Somewhere in the last year, a bunch of us who hadn’t shipped real code in years quietly started shipping again. Not reviewing it. Not architecting it in a doc and handing it off. Actually building it. And loving it.
I lead software for a living. That means my days are meetings, roadmaps, hiring, unblocking people, and saying “no” a lot. The last time “writing code” was my actual job was a long time ago. I never stopped being able to code — I stopped having the time to code. At least in my day job. There’s a difference, and every engineering leader reading this feels it in their bones.
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I’m in the group being described here and the rustiness is real, but it isn’t the part that decides whether the code is any good. What I lost in the years of meetings was the current detail, which library does what this year and where the sharp edges are. What I didn’t lose was knowing what to ask for and being able to tell when an answer is wrong, which is what you’re doing most of when something else is typing. I’d be more worried about a leader who hasn’t reviewed a diff in five years than one who hasn’t written one.
Great. The “why don’t you just…” idiots are “writing” code again and not reviewing it.
What could go wrong?
Who needs human review, the AI can do that? Who needs human coding, the AI can do that? Who needs human testing, the AI can do that? Who needs human requirements engineering, the AI can do that.
80% uptime. How did this happen?
Still five nines of uptime — 79.9999%.
Could you qualify what you mean by “idiots”? The author and the examples he gives - Kent Beck, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Garry Tan - are all very experienced software engineers.
By idiots I mean the people who haven’t engineered in years.
The subject of the article.
Seems self-evident.
Well that depends on how quickly you believe that engineering skills atrophy without use.
Though, I’d argue programming is like riding a bike. Even after a long break, it’s not difficult to get back into it, as the fundamentals for programming haven’t changed.
Reminds me of that one time when Microsoft said “We don’t need UI/UX designers, powerpoint is so easy that managers can do UI/UX design themselves”.
That’s how we got Windows 8.
… Windows 11 is far worse. 8 was solid compared to 11. 8 was a pain in the ass, but it mostly did what it was supposed-to.
What does being technically solid have to do with UX?
Windows 8 had a “reason”(TabletPCs, and the success of Tiles on Windows Phone) for the changes made. The old UX was still there if you knew where to look and what settings to change; Some searching online could mostly have you back to what you wanted in under an hour. It was coded by humans, tested by humans, and consistently worked as intended.
Windows 11’s changes have no such saving-graces or anything resembling rational justification. They let their AI re-code a bunch of fundamental features, and particularly the UI/UX, from a low-level programming language to frameworks intended for fucking websites, just so they could say it was capable of doing-so. Along the way, they used AI to test the results and skimped on or ignored the results from testing done by humans.
How many times before has Microsoft publicly admitted one of their products is broken and promised to fix it? What does being technically solid have to do with UX? EVERYTHING.
Windows 8 didn’t have a reason to look like a child drew the UI in paint. I remember well the moment I first booted up the technical preview of Windows 8, being flabbergasted by how bad it looked. I choked it up to being a technical preview, they likely didn’t get around to put decent graphics in, but no, it stayed like that.
Windows 8 also didn’t have a reason to go touch-first (and really touch-only) on the UI for a OS with a non-touch install base of around 99+%. That’s terrible UX.
Any decent UI/UX guy would have been able to tell them that they should make the UI switch between desktop mode and touch mode depending on what hardware was present or which mode the user selected.
As you said, it was “only” an hour of fiddling with the registry to bring it back, so it was mostly there. A decent UI/UX designer would have just added a button or an autoselection feature.
But since they said “screw professionals, let the managers do the design” you got shitty UI/UX that caused a massive flop.
The parallel I was drawing that with Win11 and the help of AI they are doing the same. They fire the experts and have the managers and other non-experts do the job of the experts and it falls apart.
Offtopic:
frameworks intended for fucking websites,
You know who also does that? GNOME. The whole GNOME DE is coded in JavaScript.
Sure it did. Tiles on Windows Phone were a big hit for a time. If anything, the problem on that side of things was that they didn’t commit and make sure the things that worked on the phone also worked on the “tablet” version.
Instead, they took the approach that "the developers will thank us for charging them an arm and a leg to learn and use the new APIs, like they always have, forgetting that developers often follow users, and almost every user was verbal about hating what MS had done, including Windows phone users who understood what had been promised then effectively bait-and-switched.
Microsoft’s way has just always been so inspiring, you know?
I never got into gnome. Was more of an XFCE guy for a time, enough-so to realize Gnome had “deprecated” anything I liked about GTK. I was more looking for a classic start menu style with minimal overhead, and XFCE gave me that, while most other DE’s wouldn’t let me do stuff that Windows 95 had been cool with.
