Even generating a first-pass of the eventual production code that you can step back and review is useful to get ideas, so long as you guard yourself against laziness of going with the first answer it provides
This is like 80% of CRUD apps. Sometimes they have a few interesting problems but not like the upper 20%. Most of them are hot garbage in terms of code quality because of the offshoring and layoff cycles.
In a less profit driven world, we might stockpile these in cans and then later throw them away once they spoil, taking over the canning facilities and paying for the wages via taxes on things not needed for survival. We don't maximize food security though, we prefer profit, up to and including choosing not to feed people.
Of course if they did then what's about to happen with the peach trees, you'd end up killing the dairy cows, which I'm guessing the people in this thread would have a problem with.
The government would step in and take over operations. This is why we don't need profit-driven companies responsible for food supply. By all means let Del Monte's managers try their hand in some other industry if they couldn't make it work (or not, because they couldn't make it work).
What makes you think the government is remotely qualified to run a canning operation, a logistics operation, a warehousing operation, an HR operation, and a finance operation for peaches?
Also which government? Because there are at least 3-5 relevant ones here, maybe more.
>What makes you think the government is remotely qualified to run a canning operation, a logistics operation, a warehousing operation, an HR operation, and a finance operation for peaches?
That'd actually be quite easy for this particular federal government actually (current administration aside). And probably California too.
> What makes you think the government is remotely qualified to run a canning operation, a logistics operation, a warehousing operation, an HR operation, and a finance operation for peaches?
The DoD (for one) runs lots of logistics, warehousing, HR (2.8M), and finance stuff.
Have you ever looked at the prices they pay? Government is the last place I'd look for competent management, anyone good/noncorrupt would be making 10x in the private sector.
The government is able to do all of this for an entire literal army of people, spread across the entire world. And for an additional smaller army we call the Marines. Only difference is we add peaches on top of the canning of lead.
I'm not saying this is a good idea, but the government doesn't need to know how to micromanage these operations. The company already has employees who can do these things. All they need is to get paid. If the government decided that the final harvest of peaches needed to be canned, they could take over the business and pay to make it happen.
edit: Actually, they don't even need to take over the business. Another company is already operating it. The government could simply sign a contract to buy the 50,000 tons of canned peaches and the company would can them. Again, not to endorse the idea, but it is very straightforward logistically.
If nobody else wants to buy 50,000 tons of canned peaches, why should the government use other people's tax revenue to buy those peaches? Why not just get rid of them (which is what we're doing)?
I never said the government should buy the peaches. I pointed out that your argument didn't work.
You said the government shouldn't do this because they lacked the expertise and (implicitly) would balls it up. I pointed out that it didn't require any expertise. That is all.
Do you really want a world without any fast food or snack foods? I mean, I think we consume way too much as a society, but I'd rather not have the government decide what I'm allowed to eat.
Have a conversation with someone who grew up in communist USSR/Russia sometime... It definitely isn't cool.
If we had govt controlled food supply, we'd never have the likes of hot sauce (sriracha, pace, etc) and would likely never have seen a lot of options form. For better and far, far worse.
>but I'd rather not have the government decide what I'm allowed to eat.
I don't know how it'd get to that if we had even more supply. I'm saying we'd be better off dealing with the problems of overproduction rather than the problems of unprofitable businesses and killing production capacity because it isn't profitable in the short-term.
I also never said you couldn't have non/not-for-profit food production, just that they shouldn't be for-profit.
It's difficult because a lot of the margins have been pressed out, and capital funding is often done in a way that doesn't allow for a market to shrink and respond to over-production or a reduction in demand.
If the government was responsible for running the farms, we would not have near the variety we have today... and for that matter, it would be much closer to soviet communism. I'm absolutely opposed to that.
And how do you know we would be better off? What would you do with oversupply? We had mountains full of cheese for decades from oversupply.. and that's a single product. Canned fruit doesn't even last that long before breaking down. The alternative is waste year after year, vs. cutting back and planting something else, which is what is happening... part of the market was allowed to fail (Del Monte) and part is being bailed out (farms) in defense of being able to have ongoing production, even if the product is different.
That seems far better than having mountains full of rotten peaches in cans.
I wouldn't share that with a manager even if they asked. If management were tech competent, they could proactively find inefficiencies themselves and allocate time to it instead of letting developers do all of the thinking for them.
If they gave immediate raises or bonuses for stuff like this, then things would change.
The average dev probably doesn't have any significant amount of equity in their company. The stock price at my company going up just means my quarterly checks are going to be $4 instead of $3.
>I hope I don’t come across as too harsh here, but I think a lot of developers are finally being forced to understand that their high salaries and above-average job security were fundamentally predicated on business models that largely didn’t have a ton of competition.
Would love to see the business and manager types manage software and infrastructure. What's the worst that could happen? Go on, do it. Every time a foot gun goes off it'll be followed by a condescending chuckle.
I used to see 'passion' as the defining factor of how to stay in the field and do well, and that was advice given to people who wanted to join the industry -- who showed the minimum of interest. Now we're going to have these non-technical people who definitely aren't interested and definitely don't have passion for it try to make and manage quality software?
