Aceticon

I think that there are roughly 4 causes:

• As you mentioned, people promoted all the way up to the first position they are truly incompetent at, i.e. the Peter Principle
• Nepotism and cronyism - people are getting the jobs because who they know (i.e. “the old boys network”) or who their family are, not competence.
• People get the job because they’re good at personal image management and social networking - they mingle with the right people and project the right impression with things like speaking in a firm confident manner about things they know nothing about - which are fine skills to have and even applicable to some of the job of management (at the mid and above management levels), just not enough for the rest of the job of management, and that part missing is in most management positions the biggest chunk (and includes the stuff for recognition of risks and accounting for them).
• Upper level managers hire people like themselves to work under them. This partly overlaps with number 2 but goes further. When said upper level management is incompetent because they got in due to one or more of the other 3 problems, they hire people the same profile as themselves even if not due to those reasons directly (a simple example: managers who look and behave posh because they attended a posh private school will tend to hire managers who look the same hence are likely to have attended such schools themselves - this isn’t directly cronyism but ends up producing a similar effect as they’re selecting people from their social domain even if they don’t know them personally)

I would say that nowadays in management the first one is a pretty small fraction of it (except maybe in the less prestigious and less paid low level management positions) because people are rarely “promoted from the ground floor” nowadays and hiring for more prestigious positions is very heavy on the impression people project, so most of the problem are numbers 2 and 3 plus a bit of number 4.

Number 4 is especially pernicious because it means that once an institution is managed at the top level by people who do not recognize the importance of certain skills in management (like caring about and understanding risk analysis) it tends to mainly hire people who are the same for other management positions and even for replacements for the top job - people who don’t think a certain skill or mindset is important for the job are not going to have as a hiring criteria that candidates have such skill or mindset.

Yeah, even having learned to explain this shit in the IT Consultancy language of “supply contracts” and “mission critical”, it’s still not guaranteed that I’ll convince a manager to avoid or at least account for the higher exposure to outside risks when subcontracting certain things.

Nowadays, with 3 decades of experience in the Industry, I honestly think that the majority of managers, no matter how high in a company, are either incompetent as fuck or simply manage with as priority maximizing their next bonus in the full knowledge that they’re leaving traps for the next one to solve and if they do blow up during their own time, they’ll still personally end up better off by going for bonus-today-problem-tomorrow than refraining from doing so.

Risk analysis in IT Management nowadays is spectacularly bad.

If you become dependent on a 3rd supplier then their survival as a company is now a risk for you. It doesn’t matter how good the reliability you have contracted with them - if they go under whatever penalities in the contract for failing to deliver said reliability will never be paid.

You might even be at risk of them simply chosing to close that division - small company signing a service supply contract with a big company: good luck getting a contract where the parent company (rather than whatever paper company they spun up for that business area) actually has to pay you stiff penalties if they fuck you over.

As soon as mission critical anything is outside your company, a lot of otherwise irrelevant things become operational risks for your company.

This is why you don’t put your mission critical anything on an external Cloud supplier.

You know, stuff like the only copy of 70 years of TV history that’s actually just 50TB and would’ve fit a bunch of Hard Disks or Backup tapes.

For many years when I lived in Britain I had a good friend and for a while work colleague who came from Russia. At least when he studied there (so, 30 years ago) their educational system at least for Science and Mathematics was no worse than those in Europe. In fact it’s one of the few good things the so-called “Communist” countries tend to do - they invest heavilly in Education.

Beyond that, there are two different things:

• One is a country’s capabilities to have sizable industries operating at a certain technological level.
• The other one is finding a handful of specialists for very specific design projects in highly controlled environments where making a profit is no concern.

Whilst it makes sense that Russia has trouble in the first case of actually doing high tech as a business, in size and profitably, because they at least did have a very good educational systems in Science and Mathmatics it also makes sense that they do have people with the know-how there which they could gather for specific high tech design projects were “money is not a problem” since they did train techies as good as the rest of Europe and it was not that long ago so those people are still alive.

