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Comment by sdevonoes | Hacker News Reader

It’s the same at work. You don’t ask your colleagues for help anymore, you ask the agent. You can clone all the necessary repos, link to confluence/figma/drive and then ask.

It sucks. I don’t care about being efficient (that’s something the executives care about). I care about how I live my life, and at work that means learning from others (and offer the little knowledge I have to others)… if it takes 2 engineers 2h to solve a bug (vs 20 min for 1 engineer and an agent) then thats great for me. I get the chance to exercise my brain, solve a bug, learn from other engineer and have a bond with that individual. If I solve the bug in 20min with an agent, well, that’s something my boss would love, but I personally would have gained nothing… and would have to jump to solve more bugs alone in the remaining 100 minutes (which feels like running a marathon)

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My anecdote is that most of my coworkers across multiple jobs didn't like to explain anything. I think most engineers don't enjoy being interrupted for questions and I would have appreciated a way to get answers without bothering them.

At the same time, there's a type of person who loves to explain things. They give presentations and are extra helpful when engaged. I'm pretty sure you can still ask them questions.

I don't like being interrupted, but I'm happy to answer a question when I'm at a good stopping/breaking point with whatever I'm working on.

How does the other person know you’re at such a point?

They send a message asking to see you when you have a moment. In office settings I ask people things when I see them getting coffee and am likewise asked things myself.

Send the question using an asynchronous communication medium (slack, email...) and I'll get back to it when I'm at that point.

Problem is that the type of person that leans towards collaboration and likes to explain things may be getting burned out right now or may be among the first to be replaced.

Anecdata: I am that person, loves explaining things, love seeing my colleagues learn things and grow. Needless to say, I no longer hold a job in the industry.

What did you move to?

As of now, unemployment.

what did you switch to?

OTOH, it's great for the type of person like me, who likes answering questions but is rarely asking them. Like, I don't want to interrupt my colleagues for something I can figure out on my own in comparable amount of time/effort. AI is now scaling this to questions previously way too difficult to answer on my own.

I maybe liked to explain things, but never liked to ask other people, always liked to figure things by myself. Maybe it was the experience from school and university with a lot of teachers that didn't know what they were talking about, which made me not trust other people.

I'm the same as you. I hate asking other people, unless it's for a reference or material to learn. I like to grind to understand myself, and then answer questions and explain things via presentations or a drawing board. I never wonder why I'm like that, tho

That said, hardly anyone asks for explanations now. In my team people default to a chatbot for work questions almost exclusively, and in private life for hobbies I share with other people, they increasingly go for chatbots too.

Turns out, not everyone seems to want a human connection.

Oh, we do want a human connection. But we also want good information, and want to actually know this (i.e. hobby is something to do, not merely a pretext to socialize). The overlap between the two is low.

> At the same time, there's a type of person who loves to explain things.

I like to explain things, and put them in an e-mail or Slack thread, so that I don't have to be bothered a second time about it.

Just yesterday I fixed an OpenLDAP issue we were having as a syadmin team: it was close enough to previous issues I had that I was able to circle to correct area, and was able to fix it, but I explained the context to everyone so I didn't have to be the one to deal with it if it ever rose again.

i love explaining things. it takes the workload off of myself because there is now one more person who could be more independent

Chatting with folks on other teams about technical issues was one of the best parts of my FAANG job.

Efficiency in the short-term also leads to community degradation in the long term. And by efficiency I mean efficiency past the point of diminishing returns. Compiling code by hand would suck, but not writing code at all also sucks.

There is no formula to determine the right level of it, but it's one of those things that's obvious when you see it... like not eating.

I'm surprised by this sudden "I love interacting with humans" surge. It's not something I associate with hackers.

Hackers are not anti-social, we're just a subculture. Hacking itself is ultimately a community activity. You want others to appreciate this cool thing you've made, or share tips about it, or just in general provide people connection. People buy plane tickets and conference tickets, pick their university/major, accept materially non-optimal job offers, just to seek out other members of this culture.

And for programmers that aren't hackers, they just appreciate the practical upsides of having mature humans that can take accountability for decisions that affect your work as coworkers.

> Hacking itself is ultimately a community activity. You want others to appreciate this cool thing you've made, or share tips about it, or just in general provide people connection.

It is, but it is largely also single-player.

It's single player in the same way painting is. The process of painting is done by a single artist, but the broader context of art is defined by a community people. Without them you wouldn't have a rich history of ideas to draw from, peers to discuss your work, or an audience to appreciate it.