Look at the home building inspection YouTube shorts. Guy pulls up to a house. Looks at the foundation, it's cracked. Opens the door, it's jammed and requires force. Finishes opening the door, it slams into a low part of the ceiling. Goes into the bathroom. Turns the tap. Water comes out. Sprays directly on something that shouldn't have water on it. Runs the shower. Water pools away from the drain and stays there. Opens the bathroom door from this side. Doorhandle bangs into towel rail, door is tricky to open. Drops a golf ball on floor tiles (apparently a standard test). Several are loose. Turns on the light switch. No light because the light only comes on when both switches are on. Goes to the kitchen. Puts the $5 outlet tester in each outlet. Missing neutral. Reversed hot and neutral. Missing ground. Runs hand over the wallpaper. It's not even close to flat. Goes up to the attic. Looks at where the beams are joined together. Half the nail plates are stuck into one beam instead of joining two beams. You get the idea. Could be staged for the video, but I believe it. You don't make back the cost of wrecking a house from ads on a short form video.
This is the state of the homebuilding industry right now. Most of these homes are sold to people who don't make payment contingent upon passing an inspection. The business knows quality doesn't matter to buyers and you can save lots of money by cutting corners.
This is not just homebuilding, this is the future of every industry. We're putting distilled water in the hydroponics. In tech, it was already happening before AI, just look at the usability decline in every Windows and OSX version.
There's a lot of value to be extracted in the period between "we fired all the qualified staff" and "oops, we lost all our customers due to unreliability". In physical industries that may happen sooner or in a more alarming way - you discover the loss of your safety personnel in the form of, say, a refinery explosion. But in software you can just .. break stuff, and leak personal data, and deliver a service which is down quite a lot (see github discussion passim, or endless complaining about Windows 11), and nobody goes away. Partly because software switching costs are so high, partly because the alternatives have the same problems.
This sort of thing happened to, for example, Maplin.
The big poster child is sadly Twitter. A lot of people said it would collapse without 90% of the staff, and that hasn't materialized. I suspect they can't deploy huge changes to the backend, but they never did that much anyway.
(also, those of us not in the US and not in FAANG always wondered how such a steep salary differential could have been maintained forever; more than doctors and lawyers? Comparable to finance bros or the fabled quants? All of those are much more onerous jobs with much harder entrance criteria!)
Software companies so far have been getting away with it, because the industry is relatively young versus others, and outside high integrity computing liability is yet to be a common expectation.
If everyone asked for returns, or sued, software companies the same way they deal with other goods, the atittude would most likely have changed by now.
Not to mention the whole EULAs ("we don't have any idea what we are doing here, please sign") disease.
> If everyone asked for returns, or sued, software companies the same way they deal with other goods, the atittude would most likely have changed by now.
How can they do that when they probably had to sign an arbitration agreement to use the product? Can't pull that shit with a box of oatmeal or most other physical items without software components.
Steam (the game store) had an arbitration agreement. It turns out there's no class action arbitration and the merchant pays all arbitration fees. When they did something wrong (I don't remember what) and got inundated with thousands upon thousands of individual arbitration cases, suddenly they wished for a class action lawsuit instead. They removed forced arbitration from the EULA.
It's not clear if it meant anything anyway. Half the point of an EULA is to scare you away from trying to enforce your rights even if a lawyer would rip it up.
I think that's more likely to be true of big, established companies - but not so much new companies that start off smaller, and that don't have any sort of customer lock-in.
If I'm a business owner, and my point-of-sale software was wildly unreliable, I'd switch if I wasn't constrained by a contract. I can't exactly move off of Facebook as my marketing strategy, though.
Yup, the way to short term money is to cut quality. And we really incentivize such behavior. It's not what you can actually do, it's what you can make it look like you did. And get out before it burns down around you.
>Gaming is one thing, fundamentally not understanding how engineering works will lead to shittier outcomes and cost the company in ways the management will never understand.
That means nothing to them: they jump ship and find another job just like devs do. The whole industry has been musical chairs for a while.
Misleading title: this article says it is seeking a budget increase, not that it's been approved
>The funding request, a dramatic surge from roughly $225 million a year earlier, signals a major shift in how the U.S. military plans to fight future wars, accelerating a move toward large numbers of lower-cost, AI-enabled systems.
The merits of this ask within this insane administration basically means nothing IMO. Hegseth could ask for cybernetic ponies with beer coolers and I wouldn't be surprised.
Yes it's totally insane to jump $500B, and no they cannot spend it in one year. Most of the money will go towards systems development and production spanning years. And lining the pockets of Trump bros.
We're seeing the total dissolution of Congressional control of spending and oversight. They'll get the money and spend it as they please.
>What points towards bootstraping being impossible?
Even just the security concerns and having any confidence in the implementation is likely a specialized skill, so you'll need to convince someone to work for free or be able to pay them. Now do that for other major lines of work like UI/UX, Ops, and QA.
Take a look at all of the features from GitHub or any code platform that you'd need to get people to sign up these days (because they are used to GitHub/others) and it's a very tall list. Think something like https://www.enterpriseready.io/ but definitely larger (maybe 2x, 3x as large).
Oh and if someone writes a long rant about it and it gets to the top here, it likely becomes dead in the water, and you can't get the time back, making it a risky proposition. At least with VC money, you got paid a salary.
You could theorize about all those things, or you could look at Codeberg, sr.ht or others that already are doing what you claim to be impossible, yet haven't took on VC money. People are signing up and using these already, despite not offering 100% the same features.
The aim doesn't have to be "Be the next GitHub", but something else, and that's just as valid and "successful" as anything else, as long as they survive as communities.
I'm not against rich people outright, but I am against the ones who try to pay people as little as possible sharing their views. And especially the views that contradict (working hard) how they got their wealth (not working hard) in the first place.
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