Just look at the long, long, LONG list of American and European companies helping Israel murder little children…

It makes sense to use Machine Learning technology (not the Generative crap, the actual pattern recognition stuff) for terminal target recognition.

The surprise would be if Russia did not use AI in their newest cruise missile design - just because their society is fucked up and their leadership is a socipathic, disconnected autocrat surrounded by yes men that put his own personal pride above the lives of millions of his countrymen, doesn’t mean Russia doesn’t have the people with the technical knowledge to design systems with AI (though certainly far fewer of those than they had before they tried to invade Ukraine, since a ton of the Russians with the highest qualifications left).

I mean, given them another 50 years or so in their current trajectory, but for now they’re probably still capable of creating their own high-tech solutions in focused applications.

Don’t take this badly, mate, but you sound like me when I was a “kid” thinking I was truly the shit for all my technical achievements as a self-taught programmer.

Absolutely, really impressive 1 in a really-big-number kind stuff, just the most pure technical track imaginable and not the same as understanding software development the process as whole, at all.

Decades later, 3 countries later, several industries later, various different environments and kinds of projects later and all sizes of company later, I’ve figured out that they pay us the big bucks to make software for OTHER PEOPLE, to serve THEIR needs not ours needs and certainly not for our personal enjoyment, though a good dev will always find some enjoyment in cracking complex problems, IMHO - from were a fuckton of constrains and dependencies on what and how you make it and whom do you have to work with are born - and if you want to achieve something that’s great in more axes of greatness than just pure technical impressiveness you need to actually learn how to effectively work in a team and with other teams even non-technical ones, including, beyond a certain point of experience, how to empower other more junior people in your team rather than just be pissed off at how little they know.

(And I don’t mean going into the Management track, I mean staying the Technical career track and still progressing as a Software Engineer).

And don’t get me started on the engineering-style concerns of software design around software live cycle in production and how to prepare for expected future directions of change.

Mind you I’ve crossed paths over the years once or twice with people who never moved beyond “technical excellence” as their one and only metric for software development (typically “rockstar coders”) and they were invariably miserable people who bitch and moaned about “lusers” and how other developers don’t know how to use the (not really properly designed for robust usage by people that can’t read your fucking mind) libraries they made.

Unless you find yourself a nice niche where you can be a solo rockstar hacker, technical excellence is only a good software development metric up to maybe the 5 years experience mark. Beyond that, unless your career has stagnated you’re supposed to be delivering the results the customers need to the customers and doing so in complex environments in cooperation with various teams, some of whom don’t at all understand most technical language and certain don’t have a fucking clue what “pre-emptive multitasking” means.

You missed the documenting the code

Your words.

As for your job title, don’t take this badly but “Systems Architect” is not at all the same as “Technical Architect”.

If you’re actually designing or at least tuning software development processes and coding standards across multiple teams (so, not just optimizing how teams work but also optimizing cross-team work), you’re a Technical Architect.

A Systems Architect, when the title is properly used, just means that you’re designing software whose operation spreads across multiple platforms (so, for example, multiple tiers in a multi-tier system).

Also there is quite a range in Systems Architect - knowing how to code in two or more platforms (say, STM32 and some Android, to make a bit of home electronics with a microcontroller be controllable from a smartphone) is not at all the same as knowing how to design a high-performance distributed system running in multiple machines, integrated with multiple external system working for ten/hundred of thousands of client front-ends and supporting things like Distribute Transactions so that any failures don’t leave half-complete operations.

You can be a Systems Architect and be isolated form most of the concerns of the software development out there. especially if you’re a team of one developing the software side of products based on some marketing person’s idea of what customers supposedly want.

Unsurprisingly, Technical Architects are non-existent outside large companies and even there they’re pretty rare.

Again, still making my point on Dunning-Krugger.

