Humans also work because they've been trained on a massive corpus of materials, spanning like an average 15 year period or more. And humans too need to be prompted, sometimes everyday, with meetings and whatnot to produce exactly what is required.

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LoganDark 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I used to do software dev without meetings. It worked just fine. I would send whatever I did once it was done, and get direction on where to take it next. Maybe this breaks down in companies with more than a few leaders, or where the leaders can't otherwise keep in sync.

Also gave me plenty of opportunities to go above and beyond. I miss when that felt safe.

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dahart 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This depends entirely on how well the requirements have been communicated, right? If you could go for long periods without meetings on large projects, it means either you had great PMs or you’re very good at collecting relevant info and planning in advance. Or, it could mean that your target was quite flexible and open to interpretation. I don’t doubt it, and I’ve known some developers who could do what you did, deliver something great without that much back and forth. I’ve also known many developers (probably most TBH) who will focus on problems the customers don’t have and endlessly go down rabbit holes that have no bottom. Heads down software engineering for big-O and data structures seems to be a lot more fun for some people than fixing weird hard to repro bugs with vague repro instructions that customers complain about. Many very good devs still need to check in and iterate and get some steering, especially if the requirements have not been well or fully explained… which in my own experience has been more or less always. ;)

	▲	LoganDark 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe my definition of meetings is different than yours. To me, meetings are voice or video calls where multiple people talk about progress and direction, raise issues to the others, etc. and the leaders can make calls across the whole team at once. Staying in constant communication doesn't count as much because it's more async and incremental.

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skeledrew 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe those were some very detailed requirements you were getting, the deliveries were straight-forward, or you already knew the space pretty well. Or you're the only dev there. Somehow most teams just keep tripping over each other and need near constant management to ensure they're delivering what the stakeholders expect.

	▲	LoganDark 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They weren't particularly detailed, but I did know the space quite well. I was a heavy user of other products of that type, and knew very well what I wanted out of one.

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andsoitis 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I used to do software dev without meetings. It worked just fine. I would send whatever I did once it was done, and get direction on where to take it next.

You didn’t collaborate with other engineers? Or what if the spec you were given was unclear in places? Forgive me, but the style you describe sounds incredibly collaborative, super transactional.

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LoganDark 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Funny story actually, there were a few other engineers but not very much collaboration. They were resistant to sharing source code or algorithm details, so I had to essentially reverse engineer how their other products worked. I was good enough at it that I came up with several features they didn't know were possible. They eventually ended up letting me go and cloned my design, which I thought was weird, but it was developed for them in the first place so not a big deal.

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Exoristos 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The lengths to which devs will go not to collaborate.

	▲	LoganDark an hour ago \| parent [-]
		To be fair, it's a very secretive industry, and betrayals are quite common. Worse, a lot of those betrayals are done on pure impulse without even thinking through the consequences first, so you can't actually build incentives against it because they'll just be ignored.

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skydhash 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Humans also work because they've been trained on a massive corpus of materials,

Massive? My introduction to programming (from noob to beginner level) has been like only 10 books worth of content. Including some alternative pathways like 3D, security, system administration,... To this day, I don't think I've reached 50 books of materials. And If I counted everything it would be still small.

Human learning is very efficient (not time wise, but cost wise, and even training data wise).

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skeledrew 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You're forgetting all the schooling before that, which taught you how to read, do math, etc. And the general daily experiences of just being a human being interacting with the world. Magnitudes more data taken in than any language model.

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DonaldPShimoda 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Magnitudes more data taken in than any language model.

Ah, yes, I can fondly recall reading and internalizing every word available on the internet when I was young...

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skeledrew 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You should check out how much raw data just your eyes process for every second they're open (although a significant amount is discarded before it gets to the vision center, but still). Then consider the other senses also constantly doing their thing.

	▲	LoganDark 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The vast majority of people don't internalize most things. Some internalize even less. It can become a big issue with things like dissociative disorders. (I have some experience with that)

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nvme0n1p1 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A picture is worth a thousand words. How much video data was your brain trained on?

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senordevnyc 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Only if you ignore the billion years of pretraining…