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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

#181

Post by actionfromafar »

raincole wrote: post #62
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 su…

It was very true, and one of the most success DSLs ever invented. And many people coded SQL who never would have touched other languages with a ten foot pole.

It’s just that, with more powerful tools we can create more advanced and intricate things, so it never ends…

I not exactly welcome but rather anticipate, a near future were instead of reinventing every kind of pattern and library in terms of cloud and infrastructure management, we will see the same meta-management of different AI engines and services…

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

#182

Post by pcthrowaway »

revelio wrote: post #126
pcthrowaway wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Huh? Gmail was a spa and that dates from 2004. I don't think a VC writing a blog post says much about how tech had changed. Smartphones existed before the iPhone and Android, they just weren't as popular.

The term "SPA" wasn't in use until at least after 2009 and gmail was probably using some hacky AJAX (XMLHTTPRequest wasn't even standardized until, what, 2006?). Chrome wasn't launched until 2008 so they weren't able to get away with just adding the APIs they needed into the browser. Backbone wasn't even released until 2010 and Angular probably wasn't conceived of internally until late 2008.

Yes, gmail might have had some SPA-like behaviour in 2004-2006 but it was nothing like what we have today. Pretty sure I got access in 2005 because I knew someone who worked at google, and it was mostly doing full refreshes between actions at the time, like pretty much the entire rest of the web

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

#183

Post by pbalau »

acatnamedjoe wrote: post #99
MarkusWandel wrote: post #67

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…

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…

You know what a tradesman does today and an AI cannot? Get under the sink, undo that rusted bolt, route that cable in that awkward position and so on.

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

#184

Post by RichEO »

lurker919 wrote: post #175

Are we sure GPT is going to improve 10x in 10 years? Hasn't it already been trained on the vast majority of available text data? We might get incremental improvements, but it's not like we have 10x more data lying around somewhere to feed GPT5.

I don’t have a very good sense of what kind of information that GPT-4 had access to, but I imagine there is a whole world of knowledge locked up in books, particularly textbooks, journals and periodicals that it doesn’t have access to. That could be interesting.

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

#185

Post by drclau »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #67

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…

> AI won't take plumber or electrician jobs away in the foreseeable future.

I see this argument way too often. How many electricians and plumbers does the world really need? And if the market becomes over saturated, how much will those jobs pay? How often will you actually have a job to do?

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

#186

Post by newaccount2023 »

lurker919 wrote: post #175

Are we sure GPT is going to improve 10x in 10 years? Hasn't it already been trained on the vast majority of available text data? We might get incremental improvements, but it's not like we have 10x more data lying around somewhere to feed GPT5.

10x? Try 1000x. We haven't even tried hooking up different types of reasoning models (chess engine, weather modeler) together yet...eventually LLM will be just one aspect selected based on intended use

GPT4 is basically Pong. Within a few years we will be nostalgic for its surprise value

HN has a God Complex when it comes to people like Carmack though, so you can't really survive disagreeing with him

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

#187

Post by TheLoafOfBread »

bitcharmer wrote: post #103
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…

> we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years I always found that overwhelming majority of professional academic educators are particularly bad in anything that has to do with the practical side of their domain. That is especially true for software engineering. University lecturers are very detached from our field and it shows in how badly fresh grads are prepared to do any dev work…

This is not just development, this is problem of universities in general. A professor with 5 titles before and after his name is able to put an UHF oscillator on a breadboard and be surprised that it does not work, even that in theory it should.

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

#188

Post by drclau »

pbalau wrote: post #183
acatnamedjoe wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You know what a tradesman does today and an AI cannot? Get under the sink, undo that rusted bolt, route that cable in that awkward position and so on.

Too many people make the mistake of thinking there’s an infinite number of sinks to get under.

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

#189

Post by almog »

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…

More from the category of "history never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme": https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/1631866199515738113

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

#190

Post by k__ »

In 2002, a fellow student in high school told me, I shouldn't study CS to become a developer. I should become a sysadmin instead.

His reason was, every software was already invented and now it only needs to be managed.

Movies or music? Edonkey, BitTorrent, Kazaa, and Napster got your back.

Chat or phone calls? MSN messenger, ICQ, IRC.

Games? People were onlyplaying Counter Strike and StarCraft anyway.

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