It says a lot that you think a coding good practice like “documenting things in code” which is at the level of using descriptive variable and function names, should be in the same bucket as structural non-coding processes (which are often entire professionions or very senior professional branches) like Requirements Analysis or Technical Architecture, both highly-complex things (the latter being the very top in seniority of the technical career track) which are non-existent in a formal sense in improvisational (read: amateur as fuck) “programming” companies.

You’re making my point on the whole Dunning-Krugger thing.

That style of software developer used to be called “monkey coders”.

Employing “monkey coders” because they are cheaper is a great way to end up paying a lot more money over the long run because their work is unmaintainable, ureliable, not robust and stupidly hard to be upgraded to implement new requirements.

Which, if you think about it, it’s pretty much what you get with AI code.

And yeah, totally agree that these are the people who are most threatenned directly by AI at the moment. Then again, they were the ones most threatenned by outsourcing already (to India especially, since when they grew massive as an outsourcing place for software development they started hiring tons of people there who had no skill whatsoever for it and would never have gone into software development and were pretty bad, so most coders based in India were eventually this kind of code writter).

Hiring “monkey coders” was always the product of bad management: they looked good on paper - cheap, made lots of code, bums on seats, often the kind of person who worked long hours (which in low efficient management cultures makes a manager look good because of “making their people work hard”) - whilst creating massive costs spread over time and hitting everything from production downtime costs to future system improvement costs. In some ways the mass replacement of developers with AI is born from the same management incompetence as outsourcing, which is probably why it is hitting the US so hard.

Which brings us around to how, indirectly, even good software developers are right now threatened by AI - the kind of incompetent manager who thinks code lines is a productivity metric aren’t replacing just “monkey coders” with AI, they’re cutting down head-count with no selectivity or even replacing first the more professional coders because they’re the most expensive.

This might not be sustainable in the mid and long term because AI, like “code monkeys”, just piles up massive less obvious over-time costs on software systems (I expect a lot of companies will go under from this shit) and some are already getting desperate for the kind of professionals that can fix their self-inflicted AI problem, but people who aren’t prepared for up to two years of being out of well paying software development jobs (so, most people) are getting screwed instead of aligning themselves to really profit from the wave of post-AI “oh, shit or systems are unreliable shit” work for senior types that’s just starting, plus if indeed as I expect companies will fail due to this, the Tech boom will be over and there will be fewer positions than there were 2 or 3 years ago.

“Writting the code was never the hard part”

It’s figuring out in detail what the program is suppose to do (i.e. Requirements), how it can and should do it given the technical constraints of the available deployment environment and performance & reliability requirements (i.e. Technical Analysis) and how it all gets structured from the highest level to the lowest level so that bugs are minimized, performance is suitable with the appropriate margin to absorb expect unexpected problems and costs for maintenance and future requirements implementation are low (i.e. from Technical Architecture and Systems Design down to Software Design) that are hard.

And I say this as somebody who has done all of those professionally, plus the coding (oh, so, so much coding) for systems of all kinds and sizes in various countries and industries, including some mission critical high performance distributed systems (which if they failed would have cost millions of $$$ in lost business income).

Fly by the seat of their pants coders who have never worked in a properly professional environment have no fucking clue just how much more there is to it than “coding” to go from no software at all to “reliable and robust software system that serves existing business needs”.

A lot of “coders” are like I was in the beginning of my career: they think they’re the shit, know nothing but a very limited range of work environments which they think “that’s how things are done” when those environments are actually, amateur hour, every hour of every day, every day of the month, every month of the year - they’re basically at the peak point of the Dunning-Krugger curve for software development knowledge.

It’s not just “usage without discernment”, it’s that AI flattens some costs which are very obvious and very measurable (coding) in such a way that it introduces or amplifies other costs which are much more diffused and hard to measure (code and design reviewing, bug fixing, maintenance, adding new requirements), plus AI is totally incapable of doing the higher level tasks that shape what code needs to be done (technical analysis, requirements analysis and in bigger companies technical architecture).

