alt Hacker News> So much of Management (both mid and executive) still considers Software as if it were an assembly line; "We make software just like how Ford makes cars". Code as a product.
Which, it should be noted, is the dumbest idea ever. The Ford assembly line makes more-or-less identical copies of the same design. How do you do that with software? The cp command.
If someone thinks like that, they probably read some business book and either didn't understand the book, don't understand their own business, or is following some guru who has one of those problems.
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Henchman21 • yesterday at 4:28 PM
> If someone thinks like that
So like 95% of business school graduates?
Precisely, cars are more-or-less identical copies, at each position along the assembly line its just one of a handful of variants of the step that needs to be executed.
Software is less like an assembly line and more like plumbing:
Some people design which type of pipe needs to be routed from here to there.
The implementor actually pipes the outputs of one function, in a variable, and then taps it off as an argument to another function.
Software development is like plumbing really, so a good manager of a pipeworks and plumbing company might actually make a good manager for software companies as well.
This is also why its actually not so surprising that LLM's are mastering programming skills, it's essentially just being a plumber, and a lot of people are happy they no longer need to be a plumber. Physicists, engineers, scientists, ... they have much more complicated tasks compared to plumbers, programmers and code monkeys.