The “paradox” (or whatever you might want to call it) with software is if I can describe the business case, with all of its side effects and outputs for unhappy paths, in enough detail, I’ve just done all the hard part of writing software. If AI can help with that last 20ish percent then great. The challenge with offshoring, and now LLMs, is that it takes as much time to describe the problem and outputs than it doesn’t to just write the dang code.
It is rare to ever see a software project with all behaviors spelled out in English. I think the effort required to do that is rarely necessary, and people just write code instead. "Documentation" usually means that you wrote down how to use the thing, plus some non-obvious details.
If I could predict that, I could beat the market. Inventing the difference would be both a fun technical challenge and a way to get a terrifying lynch mob at my door. Merely knowing how far away it is would help me know how to plan early retirement (kinda already could except for being a migrant).
Exactly. It’s always been possible to commoditize software engineering _if_ you could find the right developers overseas but the fact is we are where we are because it’s hard and almost impossible to manage.
And either way, talented developers from developing countries are often brought on with visas and end up with salaries close to the industry norm. I’ve been involved with large mergers with overseas dev teams and that’s how it’s always been.
At best, AI is just good documentation. This whole craze is the equivalent of saying doctors won’t be necessary because you can just google how to do x procedure.
Being an executive totally requires skills. Are they unique skills that only executives have? Not really. But people management and resource management in general require skills, wisdom, etc. If someone is made an executive and they don't have the required skills, they will usually blow up their project or company.
I don't doubt that an executive requires a certain temperament that lots of people don't have and that the people who become executives are generally intelligent and capable. What I'm saying is that it is not a "trade" or "profession" that has specific teachable skills, knowledge bases and responsibilities like "engineer" or "lawyer" or "plumber"
There totally are specific teachable skills involved with being an executive, although they are abstract for the most part. Above all an executive should have an adequate understanding of the thing they manage. But resource management, estimation, accounting, public speaking, knowledge of relevant laws, workplace psychology, etc. are all skills that executives need and can be taught. If you meet an executive with these skills and then meet one without them, you'll know what I'm talking about. I would also say the same of sales jobs, but sales is relatively narrow.
Management fat? Sure. C-Suite level? Nah. Boeing's last two failed CEOs left with tens of millions of dollars worth of golden parachute; we've seen a massive upwards trend in CEO pay over the last few decades.
Musk got $44 billion for being a part-time CEO at Tesla, even.
CEO is the riskiest, high profile hire. Million dollar golden parachutes are a rounding error distraction. I'm not justifying them, but it's generally just contractual, and the cost of getting rid of a low performer (which is no different to the rank and file, just at a much lower unit cost).
Risky for the company, not for the individual. Hence why they are happy to pay what is, at the corporate level, a paltry sum to make a problem go away. It just happens to be a rather large sum at the individual level.
A bad CEO can easily ruin hundreds of billions or trillions in value. Some tens of millions to be rid of the problem is a no brainer.
Exactly. Execs see the monthly spend, people actually doing the work see the long-term externalities and hidden costs. Many, many people I know would and do buy more expensive (often Made in USA but not always) products when doing so means that the products will last longer and need less maintenance. Treating labor as commodities implies that the labor is interchangeable. Everyone who's actually done the work knows that it's not. There's no shortcut to paying for good talent.
Or they won't discover, because they'll be 5 years gone onto the next company, and the product will slowly decay under the cost of upkeep of its technical debt and the business fail.
The free market is not, in fact, perfectly frictionless. Executive decisions still matter and can make the difference between having, say, a photo sharing site that people like to use, and having one that's shut down because they can't pay to fix the legacy code.
If you were to chart the pain and suffering of the human race over the last 10,000 years, or even over the last 100 years, it is steeply down and to the right.
I'm not hand waving anything away. It's unfortunately ruthlessly statistical.
