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Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

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Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#61

Post by pzo »

pharmakom wrote: post #17
pcthrowaway wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This person is asking about career prospects 10-15 years out though. I'm sorry, but the landscape in then might be as alien to someone asking today, as todays would have been to someone asking 15 years ago (2008). What John said is correct, but personally I think he's underplaying how much people could be affected. Those "product skills" take years of grinding to really sharpen, and in 15 years only a few people migh…

2008 wasn’t so different was it? I guess the big new thing in work since then is the “gig economy”.

The whole mobile economy pretty much started in 2008. First iPhone was released in 2007 but App Store was lunched in 2008. This changed landscape dramatically even if you consider software development. Before 2008 you were fine with writing just windows only desktop app in Delphi - no smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, smart tvs and could leave out supporting macOS or Linux

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#62

Post by raincole »

carlmr wrote: post #29

Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…

> His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers.

It might sound really crazy and stupid today, but when SQL came out, it's advertised as one of "program-generating" languages and was supposed to reduce the need to code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_...

(I mean, in some sense it's true because it's much less code than writing our own database...)

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#63

Post by edgineer »

carlmr wrote: post #29

Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…

Doesn't this assume that the no-code tools won't be smart enough to understand the most probably correct course of action, and to look up information automatically and to ask questions to resolve ambiguities, like what a programmer does?

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#64

Post by gumballindie »

vlovich123 wrote: post #30
_ink_ wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you recommend for someone with a CS degree?

Don’t listen to the guy above. Terrible advice likely colored by an unhappy career just like don’t listen to me because it works be followed by barring generally happy with mine. > and you have to waste your life away sitting in an office chasing tickets. Nothing engineery about it. It’s modern day assembly line work. Every job I’ve literally done I’ve set my own direction. Sure, there’s some negotiation because ulti…

That’s quite an assumption about my career. You may be shocked by my statement and in denial but that doesnt change my prediction.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#65

Post by jstx1 »

onion2k wrote: post #49
pharmakom wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2008 wasn’t so different was it? I guess the big new thing in work since then is the “gig economy”.

We've had LLMs for about 5 years so far in non-academic research. If we're talking 10 years out that means we're looking at tech that's about 1/3 through its development to date. Take any mature-ish technology that you use today and compare the version 1/3 through its life to the version you use now. Look at Chrome 20 compare to Chrome 111, or React 14 compared to React 18, or an iPhone 4 compared to an iPhone 14, or…

You can't extrapolate from an arbitrary selection of technologies and assume that LLMs will have the same trajectory. They could be like the iPhone, or they could be like self-driving cars which have been a year away from replacing all drivers for 10 years now.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#66

Post by dijit »

ulfw wrote: post #59
dijit wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Useless jobs shouldn't exist, people should be able to live without wasting resources and their life in doing false work.

How old are you? This is a very idealistic point of view. I might call it a "I watch a lot of Star Trek" utopian kind of view. Vast majority of people in the real world do a "useless job". What do you think they should be doing and how do they get those alternative opportunities to feed themselves and their families?

33.

Not to be glib, but I think you're too locked into an ideology.

Idealistically we shouldn't be working in jobs that do not add value to society, that could well include my job.

You work 8 hours to live 4.

You work 5 days to enjoy 2.

You work 8 hrs to eat lunch in 30 mins.

You work all year to take a week or two holiday.

You work all your life to retire in old age.

You might claim that people need to work to live, but honestly, if you're not adding value to society then expending resources and wasting your life is.. just wasteful? It's not just stupid it's literally harmful.

We're not post-scarcity, and I'm certainly not saying that there's no value in people's jobs -- I'm not even saying where to draw the line, but I think there is a line to be drawn. Driving a 4x4 to work as a greeter in a large shopping mall is just a confoundingly stupid notion and saying that a person should not be able to live without doing something as stupid as that is... well, quite divorced from the reality of the universe outside.

Not to say that there isn't a sociological requirement for people to feel useful, but that feeling could easily be found in more humane sections of life like being a good parent or good neighbour.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#67

Post by MarkusWandel »

The computers are coming for jobs ever up the white collar scale. When I started working there were (barely) still secretaries who typed and filed things for their bosses, and quite a few geeks had jobs that involved assembly language programming.

AI will take jobs. Super frustratingly, it'll probably make call centers even more useless (has anyone ever gotten anything useful out of one of those ("Hi, I'm ____. Can I help you?" popups at the bottom right of web sites?) And it'll certainly automate some of the "copy/paste" type programming jobs at the lower end of the scale, the same way email automated a lot of secretarial jobs; i.e. 10 fulltime copy/paste programming type jobs may become a job for one human and an AI assistant.

Which leaves people who are really passionate about and good at their craft. Somewhat relatedly, I saw about an uptick of people going into the trades. AI won't take plumber or electrician jobs away in the foreseeable future.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#68

Post by dijit »

bloqs wrote: post #43
dijit wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Useless jobs shouldn't exist, people should be able to live without wasting resources and their life in doing false work.

The pemise that they are being paid to do the job (and there isnt one of them) implies that its not false work.

Sure, so we should have avoided inventing alarm clocks because that was a persons job before?

Telegraphers?

Lamplighters?

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#69

Post by ScoobleDoodle »

bcherny wrote: post #57
choppsv1 wrote: post #33

I love to code, as much as I loved math in college, but coding paid better and I'm pretty good at it. Those were my choices though b/c I want to do something I love. Sure, I keep my eye on the "Delivered Value" by making sure I engineer solutions to real problems, but I've never wanted to move out of coding and into managing engineers to build stuff. I want to code. It seems to me that the advice given here would be…

The advice isn’t about coding vs managing. What John is saying is to deeply understand why you’re building something, so that you can build it better. If you over focus on the what — the implementation, the language, the approach — you won’t be as good, and your work may be increasingly replaced by AI.

I agree but I think I’d call it the “how” rather than the “what”. You might mean “what tool”, but I also think of “what feature”.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#70

Post by ChatGTP »

noodles_nomore wrote: post #54

An average programmer's main job is to track down and fix bugs that shouldn't exist inside software that shouldn't exist build on frameworks that shouldn't exist for companies that shouldn't exist solving problems that shouldn't exist in industry niches that shouldn't exist. I'm 100% convinced that, if someone comes along and creates something that actually obsoletes 95% of programming jobs, everyone would very quick…

It’s pretty true, someone today on here wrote, “teach it to understand swagger”, I actually laughed, like I’ve used swagger and it often turns into a Frankenstein, and sometimes for good reason. I completely understand the sentiment and I like swagger.

I believe the world is wiggly, not geometrically perfect, intellectuals struggle with that because square problems are easier to solve. Ideal scenarios are predictable and it’s what we like to think about.

Have you ever had to use a sleep() intentionally just to get something shipped ? That’s a wiggle.

We’re going to try square out the world so we can use ChatGPT to solve wiggly problems. It’s going to be interesting.

Yesterday I tried to use a SaaS product and due to some obscurity my account has issues and the API wouldn’t work, they have a well specified API but it still didn’t work out, I’ve been working with the support team to resolve it, but this is what I call a wiggle, they seem to exist everywhere.

Ask a construction worker about them.

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