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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

#191

Post by surgical_fire »

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…

ChatGPT will definitely make a dev job obsolete if their job is simply copying and pasting code they found online.

By all means, that is part of everyone's job. Sometimes I really can't remember how to do some specific thing. I know precisely what I want, but I don't remember the proper way to do it. I would have resorted to a web search until last year, now I ask chatGPT. It is faster, more concise, and surprisingly accurate. And when it's inaccurate it's easy to either refine my question or cross reference what it generated with online sources.

But I think it's a bit silly how people are treating it as if it was some kind of General AI. It is not, it can only give out known answers to known problems based on language statistics. As impressive as it is, it can't reason logically about problems without known solutions, it can't identify faulty, incomplete or inaccurate information, it can't evaluate on drawbacks and tradeoffs of different approaches.

ChatGPT made like 20% of my work a lot faster and less cumbersome. I like it enough that I pay for premium access. But even the notion that prompt engineers might replace software engineers is silly. I imagine people repeating this nonsense are either not engineers, or extremely junior in the profession to the point where their work is only writing code for clear specifications, no questions asked.

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

#192

Post by ResearchCode »

vasco wrote: post #136
dragonelite wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree, maybe we should replace lower and middle management with AI. What i usually find is that lower and middle management is the reason shit isn't getting done. They are the messenger that don't want to get shot but want to get promoted. Why not let the people on the floor complain to a AI manager, the people on the floor know exactly what is killing their productivity. Like "yo ai manager, manually filling…

Managing people is going to be one of the last jobs to go away. The managers might go from managing 150k/year developers to managing 50k/year prompt "engineers", but someone is still going to be there to hire, fire and ask people to do things until AI enables truly full-stack companies-of-one as a majority case.

They're language models. They don't seem less capable of replacing a manager than a software engineer. Language models can make a powerpoint and fill in an Excel spreadsheet. They can sit in on a meeting that could have been an e-mail. Hiring is a game of craps, but a language model could try to evaluate resumes for you.

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

#193

Post by lastangryman »

lmarcos wrote: post #80
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…

> I'd be surprised if the next step is "Hi, I'm an ideas guy, please give me an app that does Uber, for bicycles, but better." And even if AI is able to do that... Well, then anyone out there could become a UberCycle CEO. Which means: customer requirements will be much more complex by then and coming up with an entire product in 1h won't be enough anymore.

Or perhaps if literally anyone can make a great product, then the true successes will be either those are genuinely innovative, disruptive and have first mover advantage, or those that are one of many but gain better adoption through better marketing. Or perhaps some ideas (anything involving hardware) need capital anyway.

Which isn't actually different from today. We've just shortened the time to get your MVP to market. Rather than having to raise some seed and hire devs, you can do it with an AI in a few days perhaps. Everything after that seems it would be the same.

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

#194

Post by nickjj »

Makes sense. Someone asked me a similar question and I had the same sentiment.

I used a different analogy of if a robot were able to do specific mechanic skills to fix a car that wouldn't necessarily put mechanics out of a job. Someone still needs to figure out and understand what the problem is before solving it. A robot that's really good at automating fixing brakes becomes a tool for the mechanic. The mechanic is still there to determine your brakes are the problem.

I look forward to AI because it's an amplifier of what you can do. If it can help reduce 10 hours of implementation details down to 3 hours, that's valuable.

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

#195

Post by hnfong »

surgical_fire wrote: post #191
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…

ChatGPT will definitely make a dev job obsolete if their job is simply copying and pasting code they found online. By all means, that is part of everyone's job. Sometimes I really can't remember how to do some specific thing. I know precisely what I want, but I don't remember the proper way to do it. I would have resorted to a web search until last year, now I ask chatGPT. It is faster, more concise, and surprisingly…

> It is not, it can only give out known answers to known problems based on language statistics.

Are you sure you actually tried, or is this an a priori argument?

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

#197

Post by jdowner »

eps wrote: post #178
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…

Love to code is rooted in the love to create. This is not going away with the AI in the picture. It will be just different.

I agree but I think there is concern about the perceived value that those creative skills will have.

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

#198

Post by zoward »

When I was 19, I met Marvin Minsky at a local convention. I was a CS major, and he assured me I'd be out of a job in 10 years. I'm in my late 50's now, having spent the last 35 years programming, and am now leisurely planning my retirement. I like John's turn of phrase, "AI-guided programming". But that's already a thing.

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

#199

Post by TheLoafOfBread »

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…

I am actually finding amusing that managers will generate 100k lines project with AI and then will start figuring out that it does not work as they want to. Then they figured out actual developers are needed to fix it, either in a very strict way telling AI what should happen (i.e. higher level programming) or directly fixing code generated by AI.
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