Reminds me of patio11's classic "don't call yourself a programmer": https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
141–150 of 829 posts
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#142My fear is that people that are not competent enough to judge ai generated content will use it, intentionally or unintentionally as a sort of denial of service attack on expertise. Middle management churning out some half baked code solution in 5 mins of copy pasting from the spec which will take you hours of investigating for finding the pitfalls and 5 meetings to get the manager to conceed how she did not provide 95% of 'the solution' while dodging a barrage of slight adaptations 'that should solve your remarks' and being deriled for 'negativity'.
I love GPT4, but I hate what it will do in business environments
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#143I 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.
Musician is not only performing an instrument. The analogy is more like telling instruments players that only care about virtuosity the larger point is making music for people to enjoy, from being “a guitarist” to making music. The musical piece is the product in the professional context, and AI in that context is maybe recording, DAWs and realistic synths and sounds banks.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#144Looking 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…
I too believed that a software engineer's job is to identify and enforce rigorous specification of the abstract high level requirement. And I too was not taking AI advancements seriously but then I took a closer took at what AI tools do today.
Here's my concern:
1. AI assistance thrive on structured data
2. Computer programs are some of the most structured data. And it's available abundantly out in the open.
3. Yes, you can't generate an Uber for bycycles with a single prompt, but you can fire half your development team and increase the productivity of the rest of your dev team with an OpenAI subscription.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#145I'm not at all concerned with AI. On the short to mid term it's making my life easier by relieving me of the boring parts of my job. It's pretty good at writing unit tests for example. But I don't see the current generation of AI making complete software architectures. However, even when it does get there or in the long term a new generation comes along that can do it, then I'm still not concerned. I have enough soft…
Great take
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#146The 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…
I think we've already seen the dividing line drawn between people who can ultimately be replaced by a computer (or at least, those whom top-tier management believe can be replaced by a computer) and people who won't: Work from Home.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#147Moore's Law is dead and AI is its zombie. Best to just ignore it and spend your time making things.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#148>Software is just a tool to help accomplish something for people - many programmers never understood that. Keep your eyes on the delivered value, and don't over focus on the specifics of the tools. - John Carmack
The same as it was in the 80s or 90s, some 30 years later Tech industry hasn't changed. It may have technologically advanced, but in many cases I think the UX, tools and product decisions has actually regressed.
The divide between a product genius and actual programmers has never been greater. At least Steve Jobs used to understand this better than anyone else.
>And, one of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards for the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it. And I made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. - Steve Jobs.
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#149Looking 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…
I have gotten a lot of inspiration, several times during my career, from this classic article by Jack W. Reeves (and its two follow-ups). Let cooler heads prevail. https://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design_...
Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
#150The 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…
I see the plumber/electrician thing a lot. But talking to my friends who do these jobs it always seems like it would be even more vulnerable to AI than programming. Experienced electricians get paid decent wages because they have had lots of training and then have seen loads of different problems. So they intuitively know things like 'This is a 1960s house so if there's a problem with the lighting the first thing I s…
The most recent electrician jobs we've had done were:
- fitting a timer into the switchboard to control the hot water cylinder. A simple job, but the sparky also had to talk to me (the client) to get us both on the same page.
- fitting an EV fast charger in the garage. Not much science, but a lot of cable running and clipping down, then the garage switchboard needed to be swapped out for a larger one that could take the required RCD. And convincing me which brand charger to go for. 2 guys working together for a couople of hours.
- fixing the range hood light (always on due to a broken switch). He spent quite some time trying to extract the broken switch, with the range hood balanced on his shoulder and wires everywhere.
In every case there was no real complexity to the job, not the sort of thing that an AI could have been helpful at at all. Just a lot of common sense, knowledge of the regulations and much skilled manual work.
I don't think AI is coming for electricians any time soon.