimes it's nice to be able to just bang out some code without looking everything up. IDEs in an IDE-friendly language make this awareness accessible in the immediate frame, but don't necessarily help with having a mental menu of possibilities to choose from.
That said: I find spaced repetition utterly crushing, so I only use it very sparingly.
Exciting. Honestly I expect this will do more to advance bitemporal design than decades of jawboning has.
And really, ranges are an amazing substrate for this. I've had to do this by hand in a ... less featuresome ... SQL-speaking DB and it was clunky and performed fairly unimpressively.
The trap is that you can't get better without first getting worse. You can't get out of the destructive cycle of production pressure and decaying productivity without removing the pressure. Many managers expect, or at least behave as if they expect, improvement to be monotonic and costless.
You'll see capability traps everywhere once you learn about them.
Sterman, Repenning and other collaborators wrote several papers after this one. All fascinating and almost entirely depressing.
Especially since MIT's Sloan school, where system dynamics first became a discipline, is just around the bend from Harvard Business school, where system dynamics first became ignored.
1. It coincidentally aligns with the interests of the C-suite. They are mostly compensated in stock, and compensation mostly set by other members of the C-suite elite. And gosh darn it wouldn't you know it, they all think it's a jolly good idea.
2. It is taught in B-school, so most of the C-suite believe it or have never thought seriously about its deeper meaning. "Shareholder value" is easy to mouth, but breaks down almost immediately after trivial scrutiny. Which shareholders, pray tell Mr Babbage? What is value to them? Are they just are hivemind with perfectly identical interests, opinions, attention span, background knowledge, experience, access to capital, prestige, ...?
Mate until last week I had quite literally unlimited, unmetered access to frontier models from every major lab. No quotas, no brownouts, none of the stuff civilians gripe about. Chairman Mark had handed out the titanium amex and said "go forth and multiply my expenses".
What I saw was not ~ * ~ actual work ~ * ~. It wasn't "real stuff" either. What I witnessed was the most spectacular immolation of surplus I have ever seen. So much time, money and intelligence being pissed up against a wall in order to show the boss what a jolly good job you're doing.
When I tried to use it for actual work -- with, I repeat, utterly limitless amounts of tokens to burn -- it sucked balls. No matter how breathless the hype that this generation had finally cracked it, they all sucked. It produced flabby, buggy code by the gallon. It routinely fucked up and wasted my time. More than once I would wrestle with something for two or three days, give up, then bang a good solution in about an hour. Yes, I used rules and skills and .md files and and and and and and. Skill issue, you say? Well look, if hammers shot spikes through my hand one time in 20 then the skill issue is using the bloody doomhammer in the first place.
The actual work being done here is manic bullshitting and pissing in the village well. Shipping clanker clinker isn't productivity.
When I see a complex socioeconomic phenomenon described as "just" I know for certain that someone is about to spectacularly fail to have read books.
This is value stream mapping. No, business process reengineering. No, systems dynamics. No, a Krebs cycle. No, ...
People could always do these things. It was never a sword that only AI enthusiasts could draw from the stone. By god people, the AI has read books, can't you give it a bash too?
I recognize all these words, I can sense, perceive, parse and reason about all of these words. Yet I cannot derive a sensible meaning from them. The pragmatics is of a flailing fish singing Waltzing Matilda to a teleporting cucumber.
There's nothing transparent or inspectable about a sparse fog of floating point numbers. Rendered as a picture it's the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel. As a sound: ksssshhhhhhhhh. If you see anything in it that you believe is a real discrete phenomenon then I have a face on Mars to sell you.
You know what is an inspectable algorithm? An algorithm. The old-fashioned kind that were intensional and not gigantic quasi-extensional stews connected to nervous cats in boxes. I'm so tired of this madness. So entirely bloody exhausted. Out of all the manias I've lived through in this trade the current one is by far the most absurd, wasteful and destructive.