The article says nothing about “skilled people who work with their hands” specifically, so it’s unclear what is being refuted here.
However there are people in the workforce who don’t identify with their work. Those are likely not in professions that Marx thought of when he wrote about alienation, but instead are Uber Eats delivery drivers, call centre workers, flight attendants on low-cost airlines, nurses in mediocre hospitals, and so on.
“Scaling” as in “making sure the infrastructure can handle much higher load”, or as in “making sure the product remains genuinely useful to people, so that the user numbers go up and not down”? For both, it didn’t happen by itself, but it’s far from rocket science. A sane team of 15-20 people can do it.
Several related reasons working at once. The nature of work changed. The boundary between accidental and incidental complexity shifted (and it’s unclear whether this distinction still exists). Niche specializations within the field emerged. The way to structure and decompose projects changed dramatically (agile and stuff).
One pathological example: if you’re running a server-based product, quite often what stands between you and a new feature launch is literally couple of thousands of lines of Kubernetes YAML. Would adding someone who’s proficient in Kubernetes slow you down? Of course not.
One may say, hey, this is just the server-side Kubernetes-based development being insane, and I’ll say, the whole modern business of software development is like this.
That’s a lovely comment, thank you. If you’re keen to think about it more, consider the fact that the existing members of the project that’s being late are actually in not as much of an advantage compared to the new joiners, as it’s common to think.
Yes, they know how the feature they work on relates to other features, but actually implementing that feature is very often mostly involves fighting with technology, wrangling the entire stack into the shape you need.
In Brooks’s times the stack was paper-thin, almost nonexistent. In modern times it’s not, and adding someone who knows the technology, but doesn’t have the domain knowledge related to your feature still helps you. It doesn’t slow you down.
One may argue that I’m again pointing to the difference between accidental and incidental complexity, and my argument is essentially “accidental complexity takes over”, but accidental complexity actually does influence your feature too, by defining what’s possible and what’s not.
I sort of agree that the surface area and incidental complexity of stacks give more space to plug more developers in than was true in the 70s and 80s. But I disagree strongly this invalidates Brooks Law. Certainly there are cases where adding people helps, especially if they are stronger engineers than the ones that are already there, but I’ve also seen way too many projects devolve into resourcing conversations when the real problem was over-complicated, poorly reasoned requirements, boil-the-ocean solutions promising a perfect end state without a clear plan to get there iteratively.
gov.uk has a tendancy to treat everyone like a 5 year old
Which is not a bug, but a feature of the gov.uk website, and it's the best and the most important one. 89 year old you would absolutely appreciate it when you'd need to renew your passport via gov.uk.
Funny you say that, I actually just did a company tax return and confirmation statement a couple of days in the midst of bad COVID (2 hours sleep per night) and I was still annoyed about the multi-step process:
1) gov.uk, search for 'file confirmation statement'
2) Despite there being a sole autocomplete result and clicking on it, taken to the search results page
3) Click the first result. Turns out it's the guidance page
4) Go back, click the second result. We're getting warmer
5) Click "Start Now"
6) Get redirected to the 'Sign in to WebFiling' landing page. You can't actually sign on on this page.
7) Click 'Continue'
8) Another landing/explainer page! ("We're taking you to GOV.UK One Login to sign in to this service")
9) Click 'Go to GOV.UK One Login'
10) You think we're done yet? Think again. Another landing page!
11) Click "Sign in"
12) Think they'd let you just enter an email and password on one page? Nope! Enter email
13) Click Continue
14) Enter password
Finally...
No idea how anyone who doesn't work for GDS can justify this. It's mad
It's a bug when you're neither 5 nor 89 or have used it 10 times before...
Look, I know it's a hard problem, and GDS have a lot of talented, smart people. I appreciate making something work for both an 18 year old and an 89 year old is a hard requiement.
IMHO there is nothing wrong with having those help docs easily available so you can read at your leisure, rather than being 'forced' to wade through it each time
Perhaps we can agree to disagree that it's not a 'bug' based on the Government's general approach to how it treats its citizens and what it deems as a requirement (as compared to eg the Netherlands/Germany which is a bit more 'it's not our fault you're stupid', 'go read the docs!')
It’s important to be empathetic here to how difficult these things can be for less tech literate people.
Adding more guidance and nudges doesn’t prevent capable users from succeeding, it just annoys them. But it means the lowest common denominators have a higher chance to succeed, which is much more valuable than level of annoyance.
No, the GDS should definitely replace all services on gov.uk to be only accessible via MCP. "Claude, I've logged into PayPal via oAuth, now renew my passport" /s
I like how the author correctly shown the cover image for the "The Sciences of the Artificial", with plural 's' in 'sciences', but then in the paragraph praising it gleefully ignored it.
Thanks, I will fix this one. And yes, I am an old guy who doesn’t use AI in writing my articles. I tried once, and I felt like I was a slave to the machine ;) So, I am proud of my human mistakes in the age of AI perfection.
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