People who are non-experts, aren’t really senior domain experts or have some kinds of unbalanced expertise (they’ve never really progressed beyond being a coder, or they don’t have full life-cycle experience with big projects or they’re in an industry or position where they just make the code, shove it out the door and it’s not their problem anymore) just look at the one thing they in their ignorance think is THE cost in programming - coding - and go “hey, this AI thing is amazing” even while AI is creating all sorts of much more time consuming problems which they don’t really understand formally (they think those things are just “bad luck”, “there’s nothing we can do about avoiding this” and “it’s just the way things are in programming”) that require the time of people with higher expertise levels (i.e. who are more costly) to solve and AI doesn’t even help with the kind of stuff which if done wrongly or not at all can condemn a software project to fail before it even starts like just half-way decent Technical and Requirements Analysis.

That’s why you get some programmers going “this AI shit is amazing” whilst the really senior software development types are just nodding their heads and thinking “these people are ignorant as fuck juniors”.

People (I suspect most if not all Americans) are unironically cheering for an automated version of what the Stasi did.

Basically the kind of manpower-heavy surveillance like the Stasi did has been done for a long time, but the full automation of it as done in countries like the US and UK has only been possible for about 4 decades for text (and for just keeping track of who people made voice calls to, but noy the contents of them) and maybe 2 decades for voice contents.

You need digitalization so that all communications are digital and computers to properly automate the tracking of people’s communications and voice-to-text software to convert voice information into text so that the automation also works on the contents of voice comms.

Mind you, what’s being done in the US and UK (and Russia, and China - it’s just that the US and UK were supposed to be Democracies) is the same as the Stasi did in East Germany, just automated and with no need to place eavesdropping devices to eavesdrop on conversations not over communications devices, as people nowadays carry their own personal eavesdropping device with a microphone, camera, full networking and fully controlled American software in it - the smarthphone - so it can just be remotelly ordered to record and conversations and images in its range.

I suspect a lot of the influence of Israel and the US on European politicians who again and again act against the European Public Opinon and in favor of Israel and the US, is the ton of blackmail material those two states have gathered on politicians the world over in the modern era of digital communications mainly via American systems, using portable networked pocket computers running OSes from American companies and which have everything needed to be a fully-features surveillance device, including a camera.

Every single vaguelly criminal or even just shameful action of any European politician with a chance of reaching a position of power, done via or around a smartphone or computer running an American OS and/or using American chat software, is almost certainly stored in a database somewhere.

Certainly that would explain A LOT of what’s going on in European Politics, especially when it comes to Israel turning full-on NAZI whilst European governments mainly just make believe nothing is happening or propose purely symbolic performative measures with zero effectiveness in stopping the Genocide.

The current Economic structure is designed so that the thing that makes the most Money is having Money and tilted so that the more the Money the bigger the effect.

This is why, for example, many if not most countries have higher taxes on income from work than on income from dividends.

It’s not by chance that Social Mobility has collapsed to pretty much non-existence in most of the World, especially the US (were the saying “You can be anything” actually used to be true, but not anymore, not even close) - the Economy is so extremelly rigged for Money to make Money that the dumbest, laziest, most inept rich kid will keep on getting richer their whole lives no matter how much they fuck up.

Good, good - keep going, Mark.

Possibly even compounding, considering that there are more than just a Tech Stocks bubble and Realestate bubble at the moment (though those 2 are the largest) and any one blowing will probably cause the rest to blow.

On the “upside”, the Tech Stocks bubble is mainly in the US and countries with semiconductors as a large fraction of their Economy, such as South Korea.

If this one bursting ends the USD status as Reserve Currency, that would be great.

Painful, but in the mid and long term great.

This is going to be a mix of the 2000 Crash and the 2008 Crash.