alt Hacker NewsI do not appreciate when authors use the royal "we" to speak for all software engineers when admitting to low quality-control standards.
I suspect that it is an attempt to broach an uncomfortable topic through vulnerable self-disclosure, but we need to be serious about admitting when there is a problem somewhere.
"Bugs" are not any more cute or fuzzy or entertaining or harmless than the engine "gremlins" that haunted the aviation industry back in the day.
I don't know how many accidents had to happen before the airplane people got serious, but software people are overdue for a similar reckoning.
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At least in my experience, the 'software' people are VPs/management who push and push with short term thinking.
Article aside, I generally always use the "we" pronoun at work when writing prose. Saying "I" feels too adversarial when talking about negative effects, or too self-aggrandizing when talking about positive effects. For example: "We discovered a bug shipped at the end of the merge window, so we will restart validation with the rollback applied." I think in school they say the business-safe way to write is instead with the passive voice but I just can't do it.
> To build good software with AI, you still have to understand software.
> You need to know what you’re actually asking for, how to judge what comes back, and when the machine is just confidently serving you charcoal.
It's surprising to me this even needs to be written down. Like, obviously still use your brain and think about what the computer is doing. Did you guys think that LLMs were magic?
"We all could have done more.": said by every politician. Which is easier: writing good code, or winning a political battle over crappy code? I mean, if you're not capable of coding, and creating an appropriate architecture for the the domain: which course of action gives you the most control over risk management? So yeah most fights about software are about politics and crappy code.
Saying this to set expectations based on having a business license since 1984.
The author didn't say "we (all software engineers)", so the only person including you in his class is you.
I just want to point out this is not a royal "we". It's a regular "we". Royal "we" is when you say "we" but mean a singular person, yourself. Here, the author does actually mean multiple people beyond themselves - like you pointed out, they claim to speak for all software engineers.