smikhanov

A usual reminder that this “law” (formulated in 1975, I kid you not) hasn’t been true for at least a decade now.

There’s nothing in common between software development as an activity in Brooks’ times and now. This horse is dead, stop flogging it.

The author deliberately doesn’t specify a date, so the best way to read this article is as if it’s someone’s reaction to Borland releasing TurboPascal. Sure, let’s be ambitious!

Or since it mentions AI, this is his follow-up to Terry Winograd publishing Understanding Computers and Cognition. Mid-80s vibe, priceless.

    Exactly zero people

You are wrong! I was redoing my kitchen recently and there’s a huge variety of accessories that kitchen worktop suppliers offer that have to do with using electronics on a worktop. A round hole with a lid to thread the power cable through is a very common thing that kitchen planner software includes nowadays, especially for kitchen islands. You can even have a completely flush wireless charging pad on your kitchen worktop if you want.

God, I wish I knew which PR firm he hires. Changing his public image from the most despised, greediest, nastiest businessman of his era to a calm, wise sage over a course of 10-20 years -- that's quite an achievement.

Just read the intro to this post, it sounds like music:

"The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history" -- are you even qualified to make this claim?

"Right now, we are not preparing adequately for that transition" -- who are you to know that for certain?

"If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off" -- awwwwww.

It takes a lot of patience to read this much slop voluntarily.

God, those "software is getting worse everywhere" takes are tedious.

Let's have a look at a few rarely quoted examples from the last decade, shall we?

Just six years ago, a big company rolls out a line of new chips so good that geeks and technology experts all get ecstatic and can't stop churning endless raving reviews. Those chips are fast, small and consume little energy. On top of that, the big company reworks their entire OS (OS!), the whole suite of software it has for it, the developer suite with compilers and SDKs and god knows what else and also ensures that everything ever written for that OS for the old chips continues to work and it indeed does.

Then there's another big company that launched a file storage service around 20 years ago. Back then it was reliable and only gotten better over the years. They started offering their storage for a nanocent per gajibyte and twenty years of hard work allowed them to lower that cost to a picocent per gajibyte. They don't lose data, they are highly available, half of the internet stores their data at their servers.

And then there's a -- gasp! -- consortium of big companies (fools would reply to this with an XKCD standards strip) that works on improvements to a shared set of standards for 4G, one of the most widely used technology stacks in the world, agrees on it, calls it 5G and rolls it out across the world and the whole spectrum of hardware and software vendors in a manner that resembles replacing a wing of an aircraft mid-flight so that not a single pasta strand falls from the forks of the business class customers.

And here we have someone who thinks that a customer support page for his fridge (fridge!) thrown together by a low-paid second-grade developer in a third-world country is indicative of the whole industry decline.

"Nothing works", my hairy bum. Get real.

Intelligence is absolutely a valuable addition to dexterity, but no, current industrial robots have nowhere near the dexterity of a human hand.

The article says nothing about “skilled people who work with their hands” specifically, so it’s unclear what is being refuted here.

However there are people in the workforce who don’t identify with their work. Those are likely not in professions that Marx thought of when he wrote about alienation, but instead are Uber Eats delivery drivers, call centre workers, flight attendants on low-cost airlines, nurses in mediocre hospitals, and so on.

“Scaling” as in “making sure the infrastructure can handle much higher load”, or as in “making sure the product remains genuinely useful to people, so that the user numbers go up and not down”? For both, it didn’t happen by itself, but it’s far from rocket science. A sane team of 15-20 people can do it.

> real user pain point

That is obvious from all the upvotes your comments get on here.

The Nebraska guy’s block remains surprisingly stable, even when the whole thing above it collapses. Very symbolic.

Several related reasons working at once. The nature of work changed. The boundary between accidental and incidental complexity shifted (and it’s unclear whether this distinction still exists). Niche specializations within the field emerged. The way to structure and decompose projects changed dramatically (agile and stuff).

One pathological example: if you’re running a server-based product, quite often what stands between you and a new feature launch is literally couple of thousands of lines of Kubernetes YAML. Would adding someone who’s proficient in Kubernetes slow you down? Of course not.

One may say, hey, this is just the server-side Kubernetes-based development being insane, and I’ll say, the whole modern business of software development is like this.

That law (formulated in the 70s, I’ll remind the reader) wasn’t true for at least couple decades now.