While true, that is a weak analogy. Software rots and needs constant attention of competent people or shit stacks.
Comment on Tech's Dumbest Mistake: Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 weeks agoI don’t know. I look at it like firing all your construction contractors after built out all your stores in a city. You might need some construction trades to maintain your stores and your might need to relocate a store every once in a while, but you don’t need the same construction staff on had as you did with the initial build out.
BangBoomBamboozle@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
I’m not saying you can fire everyone, but the maintenance team doesn’t need to be the size of the development team if the goal is to only maintain features.
heavydust@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
It works for a while. Keep a few seniors and everything will be fine. Then you want new features and that’s when shit hits the fan. Want me to add a few buttons? 1 month because I have to study all the random shit that was generated last week.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
Twitter and Tumblr are operating on skeleton crews but are able to make changes.
Craigslist is still around even though it hasn’t changed much since the '90’s.
There is an entire industry of companies that buy old MMO’S and maintain them at a low cost for a few remaining players.
Southwest Airlines still runs ticketing on a Windows 95 server.
I think you’ll see more companies accept managed decline as a business strategy.
thequickben@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Software engineer here. You’re completely wrong. The amount of work it takes to maintain and extend functionality to existing software is even bigger than the original cost of building it. Get some time understanding how software teams work and you’ll understand. There’s a reason C Suites are hoping AI generated code can replace developers. They can’t hire enough of them.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
Is there really a need to extend functionality like there was 10 years ago?
thequickben@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Yes. That’s at least half of the work I do on a daily basis. How else do companies in the same market compete with each other if they cannot add on to functionality and remain static? That’s a quick way to lose market share to your competition.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
We’re at a point of effective monopoly and vastly increased costs of creating competition.
The spigot of free money has been turned off, so most projects today need to have a planned out ROI, which is why enshitification has become such a big thing recently. Improvement for competition sake is out the door unless the incumbent is weak or a jump is needed as the existing revenue stream is collapsing.
cestvrai@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
In my experience, you actually need more people to maintain and extend existing software compared to the initial build out.
Usually because of scalability concerns, increasing complexity of the system and technical debt coming due.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
Most extension today is enshitification. We’ve also seen major platforms scale to the size of Earth.
If you’re only going to maintain and don’t have a plan on adding features outside of duct taping AI to the software, what use is it maintaining a dev team at the size you needed it to be when creating new code?