rook

Much of the content of mythical man month is still depressingly relevant, especially in conjunction with brooks’ later stuff like no silver bullets. A lot of senior tech management either never read it, or read it so long ago that they forgot the relevant points beyond the title.

It’s interesting that clausewitz doesn’t appear in lw discussions. That seems like a big point in favour of his writing.

A second post on software project management in a week, this one from deadsimpletech: failed software projects are strategic failures.

A window into another it disaster I wasn’t aware of, but clearly there is no shortage of those. An australian one this time.

And of course, without having at least some of that expertise in-house, they found themselves completely unable to identify that Accenture was either incompetent, actively gouging them or both.

(spoiler alert, it was both)

Interesting mention of clausewitz in the context of management, which gives me pause a bit because techbros famously love the “art of war”, probably because sun tzu was patiently explaining obvious things to idiots and that works well on them. “On war” might be a better text, I guess.

https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/failed_software_projects

I chose to believe the evidence in front of my eyes over the talking points about how SpaceX was decades ahead of everyone else, SpaceX is a leader in cheap reusable spacecraft, iterative development is great, etc.

I suspect that part of the problem is that there is company in there that’s doing a pretty amazing job of reusable rocketry at lower prices than everyone else under the guidance of a skilled leader who is also technically competent, except that leader is gwynne shotwell who is ultimately beholden to an idiot manchild who wants his flying cybertruck just the way he imagines it, and cannot be gainsayed.

Bleugh, I’ve been using crucial ram and flash for a hell of a long time, and they’ve always been high quality and reasonably priced. I dislike having to find new manufacturers who don’t suck, especially as the answer seems to be increasingly “lol, there are no such companies”.

Thanks to the ongoing situation in the us, it doesn’t look like the ai bubble is going to pop soon, but I can definitely see it causing more damage like this before the event.

For a lot of this stuff at the larger end of the scale, the problem mostly seems to be a complete lack of accountability and consequences, combined with there being, like, four contractors capable of doing the work, with three giant accountancy firms able to audit the books.

Giant government projects always seem to be a disaster, be they construction, heathcare, IT, and no heads ever roll. Fujitsu was still getting contracts from the UK government even after it was clear they’d been covering up the absolute clusterfuck that was their post office system that resulted in people being driven to poverty and suicide.

At the smaller scale, well. “No warranty or fitness for any particular purpose” is the whole of the software industry outside of safety critical firmware sort of things. We have to expend an enormous amount of effort to get our products at work CE certified so we’re allowed to sell them, but the software that runs them? we can shovel that shit out of the door and no-one cares.

I’m not sure will ever escape “move fast and break things” this side of a civilisation-toppling catastrophe. Which we might get.

Reposted from sunday, for those of you who might find it interesting but didn’t see it: here’s an article about the ghastly state of it project management around the world, with a brief reference to ai which grabbed my attention, and made me read the rest, even though it isn’t about ai at all.

Few IT projects are displays of rational decision-making from which AI can or should learn.

Which, haha, is a great quote but highlights an interesting issue that I hadn’t really thought about before: if your training data doesn’t have any examples of what “good” actually is, then even if your llm could tell the difference between good and bad, which it can’t, you’re still going to get mediocrity out (at best). Whole new vistas of inflexible managerial fashion are opening up ahead of us.

The article continues to talk about how we can’t do IT, and wraps up with

It may be a forlorn request, but surely it is time the IT community stops repeatedly making the same ridiculous mistakes it has made since at least 1968, when the term “software crisis” was coined

It is probably healthy to be reminded that the software industry was in a sorry state before the llms joined in.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/it-management-software-failures

It is important to note that the reviews were detected as being ai generated by an ai tool.

This is a marketing puff piece.

I mean, I expect that loads of the submissions are by slop extruders… under the circumstances, how could they not be? But until someone does the legwork of checking this, it’s just another magic-eight-ball-says-maybe, dressed up as science.

Stuff like this is particularly frustrating because this is one of they places where I have to grudgingly admit that llm coding assistants could actually deliver… it turns out that having to state a problem unambiguously and having a way in which answers can be automatically checked for correctness means that you don’t have to worry about bullshit engines bullshitting you so much.

No llm is going to give good answers to “solve the riemann hypothesis in the style of euler, cantor, tao, 4k 8k big boobies do not hallucinate” and for everything else the problem then becomes “can you formally specify the parameters of your problem such that correct solutions are unambiguous” and now you need your professional mathematicians and computer scientists and cryptographers still…

And whilst we’re in that liminal space where no-one reads the old stubstack but the new one hasn’t yet surfaced, here’s an article about the ghastly state of it project management around the world, with a brief reference to ai which grabbed my attention, and made me read the rest, even though it isn’t about ai at all.

Few IT projects are displays of rational decision-making from which AI can or should learn.

it doesn’t get any cheerier, and wraps up with

It may be a forlorn request, but surely it is time the IT community stops repeatedly making the same ridiculous mistakes it has made since at least 1968, when the term “software crisis” was coined

Oof.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/it-management-software-failures

Noted for the amusing headline: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03506-6

Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI Controversy has erupted after 21% of manuscript reviews for an international AI conference were found to be generated by artificial intelligence.

Do note that it appears to be an advert for ai peer review detection services, but I was still tickled by the whole “why are there leopards at our face-eating conference” surprise being expressed.

Given the state of renewables and energy storage, this feels a lot like the final opportunity for nuclear power in its current state to actually do anything at all, and the “move fast and break things” crowd have no idea about building physical things more complex than a datacentre which honestly, isn’t that challenging in comparison.

openai will be a smoking crater well before site for the first plant will get selected

Other things that might not last that long include the government of the country in which you’re trying to build massive piece of infrastructure that represents a significant ongoing maintenance burden and risk.

Lord grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man, etc.