Wisdom.
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
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 su…
SQL was also meant to give a wider range of people access to data. The “business analyst” comes to mind. And, I think SQL was successful. What it didn’t do was reduce the need for programmers, because the new SQL users always wanted more data to answer more complex questions.
I didn't mean SQL wan's a success. I meant, as the commenter above me said, a higher-level tool doesn't necessarily replace the lower-level ones, or reduce the need of them.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#83People will always want things cheaper and faster (value)
- looking at AI as "chat" or textbox or AI autocomplete is wrong imo
- companies will come that utilise AI to deliver things faster and cheaper
- you quote $10k and 1 month, we will do it in $1k 1 week
- first to go is low value difficult to automate work which is already offshored and commoditised (basic webdev, graphic design)
- later the middle tier of work, that requires internal context (once whitelabel NDA'ble bespoke AI solutions are mainstream)
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There will always be need for top tier leetcoders. but barrier to entry will get much higher.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#84Earlier 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…
I doubt AI will replace any job in my lifetime (got 40-50 years left). Progress will grind to a halt just like self driving cars did because the real world is just too chaotic and 'random' to be captured by a formula/equation/algorithm. My prediction is: AGI is theoretically possible, but would require impractical amounts of computing power - kinda like how intergalactic travel will never happen.
We don’t AGI for LLM to be useful.
And regrading comparison with self driving car they are still improving just the bar for them is much higher. If autopilot works 99.9% if time then 1 out of 1000 drivers will die - so technology has to be even better. for LLM is enough if it’s 90% good to be broadly useful.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#85Earlier 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”.
Well I'm in web dev (though I was studying CS in 2008) and the 2008 landscape had almost none of the same things. jQuery was not yet a household name, let alone SPAs. Facebook had barely 100 million users. Marc Andreessen yet hadn't written about "software eating the world". Personally I was more optimistic. If anything, the last 15 years have seen the growth of an attitude of tech "entitlement" because hackers got to the a lot of the ideas that now seem obvious in hindsight before a lot of the big corps could.
I'm sure there's still room for innovation, but I think a lot of it going forward will be driven by rapid improvement in AI capabilities.
In 2008, tech wasn't everywhere. iphones were brand new and very few people had them.. There was no "mobile browser" market share (though we did have SMS gateways). 77% of the global population hadn't even been on the internet yet.
AI looks like it's going to be at the forefront of the next big wave of fundamental changes to society, and it's really hard to predict where that will lead us. But I suspect it's going to become apparent that this relatively brief period of tech-elite empowerment was a historical anomaly, because the AI underlings are going to be willing to do a lot more work with none of the coddling, and they're going to improve very quickly.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#86Looking 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 su…
My career predates relational/SQL databases so I can confirm what you wrote. When Oracle came out the buzz was that a whole bunch of programmers would go away because managers and executives could write queries in a “natural” English-like language.
That never happened. SQL is hard to master, but it’s the easy part of understanding the relational model and any particular schema. Instead Oracle and the other RDBMSs that followed created more jobs for programmers and database analysts and admins.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#87"programmer" is not single thing.
Software jobs can be divided into expert jobs and laborer jobs.
Even if the demand for "code monkeys" decreases, demand for much smaller group of software engineers with masters or PhD (equivalent) and good mathematical skills probably increases.
It's a dynamic process where two forces find a equilibrium.
>Automation, which enables capital to replace labor in tasks it was previously engaged in, shifts the task content of production against labor because of a displacement effect. As a result, automation always reduces the labor share in value added and may reduce labor demand even as it raises productivity.
>The effects of automation are counterbalanced by the creation of new tasks in which labor has a comparative advantage. The introduction of new tasks changes the task content of production in favor of labor because of a reinstatement effect, and always raises the labor share and labor demand.
Automation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and Reinstates Labor https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.33.2.3
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right now it is a kindergarten child at cognitive level, and like humans it will grow up and evolve, unless we nuke ourselves before it happens.
right now it will only solve problem someone else already knows the solution to, so not even at that. that said, I expect an ai assisted clerk to be order magnitude faster than not. it will be though for people at the bottom of the learning curve for a bit, but in half generation the educational offering will include how to work toghether with ai, massively improving worker productivity that is not to say it won't ha…
Having helped companies in traditional line of business to "streamline" their work processes, I am quite clear that many of the stuff that the West outsources into Asian countries will eventually be outsourced to AI.
It is already so that in many industries there are hardly any traditional coder jobs on site, and having to explain every step to avoid it going off rails in offshoring assignments is hardly going to be any different to explain it to an AI, when it gets good enough.
Maybe by GPT-20 only, but it will come, and then the roles of architects and business analists are the only ones left.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#89I 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…
It's like telling a musician to become a DJ because the point of performing is to entertain people. It's not wrong, but it's also not applicable to all people who enjoy performing an instrument.
Yeah, but the original question was specifically about coding jobs, not hobbies, hence i think a reasonable business angle on the answer.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
SQL was also meant to give a wider range of people access to data. The “business analyst” comes to mind. And, I think SQL was successful. What it didn’t do was reduce the need for programmers, because the new SQL users always wanted more data to answer more complex questions.
I didn't mean SQL wan's a success. I meant, as the commenter above me said, a higher-level tool doesn't necessarily replace the lower-level ones, or reduce the need of them.
Relational databases replaced a whole raft of vendor-supplied databases and custom-built solutions. It was a new tool for software developers, not a replacement.