Neither do I. But what I suspect is that the unpleasantness of too much forced social interaction, which dominated discussions in times past, was also associated with the begrudgingly-acknowledged good it did, even for us introverts. Hey, I'm like that too. But AI has taken that away for many people, who are now realizing that occasionally eating those dark greens actually did some good and now they're gone, life is actually worse.

This stereotype of "hackers" feels very rooted in the late-90s/early-2000s. Ever since mid-2000s the prominent "hackers" have been collaborating in the open and chasing VC funding...

I've discovered that I either want to have no interaction with people, or I want to have real human interactions. I don't want the shitty half measure where my manager sends me whatever Claude sent them, or gives me instructions like I was a prompt ("do X now").

Not every hacker fits the stereotype of "guy typing fast in a basement filled with screens and terminals".

People are people, all different, some hackers enjoy the solitude of doing their project by themselves with no human interaction whatsoever, others enjoy and thrive with a collaborative setting, spitting ideas, showing code, and getting feedback to iterate on and improve them.

I've belonged to the latter camp most of my life even though I acted like the first when I was learning how to program (and on my first job); I'm not a stereotypical extrovert but love nerding about stuff together with someone: coding an idea, making music, working on wood, for me those are all more enjoyable with another human sharing the same passion.

There's a wide gap between "introvert" and "no interaction ever".

hacking something alone is fun, but maintaining something that’s being hacked by someone else without coordination has always been a shitty experience.

Even those that have less bandwidth for human interaction value being in the loop.

Presumably the people who loved interacting with humans were too busy interacting to show up on forums. And now that interactions are being curtailed they do end up here.

When I read Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, I got the sense that the story was all about community: disaffected nerds suddenly finding each other through the emerging medium of personal computing — in the halls of MIT, at Homebrew Computer Club meetings, through interactions with Community Memory.

> I'm surprised by this sudden "I love interacting with humans" surge.

This exists on a spectrum for both interactor and interactee: some folks are more introverted than others, some folks don't mind talking shop with fellow hackers but don't want to get into business-y stuff with PMs.

There are people working in IT or CS who aren't hackers.

I was mainly referring to comments on Hacker News.

Hacker news has long drifted from being purely hacker-related content, if it ever was. From my experience, it's a melting-pot of stuff related to entrepreuneurship, IT, VCs, and stuff that happens around silicon valley.

perhaps consider what motivates a person to read comments on a forum like hacker news. Or indeed, post on such a forum.

There may be reasons other than self promotion

"You ask the agent", you do? I would never ask an agent about a system at work. I see people doing this and they are getting very obvious, and bad results. I do see this as a detriment for junior devs though since they may need help. But I will never let my dev team off the hook for writing documentation. Although they may now feel using LLM is ok for that.

The biggest difference in experience with seniors is that we already know the standard patterns, I dont have to ask what the inside of a microservice looks like, or the inside of a react app. Or how event driven systems work.

Engineers should learn that stuff by doing. And reading the massive amount of (non-LLM) written documentation on the subject. Written by real people.

I feel there are workplaces and career choices where those people go who want social contact and fulfil personal utopian ambitions, not necessarily having profit in mind, and jobs where you go to make money efficiently. And these days, the divide between those has gotten very large to the point many jobs have no personal contact or room for personal growth, interests or artistic skill anymore. It feels the sane middle ground for sane people who are looking for a sane balance has been or is being hollowed out.

And when that workday is done, everybody goes home by themselves to scroll some more.

no, it’s absolutely awesome.

I can move across the repos fixing whatever god damn bothers me, without ever talking to anyone.

Code and commit/review messages have always been all the communication needed.

The thing is, most humans don’t communicate in order to exchange information, but in order to regulate their emotions.

Yeah this is infinitely preferable to meetings, particularly if you're on remote teams where someone is forced to be online at unhealthy hours

Do you apply this logic to all efficiency gains or just ones that weren’t commonplace when you entered the industry?

For instance, package managers didn’t always exist. Would you prefer it if we got rid of them? Instead of 30 seconds running `uv add whatever` collaborating with your package manager, you could spend 30 days collaborating with other human beings to build the functionality yourself.

> You don’t ask your colleagues for help anymore

To be fair, I never did. No one wants to be bothered and I don't want to bother anyone, too.

Yes, it's like GP never heard the term RTFM.

I think the key question to answer for all of us - Where would you be in 5 years? :-)

In capitalism companies do things what is good for the company.

You can try convincing them that doing the same job in 2hrs is better for the company but they may not listen.

Like in outsourcing when they say the Indian worker does the same job for a much smaller salary and they don't care about the quality of the code they produce only about hitting the milestones. If the code is bad then they hire some other cheap outsourced workers to fix it, etc.

The market does not reward good code, the market rewards low price and speed of delivery.

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