Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 829 posts

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

#201

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

cwillu wrote: post #46
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…

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.

I think it's more like telling a DJ in the 80s, "Don't worry that mixing vinyls won't be a thing forever. It's not about the tools but about the product, as a DJ your job is to mix good music and you can do that with vinyls, cassettes or with MP3s."

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

#202

Post by Keyframe »

What's ahead is what happened in animation when computer assisted animation entered the scene. What about all the in-betweening jobs, inking, coloring..? Yeah, gone. However, most people can concentrate on posing and directing the action now and have computer handle everything in-between.

So, hopefully, get on posing key features and concepts in your software and let the computer handle everything in-between. Until it becomes its own market, then we gone.

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

#203

Post by lexx »

Software development demands a very deep understanding of a company's business model and effective communication between a lot of people to get the final result right. Not only in terms of coding, but also in terms of strategy and architecture. AI can definitely help for quick prototyping, solution comparison, boring maintenance and stuff like that.

But how can AI help build something that not a single person has the answer to what that is?

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

#204

Post by tambourine_man »

jstx1 wrote: post #165
tambourine_man wrote: post #123

I never would have expected these kinds of words from Carmack. Product skills, delivered value, help accomplish something for people. All sound like consulting/coaching. Carmack to me was a true hacker’s hacker. I guess it either gets to most of us eventually or programming as I knew it is truly over.

> I never would have expected these kinds of words from Carmack. He already talked about this in his interview with Lex Fridman - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzPuGf89vpI

I heard that interview in its entirety. He didn’t sound evasive like he did here.

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

#205

Post by gregjor »

411111111111111 wrote: post #160
gregjor wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Mine doesn't predate it but it's very confusing for me to read this opinion. From my point of view, it totally did happen? Can you imagine how many programmers the company would've needed to get all the data a business analyst casually queries per day? What you're looking at is the quantity of people actually employed in the industry, not how many SQL made obsolete. The industry just grew so much that it didn't becom…

A few things happened. Relational databases enabled more new development, larger databases, interoperability, all of which needed programmers.

With more flexibility in the database companies could collect, store, and use more data. And that data had to get into the DBMS somehow: more code.

Setting up and managing databases required DBAs, a role often filled by programmers in smaller companies, and still filled by programmers today. And only larger companies had business analysts. In smaller companies programmers or maybe technically-proficient managers did that work.

Anyone who had devoted their career solely to building bespoke database systems had to pivot or walk in the late ‘80s, but very few programmers only did that — it was part of the larger application development. If you were good enough to write robust database code pre-Oracle you had plenty of options.

In the ‘80s when RDBMSs started to take over I worked in enterprise logistics. Oracle created jobs at the places I worked, and no programmers had to leave because we got a better tool.

I’ve worked in large and small organizations for 40+ years. I’ve never worked with a manager or analyst who could write SQL more complex than “SELECT * FROM orders WHERE total > 10000.” I’m sure they exist, but not in career-threatening numbers.

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

#206

Post by BiteCode_dev »

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…

The thing is:

- gpt doesn't need you to be exact

- one day gpt will be able to ASK YOU question to refine what you need

It may take years, but at some point, it will be able to do 80% of my job.

Not a big deal though, cause people will still hire me to do the remaining 20%, and pay me even more money because not a lot of devs will be able to do it.

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

#208

Post by drewcoo »

szundi wrote: post #4

I would just remind everyone that this so-called intelligence is generative text editor and feeds on our creativity/content. Probably it is going to degenerate (pun intended) after feeding on stuff that it generated itself. What do you think?

What better way to glue-code disparate things together?

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

#210

Post by krisoft »

jackblemming wrote: post #2

If programmers can be replaced by AI, so can every other white collar job and humanity will look very different than what it is now. And I’ve been using ChatGPT and copilot and it’s a nice tool but nowhere near a replacement for knowing how to program.

> If programmers can be replaced by AI, so can every other white collar job

If programmers can be replaced by AI, so can it replace even the blue collar jobs. Because if it can’t that is what this developer here will be working on.

Post reply on HN